Casablanca Blues (2013) (21 page)

‘What am I doing here, grandpa?’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

His grandfather touched him on the arm.

‘You’re following your heart,’ he answered, ‘and a man who follows his heart can never go wrong.’

The sun vanished and, gradually, the pink glow dissipated, shadows melting into dark. Blaine listened to the chorus of dogs in the distance, and to the bats darting through the evening air.

When it was pitch-black, he went back inside, and found the little house illuminated by candles. Ghita and Habiba were still chatting, hardly drawing breath as they rooted through the past.

At length, an olive tagine was brought out from the kitchen. Bubbling and squeaking with heat, it was set down, and spoons were passed out. Only when the guests had feasted sufficiently did the host taste the dish.

After the meal, a long silence prevailed, and then Habiba ambled into the kitchen to prepare more tea.

As soon as she was gone, Ghita got up, and sat down beside Blaine.

‘She’s told me something.’

‘What?’

‘You remember I said that my father regarded her as our most trusted friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, three years ago he was frightened that someone – I don’t know who – would try to bring his empire to its knees. So he came here without telling anyone, and brought a box with him. He asked Habiba to look after it, and to give it to me were I ever to come.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘I don’t know. Nor does she – she’s never opened it.’

‘Where is it?’

Ghita motioned to the dirt floor.

‘She buried it under there.’

Before dawn Habiba was up, drawing water from the well. Then, at first light, she took a tray of bread a mile and a half across the fields to the communal oven, and brought it back once it was baked.

The two women had slept the night in the bedroom, while Blaine stretched out on the banquette. He woke to the scent of fresh-baked bread, eggs, and an endless supply of sweet mint tea.

Through half-open eyes, he scanned the room, wondering where to find the bathroom. He hadn’t relieved himself since the truck stop.

‘There’s a squat toilet in the little lean-to at the back of the house,’ said Ghita, reading his mind.

The American raised an eyebrow, surprised that she had adapted so readily to the reduction in luxury.

‘This is what we call the
bled
, the countryside,’ she said. ‘It’s sacred to all Moroccans, whether they’re from here or from the city. Its simplicity reminds us that we are all equal.’

After breakfast, Habiba fetched a shovel from the barn and set about digging up the sitting-room floor. She refused to allow Blaine to help her, insisting that it was her duty, a solemn duty she had undertaken to Mr. Omary.

It took half an hour to excavate the wooden box.

The sides were stained red from the dirt, and the top was battered where the shovel had struck it hard. Reaching down, Habiba removed it, praised God, and passed it to Ghita.

‘Open it up!’ said Blaine enthusiastically.

Ghita paused to mumble a prayer, and then prised off the lid.

Inside were three thick bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each one the size of a brick. Beneath them was a letter and locket.

Ghita ripped the envelope open and scanned its text.

‘My darling daughter,’ she read, ‘as I have always told you, Habiba is one of our family, and the bond we share with her is more highly valued to us than with anyone else we know. I am writing this letter at a time of grave danger. I can feel that forces here in Casablanca are conspiring against me. I don’t know who they are, or what their motive is, but I fear them. For this reason, I have entrusted this box to Habiba. I am certain that at a time of catastrophe you will seek her out. Inside, you will find enough funds to see yourself through turbulent times, and the locket your mother wore every day of her life.’

As she reached the end of the letter, Ghita’s eyes welled with tears.

‘Baba, wait for me,’ she said, ‘I am coming!’

Eighty-five

Once again, standard-issue boots marching over flagstones woke Hicham Omary from his sleep. Kept in perpetual darkness, he had no idea whether it was day or night.

For a full week he had not left the cell. In that time he had revisited a thousand memories, and pondered all kinds of philosophical questions, the kind for which there’s never quite time in the haste of normal life.

He found that by breaking the years down into an intricate flowchart of events, he could keep himself amused for hours at a stretch. The exercise drove away boredom – the curse of solitary confinement.

The boots moved in a rhythm, steel tips striking down hard on the stone. The sound grew louder as it approached Cell No. 3. Then silence. And a set of keys clattered in a primitive music of their own. Omary listened, waiting for the inspection hatch to open, and for the blinding shaft of low-watt light.

But, this time, another key was selected.

It sounded quite different as it slipped into the lock. It was larger and was serrated on both sides. Hicham Omary hadn’t been in the prison system long, but long enough to learn the ritual of keys.

For it was they alone that could deliver freedom.

The cell’s tempered steel door was pulled open fast. Jerking both hands over his eyes, Omary blocked the light, as his lungs expanded with what smelled like fresh mountain air.

The guard ordered the prisoner to stand.

Omary did so, adrenalin coursing through his bloodstream, as he struggled to make sense of what was going on. A grating sound followed, metal rasping on metal. His hands were cuffed behind his back, then attached by chains to the fetters around his ankles.

After that came the blindfold.

Not a puny half-hearted blindfold from a children’s birthday party, but a military-issue one of triple-thick hessian, with four straps.

Disorientated, the fetters cutting into his ankles and the handcuffs into his wrists, Omary was led inch by inch down the corridor.

At the end, he was turned around six times to the right, and six to the left. And, swaggering like a drunkard after a night on the town, he was taken calmly into the interrogation cell and forced down onto a stool.

There was warmth, glorious warmth from the interrogation lamps – lamps he could only feel but not see.

Omary listened.

He made out the call of the muezzin far away, although uncertain which prayer it could be calling. And, much closer, he heard the sound of a lighter clicking, being tossed onto a desk, and the stink of a cheap cigarette.

The interrogator drew a chestful of smoke into his lungs, exhaled, and signalled to the guard to lock the door. He had worked in the prison service for thirty years, and prided himself on being able to get the results desired by the authorities in Rabat.

Resting the cigarette on the edge of the desk, a desk speckled with little burns from a hundred other nights, he leafed through the dossier.

‘It says that you have a liking for heroin,’ the interrogator said in a chill well-practised voice.

‘Does it?’

‘Yes, it does. And it says that you have made a fortune in working for the criminal underworld.’

Omary flexed his back to relieve the pressure on his wrists.

‘Are you expecting me to confess to invented charges?’

‘No. But I am expecting you to answer my questions.’

The interrogator stood up.

He walked around the table, and untied the blindfold. Omary’s eyes were flooded with a tidal wave of high-watt light. Eager to avoid it, he glanced sideways and found himself focusing on the walls.

They were festooned with all kinds of equipment.

There were wooden batons and straps, a harness for suspending a prisoner upside-down, electric cables and tourniquets, syringes and a box of broken glass, a variety of blades and pliers. And, in an arrangement high on the back wall, were a selection of what looked liked meat hooks. And, on another hook, an apron was hung. It had been drenched in blood – some of it old, some of it new.

Unlike the movies, where interrogation rooms are usually pristine, the one in which Hicham Omary found himself was filthy from use. Like the apron, the tools and equipment were spattered in dirt and dried blood.

His gaze jolting from one detail to the next, Omary’s eyes came to rest on a drain just near the door. It was clogged with what looked like a lump of human skin and matted hair.

Eighty-six

By ten a.m. the Silver Ghost was back on the highway and, by noon, it was swerving its way through the rip-roaring traffic of Marrakech.

All around, there were mopeds veering to and fro in all directions, like a game of 3D Space Invaders. There were donkey carts, too, and throngs of bicycles, and watersellers ringing their great brass bells, and beggars weaving through the traffic in their wheelchairs.

‘Which way?’ asked Blaine at a crossroads.

‘That way, straight – towards the great minaret of Koutoubia.’

‘That’s Koutoubia?
Fantastic
! That’s where I’ve gotta pick up the trail for the next postcard.’

Ghita was about to rein the American in, but she cautioned herself. As he had reminded her – she needed him more than he needed her.

‘We’ll go there first,’ she said, ‘to get your postcard, and then we’ll go and find the goldsmith.’

Blaine eased the car to a halt.

‘Just park up there on the pavement,’ Ghita said.

‘But I’ll get towed.’

‘This is Marrakech, not Miami,’ she replied. ‘The police can be reminded that they are on our side.’

‘So I’ve noticed,’ said Blaine.

Mounting the kerb, he steered the Silver Ghost up to within a few feet of the mosque wall.

‘Koutoubia means “Booksellers”,’ said Ghita, ‘because there used to be bookstalls here.’

‘When was that?’

‘About a thousand years ago.’

Blaine wasn’t listening. His mind was on the postcard. He pulled it out and did his best to decipher the text on the back.

‘It says to ask at the “Old Lady”.’ He turned around and peered up at the great square minaret. ‘This must be the Old Lady,’ he said, ‘but who to ask?’

Ghita frowned. She took the card from Blaine.

‘This was clearly written by a man in love,’ she replied. ‘I can always tell.’

‘Tell what?’

‘When a man is in love.’

‘
Huh
?’

‘You men are so poor at concealing your feelings.’

‘So, who was Bogart in love with?’

‘With the Old Lady, of course.’

Blaine nodded towards the mosque.

‘
That
Old Lady?’

‘Would a drunk American actor really have been in love with a mosque?’ said Ghita.

‘I guess not.’

‘So, where’s the Old Lady we need?’

‘
La Grande Dame
, The Mamounia, of course.’

Eighty-seven

A master in the art of anticipation, the interrogator could predict exactly the pain threshold of anyone trussed up in the seat before him.

His wife had spent decades begging him to stop, to find a less severe career. But, as he told her time and again, there was nothing quite so satisfying as extracting information from the lips of the unwilling.

Omary circumnavigated the questions, and tried to gauge where they were leading, if anywhere at all. He was asked about his father and his grandfather, about his income and his schooling, and about the scar on his right cheek.

The examination lasted an hour or more, but was nothing more than a warm-up for things to come. Lighting another cigarette, the interrogator blew out – the grey smoke billowing like a storm cloud into the light.

‘Now, Mr. Omary,’ he said, his tone deepening, ‘you are to tell me about the heroin. Where did it come from?’

His muscles fatigued with lactic acid, Hicham Omary struggled to keep his cool. He was damned if a two-bit torturer was going to ruffle him.

‘I’m a businessman, not a drug dealer,’ he replied.

‘I am looking for correct answers,’ the interrogator said. ‘And if I don’t get them, I shall use the equipment.’ He waved a hand towards the apparatus hanging on the walls. ‘I have a special treatment for everyone they send to me,’ he said.

‘Do you expect me to make something up, something to incriminate myself?’

‘I expect you to speak the truth.’

‘Then listen to me. I don’t know anything about the drugs I’m supposed to have bought or sold. And you know it as well as I. You can see it in my eyes. But if you’d like to continue this little charade, we can. You can pull out my teeth with those pliers. Or you can electrocute me with those wires, or cut me into little pieces with the knives. But my response is not going to change.’

‘My superiors in Rabat are waiting for your confession, and I have vowed to get it for them. But I think a few more days in the hole will soften you. You will return there now and be put on half rations, and a nice cold bath twice a day.’

The interrogator called out to the guard and, a moment later, Omary was hobbling forwards down the corridor. The blindfold had been left off, allowing him to look into the other cells as he went.

Unlike his own cubicle, the others had bars rather than a full steel door. The walls of the first were painted in black and white spirals, a ploy to drive a sane inmate mad. The next was spattered with a profusion of dark dried blood, from a suicide.

In the first cell, the prisoner was huddled up on the concrete floor. In the second, a convict was standing with his head in his hands. And the man in the third cell was tethered by a metre-long chain to the wall.

Staggering forwards, Omary got eye contact with him for a fleeting moment. The man’s eyes hung in an empty face, swollen with illness, with fear, with nights of treatment in the torture cell.

Until that moment, Hicham Omary managed to remain composed. But the sight of real terror, of a life hanging by a thread, was too much to bear.

As soon as he had been kicked back into his cell, the shackles removed, and the door slammed shut, he broke down and wept like he had never wept before.

Eighty-eight

The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost ran alongside the ancient crenellated ramparts of the Marrakech medina. Coral pink and crumbling, the city walls were straight out of the
Arabian Nights
. Their entire surface was peppered with little square holes, used from time to time for scaffolding – and always by swallows for their nests.