Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti) (14 page)

He flicked a twenty note on the ground. ‘For the coat check.’ He was almost out of the door when he heard Marouane call after him: ‘You a dead man. You cunt.’

Spike turned. Marouane’s left hand held up his business card. The wrist drooped: he transferred it to his right. ‘I find you, cunt. Maybe Tangier. Maybe your home. But I find you.’

‘I look forward to it,’ Spike replied as he headed back out to the sunshine.

Walking along the pavement above the bar, Spike saw blood spreading beneath his bandage. A young woman was closing in; he recognised Tatiana, casually dressed in stonewash jeans and a paisley headscarf. She stopped, eyes on the ground. ‘Zahra,’ she said, ‘she gone.’ Her left eye was puffy, flaking with foundation, the scar on her chin unmasked and prominent.

‘Gone where?’

She stared across the Straits. ‘Sometimes when a person leave, first they make visit to the Café des Étoiles.’

‘Here in Tangiers?’

‘Ville Nouvelle.’

Spike nodded. There was fear in Tatiana’s good eye as it flitted from the cut on his hand to the handbag on his shoulder. ‘Listen,’ Spike said, ‘Marouane’s in a bad mood.
Mal humor
. Take the day off.’ He gave her a two-hundred note, then continued along the pavement.

Chapter 30

Stretching out on the unmade bed, ankles dangling, Spike listened to the rapid-fire finale of Caprice No. 13 in B flat major. No wonder they called it ‘The Devil’s Laughter’. He stared at the handbag, then reached for the central zip. It felt like opening a body bag. Sitting up properly, he emptied out the contents onto the bedclothes.

Condoms, aspirins, golden tube of lipstick. Well-used pack of tarot cards, screwed-up receipts . . . Spike checked for credit cards or cash. Not so much as a coin.

As he refilled the handbag, his hand brushed something solid. He stood and carried the bag to the light of the window. Drawing the two sides apart, he found a concealed zip at the base. He slid in his fingers and worked out a slim mobile phone.

He tried the on button: the screen flashed white then went dead. He pressed it again and nothing happened.

Turning the device over, he found a hole for the charger. He unplugged his own phone and tried it. Too small. He checked the make: Arabic.

The soundtrack of an action film boomed from next door. Picking up Esperanza’s phone, he stepped out onto the landing.

Chapter 31

Jean-Baptiste rolled his eyes, the whites reminding Spike of the skinned lambs’ heads in the
souk
. ‘Relax,’ Spike said. ‘It’s not about the noise. I want to take you up on your offer.’ He held out his wrist.

Jean-Baptiste glanced down at the bloodied bandage and made a series of clicking noises with his tongue. He stepped inside, leaving the door half open.

Spike followed him in. The shutters were closed, the air sweet and stale, the only light issuing from a line of four TV monitors, side by side at the edge of the room. The same film seemed to be showing on each; Spike recognised a starlet of the moment, doing ‘scared’ in the hallway of an ultra-modern house.

‘Wait here,’ Jean-Baptiste said. His accent was French, deep and languid. On the screens, the girl had responded to the danger by slipping off her hot pants and creeping through the house in her underwear. Spike looked about: four DVD players lay interconnected on the floor. A glinting pillar of blank discs stretched halfway to the ceiling. Turning to the bedside table, Spike saw a photograph taped to the wall, a hefty matron beaming beneath a floral headdress.

‘You like movies?’ Jean-Baptiste said as he upended an iodine bottle onto a cotton-wool ball and swabbed it over Spike’s cut. Spike felt a sting then saw yellowness stain the skin. The film soundtrack changed to urgent strings as the killer snuck up. ‘She should run away,’ Spike said.

‘They never do.
Voi . . . là
.’

Spike drew back his wrist then took out Esperanza’s mobile. ‘You wouldn’t have a charger for this, would you?’

Jean-Baptiste examined the handset. ‘
C’est d’ici, uh?
’

‘Belongs to a friend.’

With a knowing grin, Jean-Baptiste crouched down to the bedside table, plunging his hand into a vipers’ nest of cables. He seemed able to navigate expertly in the half-light. Spike watched him try various pins until at last he saw the blue-white glow of a phone screen. Jean-Baptiste looked up. ‘
Tu veux du kif?
’

Spike suddenly felt very tired. ‘Why not?’

Jean-Baptiste’s teeth flashed like bone as he reached for a drawer and took out a toffee-sized lump of hashish. Sitting back on the bed, he burnt a large crumb onto a DVD case, mixing it with sprigs of tobacco which he stuffed into the mouth of a clay pipe. The cop launched into a showdown with the killer as the girl lay unconscious, breasts straining against her bra.

Spike caught the familiar sweet herbal smell as Jean-Baptiste puffed on the pipe then handed it over. He sucked on the end, hot ash catching at the back of his throat. The iodine on his cut began to throb.

‘
Oro negro
,’ Jean-Baptiste said. ‘Black gold from the Rif Mountain.
Le kif est dans le Rif, uh?
’

‘Mercy,’ Spike replied, finally letting the smoke out.

‘
Tu parles français?
’

‘
Pas un word
.’

Jean-Baptiste took a few more puffs. A new sound from the TV, like two men in the distance sawing a tree in half. Spike felt the mattress vibrate then realised Jean-Baptiste was laughing. ‘What?’ Spike said.

‘
Pas un word
 . . .’

Spike found he was laughing too. He took another puff, feeling tears prick the corners of his eyes. Jean-Baptiste sat back, sighing.

‘So how did you get into all this?’

‘Into what?’

Spike forgot what he was going to say. They smoked some more until he remembered. ‘The technology.
Technologie
,’ he added in a Clouseau accent.

Jean-Baptiste cleared his throat, suddenly serious. ‘In
the Côte d’Ivoire
. Abidjan. I work for the radio.
Producteur de radio
. One day I make a programme the police do not like. My mother’ – his eyes flicked to the bedside table – ‘she give me money for Europe. All her money.’ He puffed out slowly as though trying to cool the memory. ‘I cross to the north. Burkina, Mali. Into desert. Three thousand kilometre. Bus, lorry,
camionette
. One month in the desert. When I reach here, I think, it is time for Europe. But for Europe you need money and now my money is gone. So I earn’ – he gestured at the screens, as the hero cop and the starlet embraced – ‘and I wait.’

‘DVD sales holding up?’

‘Not just DVD,’ Jean-Baptiste said defensively. ‘I make slide show for tour companies. Business conference for hotels–’

‘The El Minzah?’

‘Sure. El Minzah, Mövenpick, Intercontinental.’

Spike received another numbing hit of smoke. ‘Did you meet many Bedouins in the desert?’

‘
Les bédouins?
’ Jean-Baptiste nodded vigorously. ‘
Très costauds
. Tough man, tough woman. Berber, Tuareg, black man – all are the same to
les bédouins
. First,
les bédouins
, then all else. Not like in Tanger. Know what they call me here?’

‘What?’

‘
Abid
.’

‘Abid?’

‘Slave.’

Spike passed back the pipe. ‘I get that sometimes.’

‘
Tu parles de la merde
, white boy,’ Jean-Baptiste muttered.

‘In Gibraltar,’ Spike went on. ‘The Spanish. They call us Chingongos.’

Jean-Baptiste paused. ‘
Chingongo
,’ he said, trying to replicate Spike’s accent. ‘What is that?’

‘A remote tribe of people who are interbred.’

Jean-Baptiste looked puzzled.

‘
Incestuoso
,’ Spike explained. ‘Have sex with their family.’ He contorted an eye and let his tongue loll. ‘
Chin-gon-go
.’

Spike saw Jean-Baptiste’s face scrutinise him in the glow of the credits. He looked preoccupied, then his eyes creased and he spluttered out a long, hacking laugh. ‘
Abid
,’ he sighed, ‘
et Chingongo
.’ He pointed at Spike; this set him off again until he wiped his eyes and crouched down to the nearest DVD player. Spike felt his inner thighs squeak as he adjusted his position on the bed. For a moment he envied the flowing cotton lightness of Jean-Baptiste’s
djellaba
. ‘Do you know the Café des Étoiles?’ he said.

Still on all fours, Jean-Baptiste worked himself round. ‘Is like my
salon
. You want to go there,
Chingongo
?’

‘
Mais oui, mon ami
.’

Jean-Baptiste gave another serious look. Then he burst out laughing again as he pressed a DVD into its plastic case.

Chapter 32

The sun was setting, the cafés and takeaway stalls abuzz. Spike and Jean-Baptiste wove through the labyrinth of lanes, towering over the locals. Every third step Jean-Baptiste seemed to stop to greet a vendor or glad-hand a shopkeeper. As he chatted to two weary-looking men with Afros, Spike asked him to wait and went down to the coast road.

The police station was starting to fill up. Spike handed over Esperanza’s handbag wrapped in a hotel laundry bag, a letter taped to the front. ‘For Inspector Eldrassi,’ he said to the duty sergeant. ‘Tell him it’s to do with the Solomon Hassan case. Solomon Hassan, you got that?’

‘Hassan.
Wakha
.’

Jean-Baptiste was waiting outside the police station. He carried his bulky canvas duffel bag with ease. ‘You go in there for your friend?’ he said.

‘
Oui
.’

He nodded, satisfied, and they continued up the coast road. The wind was picking up, billowing out the burka of a lady coming the other way like some funereal ghost. A set of three-footers broke on the beach, the Gut doing its hidden work, roiling and churning beneath the surface.

Chapter 33

The Café des Étoiles occupied the tongue-shaped end of a shabby block of the Ville Nouvelle. Two boulevards crossed at its facade; a black bin bag had been kicked into one, clipped by cars, spilling its guts. A cedar tree grew outside the main door, gnarled after a lifetime of being kicked by passers-by and urinated on by dogs, one of which cocked its leg as Spike and Jean-Baptiste passed, observing them with pink discomfited eyes.

The brown-stained interior was a fug of malodorous smoke. ‘I visit to maître d’,’ Jean-Baptiste called over the din. ‘Ski-Coca for later?’

‘Ski?’

‘Whi-ski.’

Spike watched him edge through the crowd, somehow avoiding the cul-de-sacs as he moved to a doorway in the back wall. In front, the low tables were crammed together, the spaces between filled by punters talking over the heads of those seated. At one end stood a platform where a trio of rictus-grin musicians were struggling to make themselves heard. The two men on double bass and drums were North African, the keyboard player white. A fellow European, Spike assumed, until he passed and saw he was a freckled, albino black.