Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti) (9 page)

The girl snapped closed her thighs. ‘I prefer a man who
fuck
,’ she said, fluffing out her crisp white hair. ‘Maybe you only talk because you cannot fuck. Spanish
zamel
.’

Spike held open the door back into the club. A new song blared: ‘Rock the Casbah’ by
The Clash
. The girl pushed past, the top of each buttock embossed with a cherry-red welt.

Marouane was standing behind the bar, hunting for scurf in his hair. On the previously empty podium, an Arab boy in cut-off shorts and Cleopatra eyeliner was humping a pole. Beneath, Spike recognised the two Spaniards from the reception of the Hotel Continental.

The bespectacled businessman drank alone, scouring the room, legs folded daintily among the cushions. Spike walked over, leaned in close and whispered a few words in his ear. Then he left.

Chapter 17

Spike crossed the waiting hall of the Sûreté Nationale on Avenue d’Espagne. The fissured marble floor was covered by men reclining in traditional dress. The air smelled like a classroom in midsummer.

At the desk, a duty sergeant was reading the
Journal de Tanger
. Spike asked for Inspector Eldrassi; without looking up, the duty sergeant waved a benedictory hand across the silent, waiting congregation. Spike saw they formed a sort of queue. He asked when Eldrassi would be available. ‘
Demain
,’ the sergeant replied, flipping to the sports section.

Outside, dusk clung on, as though afraid to surrender to night. The restaurant terraces were bustling with men eating sweetmeats. Spike realised Tatiana was the only woman he’d exchanged words with since arriving.

There was a bank opposite; Spike went to the cashpoint. A heavily armed security guard stood by as he made the withdrawal. On the other side of the avenue, three young black men looked on.
Sans-papiers
probably, awaiting their chance to steal across the Straits. Spike had read countless articles on the risks involved – bloated, cracked bodies washing up each month on Spanish beaches, victims of unscrupulous boat runners, victims of the Gut.

A
petit taxi
swerved to a halt, responding to Spike’s European height and clothes. The driver had a package of greaseproof paper on the passenger side; he drew it onto his lap as Spike got in and shunted back the seat. ‘Chinatown.’

‘
Comment?
’

Spike pointed up the hill to where the city rose. The driver shrugged. ‘
On va à Chinatown, donc
.’

Chapter 18

Spike forced down the stiff window to let the curried air circulate. Once they’d passed through the Ville Nouvelle, with its ornate, Parisian-style apartment blocks, they crested the hill and rolled down the other side. Vandalised, half-finished buildings – breeze blocks and rusting girders – protruded from a cacti-studded wasteland. The road began to dispense with pavements, then markings, then traffic altogether until a jeep drew up behind. Once it had grasped that the taxi couldn’t speed up, it overtook on a blind corner.

The driver braked suddenly as a tall man with a long white beard emerged from the wayside, guiding some goats over the road. Kids crossed behind, bleating. Somewhere a dog barked.

They drove on, turning left down a potholed track. The food parcel bounced on the driver’s lap. He stopped the car. ‘
C’est Chinatown
.’

Spike stared down the slope to a line of low-slung brick buildings clustered at the bottom of the track. The light was poor but they appeared to have sprung up in a dip between two hills, like fungus on a moist enclosed part of the body.

‘It’s a shanty town?’

‘
Bidonville
.’

‘Can you get any closer?’

The taxi driver crunched on his samosa. He was a small, bug-eyed man with pictures of small, bug-eyed children gummed to his glove compartment. Spike took out his wallet and removed a hundred-dirham note.

The driver shook his head. ‘Bad place for taxi.’

Spike looked again down the slope. A few lights were visible. It clearly had electricity. ‘Why’s it called Chinatown?’

‘No laws for building.’

‘Seems quiet.’

‘People working. In the city.’

‘Bedouins?’

The driver coughed a flake of samosa onto his beaming children. ‘
Tu parles des bédouins?
’

‘Do Bedouins live in Chinatown?’

‘Desert peoples . . .
C’est bien possible
.’

Spike put away the note and held up a two hundred. The driver restarted the engine and they continued another fifty metres up the road before turning left. This time they drove further down the rough, unsurfaced track. Reeds sprouted by a stream; a patch of dusty scrubland revealed two burnt-out cars, kissing bumper-to-bumper like some untitled art installation. More brick buildings ahead; the driver switched off the engine.

‘Twenty minutes,’ Spike said, signalling the number with his fingers. As Spike opened the door, he felt a tap on the shoulder. ‘
Attention, uh?
’

Outside, the air smelled sulphurous. Spike removed some low-denomination notes from his wallet and stuffed them in the top pouch of his cargo trousers. The driver watched on in silence, chewing his samosa.

Chapter 19

The ground consisted of layer upon layer of trodden rubbish: flattened cans, shredded sackcloth, powdered glass. A stream snaked between the brick shacks. Its stench – eggs and rotten meat – suggested open sewer. The tall, nuclear-green reeds grew on one side only, giving Spike a glimpse of a brownish sludge oozing through the centre.

Covering his mouth and nose, he followed the stream between the buildings. The walls, he saw, had plywood embedded in the brickwork. Sticking from the top of one was an incongruously modern satellite dish.

Spike gagged as he neared the water. Beneath the surface lay an eyeless mongrel puppy, its chest swollen, guts flapping in the current like pink pondweed. He put a hand to his neck as he passed, folding a soft mosquito beneath.

The stream continued on through the settlement, forming a muddy half-moon-shaped bank. A few plastic tables had been pushed together, at which a group of men sat smoking clay pipes and playing cards. All wore thick black moustaches, their faces darker than the other Moroccans Spike had seen, Indian almost. Paired with white
djellabas
were coiled, light-blue turbans.

Candles guttered on tables, an electric light fizzing behind, dive-bombed by suicidal, shiny-backed beetles. A woman in a headscarf sat cross-legged on the mud, shelling pods with a knife as a child played nearby with a food wrapper. The cables feeding the naked bulb looped away over corrugated roofs – illegally siphoned electricity, Spike supposed. ‘
Zahra, por favor?
’ he called, holding out the photograph of the girl.

The child stared up, open-mouthed, as her mother continued shelling. One of the card-players crooked a fingertip to the left. Spike gave a nod, hearing urgent, whispered rasps as he walked away.

Of the twenty minutes Spike had asked the driver to wait, five had elapsed. A thicker, more faecal smell began to coat the back of his throat as he turned into a gap between the huts. Through an open door he saw the flicker of a TV, a rag-draped figure prostrate before it on a camp bed.

Despite the condition of the buildings, Chinatown appeared to follow a grid system of sorts: parallel roads intersected by narrow alleyways. Spike continued left. Scrawled on a door was a painting of some rapt children with the words
École Primaire Mohammad VI
. The dark, plastic-sheeted windows were too murky to see through. Spike glanced up to the sky: the last of the sunlight had gone.

On the opposite side of the road, a bulb gleamed from an open-fronted shack. A youth appeared by Spike as he crossed over, cycling tight against him, aligning his wheels in the tyre tracks scored in the dried mud. He was staring so fixedly at Spike that his front axle caught in the furrow and he almost fell.

The facade of the shack was made of sliced-up plastic pallets. A man was sitting inside, eating with his fingers as a TV blared out Al-Jazeera news. A balding parrot clattered above him in a cage.

‘
Hola?
’

The man suspended his fingers by his lips as Spike drew closer. ‘
Zahra la beduina?
’ he said. ‘
Dónde?
’

‘
À gauche
,’ the man said. ‘
Gauche, gauche
.’ He crammed his fingers to his mouth. The parrot chewed at the bars of its cage.

The moon was visible, just a nail clip of white in the hazy, blue-black sky. Ahead in the street, Spike saw the boy on the bicycle joined by four other youths. They were all watching him too.

He turned into the next alley. Some sort of shop, a rack of exhausted-looking vegetables outside and an old, aproned woman hunched on a stool, serving a girl. As Spike drew closer, the girl glanced round. Then she picked up her plastic bag and walked quickly away.

Chapter 20

Spike kept ten metres behind the girl. Her black kaftan flowed outwards, a sequinned headscarf concealing her face as she glanced around, increasing her speed. They were one behind the other now, following the raised, mud-packed ridge between the tyre tracks.

‘I’m a friend of Esperanza’s,’ Spike called out.

The girl crossed the road beside a half-built breeze-block wall.

‘I’ve spoken to Tatiana.’

She dropped a handle of the plastic bag. Tomatoes and aubergines bounced to the ground. She cursed, crouching as Spike loomed above. Behind, a vehicle began to glide silently along the road. Spike turned to look: a jeep. He took a step closer to the girl. ‘I’ve been to the Sundowner Club.’

She continued gathering groceries.

‘You’re Zahra, aren’t you?’

‘Why don’t you fuck off back to Ángel?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Or I’ll scream,’ she added in surprisingly clear English.

A tin can had rolled into the tyre tracks; as Spike bent down for it, he glimpsed the girl’s tight denim jeans stretch beneath her kaftan. The sequins on her headscarf began to glitter in a beam of light; the jeep had performed a U-turn and was peeling back towards them. It traversed the road until it was facing the girl, stopping twenty metres shy, engine on, headlights blazing through a bull-bar bumper.

Spike picked up the tin can, then heard the engine rev. ‘Zahra!’

The girl snapped up her head as the jeep roared towards her. Sprinting over the road, Spike launched himself into the air. He smelled her sharp, citrus perfume as he pressed himself against her clothing, bruising his shoulder as they thudded down together onto the hard ground. She elbowed him in one kidney, then scrambled to her feet.

The lights of the jeep glowed red. Hubcaps scraped against ridges of crisp mud. Zahra crouched again, gathering her shopping.

‘What are you
doing
?’

The reverse lights of the jeep had been replaced by sharp yellow beams. Spike gave Zahra a shove; she took a step forward, dropping her bag before starting to run. Spike followed her into a narrow side street. Headlights tickled its mouth, disappearing before returning more strongly. ‘Down here,’ Spike said.

The walls on either side of the alley were made of cemented, blue-grey breeze blocks. Glassless windows above revealed dark figures silently watching. Rats scuttled in front, shifting one behind the other like a relay team. A pothole of stinking softness slurped at Spike’s foot as Zahra streaked ahead with long strides – she seemed focused, unsurprised.