Stewart, Angus (13 page)

'
Mille cinq cents francs
,'
Achmed said without hesitation. 'Well, supposing I gave you another ten. And you gave me this?'

'Party?' Achmed's eyes narrowed as he squatted beside his bundle.

'That's right. I think you've got the idea.'

'After party? This one? Where?' Achmed queried, with a sequence of rapid shrugs.

'Oh, you can keep it then.'

'Achmed?'

'That's right.'

'
D'accord
,'
Achmed said with quick resolution. 'Give me ten dirham.'

Achmed now repacked his bundle, left the dress neatly folded in the lounge, and departed with fifteen hundred francs. He returned at once to the clothes market where he bought an identical yellow dress for four hundred and thirty francs, and a pair of second-hand leather shoes for a hundred and ten. The remaining nine hundred and sixty francs of Raphael's money he folded in a tight wedge and zipped into the pocket of his bathing trunks.

  *  *  *  *  *

After leaving Raphael Bonnington still at his breakfast, Jay Gadston was determined to find Achmed. He went first to Frederick Halliday's bookshop. This he approached cautiously, even furtively, as Achmed himself might have done, half expecting it to be thronged about by curious spectators and police. The feeling was, of course, irrational; but, when he came up to the shop, it was with a shock, nevertheless, that he found it unchanged since the night before. The single neon strip light still burned, palely now in the display window, and the door remained firmly closed. Dust and waste paper rose in lazy spirals from the open ground which adjoined it, and from where there was a view of the sea. On the other side of this area, looking across at the shop front, was a café; and here Jay now sat down. He had some idea that Achmed might appear, but rather more, the untenanted shop, and the idleness of the morning in
this dead quarter of the town, temporarily baffled any concerted search he had been proposing to make. The shop stood as a mute witness to violence which had taken place in another part of the town. It seemed to be waiting reproachfully for a customer to try the door; to be puzzled, or indignant, and to raise the alarm. Jay recalled that he knew almost nothing about its owner. His existence for him had been realised solely through Achmed. The boy had spoken of Halliday as his 'father', as 'mad', and with the implication that he was intolerant in the restrictions he imposed upon him. But, quite clearly, by a one in a thousand chance, that no doubt had been influenced by his elfish prettiness and an ambition, not as yet fully formulated, but showing itself in a dogged cheek, the waif had found a home. Halliday, during those months, was providing for
the boy what Jay
would have provided fur him had the means been his. Jay had discovered Achmed, starved and wandering, shortly after the boy had migrated to the city. At that time he had had a two-roomed house in an Arab suburb, and it was here that Achmed had come to live with him. Their existence had followed a primitive pattern of camping, water having to be fetched from a well, and charcoal providing the only source of heat and power. Achmed had quickly made friends with neighbouring boys, differing from them in that he was not entitled to attend any school. This had been just as well, because he remained impervious to the advantages of formal education, even when its benefits were rationalised as ultimately providing cash. After laborious negotiation the master of the local, Koranic school had been, persuaded to instruct him privately in reading and writing, but Achmed had flatly refused to become his pupil, albeit for a single hour each day. When Jay departed to wander in the south of the country, Achmed had been left in charge of the house, with sufficient money meted to him daily by the local shopkeeper with which to eat. He had, of course, protested violently at this tying up of his funds, but Jay had remained adamant. On his return the question of Frederick Halliday was just emerging. Achmed had in fact consulted him on the advisability of the move; and Jay, seeing the chance of his being relieved of a responsibility for which there had seemed no answer, both agreed, and encouraged him. Since that time, during which he had moved to his present apartment in the city, Achmed had visited him regularly.

Now, sipping coffee while he stared at the lifeless shop, Jay wondered again why the boy had not come to him at once with news of the disaster. His first move had better be to return to their old suburb and enlist one of Achmed's friends to search. It was a Friday, and so there was no school. The problem might therefore be communicated to a French-speaking boy, who would have plenty of time to comb the Medina before nightfall.

He set
out along a wide, leisurely arc, skirting the city on its westerly quarter, and avoiding the busy centre. The sea front, the Boulevard, the Place de France, and the Petit Socco in the Medina—in short the pimp zone—still found him uneasy in certain moods. Perhaps he carried a burden of guilt. At any rate Arab perceptivity was amazing. He had only to feel himself a prey to become one. Paper-sellers and shoeshines tended to view their services as obligatory. A white skin and English cut jacket meant limitless money and clueless innocence, not to mention daily contact with Gibraltar. Why then should one refuse to change half a crown, even though the proposition occurred with daily frequency, until it assumed the proportions of a particularly malicious plot? Jay was still sufficiently Anglo-Saxon as to feel self-conscious when called upon by a stranger to express his sexual preferences before lunch and in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. But really his objection was more deeply seated, and turned upon his pride in resident status, A fortnight's refusing to pause for touts would normally leave one suddenly free. The city was so small that it was quickly and tacitly understood that one did not buy. But the stranglehold of unemployment was such that new touts were forever appearing on the scene. It was these who upset one's sense of resident status. Any approach by a pimp made Jay instantly picture himself as a week-ending tourist, and while the firmest course might simply be to ignore them, the temptation to cynical rejoinder, inspired as it was by the guilt and uncertainty that is so much a part of the Western mind, was often too great to resist Sometimes he had even been
persuaded to
connivance, feeling bound to explain to a particular man why a particular approach was offensive. This puzzled, but failed to reform. Arabs have small grasp of irony.

Jay found himself walking through dusty European suburbs. Many of the houses, he supposed, would own cut-glow chandeliers like his own. He crossed a road junction where Berber women were
selling the coarsely woven straw mats they would have brought in from the countryside early that morning. Beyond, the orange, wedge-pointed spire of the Spanish cathedral thrust into the sky. It was the highest, sharpest monument one glimpsed from the sea. He passed beyond this and out on to open ground. Here the road ended like a dried-out finger of ink. A low hill, covered on its ridge by scrub and cactus, and grazed over by goats the colour of doormats, sank again into a hollow filled with the pastel-shaded boxes of native houses. Behind this again the even curvature of the Mountain formed the smoky horizon, pierced through by flashes of light where the sun caught the windows of tree-hidden villas

As he approached the well, circling the great outcrop of cactus where washing had been
spread to dry, he met Abdullah carrying two tin buckets on the ends of a stave slung over his shoulders, and smoking surreptitiously from his cupped hand. The meeting could not have been more fortunate, since Achmed and he had remained friends since their first corning together at Jay's house. Abdullah was a square-faced, ugly boy, enormously stolid in the stability of his temperament and friendliness. The terms in which Jay conceived him were in direct contrast to the slight Achmed, whose brittle, passionate nature could be swayed unpredictably by all manner of distrust, jealousies and superstitions as were endemic in his peasant background and uneasy existence.
Abdullah was one of an urban family of seven, whose income amounted to around two thousand three hundred francs a week. He was happy to attend school, to learn French, and to carry water. Later, if he were very lucky, he would drive a taxi or become a waiter in a café. If he were not lucky there would be no employment for him at all.

They greeted each other now, and Abdullah, putting his buckets down, inverted them and, with elaborate mime as though he were an usher in a cinema. conducted Jay to his seat. He grinned broadly.

'Have you seen Achmed this morning? Or maybe last night?' Jay asked.

Abdullah shook his head, spitting with unconscious vehemence as he did so. 'Not for two—perhaps three days. But he is at the Englishman's shop, surely?'

'No,' Jay said slowly. 'The Englishman is dead.'

'He has
died
?
He was not old!'

'He was killed. There was some sort of riot last night after the voting.'

'Tiens!' Abdullah said. Nothing more.

Jay looked at him curiously. He accepted the murder as fact, without any question as to why, or just how it had come about. Jay, for his part, saw no reason to say more. 'I was
down at the shop this morning,' he went on. 'It is locked up, and there was no sign of Achmed. I saw him for a second last night, but didn't speak to him.' Not for the
first time Jay wondered why he had not gone over to Achmed when he had glimpsed him sitting solemnly and alone at the cafe table.

'Will Achmed come to live with you again now?' Abdullah asked.

The implications of the question were so great that Jay found himself unable to answer it for a moment. 'I don't know,' he said eventually. 'It was utterly wrong for Achmed to have left his home in the first place. Though that's no answer now.'

'Achmed says his home is no good.'

'Sure,' Jay said impatiently, because the pathos of the statement only increased his own sense of powerlessness. 'Look, I really came out here to ask you whether you could find him for me. You know the Medina much better than I do. Will you try?'

Abdullah nodded at his most stoic. I'll bring him to your apartment.'

'Fine. Then I'd better give you some money,' Jay said. 'You'll probably have to visit all the cinemas and pin-ball alleys in town.'

Characteristically Abdullah refused this offer of funds. The gesture had the effect of saddening Jay. He thought to reverse the two friends' standing in some ironical pleasantry, but the moment passed.

Abdullah had caught his elbow, and now motioned towards the base of the hill. He began laughing.

'Well I never!' Jay exclaimed. 'I'd better go and have a word with them.'

At the bottom of the hill, where the serene, ochre-tinted geometry of native houses gave on to open ground, Colonel Corbet and Ali were just emerging from a passageway beside the Koranic school. The sight was one familiar to the neighbourhood, which had watched it for nearly twenty years. The frail, spindly soldier, and his diminutive, bloodhound-sad factor, would be setting out for a bar. Jay got up, judging his line of interception as the point where the dirt track became metalled road, about a hundred yards away. He turned to Abdullah. 'Why not come in for a meal tonight and let me know whether you've found him?'

Abdullah shouldered his buckets again. 'About seven?'

'That'll he fine—I'll expect either one or both of you.'

Jay began to make his way down the rough hillside. Thor Corbet had seen him now, and was prolonging one of his intermittent pauses, leaning with magisterial patience upon his walking stick. Ali stood beside him with his hands artfully clasped before his chest. As Jay approached he patted them soundlessly together like a head waiter, nodding his balding, gnome-like head as he did so. Thor Corbet continued to regard him fixedly with his live watery blue eyes. Wearing a muffler, sports jacket, and brown corduroy trousers which terminated in pigeon-toed moccasins of tawny suède, he looked like a stringy, overbred adolescent dressed for snowballing.

'They
are
, you know!' Corbet said, addressing Ali, but eyeing Jay warily.

'Oh, no, Thor! No!' Ali continued to bob and squirm like the obsequious waiter; then suddenly executed an absurd little bow, and thrust forward his hand. 'Hallo, sar! Jay!' 'They are, you know.
They're syphilitic spots
!'
Corbet insisted, simpering.

'Surely!' Jay indulged him ironically in
what was an old joke. 'But how are you, Thor?'

'Really never better, thank you.' Corbet had considered this seriously for a second. 'But what do you think of
le prince
!
Isn't he looking
well
!'

'The very picture of a noble and cultivated Moor!' Jay enthused, as he considered Ali. How are all your family,
prince
?'

Ali's face assumed its martyred expression as he considered the mixed blessing of his six children. 'Oh, ver' well Jay sar thank you ver' march!' He continued ducking and prancing like some mechanical toy.

'Look, won't you join us for a
drink
?'
the old man said. 'The
prince
tells me the wildest things about your doings since you left us.'

Ali was muttering disclaimers. Jay eyed him with mock reproof before saying solemnly, 'The
prince
knows all.' He could never quite bring the right nasal twang to the ridiculous title. No one but Corbet could.

'Oh but he
does
,
the dear!' Corbet said.

Agreeing to join the odd pair for
a drink, which meant in effect buying innumerable tumblerfuls of the cheapest white wine, Jay realised that Ali had not learned of the murder. Jay, for his own part, felt as disinclined to speak of it to them as he had to Abdullah. Since leaving the neighbourhood his path had rarely crossed theirs, though occasionally he
had met them going about the pathetic business of persuading stationers and hotel reception desks to display little bunches of Corbet's Christmas cards. This process, together with endless self-laudatory discussion of Corbet's water-colours, was the principal industry and focus of their lives. Yet Thor Corbet was a kind and shrewd old man. What made his particular expatriate circumstances absurd, and even despised by others, was his ceaseless bringing forward of this man whom he called
le prince.
The Expatriate community, as Jay saw it, licensed the silent and the strong; and some of these to an astonishing degree. Thor Corbet was neither of these things. Living in squalor in a native quarter supporting Ali's wife and six
children, both financially, as physically above his head, he became an easy butt for his would-be fellows. Ali himself was an inflexibly devoted aide, on whom Jay had come to place heavy reliance when he had lived in the neighbourhood. Corbet had found him more than fifteen years previously as a street trader, and now looked to him entirely in the running of his own life. To Achmed the model must have been inescapable. To Jay, discovering the strength of ties at a more illogical level, it had been alarming.