Stewart, Angus (31 page)

'Perfectly,' Lom said. 'Let's get my stuff loaded.'

  *  *  *  *  *

It was a hectic hour. Inevitably, Jay found, the banks were closed. Fighting his way through the overflowing Medina to exchange money had all the qualities of the nightmare in which one runs only to find oneself standing still. For each step he gained the crowd seemed to force him back two. Eventually he succeeded both in obtaining cash, and in extorting a promise from the Indian's son that he would carry explanation and a sealed envelope of money to Naima before nightfall. Inwardly torn and made angry by the decision fate seemed to have forced upon him, Jay turned for the European town once more, to find, this time, that the press of people was bearing him with them. He had so far found no pause in which to become aware of the hopelessness of his task. Now he began to do so. He was being thrown about like a cork upon the mindless torrent of people surging out of the medina to welcome their king. If it were true that Achmed had been recruited into a squad to clear mine-fields, then he had no idea how he was proposing to find him. Enquiry of Rahim's superiors could only have been met by blank disclaimers. However barbaric the recent past of these people, with their seeming callousness with regard to suffering and death, which so much fascinated Lom, the outrage Lom had heard rumoured presumably had a political embarrassment value that would ensure its being kept very secret. 'Near Marrakesh' was the only lead he had, or was likely to get. To Marrakesh he would go. Even if he could achieve nothing, it was now out of the question to collect Naima and enjoy the festivities occasioned by the arrival of the king.

Jay swore savagely in Moghrebi at a group of citizens who had elbowed him into the gutter, and whose technique owed nothing to an English Cup Final crowd.

In his flat once more, Jay found himself throwing things into a canvas grip while he briefed the Spanish concierge on the feeding of Raskolnikov. Fredo's decrepitude was matched only by that of the building, to which his allegiance, anyway, tended to be nominal.

At that moment the black kid, grown firm on his legs now, came clattering in off the sunlit balcony. Jay looked at him sadly.

'Damn it, Fredo,' he said, 'he needs the open air now. Would your little grand-daughter like him?'

'
Si, señor! Muchas gracias
!' the
old man, who avidly begged stamps from Jay's letters, beamed.

'Then please take him,' Jay said. They'll eat him, but what the hell, he thought, and was gone.

The last stretch was hardest of all. It meant fighting through the crush lining the road, ducking under the rope, conspicuously crossing the sudden, expectant emptiness of the Boulevard, and plunging into the astonished crowd again on the other side. But no burst of automatic fire halted his infringement He could now see where the entrance of the Minza ought to be.

  *  *  *  *  *

'Here he is now,' Lom said, sitting beside Abdslem in the jeep.

Critically, the youth inspected a gold watch he had not been wearing at their previous meeting either. Jay scrambled into the back.

'This is Captain Abdslem Kerim, my guide and driver,' was all Lom said.

Unsuccessfully, Jay tried to place the Moroccan's face. 'Hallo!' he gasped.

Lom looked at the crowds milling about them. 'Now our only problem is how to get out of the city.'

The Moroccan, Jay saw, was grinning with a sudden access of glee. Uncomfortably, the gears engaged, and the horn blared. They nosed through the throng; then were negotiating the miraculously traffic-free roundabout in the
Place de France
.
Before them, empty, but lined with thousands of expectant faces, decked with bunting, and traversed by a dozen brightly painted fretwork arches, lay the waiting, ceremonial stretch of the Boulevard.

'Goodness!' Lom affected a child big specially indulged on its birthday as he grasped Abdslem's intention.

'Just for us!' The Moroccan waved a carefree hand at the scene as he pressed down on the accelerator.

But perhaps the scrutiny of his watch had not been on Jay's account after all. They sped on. But from where the Boulevard disappeared out of sight in a right-hand curve in front of them, there now came the sound of sudden, arbitrary drums, and the ululating of women.

'Oh dear!' Lom commented.

Unabashed, though with a shrug, Abdslem ploughed the jeep to a standstill among the crowd at the roadside as the first motor-cycle outriders swept up to them.

The Sultan's motorcade passed them slowly, and Jay had a
startling impression of it. Curiously, the cars were not Cadillacs but a uniform species of shooting brake that looked modest, almost English, in everything except their dimensions. These were gargantuan. Each vehicle had a wheelbase on something like the scale of a London bus, and held some dozen passengers. Half a dozen of these specially built monsters preceded the royal car, while the uniformity of the fifteen or so following it was broken only by an even larger vehicle, painted dark green, and resembling a vast, though windowless mobile bungalow. The royal car differed from the others in being open, and painted white. In this the king stood upright, raising both arms in a triumphant gesture to the crowds. A brilliant white
djellaba
,
and matching
tarboosh
set off the rather negroid cast and colouring of his face. Any momentary thoughts Jay might have had that he was never likely to he better placed to make dramatic petition for
Achmed's release were snuffed by the malign expressions of some of the bodyguard. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a number of these regarded the hastily parked military jeep with its two oddly assorted European passengers minutely. The captain named Abdslem, Jay noticed, was impressively saluting.

Then the procession was past them; and they were moving out into the road again after the last police car. The strange wailing of the women was still deafening: men made no sound.

'What was that van affair the size of a house?' Jay shouted, leaning forward between the front seats.

'Hospital,' Abdslem called back; the wind of their acceleration making communication more difficult now. 'In case some person shoot the king.'

'A legacy of Kennedy, I suppose,' Lom said, over his shoulder.

Jay waved away something he was being offered to eat. 'Be damned,' he muttered, settling back.

Dust flew from their wheels in the hot afternoon. The Moroccan drove fast, but expertly. Lom produced a floppy green hat. Behind his sun-glasses, Jay sank into something like torpor, conscious of the brilliant, ever changing scenes that flashed by, but finding release from coherent thought in the immediacy of the heat, and the jarring, purposeful career of the hard-sprung, open car. So long as the wind buffetted past his ears, his mind was content to cling tightly within the confused awareness of travel.

Disjointedly, he thought of the sleepfilled, often sleezy cosmopolitan city they had left behind. When the king departed, Tangier's unique vacancy and purposelessness would descend upon it once more. Dead, as some said, since the ending of the International Zone, it nevertheless retained a fascination that was perhaps no more than the wry awareness of its undeniable decadence. It was the city of uncertainty; as yet insufficiently sure of itself to be either the advocate, or even the apologist of anything that was very definite at all. The high-water mark of Europe once, the ebb had left only curiosities on the shore. Newly arrived expatriates scratched their heads and stared warily about them. Their more indigenous counterparts, drifter's themselves, for the city had not been purely Moorish, purely anything for centuries, stared back. But then ideas, even objects, confronted one another only similarly; and with the same envy, suspicion, or propensity for careless alliance.

There was Porte's, the best
pâtisserie
outside
Paris,
more decorous than Fortnums'. There was Thor Corbet. And the least inspired mosque, probably, in Islam. Catherine Diergardt, and Brown. Brown and that girl. Could they he—it suddenly came to him—secret emissaries of some sort? Perhaps of a humanitarian organisation, say a United Nations agency, sent to probe the horror that had engulfed Achmed? But no—he was surprised at his own instant knowledge—that wasn't it. That wasn't it,
at all
.

The procession inside his head moved on. A bar off the Rue Fez that produced black Sudanese girls as readily as branded beers. Raphael, Mary Simpson. That bullring the Spaniards built, crumbled now, useless. Jaqueline, and killer dogs. Gnarled fishermen living on
kif
and singly caught sardines. A tape-recorded call to prayer. The dreary beach-cum-bar-and-bar-again queers. Blue haired, smothering Spanish ladies beneath kilos of costume jewellery. The rent youths, doubling as gigolos. Divorced colonial women, in speculative retreat behind Dunhill holders. Brown's little friends, with white jeans from Kadex, and unnaturally wise eyes. The pale aspirants to succeed Dean. Halliday, whom Jay should have known, now dead in a riot. The thousands of sheep fleeces for sale after the
Aid el Kebir
.
Ali, the sad, wine-swilling father. Manolo. The curious Jew in front. Caroline Adam, that unplaceable girl. Dan Gurney: murdered, almost certainly . . .

There was the glittering Boulevard, the
seedy Soccos, the English Church of St Andrew, most of
whose parishioners had arrived at a secret compact with God about bed. There were
the Jews with black suits, black beards and black homburgs. There was the sky. The dawn that lightened slowly out of the vast expanses of Africa. There was that politician, whom Chalmers had described, ridiculing the workless from the running-board of his car. Brodie himself, whose mysticism might well be the only coherence the complex knew . . .

And there was Naima. Naima from whom the speeding jeep was carrying him away. Naima, who seemed not to belong to the city. Who was more real, yet more strange.

The sun baked hot the macadam, the concrete, the pastel-washed plaster, the mud-brick, the people, as, at times, the rain tried mercilessly to wash all these away.

It was May now. Time of the city's special effort. When it yawned. When it wet its lips, though with bored appetite. Exercised its jaw, yet carelessly, in preparation for the summer tourists. Paint was flicked on to beach cafés. A news-stand ostentatiously displayed a year-old copy of Punch. The police seized neither pornographic postcards nor paperbacks, because these did not exist. Instead they stepped sobered out of the Spanish-dubbed Hollywood at the Roxy, and arbitrarily gaoled anyone in sight who might baffle Western expectation. Often it was only after puzzled thought. 'Was there a beggar with sores like this in that sequence of Times Square?' 'Mustafa, this boy Achmed Zoffri has been brought in again. He says the Nazarene he worked for is dead' . . .

In the city was Naima. There was too much, as the beat called Ezra had evidently decided. There was too little, though with Achmed to pay for it.

The savage beauty of the Rif Mountains lay all about them: inaccessible ridges that were bare, slate blue, jagged, as though axed out of whetstone. Tormented scrub dung to the walls of the valleys, whose narrow, serpentine beds sometimes revealed a ribbon of live green, or early corn crop turning gold. The crêpe petals of poppies fluttered scarlet at the roadside. Forty kilometres. Yet one need not come this far to experience the
recurrent shock of just how alien the city was, even to its immediate hinterland. People paused now to watch their passage. Many raised a hand in greeting. A life that was the same yesterday as it would be tomorrow had its own tempo in the stoop of the Berber woman gathering wood, the absorption of a man shaving his pubis on a sunny rock not far from the road's edge. Storks seemed to favour the highway with remote interest too. Fearless, even a little arrogant in their sacred protection, they took a pace backward, and stretched lazy wings a moment at the racing jeep.

They began to pass primitive, mountain villages: honeycombs built into a sheer face of rock, tonally inseparable from the surrounding scene, and visible only as a series of more or less rectangular apertures. Even the road had lost its cosmopolitan look, becoming mare purely French, straight and tree lined, now that it had begun to dip down into the plain. All Spanish and British influence was left behind with the city, and the triangular promontory dividing the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. From here on there would be only the ghosts of French colonialism, with its new cities built invariably, and out of fear rather than deference, a few kilometres outside the old. There was little left now to distinguish the origins of these very finely. At most there remained the bare, echoing provincial restaurant, open to the sidewalk, with its soup-stained waiter, its broken fan, and the extremes of unpredictability that mark an adoptive cooking. Once more Jay waved away Lom's seemingly inexhaustible paper-bag, whose contents he had now identified. Instead, he thought of the dismal salons where he had sat, surely the only patron to have ever actually eaten among the bravely beer-drinking youths batting the little ball excitedly back and forth between the croaking wooden men in the boxed football game, only to be afforded an utterly improbable meal of
Routiers
'
splendour and proportions. Of the identical setting where he had chewed the leather omelette, the mummified chicken knee, the lettuce snatched from the load that happened at that moment to be passing through the great, sleepy white blaze of midday in the square beyond the oil-clothed pavement tables, the drooped, unstirring strip of tattered awning. And Jay recognised now a nostalgia in himself. It was a liberating emotion after the staleness of the city.

Delicate, wand-like cypresses lined the road. The plain lay stilly
beneath the sun with even greater assurance than the mountains. The people, the scenes they passed, seemed totally the phenomena of a carelessness that proclaimed only the sovereignty of that present, idling hour. Yet the most commonplace physical movement of a human being had about it the subjugation which was the essence of the philosophy of
mektoub
;
and with this some quite final sadness. The people they were passing lived terribly, and died, most often, in great pain. Jay could not define what it was they did have, which the city had certainly lost, and whose lack he felt within himself as he gazed out from the speeding jeep.