The Complete Enderby (45 page)

Mint, mint, mint. It was too easy to think that, though the immigration official waved him through when he cried: ‘
Ma mère est mortellement malade
,’ though the leading taxi opened up smartly for him when he mentioned
Monsieur Mercer
, he was destined for the butcher’s block. The sun was about half way down the sky, but it was still up to Regulo Mark 4 and there was all this mint. The memory fumed in of his once trying out a small leg of fatty New Zealand in Mrs Meldrum’s gas oven. It had emerged not well-cooked, and he had made a stew out of it. You could not really go wrong with a stew. There had been a lot of grease to skim off, though. The driver, a Moor as Enderby took him to be, was stewy in the armpits – no, more like a tin of Scotch Broth. But he was fumigating himself and his cab with a home-rolled cigarette that reeked of decent herbs, though possibly hallucinogenic. He also rolled his eyes. Soon, Enderby considered, the time must come for jettisoning his Enderby passport. Miss Boland would soon be uncovering aliases to the police. He could not be Hogg, he could not be Enderby. The nasty world outside had succeeded in taking pretty well everything away from him. Except his talent, except that.

A well-made road with trees, probably bougainvillea and
eucalyptus
and things. And plenty of mint. Also people in turbans, caftans, nightgowns with stripes, and what-you-call-them djelabas. The driver drove with the automatism of a pony pulling a trap, though much faster, his being not to reason why Enderby had to reach the tour hotel before everyone else. It was time to tell him some other place to go. Enderby said:

‘Je veux aller à Tanger.’

‘
Demain
?’

‘Maintenant.’

‘
Impossible
.’

‘
Regardez
,’ Enderby said, ‘I’m not going to that bloody hotel.
Une femme. Une question d’une femme. Il faut que j’évite une certaine femme.’

With care the driver steered his cab round the next corner and stopped by the kerb. His hand-brake ground painfully. ‘
Une femme
?’ It was a pleasant little residential avenue full of mint. But down it a bare-legged man in Sancho Panza hat and loose brown clouts urged a laden donkey. ‘
Tu veux une femme?’

‘Just the opposite,’ said Enderby, frowning at the familiarity. ‘
J’essaie à éviter une femme, comme j’ai déjà dit
.’

‘Tu veux garçon?’

‘Let’s get this straight,’ cried Enderby. ‘I want to get away.
Comment puis-je
get to bloody Tangier?’

The driver thought about that. ‘
Avion parti
,’ he said. ‘
Chemin de fer
–’ He shrugged. Then he said: ‘You got money, Charlie?’

‘I thought it would come to that,’ said Enderby. He brought out his small bundle of old international tips. What was the currency here? There were a couple of notes with a bland capped and robed ruler on them,
Banque du Maroc
, and a lot of Arabic. What were these? Dirhams. He had, it seemed, ten dirhams. He didn’t know how much they were worth. Still, resourceful Enderby. Ready cash for all emergencies of travel. The driver was quick to grab the ten dirhams. He pushed them, as if he were a woman, into his unbuttoned hair-whorled brown breast. Then he cheerfully started up his cab again. ‘Where are we going?’ Enderby wanted to know. The driver didn’t answer; he just drove.

Enderby was past being uneasy, though. After all, what was he trying to do except borrow time against the inevitable? If Yod
Crewsy
died, well then, he, his supposed murderer, could only be put in jail for a long period, the death penalty having kindly been abolished. And in jail poetry could be written. There would be ghastly stews, but he knew all about those. Great things had been written in jail –
Pilgrim’s Progress, De Profundis
, even
Don Quixote
. Nothing to worry about there. Slops out. Here’s your skilly, you horrible murderer, you. Snout-barons. What you in for, matey? I murdered a practitioner of foul and immoral art. You done a good job, then, you did. But, sheep for a lamb (all this mint, mint everywhere), he had things to do first. They had to catch him first, and it was up to him, rules of the game, to make things difficult. They drove down a great smooth highway, then turned right. It was all French colonialism, with decent official buildings, green lawns, palms. Little Moroccan girls were coming out of school, gaily shrieking, and some were sped off home to their mint tea, as Enderby supposed, in haughty squat automobiles. But soon the road changed its character. Instead of shooting cleanly along an artery, the cab began to engage a capillary that was pure, and dirty, Moorish.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Enderby again.

‘
Djemaa el Fna
,’ said the driver. This meant nothing to Enderby. They were now honking among fruit-barrows, donkey-whippers, brown and black vociferators in pointed hoods and barmcake turbans and even little woolly caps like Mr Mercer’s. The faecal-coloured houses and windowless shops (loaves, strangled fowls, beads, egg-plants) bowed in towards each other at the top. Somebody wailed about Allah in the near distance. It was what was known as very picturesque, all laid on for Winston Churchill as amateur painter. Then, shouted at through gold or no teeth, the cab-flanks resonantly fisted, they drove into a great square which was full of robed people and very loud. There seemed to be native shows going on: Enderby glimpsed a fire-swallower and a man who let snakes crawl all over his person. Then, above the heads of the crowd, a small black boy went up into the air, wiggled his fingers from his ears, then sailed down again. Enderby did not really like any of this. The driver stopped and, with a vulgar thumb, pointed to where Enderby should go. It seemed to be a soft-drink stall, one of many set all about the square. He shooed Enderby out.
Enderby
got out, bag on arm, groaning. The driver did an urgent and insolent turn, butting bare shins with deformed fenders and, cursed at by some but greeted toothily and, Enderby presumed, with ribaldry by others, probed the crammed barefoot alley whence he had come. He honked slowly among thudded drums and weak pipe-skirls, fowl-squawks and ass-brays, then was smothered by nightshirts and most animated robes, pushing his way back to a world where an airport, complete with waiting Miss Boland, might be possible. Enderby encountered blind men howling for baksheesh. He brutally ignored them and made his shoes pick their way among great splay brown feet towards this soft-drink stall that had been thumbed at him. He would have a soft drink, anyway. No harm in that. And that climbed hill of an act would show the next one. But just by the stall, newly disclosed by a small mob that came away chewing things, probably nasty, he saw a patriarch tending a small fire. A little boy, his head shaven as for ringworm, was threading rubbery gobs of what Enderby took to be goatmeat on to skewers. Enderby nodded in awed satisfaction. His imagination had not failed him, then. It was time to get rid of that passport.

He stood by the fire, the passport in his hands open, mumbling to himself the liturgy of its shards of autobiography. There were still so many blank pages of travelling Enderby to be filled, and they would not now be filled. He must appear, he thought, like some Zoroastrian missionary to these who skirted him warily in robes and yashmaks: murmuring a late afternoon office to the fire. And then, as he prepared to drop the well-bound document in, the act was, as by an Oriental miracle, arrested. A bony tanned wrist gripped his chubbier whiter one, pulled, saved. Enderby looked from wrist to shoulder, meekly surprised. Then up to face above that. A white man, though brown. Lined, crafty, the eyes blue but punished. The straight hair as though bleached.

‘I was,’ said Enderby with care, ‘just getting rid of it. No further use, if you catch my meaning.’

‘You cracked? You skirted? You got the big drop on? Grandmother of Jesus, I never seen.’ The man was not old. His accent and vernacular were hard to place. It was a sort of British colonial accent. One hand still gripped Enderby’s wrist; the other hand snatched the passport. The man then let go of Enderby and began
to
pant over the passport as if it were a small erotic book. ‘Holy consecrated grandad of Christ Jesus Amen,’ he said. ‘And this is you too on it and the whole thing donk and not one little bit gritty. The genuine, and you ready to ash it up. If you don’t want it, others as do. A right donk passy. Feel his uncle, O bastard daughters of Jerusalem.’

Enderby almost smiled, then felt cunning creeping along his arteries. ‘I tried to sell it,’ he said. ‘But I could find no buyers. All I wanted was a trip to Tangier. No money, you see. Or not very much.’

‘You better come over,’ said the man. ‘Ariff ’s got a swizer of that-there at the back.’ And he led Enderby across to the very soft-drink stall that had been thumbed to him by that driver.

‘Funny,’ Enderby said. ‘This man who brought me wanted me to wait there or something. I wondered what for.’

‘Who? One of the cab-nogs? Ahmed, was it?’

‘Don’t know his name,’ said Enderby. ‘But I told him I had to get away.’

‘You on the out, then? How did he know it was tonight? Some shitsack’s been on the jabber.’ He mumbled strange oaths to himself as he led Enderby over. The drink-stall was a square wooden structure covered in striped canvas. There was a counter with cloudy glasses and bottles of highly coloured liquids. There were oil-lamps, blind at the moment, since the sun had not yet gone down. A few Moors or Berbers or something were downing some sticky yellow horror. Behind the counter stood a lithe brown man in an undervest, snakes of veins embossed on his arms. Crinkled hair rayed out, as in shock, all over his bullet-head. ‘Right,’ said this British colonial man, ‘swing us two bulgies of arry-arry.’

‘Where do you come from?’ asked Enderby. ‘I can’t quite place the accent. No offence,’ he added hurriedly.

‘None took. Name of Easy Walker. Call me Easy. Your name I know but I won’t blart it. Never know who’s flapping. Well now, you’ll have heard of West Rothgar in New Sunderland. Fifty or so miles from the capital, boojie little rathole. Had to blow, see the great wide open. And that. And other things.’ As if to symbolize the other things, he stretched his left mouth-corner, as also the left
tendon
of his neck, and held the pose tremulously. This, Enderby seemed to remember, was known as the ki-yike. Easy Walker then scratched his right ear with Enderby’s passport and said: ‘You sound to me like from back.’ Enderby stared. Easy Walker snarled a full set in impatience. ‘Great Dirty Mum,’ he explained. ‘How shall we extol thee?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Who were born of thee,’ danced Easy Walker. ‘Here it is, then. Down the upbum or,’ he said, in a finicking uncolonial accent, ‘the superior arsehole.’ There were on the counter two tumblers of what looked like oily water. Easy Walker seemed to wrap his lips round the glass-rim and, with a finger-thud on the glass-bottom, drive the substance down as though it were corned beef hard to prise from its container. He smacked in loving relish. Enderby tasted what tasted of aniseed, lubricator, meths, and the medicinal root his stepmother had called ikey-pikey. ‘Similar,’ Easy Walker told the barman. ‘And now,’ to Enderby, ‘what’s on? Why you on the out, brad?’

‘You can’t really say “similar” if it’s the same again you want. “Similar” means something different. Oh, as for that,’ Enderby recalled himself from pedantry that reminded him poignantly of those good seaside days among the decrepit, ‘it’s partly a matter of a woman.’

‘Ark.’ Easy Walker was not impressed.

‘And,’ Enderby bid further, ‘the police are after me for suspected murder of a pop-star.’

‘You do it?’

‘Well,’ said Enderby, ‘I had the means and the motive. But I want to get to Tangier to see off an old enemy. Time is of the essence.’

This seemed reasonable to Easy Walker. He said: ‘See that. Right right. Gobblers watching at the airport and on the shemmy. Clever bastard that cab-nog, then. Ahmed, must have been. Well,’ he said, fanning Enderby with Enderby’s passport, ‘give me this and you can come on the lemon-pip by the long road. Fix you up in Tangey up the hill. No questions, get it? The gobblers leave it strictly on the old antonio. Wash me ends, though. Right up to you, brad. Never clapped mincers on you, get it?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Enderby said. ‘Thank you very much. But,’ he added, ‘what are you on then, eh?’

‘Well,’ said Easy Walker, rolling his refilled tumbler. ‘It’s mostly Yank camps, junkies, had-no-lucks. See what I mean?’

‘American troops in Morocco?’ Enderby asked.

‘Riddled,’ said Easy Walker. ‘All off the main, though. Forts, you could call them. Very hush. Moscow gold in Nigeria I mean Algeria. PX stuff – fridges mainly – for Casablanca and Tangey. That’s why I’ve got this three-ton.’

‘A lorry? Where?’

‘Up the road. Never you mind.’

‘But,’ said Enderby with care, ‘what are you doing here, then?’

‘Well, that’s the real soft centre,’ Easy Walker said. ‘See these niggers here? Not the Marockers, more brown they are than the others, the others being from more like
real
blackland.’

‘The heart of darkness,’ said Enderby.

‘Call it what you like, brad. Berbers or Barbars. Barbar black shit, but no offence is what I tell them. They bring the stuff up with them for this here racketytoo.’

‘What stuff? What is all this, anyway?’

‘Everything,’ said Easy Walker, with sudden lucidity, ‘the heart of darkness could desire. Tales of Ali Baba and Sinbad the whatnot, and snake-charmers and all. Suffering arsehole of J. Collins, the sprids they get up to in this lot. Hear them drums?’