The Fury of Rachel Monette (15 page)

She reclined her chair as far as it would go and closed her eyes but she was unable to sleep. She thought of her last telephone conversation with Trimble.

“Of course we're keeping the case open,” he had said. “We haven't given up on tracing the black car, and something may turn up on the blond man.” But the FBI had found no record of a graduate student named Gurt Weiss enrolled in any university in Munich, and no one had ever heard of a German encampment named Siegfried in a place called Mhamid or anywhere else in North Africa.

On the drive to Kennedy Airport her father had reiterated these facts. “Let the professionals handle it,” he told her.

“Adam's been missing for over a month. That's not handling it.”

“But—”

She gripped his shoulders hard. “Adam is alive. I'm going to to find him.”

At the last minute he offered to go with her. “But who would take care of the fish?” she had said. She meant it lightly but it brought a hurt and slightly shameful look to her father's face. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead.

“Have you got enough money, Rachie?” he asked.

“Yes.” She kissed him again and went through the glass doors where a tired young man waited to search her bag.

To the east the sky began to lighten. A band of red gold appeared on the horizon dividing space into two endless halves of navy blue. Rachel pictured herself sitting in a padded chair bolted to a hunk of metal speeding over the cold sea. She hated flying.

Dawn brought the stewardesses in fresh make-up, applied thickly enough to hide signs of fatigue, or anything else. They woke up the passengers to give them tepid, bitter coffee and jellied rolls of the sort a tongue could feel but not taste. Everyone was eager to get off the plane; she could hear it in the captain's voice when he told them it was he speaking.

True to his word he landed the plane on the runway at Mohammedia Airport, north of Casablanca. Then he drove it around the tarmac for a while giving the stewardesses a chance to walk up and down the aisle ordering everyone to remain seated. They were released at precisely 8:32 in the morning, Tuesday, the twenty-third of March. Rachel knew that because she was adjusting her watch on the captain's instructions.

Inside the terminal a fat man in a gray uniform held out his hand for her passport. He opened it to an unmarked page and stamped it hard, so it would stay stamped. She was admitted into the country.

The first place she visited was the luggage carousel. A dark youth with a broken zipper beat her to her suitcase and in English demanded a four-dirham ransom. She explained in French that she had not yet had opportunity to change money, consequently she herself had no dirhams. Her accent sounded strained and arrhythmic in her ears, but the boy didn't seem to notice. He smiled and handed her the suitcase.

“You owe me,” he said in French.

“The next time,” she answered. Despite everything she felt excitement at being in a strange place.

On her way to the car rental counter Rachel made a detour and entered a door that had the word for women written on it in five languages, and also displayed a black plastic silhouette that looked like a man wearing a dress. She went into one of the cubicles, closed the door, wiped off the seat with the coarse brown tissues which the tin box dispensed one at a time, and sat down. On the inside of the door in front of her face she saw fingerprints etched in human waste. Rachel laughed out loud. She had left the deodorized world of the west far behind, but she knew the culture shock had come and gone, passing through her in that one moment. She was glad it had happened while she was still in no-man's land.

At the car rental counter, operated by an international agency, Rachel asked for something with four-wheel drive. At first she spoke French, but the attendant, a dark woman with dyed blond hair who weighed less than she was meant to, held steadfastly to English, so Rachel gave up. In English she felt more muscular, and she needed all her strength to wrest the automobile from the woman. It was almost noon before she drove away in a dusty Land-Rover with an ashtray full of date pits.

On the flight Rachel had studied a detailed road map of Morocco. She had plotted the route from Casablanca to Mhamid and added the figures that marked the distance in kilometers from point to point along the way. They came to a total of six hundred and ninety, slightly more than four hundred miles. She had planned to complete the drive in one day, but she did not reach Mhamid until Thursday morning.

She couldn't blame the car—it ran without difficulty. Or the roads—except in the High Atlas, where children waved raw chunks of amethyst at her, they were straight. Only the last ninety kilometers, from Zagora to Mhamid, were they not paved as well. It was her own fault. A tiredness overcame her on the journey that made her sleep for fourteen hours in an expensive dirty hotel in Marrakech and twelve more in an expensive clean one in Zagora. Even on the road her eyes constantly felt heavy, and she didn't exceed fifty miles an hour.

Soon after Zagora the mood left her quite suddenly. Perhaps it was dispelled by the sight of the first sign pointing toward Mhamid. Rachel followed the graded dirt road which clung for a while to the west bank of the Oued Draa, a mean trickle that managed to sustain narrow bands of palm groves on both sides. The green of their fronds, in the midst of the surrounding waste, seemed more succulent to her than any green she had known before.

The road turned away from the valley of the Draa and led her across a plain of sand and pebbles. Bare brown mountains ringed her on all sides; whenever Rachel looked at them they receded before her eyes. She did not see another person until the road rejoined the Draa.

She smelled the date palms long before she saw the trees themselves, surrounding a small village walled in reddish stone. A group of little boys sat barefoot beneath the trees, each holding chalk and a slate and facing a bearded old man who stood in front of them. The boys watched Rachel pass. Many of their faces were black, but some were lighter than Rachel's. Rachel waved. The old man said something in a sharp voice and the boys turned their heads away.

Beyond the village the road ran once again along the bank of the Draa, now completely dry. The trickle of sluggish brown water had become a line of polished stones. As if in sympathy the road, too, grew rougher and began trying to shake the Land-Rover apart. Rachel found it easier to leave it completely in favor of the hard-packed plain.

After a while the first dunes appeared, forcing her to return to the track. Then, divided here and there by the sand came a last resurgence of palm groves. Through the trees she could see small villages, some of them fortified. Suddenly the rutted track became smooth black asphalt and the noise of rattling metal was replaced by the quiet hiss of the tires.

The palm groves ended and Rachel found herself in the central square of a small town. Several jeeps of various manufacture stood at different angles in the middle of the square, more abandoned than parked. The whole town had that forsaken look. There were no people or animals in sight. The doors of the faded yellow-cement buildings that surrounded the square were closed, and the windows covered with crude wooden shutters. Two buildings slightly taller than the others faced each other across the square. One was the gendarmerie, the other the Hotel Mhamid. Neither looked inviting.

Rachel drove on, her destination ten kilometers beyond, somewhere in the southwest. Beyond the square the road continued for a few hundred feet before the asphalt stopped abruptly. No dirt track replaced it. Rachel stopped the car and got out. A dirty cloud of flies circled her head and came to rest on the windshield. She gazed into the distance. Two faint trails led north and northwest. To the southwest Rachel saw a plain of sand and stone that gave no sign that anyone had ever set foot on it.

She looked back toward the town. Two men, one wearing a white robe, the other in khaki uniform, stood in front of the gendarmerie, watching her. She climbed into the Land-Rover, noted the number of kilometers recorded below the speedometer, and drove slowly into the southwest. The flies stuck to the windshield like barnacles.

There were no clouds in the sky but that didn't mean it was blue. It seemed to be filled with fine dust made honey-colored by the warm sun. In the golden light her eyes were unsure of distance and direction. She took a pocket compass from her bag and set it on the dashboard.

When she had gone ten kilometers she got the binoculars out of the glove compartment and stood on the roof of the car. She scanned the world around her. Nothing moved. There was no sign of any building, old or new. On the northern horizon rounded hills rose out of the plain. To the west it continued unchanged, stony and flat. In the south fields of sand appeared, covering parts of the rocky surface, and beyond she saw columns of dunes marching into Algeria.

In her notebook Rachel drew a diagram of what she had seen, and then began a methodical reconnaissance of the area. Using the place she had stopped as a mid-point she made a two-kilometer square in the desert. When she had completed it she began a second, twice the size.

On the southern leg she began encountering sand dunes. Keeping to the shallow sandy patches, she picked her way between them until she was blocked by a long line of dunes, running east to west without a gap. She drove west until she found a dune less imposing than the rest, then circled back across the sand. From a distance of about three hundred yards she accelerated toward it, the tires whining at the lack of traction. Nevertheless when the jeep hit the dune it was moving fast, fast enough to twist its way to the top and drop off the other side. It landed with a heavy jolt that knocked the wind out of Rachel. When she had recovered she got out and crawled under the chassis. Nothing dangled.

She stood up and brushed the sand from her clothes. A man was singing. He sounded like Frank Sinatra. He was singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” Frank was fighting a large smothering string section for possession of the melody, and losing. The sound of the battle came closer.

A huge yellow smile appeared at the crest of a dune. It belonged to a camel that lumbered over, looked right through her and kept on going. The man sitting on top, resting his bare feet on the camel's neck, wasn't as friendly. He didn't turn in her direction at all. He was too busy adjusting the aerial on the big overseas radio that hung on a strap from the small leather saddle, beside a long and very old rifle. Frank wondered about the quality of life on Jupiter and Mars.

“Wait,” Rachel called, trying French and English.

The camel halted. The two heads swiveled slowly. Two sets of eyes rested on her, one brown, one yellow. She walked close to the camel, but not too close, and spoke to the rider in French.

“I am looking for an old settlement called Camp Siegfried,” she said. The camel made a loud sniffing sound and turned away, but the man kept his eyes on her. His skin was very dark, and tinted indigo by the dye in the robe he wore. He had prominent cheekbones and a thin-lipped mouth. “Campement Siegfried,” she repeated.

The fine mouth opened and the man spoke rapidly for a minute or two in a language Rachel did not know. He ended on an interrogative note. She squatted and with her finger drew a picture in the sand. A flat-topped blockhouse. A tent. A flagpole with a flag sticking out at the top. A circle around it all to indicate the wall.

The man laughed happily. He switched off the radio and made a clicking sound in the back of his mouth. The camel knelt. Gracefully he slipped down, landing lightly close beside her. He drew several new buildings in the sand, and outside the circle added a few palm trees. The palm trees pleased him. He chuckled to himself and drew a few more. Against one of them he sat a little stick figure. That did it. He clapped his hands like a four-year-old and laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. After a while she joined in. Gradually the fit subsided. He dabbed at his eyes with the tips of his finely shaped fingers.

“Where is it?” she asked in French. He smiled at her encouragingly. Rachel assumed a questioning expression and pointed with exaggerated tentativeness in different directions. He began to like this game as well as the other. Each new direction struck him as funnier than the last. He was getting set to go into the hand-clapping bit.

“Stop it,” Rachel said in an irritated tone.

His laughter ceased immediately. Gently he laid his hand on her shoulder and turned her toward the northeast. With a slow gesture he raised one of his beautiful hands and pointed in the direction she had come from.

“Merci,” Rachel said, clasping her hands in a thanking gesture.

She thought of one more question: “How far?” She repeated it a couple of times. He pointed again with the same elegance. She shook her head, and held her hands apart as if she were telling fish stories. He giggled and held his hands apart, a little wider.

“Merci,” she said again.

From an inner pocket the man drew several grimy dates and offered them to her. Because she had read that refusing food was a cardinal rudeness in the eyes of primitive people she took one and ate it, expecting him to do the same. But he returned the rest of the dates to his pocket.

“Merci,” she said again, holding out her hand. Instantly she saw that he did not want to shake it. He clasped the tips of her fingers for a moment, stepped on the neck of the camel and sat lightly against the hump. The camel stood, bobbed its head and strode away. Two French female voices began discussing their favorite detergent.

Rachel made a detour of several kilometers to the west before she found a path through the dunes. Then she drove in the direction the man had pointed, stopping several times to look about with the binoculars. She saw nothing resembling the drawing in the sand, nor any sign at all of human existence, until she re-entered Mhamid. He had sent her back to the town. A late afternoon breeze nipped at the Moroccan flag on the pole in front of the police station.