The Torch of Tangier Page 4

  The first chill of autumn seeped into the dank room.

  “Can’t the U.S. government afford a newer building?” Lily asked. “This smells like an old shoe.”

  “Have a little respect for history,” Drury said. “This is the oldest American government building in the world.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “Morocco recognized America in 1776, while the ink was still wet on the Declaration of Independence. First country that recognized us.” An expansive wave of his arm wafted over their tiny office and included the hall outside. “This was once a sultan’s palace, a gift to America from the Kingdom of Morocco.”

  ***

  They worked on the pamphlet every day, cobbling it together from books in the Legation library and from yellowed notes on brittle paper in trunks that Drury kept in storage in MacAlistair’s villa.

  Lily wrote about the cultural history of the zone; Drury, about physical characteristics and diseases of the indigenous population. Lily wrote about social organization, residence, and kinship; Drury, about language, resolution of conflict, and political organization.

  The work went smoothly, except when Drury leaned over Lily’s shoulder to see what she had written. Then the cramped office, the tight writing on the pages, the damp smell of the place bothered her.

  One of those afternoons, when she felt restless and out of sorts, she decided to take a break.

  She put down the pen and left the office, left the Legation and started to walk through the crowded streets of the medina, into the bustling fondouk market with its tangy aroma of spices, of apples, of half-rotted vegetables. She pushed her way past shoppers haggling with Berbers hawking produce heaped high on carts, past women squatting next to squares of cloth laid out on the sidewalk and piled with mounds of rice, of thyme, of cumin.

  She noticed a Berber watching from the edge of the crowd. He’s from the south, she thought, noting his dark skin, the reddish-brown stain of his teeth, his striped burnoose. He’s from Marrakech, the Red City, where the iron-infused soil tinted the mud brick walls with a roseate glow and seeped into the well water to pit and stain the teeth of children.

  She passed him and climbed up, up into the calm above the market, through cobbled lanes and alleys that snaked among the whitewashed walls of houses.

  Over subdued street sounds—children’s voices, mothers calling—she heard the shuffle of Berber slippers close behind her.

  She looked back. It was the Berber from Marrakech she had seen in the fondouk market.

  She paused at a café near a street corner, where men and women seated at outdoor tables nursed glasses of tea, browsed through newspapers, played at backgammon.

  She took a table and ordered a mint tea. As she sipped it, she gazed down the street, watching women trudging with net bags stuffed with vegetables, watching strollers hiking up the hill.

  When she saw the man with the camel’s hair jacket at the corner, she felt a prick of anxiety. He was talking with the Berber. The man leaned against a wall, his head back, his eyes half closed. He was talking to the Berber but looking at Lily. What bothered Lily most was the man’s eyes, the irises ringed in dark blue, the rest so light they were almost white. They were like ice.

  The man stopped talking and ducked into an alley.

  Lily paid for the tea and got ready to leave. She started down the hill toward the Legation.

  Once more she heard the Berber’s footsteps behind her.

  Don’t look back, she told herself, and felt a chill running up her spine.

  She could feel him coming closer, felt his presence on the back of her neck.

  She started to run and heard his footsteps slap against the cobbles, the sound of them faster and faster, closer and closer.

  He caught up with her when they were out of sight of the café.

  He grabbed her arm.

  His face was blank, his eyes cold. “You will come with me.”

  There was no one else in sight.

  “Why should I go with you? Who are you?”

  His grip tightened.

  “I don’t know the city.” Lily tried to pull away. “I can’t give you directions.” She felt his thumb pressing on the inside flesh of her arm. “You’re hurting me.”

  “What do you do for Drury?”

  “Drury?”

  The pressure on her arm increased. A jolt of panic crept into her throat.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He leaned into Lily, started to twist her arm.

  Instinctively her knee jerked up and she jammed it into his groin.

  He loosened his grip, began to double over.

  His knitted cap fell to the ground.

  A flurry on the edge of her peripheral vision made her glance to the side. Drury stood at the bottom of the street emerging from an alley, transfixed, waving his arms, his mouth opening and shutting, shouting, starting up the hill.

  Her breath came in gasps and a surge of alarm pounded in her ears, fluttered in her eyes. She couldn’t hear Drury.

  The Berber reached for her again. She kicked at him, shoved him back with both hands.

  He staggered, hit his head on the corner of the building, sank to his knees and collapsed onto the cobbles.

  “You all right?” she heard Drury ask from behind her.

  “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” Her voice caught. “I just pushed him.” She was staring at the Berber lying motionless on the ground. “He was trying to….”

  “I saw.” Drury gave her an appraising look. “Remind me to keep my distance when your adrenaline is up. You have more talents than I suspected.”

  Drury bent down and felt the man’s pulse.

  “He’s dead?”

  “No.” Drury looked up at Lily. “He’ll live.”

  Drury felt along the Berber’s head. Flakes of whitewash from the building dropped out of his hair. “He has a concussion.”

  “Who is he?” Lily asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Drury patted the man’s body, turned him over and felt under the burnoose. He pulled out a knife and then, a gun.

  “A Luger.” Drury rose. “Let’s get out of here before he wakes up with a headache.”

  They hurried downhill through silent streets.

  “You could have been killed,” Drury said as they plunged back into the tangle of the fondouk market, before they lost themselves in the safety of the crowd and made their way back to the Legation.

  ***

  That evening, Zaid was late for dinner. The three of them, Lily, Drury, and MacAlistair, waited for him, seated at the table in the courtyard of the villa.

  “It’s taken care of,” Zaid said as he sat down, and Faridah, the cook brought out a steaming tureen.

  None of them spoke until almost the end of the meal.

  Lily broke the silence. “That Berber this morning,” she said to Drury. “Why was he asking about you?”

  Drury put down his fork. “Was he now?”

  “He was talking to a man with steely eyes when I first saw him. The man gave me the creeps.”

  Zaid pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair. “Your Berber was a dangerous man.”

  “What do you know about him?” she asked.

  “His name was Saleem.”

  “Was?”

  Zaid took a packet of Gauloise from his pocket. “He had an accident.”

  A surge of anguish flooded through her. “The concussion?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Drury said. “It happened much later in the day.”

  “How?”

  “You had nothing to do with it.” Zaid busied himself with opening the pack of cigarettes. “He slipped as he was getting into the bath. Drowned in the bathtub.”

  “You heard it on the news?”

  Zaid shook a cigarette from the packet. He didn’t look up. “Things like that are not reported in the
news.” He seemed to be smiling.

  “The police, then?”

  Lily looked across the table at Zaid. He took a box of matches from his pocket. “They don’t know about it yet.”

  “Well then, how do you know?” She felt a sudden, inexplicable anger. “You killed him, didn’t you? In cold blood.” Her voice rose, trembling. “What’s wrong with you? He was a simple Berber, for God’s sake.”

  “He was a traitor, was willing to sell out Morocco to Europeans,” Zaid said. “He worked for the Germans, worked for the French. For money.”

  “Zaid handles…” MacAlistair began, and looked over at Zaid.

  He rolled the cigarette between his fingers and began tapping the end of it against the side of the box.

  “Zaid,” Drury said, “has contacts, knows people, knows how to get things done.”

  Lily waited for him to say more.

  “The Berber worked for Gergo Ferencz,” Drury added. “Ferencz runs German intelligence here in Tangier.”

  “You should be grateful to Zaid,” MacAlistair told her. “The man threatened you, tried to kidnap you, could have killed you. Zaid handles problems like that, watches over us.”

  Zaid lit the cigarette. “I do what I can,” he said and shrugged.

  His tongue flicked at a piece of tobacco stuck on his lip and he rubbed it off with his finger.

  “And he does it so well.” MacAlistair beamed at him like a proud father.

  Chapter Seven

  Drury trudged back to their office with the mail, rifling through it as he came down the hall. He stopped once, examined one of the envelopes, turned it over, and glanced toward Lily at her desk.

  “This came for you in my packet.” He hesitated before handing it to Lily. “It’s been traveling around awhile.”

  She stood up and reached for it. The envelope was smudged, re-addressed, and branded with forwarding stamps. The original address, in Rafi’s handwriting, was International House at the University of Chicago. It had been forwarded to the Oriental Institute and sent from there to other addresses that Lily had never heard of. This was the first letter that she had received from Rafi in a year. It seemed a miracle that it had reached her.

  “Who’s it from?” Drury asked.

  “I have a… friend.”

  “A friend?”

  Lily felt her cheeks flush. “He’s somewhere in the Maghrebh.”

  “He’s British?”

  “American. He’s attached to the British.”

  Drury glanced at the letter poised in Lily’s hand. “When’s the last time you heard from him?”

  “This is the first letter in a long time.”

  Drury reached out toward her, hesitated and drew his hand away. “Have some business down the hall. Be back in a while.”

  She waited until he was out of sight and his footsteps faded before she opened the letter.

  “I have your picture in my tent,” it began. “It’s the only thing that keeps me going. I look at you and think about when all this is over, when I come home and we are married. I kiss you before we sit down to dinner. Sometimes we have a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park; sometimes we already have two children. But always, I kiss you before dinner.”

  Most of the letter was unreadable. The British military censors had made hash of the rest of the first page, blacking out phrases, whole lines, alternate words. The letter made no sense until well down on the second page.

  “Stories are coming out of Europe about Nazi concentration camps, about evil too terrible to imagine, stories of slavery, stories of torture, of sadistic ‘scientific’ experiments on human beings that make the Inquisition sound like a picnic in the park. It’s as if a whole nation has gone mad. We must win here in North Africa so that we can attack Europe and beat them back into oblivion. I will do anything to stop them. Anything.”

  She folded the letter and held it in her hand before returning it to the envelope. It had journeyed through time and space, was soft with wear; yet still seemed warm with his breath. She clung to it, clenching it in her skirt pocket, and felt the envelope curl within her hand.

  She took it from her pocket again and ran her finger along the ragged edge of the envelope. The postmark read Tobruk, June 10, 1941. More than a year ago.

  Fear washed over Lily as she thought of the battle in the Western Desert, the hasty retreat and evacuation, and finally the fall of Tobruk at the end of June.

  She put the letter back in her pocket, patted it twice, sighed, and went back to work.

  She settled herself at the desk, reached for the top paper on the stack, changed her mind, and then took Rafi’s letter out of her pocket and weighed the envelope in her hand.

  Tobruk, June 10.

  She opened the letter again, expecting to find terrifying news hidden between the words. She held the first page, scarred with heavy black censor marks, up to the light to see if she could read what had been crossed out. Useless.

  Tobruk in June. Lily put both arms on the desk to cradle her head as a feeling of dread crept over her.

  “I have your picture in my tent,” she read again. “Always, I kiss you before dinner.” The words rang through her head like a tocsin.

  He’s all right. “He must be all right or I would have heard by now,” she said aloud.

  Get back to work.

  Lily jammed the letter back into her pocket, flicked some imaginary dust off her skirt, and straightened herself in the chair.

  She reached for the stack of papers again and began sorting them, putting them in order.

  ***

  Back in the office, Drury looked over Lily’s shoulder to see what she was writing. She was rattled and gouged a line through the last sentence. He picked up the sheaf of foolscap she had stacked at the edge of the desk and thumbed through the manuscript. Each page read like a maze, interrupted with crossed-out lines, arrows that led from broken sentences and paragraphs, from carats to sentences written sideways in the margins.

  He rotated the paper in his hand and crooked his head. “We need a secretary.” He tossed the page onto her desk. “Come on.”

  Dragging Lily behind him, he marched into Boyle’s office, demanding a secretary.

  “Can’t spare the personnel,” Boyle told him.

  “Hire someone,” Drury said.

  “Too complicated. They need security clearance. Can’t hire just anyone.”

  When Drury showed up the next day with Suzannah in tow, Lily wondered how the Legation staff would react. “I’ll vouch for her,” Drury had said.

  “Get out of my office.” Boyle’s voice reverberated down the corridor. Korian came out to the hall to watch the tableau.

  “And take your doxie with you,” Boyle shouted.

  Korian backed out of Drury’s way with a knowing glance and the shadow of a smile as Drury slammed down the hall back to his office.

  “I should have punched him in the nose,” Drury told MacAlistair that evening. They were all having dinner together at a restaurant in the medina, Drury and Lily, MacAlistair and Zaid.

  “Suzannah’s a prostitute, for God’s sake,” MacAlistair said.

  “What do you know about Suzannah?”

  “Very little.” MacAlistair’s breath caught and he coughed into a napkin. “What did you expect?”

  “A little respect for my status,” Drury said. “A little respect.”

  “What status? What does he know about you? What does he know about Suzannah?”

  “Nothing.” Drury picked up his wineglass, took a sip. “I can’t—.” He waved the glass in the air and put it down.

  “Well, then,” MacAlistair said.

  “Nevertheless.”

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning, Drury glowered at the German who waited in the shadow of the entrance to the hotel.

  “Trying to wither him with a glance?” Lily asked.

  Drury gave an exasperated grunt. “This ha
s to stop,” he said, loud enough to be heard by the German.

  They started toward the medina and the German followed, pretending not to have heard. Drury took a tortuous route through the Grand Socco, slithering around peddlers stocking vegetables, hawkers waving and singing their wares, past the smell of roasting meat and smoke curling from sizzling coals, past Berber men in bright pantaloons—orange, red, striped—a cacophony of colors in the churning sun.

  Across the square, Suzannah sat at a table in an outdoor café near the entrance to the Petit Socco. She raised her coffee cup and tilted her chin in the direction of the Grand Socco.

  “Isn’t that Tariq?” Lily asked.

  “Where?” Drury whispered from between his teeth, scarcely moving his lips.

  “Over there, in the Grand Socco.”

  “Don’t gape at him,” Drury muttered.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Comes into town from time to time to sell chickens and fish. Has a permit to fish on Cape Spartel.”

  He passed through the Grand Socco without a blink in Tariq’s direction. When Lily raised her arm to wave at Tariq, Drury pulled her along and kept them moving.

  “Hurry,” he said.

  Lily stumbled after him. “Where are we going?”

  Drury darted past women squatting in the sun next to their wares; past men hawking plates, bowls, meat, and leather from donkey carts.

  He scuttled through the Street of the Silversmiths and into the Petit Socco, Lily at his heels.

  The German followed.

  They twisted through crowded streets, traversing alleys with blind walls, skirting hordes of children in school outfits.

  “What’s going on?” Lily asked, panting.

  Faster, he pushed past crowded stalls and shops, past Berber women selling goat cheese and brooms and onions. They scrambled up and down steps through the congested streets. And still the German followed.

  A warning to get out of the way, a cry of “Balek, balek,” came from behind. Lily turned to see a donkey laden with firewood trudging along the cramped alley. The German flattened himself against a doorway to let the donkey pass. Drury pulled Lily ahead of the donkey, turned one corner, then another.