Moroccan Traffic: Send a Fax to the Kasbah Read online

  A long rectangle opened before us, displaying arched walls, and hotels, and palm trees. There were people, but not all that many. Beyond were the porticoed courtyards of the markets, fitted with cells crammed with unpackaged goods in sacks, bowls and dishes. There were trays of crabs in the fishmarket, and aproned men wielding hoses. Mid-piazza, men sat among papers loaded with lemons and eggs, and cast handfuls of water on baskets of anonymous greenery. A barrow of mint trundled past.

  The sun was still high. No one hurried too much. As we passed, I read the labels stuck on the spice stalls. Pour la chute des cheveux. Pour la rhume. Pour I’estomac. Pour la toux. And beyond that, in alleys lined with blue tiles and awnings, the silversmiths’ shops, which didn’t cure anything. Next, a street of grimy, everyday shops, selling plastic bowls and dirty cassettes and thick rolls and pastries. A street of cedarwood boxes and tables inlaid with mother of pearl. Dirt-paved lanes. Passages with carved, ornate doorways; a buzzing alley of sewing machines. Roofs with untidy storks, and windows hung with bird cages and carpets. Shutters opening, and children wandering into the street, and the sound, in all this indolence, of feet pounding down some distant street and voices shouting. A cat, backing out of an upper window, peed gracefully into the street and I stopped.

  Sullivan had stopped already. The voices we heard were Canadian. Sullivan said, ‘They’re going towards the harbour.’

  He started to hurry. I followed. My jacket stuck to my arms, and Sullivan’s tunic was marked with sweat down the spine, and under the arms, and round the glistening Afghan silver belt. All the same, he ran on the balls of his feet as if made of rubber. Beyond the fish market and under the palm trees we found the whole Canadian party, face to face with a pair of disbelieving bifocals.

  The Toronto Star was making the running, followed closely by Chom. The Toronto Star, who was handsome, bearded and hot, said, ‘Did he come back to you?’

  Johnson Johnson, his pipe in his mouth, gazed back at them all. He said, ‘Who?’

  The lady from Radio-TV Toronto said, ‘Ellwood Pymm. Have you seen him since he left the harbour?’

  ‘No. Why?’ said Johnson. The bifocals registered that I had joined the party, with Sullivan.

  The man from CFCF said, ‘Because he was assaulted, that’s why. A group of men started to hustle him on the Portuguese battery. He ran down the steps. We ran after, but by the time we got down, he’d disappeared. He didn’t come back to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Johnson. ‘I suggest someone gets hold of the police, and the rest of you start searching about from where you saw him last. Did he pick a fight in some way?’

  The voices reduced themselves slightly. The Toronto Star said, ‘No. Not really. Not more than usual. You’re right. Let’s go back to where we saw him last.’

  Essaouira is not all that big. I was the one who found the Arabic phrasebook, covered with stork shit. It lay genteelly open at the column that said:

  Hi Sir!

  You are Pregnant!

  Congratulations!

  And below the guano, the pages were spotted with blood.

  Chapter 8

  Although the amount of blood was not large and Ellwood Pymm, to my recollection had plenty of it, it was a shock to see the soaked spots, brown already, and splashes leading off in the dust.

  They petered out, and when the local police, and later someone from the Sûreté Nationale arrived, there was nothing we or the Canadians could tell them except the cause of the original quarrel which, as might have been expected, turned out to be over a woman. Ellwood Pymm, hunting for trade, had not been the most tactful of men. The outraged fathers, brothers or husbands had disappeared, perhaps to follow and knife him, but more likely to frighten him into hiding. His fellow Canadians ranged the streets in twos and threes calling ‘Ell-wood!’ while their ONMT host made agitated phone calls from the hotel nearest the gates.

  Sullivan had settled there too, and was ordering drinks for himself and Johnson and me while I stood irresolutely, holding the unfortunate phrasebook by its cleanest corner. Mr. Pymm, while far from a soulmate, had at least once lent me the book; the police didn’t want it and I felt I couldn’t abandon it or him. Colonel Sullivan, when this was explained, poured the beer he had ordered and said he hoped I wouldn’t mind if he didn’t join me, and further that he proposed to drive back to Marrakesh before dark. There was a long pause and then Johnson, who was drinking beer also, said that if I was really keen to go back to the search, he would come along with me. But it got dark, I would remember, before seven.

  Thanks for nothing. Thanks for the gentlemanly enthusiasm. I waited until Johnson had finished his drink, then he and I went off together.

  Now all the shutters were open, and the sun beat down on streets crowded with men and women and animals. We walked up to the markets. I said, ‘Where would you hide, if you were Mr. Pymm?’

  ‘In the Trump Tower,’ said Johnson Johnson. ‘Or the Barbican. Or possibly somewhere sinking or rising near Iceland. What would you do with Mr. Pymm if you were a serious-minded Moroccan whose sister had just been insulted?’

  ‘Sssst!’ someone said.

  ‘I wouldn’t kill him,’ I said.

  ‘Sssst!’ said someone again.

  ‘Of course you’d kill him,’ Johnson said. ‘Then you’d kill your sister, then you’d kill yourself. Who’s saying Sssst?’

  It was a man in a striped djellabah and a strong five o’clock shadow, who had appeared, stumbling, at my side. He said, ‘Ameerka!’

  ‘British,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Ameerka here!’ said the man.

  ‘Where?’ said Johnson.

  ‘Follow!’ said the man, and hurried before us.

  I said, ‘He means American. He means Mr. Pymm.’

  ‘You’re the expert,’ said Johnson. ‘Send two neck foils, and the complete boxed set of questions is yours. Do you think we should be humdrum, and tell the police about this?’

  ‘We haven’t time. We’d lose him,’ I said.

  ‘So suspense writers have been saying ever since the New Testament,’ Johnson said. ‘What about tearing out leaves of your phrasebook?’

  It was, actually, a sensible idea. I dropped ‘Hello!’ (Alo!) at the first corner, followed by ‘Give me a kiss!’ (Iteeni bawsee!) and, as we dived into a doorway, ‘Okay!’ (Tayyet!) and ‘Hamburger’ (Ground meat with parsley and spices cooked on skewers: very good). Then someone seized me by the arms, dropped a sack over my head and said, ‘You scream, I kill.’ In French.

  I deduced, from a short obscenity behind me, that the same thing had happened to Johnson whose mother, I remembered with gratitude, had also had him taught French. Then no one spoke French any more, but several people just used their hands to propel us along a confined space of some kind, and round corners, and up a flight of difficult stairs, and along several other uneven floors to a place where, without warning, my feet were kicked from under me and I heard Johnson grunt and fall, also. There were other sounds, as if he had tried to get up, and they hit him.

  I wondered if I were going to be raped. I wondered if I were going to be killed. I wondered if they knew who Johnson was, and if the Royal Academy would hang Sir Robert’s picture unfinished, and what the Moroccan royals would do (if they caught them) to the men who had ruined their portraits. I opened my eyes as the bag was pulled off my shoulders and found myself in a dim room packed with rolls of new carpets, in the grasp of two turbaned men with their faces wrapped over like women. A little way off, Johnson lay sepulchrally propped on his shoulders. His spectacles glimmered. There were columns of carpets with price tags on either side of him, but no dog at his feet. Apart from a slight flush, he looked the same as he had at his Club; and if someone had slugged him, there was no sign of it. He said, ‘I forgot the damned word for “Okay”.’

  I didn’t want jokes. I wanted Sir Robert, or Sullivan, or even my mother. It was time for what my mother would have identified as a quality response in the field of interperson
al dynamics. I addressed my captors in French. I said, ‘Do you want money?’

  No one answered. The two men released me. One went off down a corridor stacked with rolled carpets. The other sat on his hunkers trimming his nails with a knife eight inches long. Every time Johnson moved, the knife glittered. Then the first man came back with some cord, and lashed Johnson’s wrists and his ankles. I waited for them to do the same to me and, from the expectant look on his face, so did Johnson.

  They didn’t. One of them placed himself behind me. The man who had fetched the cord fumbled under his robes and, surprisingly, produced a tobacco bag and a packet of papers. I wondered if he was going to offer Johnson a fill of his pipe. Instead, he rolled a cigarette, lit it, and offered it between Johnson’s lips. Johnson’s lips remained shut.

  ‘Smoke!’ said the man. He wrenched away Johnson’s glasses, exposing an expression of mild resignation, and stabbed the cigarette forward again, without obtaining an opening. Then the man behind me made some sort of movement. Johnson looked at him, and then at the fist in front of his face. His mouth slowly relaxed. When the cigarette came forward again, he gave it a niche. It sloped from his world-weary face as in Casablanca. He was treating us all, I realised, to Humphrey Bogart. ‘Draw!’ said the man at his side.

  The tip of the cigarette came to sudden life. Johnson said, ‘I should prefer a pipe, if I must.’

  ‘It is we who state preferences,’ said the man. ‘Be happy you are alive.’ He tossed the bifocal glasses on the floor and stood on them carefully, so that the glass didn’t cut up his slippers.

  It still sounded like Casablanca, except that he wasn’t acting. It was real. I didn’t know what to say. ‘You won’t get money,’ I said, ‘unless you treat us well.’

  They didn’t bother to answer. The man behind me shifted a little. Johnson smoked. We were, I guessed, on the second floor of some carpet warehouse. Corridors on either side were stacked with rolled carpets and filled with intermittent daylight from a central well which must descend, I supposed, to the sales floor. Normally, the place would be full of tourists. Today I could hear nothing at all from below, and at first no other sounds from the corridors, which were really first-floor galleries surrounding the well. Then I heard a distant movement, and the man behind me, rising, walked towards it and called.

  He spoke Arabic, and it wasn’t anything that I recognised. He disappeared. A moment later, he returned walking backwards with a third man whose face was also hidden. Between them, they bore the recumbent form of Mr. Ellwood Pymm, whom they dropped on the floor. His eyes were shut, but he was breathing.

  I never thought that a crewcut, pug-nosed, sun-blistered American would make me think of my mother, but Ellwood Pymm did. Ellwood Pymm, smeared with blood and lying as if recently pole-axed was the epitome of the lame ducks that swam into every house my mother ever had. My friend of the knife retired to the wall. The newcomer remained crouched by the body, his head turned to watch Johnson and me. He said, ‘Mademoiselle. You recognise this gentleman, maybe?’ He spoke French, but not as an Arab speaks it.

  I said, ‘Yes, He’s Mr. Ellwood Pymm. He’s a guest of the National Tourist Office.’

  ‘One realises that,’ said the man. ‘One regrets. But time presses; he has been foolish, and it may be that we must take severe steps to obtain the information he has denied us. You work for Kingsley Conglomerates?’

  The words came from behind a face-veil and under a turban and above a ton of fluttering clothes as worn in Mecca. I couldn’t have been more surprised if a belly-dancer had walked into the Boardroom. I opened my mouth. Johnson said, ‘She’s an Executive Secretary. She answers the telephone.’ His voice was even huskier than mine, but his French was all right. I saw the cigarette was almost finished and another, already lit, was waiting.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man in Arab clothing. ‘And she receives encoded Fax messages at her hotel, and has a good memory for numbers. Mademoiselle, tell me you have a good memory for numbers? I hope so, or Mr. Pymm will not be comfortable.’ In the slit between his turban and his face-cloth and indeed all over the rest of him he was establishing Appropriate Eye Contact, Relaxed Posture, and the Comfortable Tone of Voice that Resolves Conflict. By now, I was used to being pre-empted. I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean!’ It seemed to be my phrase for the day.

  ‘It is simple,’ said our unknown French-speaker. ‘Your Sir Robert conducts business in Marrakesh. Messages reach him from London through you. Mr. Pymm, being a journalist, is interested in his hotel Fax machine and is capable, I should say, of interpreting what he notices there. Unfortunately, he denies this. He claims to understand none of what has been transmitted to you. We require that information from you.’

  I stared at him. That was secret company information. The carpets stirred in a draught, and their price tickets dangled. I said, ‘I’m not going to tell you any of that!’ Johnson for some reason snorted. His current cigarette had gone out: they lit him a fresh one. I said, ‘In any case, Mr. Pymm—’

  Johnson said, ‘Look, how can a girl secretary interpret numbers? If you’re convinced that Pymm knows, wake him up and ask him again. You’ve got us now as leverage.’

  This was nonsense, of course. Even if he’d intercepted them, Pymm couldn’t have decoded yesterday’s Faxes. No one could, outside the company. But before Pymm convinced them he really knew nothing, Johnson Johnson and I could be dead. Our interrogator snapped, ‘Why are you afraid the girl secretary speaks? We have no time to wake your Mr. Pymm. Your friends search for you, do we not know it? Therefore I say again, mademoiselle. Reply to my questions, or Mr. Pymm suffers. Will he lose a hand? Or an ear?’ And the man with the knife, getting up, walked over and stood above the recumbent form of Ellwood Pymm, guest of the National Tourist Office.

  I was breathing so quickly I hiccoughed. Johnson said, ‘Wendy. It’s bluff.’ The cigarette muffled his voice, but I made him out. I’ve had enough practice.

  The French-speaker sighed and said, ‘Cut his ear off.’ The knife was lifted above Ellwood Pymm. I said ‘No!’

  The knife stopped. The first man said, ‘Ah. Then you will tell us?’

  ‘No, she won’t,’ Johnson said. ‘One journalist’s ear against the livelihood of all Kingsley’s employees, worldwide? Go on. Show us. Cut it.’

  ‘No!’ I shouted. I might have been talking to my mother.

  ‘Cut it! ‘ said Johnson. He had gone mad. I could hear it.

  The man with the knife looked at the other, and the man with the curious French said gently, ‘Eh bien. You wish us to cut? Shall we cut you?’

  ‘Only,’ said Johnson, ‘if you are crazy. I will say it again. If Miss Helmann possesses this information, which I doubt, it is of an importance which surpasses that of Mr. Pymm’s ear, or mine. She will not impart it.’

  I was impressed by the extreme deliberateness with which he made this statement, as well as irritated by his bossiness, and shocked by the way he’d selected Pymm as Chief Victim. Even then, I had no chance to speak. The man who wore Arab dress said, ‘Then perhaps it is not the ear with which we should concern ourselves. Mademoiselle, it is for you. Do we cut now?’

  The knife glittered. The knife hung, poised, over the invisible assets of Ellwood Pymm, whom I did not especially like, whom I did not especially know, but whom I did not wish to see debarred from trade, rough or smooth, for the rest of his natural life. They were all four looking at me: three slitted pairs of eyes and Johnson’s, screwed up against the smoke and more intent, somehow, than all of them.

  It was Johnson who spoke, quickly and quietly, and not in English. He said, ‘Wendy. Do you know German?’ And when I nodded, he went on, in German as beautiful as Roland Reed’s: ‘They are bluffing. Force them to use the knife. If they draw blood, then I am wrong. Give them some figures at once.’

  And suddenly, looking at his untouched face, listening to the cajolery in his voice, I saw I’d been duped. Ellwood Pymm had nothing to do with it. Pymm was only
the hostage who got me here. It was Johnson – Johnson, backer of Marguerite Curtis Geddes who needed those figures, and before tomorrow’s meeting. Johnson who hired the men. Johnson who made sure he came with me and was using Pymm, now, to convince me that I had to speak. I said, ‘Mr. Johnson, I think Mr. Pymm is quite safe. I don’t think you or anyone else would stoop to murder. And so I’m not giving you or anyone else the figures you ask for.’

  ‘Me?’ said Johnson. ‘Holy Jesus, if you think I’m behind this, why did I lay a whole bloody trail with your phrasebook? If they force you to, make up the numbers.’

  I stared at him, since for a moment he had sounded wholly alarmed. It still didn’t convince me. He had laid a trail. Equally, he could have paid someone to pick up all the papers. And he needn’t count on my gratitude for suggesting I dream up the numbers. I had thought of that. So had everyone else. While we spoke, a clipboard appeared in front of me. Our interlocutor said, ‘You will speak English or French, if you please. Naturally, the message is known. We require interpretation of the words employed in it. Inconsistencies will be apparent. Here is a pen. Now I will ask the questions.’ He held a paper of notes in his hand.

  I didn’t know what to do. I took the board and the ballpoint. Beside Ellwood Pymm, the man with the knife was using its point, idly, to slit Pymm’s leather jacket to shreds. Pymm, with his mouth slightly open, lay as if already dead.

  If I told them what they wanted to know, MCG would know how to resist the takeover. The City would know how much we needed MCG money. Mo Morgan would realise that he was Kingsley’s only prospect of long term survival, and that without MCG he might never be paid. And anyone with the idea of bidding for Kingsley’s would know that they would never have a better chance than just now. Sir Robert had thought, bringing no one but me, that he had escaped interference. Instead, I had put his whole business in jeopardy.