Flashback

EIGHTEEN

“How does it happen?” I asked. Brian and I had left Ourzazate and were rattling up into the Atlas’s desert foothills in an ancient Land Rover.

“How does what happen?”

“This,” I said. “All of this. How did you become what you are? How did I?”

Brian downshifted and slowed, dodging two tourist vans that were stopped by the side of the road. “I’ve told you everything I know,” he said as we picked up speed again.

“Or everything you can.”

Out my window the road fell precipitously away, the crumbling hillside sweeping downward to a series of terraced dwellings, a village made of sticks and mud. Even here, on the bleak fringe of the Sahara, a handful of satellite dishes, like pale morning glories, perched among the settlement’s flat roofs. Makeshift power lines tapped the electric cable that ran along the highway.

“What do you think they watch?” I asked, pointing toward the receding village.

“Baywatch. Friends. MTV,” Brian hazarded.

“God, I hope not.”

“American culture at its best. The new imperialism.”

“You think it’s better than the old?”

Brian shrugged. “Who am I to judge? But whatever else is true, they love our blue jeans and our music. A couple of years ago I saw a kid wearing Nikes and a Michael Jordan jersey burning an American flag.”

“Where was that?” I asked, expecting no answer and getting none.

We drove on in silence for a few miles, dodging battered trucks and more tourist vans, the dinosaur traffic of the Moroccan road.

“Listen,” Brian said, finally. “I’m not lying. I’ve told you everything I know.”

“You mean everything they told you.” I watched his jaw flex once. “Did they tell you I have a kid?”

He shifted his hands on the wheel. His eyes didn’t move from the road ahead.

“I’ve got a kid somewhere,” I told him. “A little boy or a little girl. I don’t even know which. The doctor had to show me. She had to show me the scar. They didn’t tell you that, did they?”

Brian shook his head. “No,” he said. “They didn’t tell me.”

“Do you have a name?” I asked. “A last name?”

“Yes,” Brian said, but the acknowledgment was as far as he would go.

The engine whined into a lower gear, and we slowed to a crawl. The road was climbing hard now, and ahead of us an ancient public bus led a small caravan of slowed vehicles.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh,” Brian said, relaxing into his seat, giving in to the snail-like pace. “My dad’s an electrician, and my mom sells real estate. I’ve got an older sister who lives in Cleveland. Her husband’s a CPA. She’s a soccer mom.”

“And you wanted a life less ordinary?”

“I guess. I wanted to see the world at least. I joined the navy out of high school.”

“Is that how it works?”

“That’s how it worked for me. The agency came to me when I retired from the Special Forces.”

“And for others?”

“I don’t know exactly. Some come from the military. Some are just-” He paused, searching for the right words. “Some are just good at what they do.”

“I assume you’re not talking about cooking and sewing.”

Brian shook his head.

“I killed people, didn’t I? Was that one of my special talents?”

Again, Brian didn’t answer. I took his silence for a yes.

“You know about the sisters?” I asked. “About what happened at the abbey?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it was Werner?”

“Who else?” He shrugged. “I’m sure he still has the connections to have tapped into the consular grapevine.”

Of course, I thought, watching Brian shift his hands on the wheel. He ducked out into the opposite lane and craned his head, looking for an opportunity to pass. Whoever had found me had done so through the consulate, through whatever efforts had been made to get me to the States. I was reminded of the pictures in Werner’s office, the grim record of slaughter, but still, something told me it wasn’t Werner who had killed the sisters. He didn’t seem like the kind of man to lie about such a thing, especially not to me, when his intentions had so obviously been not to release me, at least not alive.

No, I thought, someone else had murdered the sisters. Someone besides Werner had paved my way at customs. I was certain of it. Someone had put two and two together, the woman who’d been left for dead in that Burgundy field and an American trying to get home. The question, as Werner himself had pointed out, was who.

Brian found a clear moment, and we sped forward, overtaking the bus just before a blind curve.

“You don’t have any idea who I was working for?” I asked, as we slipped back onto the right side of the road.

Brian shook his head and punched the accelerator. “No.”

“But you believe it?” I asked. “You believe I’m a traitor?”

“Were,” he corrected me. “I believe you were.” The words were meant for me, a show of conviction, but it seemed to me it was himself he was trying to assure.

We came into Marrakech from the north, skirting the red walls of the medina and the stone-pocked cemetery outside the Bab el-Khemis, plunging down the Route Principale toward the Bab Larissa and the Avenue Mohammed V. We passed the Koutoubia Mosque, then turned onto the Rue Moulay Ismail, pulling to the curb in front of the Hotel Ali.

“Wait here,” I told Brian. Praying Ilham had kept my storage locker, I climbed out of the Land Rover and headed into the hotel’s lobby.

The proprietor was at the front desk, her hair neat as always, the blue eye shadow that colored her lids a perfect match to her djellaba, the robe a light azure shot through with gold threads. She smiled graciously when she saw me enter. “Mademoiselle!” she said, her smile fading to a scowl as I approached. “You have been ill?”

I nodded. I must have looked terrible. “I went to Ourzazate. I was too sick to travel back.”

“La pauvre!” she exclaimed, reaching out and taking my hand in hers. “I was so worried for you. Gone off without your things. I didn’t know what to tell your friend.”

“My friend?” I asked.

“Yes. She was here this morning. A friend from the States. She said you had gone on across the mountains, that you had sent her to get your things.”

My stomach dropped. “She took my pack?”

“But of course not.” Ilham fished in her djellaba and withdrew her key ring. “I’m sorry, Mademoiselle, but you said nothing to me about this. I told her you would have to come yourself.”

“What did she look like?”

“A woman.” The proprietor shrugged, coming out from behind the desk, opening the door to the storage room. “Rather tall, with blond hair. You do understand, don’t you? I can’t just let anyone in here. If you had told me yourself…”

“Yes,” I said, catching a glimpse of my pack in its wire locker. “You did the right thing.” I flashed her a weak smile, my gratitude as real as it gets.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to charge you. It’s five dirhams a day for luggage storage.” She undid the lock and stepped aside.

“Of course.” I reached up, undid the pack’s top flap, and fished deep in the inside pocket. “Here,” I told Ilham, pulling out a one-hundred-euro bill, then handing it to her.

She shook her head vehemently. “But, Mademoiselle, I couldn’t possibly have change for this.”

“Please.” I pushed the bill into her hands. “Take it and keep it.”

“Got it?” Brian asked as I slid into the passenger seat of the Land Rover.

I nodded, hauling the pack in after me. “Someone was here asking about me. A woman.”

“When?”

“This morning,” I said. “She wanted my pack.”

“It doesn’t look like she got it.”

Shaking my head, I opened the pack’s top flap. “Thank God for inscrutable hotel managers.”

“Thank God,” Brian echoed.

“Here.” I withdrew the tattered ferry ticket and handed it to him. “My sole worldly possession.”

He took the scrap of paper and examined it carefully.

“There’s something on the back,” I told him. “I always thought it was a code of some sort.”

I watched him flip the ticket over and mouth the characters silently to himself.

“Or maybe a combination,” I hazarded.

“It’s not a combination,” he said. He handed the paper back to me, started the Rover’s engine, and pulled out onto the street.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Brian turned onto the Avenue Mohammed V, heading in the direction of the Ville Nouvelle. “We need to find a Koran.”

We parked on a side street behind the post office and walked the few short blocks to the All Join Hands offices. It was early afternoon and the building was still open, but the offices were nearly empty. Charlie Phillips and a pretty but overly thin young black woman with an upper-class British accent were playing darts in the common area while a scrawny American kid with bad acne played a video game at one of the many computers.

It was a strange threesome, each of them a misfit, each so obviously wounded in his or her own way, at large in the world, trying to find some comfort in exile. For why else would you leave? What else but belonging would you be looking to find in a place so far from home?

Charlie glanced back when he heard us come in. For a split second he looked less than happy to see us; then he tipped his mouth up into a wide grin.

“Bri,” he said jovially.

Brian stepped forward, and I followed. “Hey, man,” he said. “You mind if we make use of your library?”

Charlie smiled uncomfortably. Something was wrong, I thought, though it could have been just that we’d busted in on his hustle. “Sure,” he said.

Brian started for some bookshelves on the far side of the room. “Don’t let us keep you from your game.”

Charlie looked over at the woman. “She’s beating me anyway.” He chuckled nervously. “You know Fiona, don’t you?”

“Hey, Fiona.” Brian acknowledged the woman, then turned to the stacks, his finger running across the rows of worn spines. He pulled a leather-bound volume from the shelf and took a seat at one of the desks, motioning for me to join him.

Brian opened the Koran to the back cover and began paging backward. “The ticket,” he said, stopping about a third of the way through the text, setting the book flat on the desk.

I pulled the ferry ticket from my pocket and handed it to him.

He laid the paper on the page.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Mary,” he said. “The letters are from the first line of the sura called Mary. Only here you have them written backward.”

“What do they mean?”

Brian shrugged. “No one’s quite sure. Some people think they’re the initials of the original scribe. Another camp believes they have some mystical significance.”

He ran his finger down the page. “Verse twenty-one,” he said, reading the text out in Arabic.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“It’s the angel, talking to Mary about the Immaculate Conception. She wants to know how she can have a child when she’s a virgin. The angel tells her these kinds of things are easy for God. The Lord saith: It is easy for Me.”

Easy, I thought, it is easy for me. Where had I heard that before? “Abdesselom,” I said, remembering the Koran I’d found in my room there.

“What?”

“At the Hotel Continental. It was the first thing he said to me when I went to check in. It is easy for me. I thought he knew me. I could have sworn he knew me.”