Flashback

TWENTY-TWO

I slept like a corpse in my narrow bed at the pension and awoke to darkness outside my window. It was close to seven by my watch. Down in the street voices clamored and hummed, crowds driven by newly full stomachs and nicotine. I got up, went down the hall and relieved myself, then came back to the room and washed my face and hands in the cold-water sink.

We all live with a variety of illusions, the crooked nose, the lazy eye, the faint scar no one else can see. Or the promise of courage under fire, the belief in some kind of undeniable inner virtue. For so long I’d had nothing but the face in the mirror, nothing but what I’d come with, the careful tracery of the bullet, this delicate boundary between the self I’d been and the one I wished myself to be. Now, in the room’s paltry light, in the cheap warped glass, I barely recognized myself.

I dried my face, pushed my hair back, and checked the old scar. And then, without warning, I thought of the child. I could smell it as if it were there in the room. Soap and powder and the faint odor of sour milk.

Turning to the bed, I slipped the black box from the leather shoulder bag and spread the seven passports out on the worn coverlet. Five years, I told myself, paging through the blurred immigration stamps, confirming what I’d seen that night in the bathroom at the El Minzah. Not one of the passports had been used in the past five years. Hadn’t Abdesselom said as much at the Continental? Five years and not a word.

And yet here I am, I heard Heloise say that summer morning in the kitchen. I could see her still, tan forearms shining with steam and sweat, eyes closed as she gave herself to the pleasure of her cigarette, to that single moment of unfettered quiet.

Yes, I thought, that’s how it works, not five times a day, not ten, but hundreds, each fragile instant of faith a surrender to the unknown, to the story we all must choose for ourselves. For in the end, the only thing certain is what we can never really know. Memory or not, we are all dumb and blind, fooled, like Brian, by some hollow reflection of ourselves. In the end, all we are is what we believe.

Yes, I had been these women in the passports, but I had also chosen to leave them behind. I’d had a child somewhere in those five years, and another life, one in which Leila and the others didn’t exist. When I had come back, it had not been as a traitor, but to find out what had happened all those years ago in Pakistan, to learn who had killed my mother.

And Patrick Haverman? He had loved me. He had believed me when I’d told him why I’d come, had loved me enough to help me. And the truth, not just hope or hazard, was that I’d loved him back. That’s why the people who were supposed to help him had silenced him instead.

This, then, was my story, my faith, the one I chose. Someone’s mother, someone’s child, the girl of his dreams. Of this I could be certain, but there was much more I didn’t know.

There was still the man, the American, the face at Les Trois Singes, and outside that Peshawar warehouse. It was he who’d had the sisters killed, who’d left me to die in that field. I was sure of it now. But what had I been doing in France in the first place? You only said you would send someone, Abdesselom had told me, someone who would know our signal. Had I gone to find that person?

It wasn’t far from the pension to the main gate of the medina and the Grand Socco, a fifteen-minute walk at most. I slipped back into the anonymity of the burnoose and set out with just the leather bag, the passports, the Beretta, the pen drive, and what little money I hadn’t yet spent, a meager haul, but far more than what I’d brought to that damp field. Hannah’s clothes and pack I left behind.

The narrow streets of the Old City were jam-packed, the Petit Socco teeming with humanity, the patio at the Café Central overflowing. Monklike figures in burnooses scurried along, faces hidden under pointed hoods. Southern African whores called out from doorways. Voices whispered from dark corners, Something special, my friend. It had rained while I slept, but the shower had served only to heighten the smells of the Old City. There was a pervasive dampness and stink: the stench of wet donkey shit and cheap perfume, urine and bile, and the jumbled odor of spices, cumin, cayenne, black pepper, ginger.

I turned away from the Petit Socco and started down the rue as-Siaghin, letting the crowds carry me past the long-neglected Church of the Immaculate Conception, its gray face smeared with some twelve decades of black filth. Just past the church, the crowd knotted and slowed as the deluge of bodies fought its way out through the old arched gateway. Then suddenly we were free, streaming loose from the bottleneck into the Grand Socco.

It was closer to nine than to eight when the last number fifteen bus finally lurched into the square. The Grand Socco is where the Old City meets the new, where the wide colonial streets collide head-on with the medina’s narrow alleyways, and as a result, it’s a perpetual traffic jam, a tight clog of taxis and private cars fighting to get in through the old gate.

The bus crawled toward us, and the crowd that had been waiting picked up their bags and cases in anticipation of its arrival. A few passengers disembarked, but at this hour the flow of traffic was definitely away from the city. The bus filled quickly, and by the time I got on there were just a handful of free seats. I found a place near the back, next to a stylish young woman in a black turtleneck and jeans.

We rumbled out of the city, past the long dark stretches of beachfront, the Club Med and the white high-rise apartment buildings that lined the eastern shore. Gradually, the surroundings turned more and more rural, until stretches of dark scrub marked the distance between homes, and the road dropped sharply toward the sea on our left-hand side.

Ghandouri was not much of a place. The lights of a half dozen homes and a small café shone in the darkness. I asked the only other passenger to disembark with me for directions to the beach. He pointed hastily to a dark space in the cliffside, then disappeared quickly, the hard soles of his shoes tap-tapping on the road.

I could smell the beach, and I could hear it, the easy cadence of the Mediterranean, the brackish odors of fish and flotsam. I stood at the edge of the road for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, then started toward the path. The little trail was overgrown with sea holly and evergreen shrubs, and I had to pick my way down to the water. But once I was there, the beach opened outward in a long expanse of sand and surf.

To the west lay Tangier, a crescent of light against the utter blackness of the sea. To the east, its silhouette just barely visible in the moon’s dim light, was the lighthouse at Cap Malabata. A few lone ships winked from the Strait of Gibraltar, tankers fighting the powerful fist of the current. It was no place for a small boat, and yet in a few hours I’d be out on those black waves in a craft I could only hope would prove as large as a fishing boat.

The temperature had dropped substantially, and the sky was clear, the stars bright and plentiful as at the abbey. For an instant I was back in Burgundy, back in the yard, heading to the kitchen to ready the bread for its second rise. Down the hill the Tanes’ dogs were barking, their call and response filtering up through the woods. Muffled by the stone walls of the chapel, the sisters read that night’s psalm in unison, their voices catching the rhythm of the verse.

My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?

Why art Thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry by day, but Thou dost not answer: and by night, but find no rest…

… But I am a worm, and no man: scorned by men, and despised by the people.

Shivering, I turned east and headed for the cliffs, for the bright beacon that burned at the base of the rocks. As I neared the fire, a cluster of dark and silent faces came into view, teeth and eyes catching the light, skin reflecting the flames. A figure beckoned me forward, and I stepped closer, pulling back the burnoose to reveal my distinctly European face to the all-male group.

Whether they had been told to expect an outsider, or whether they recognized me for what I was, someone, like themselves, simply looking for a way out, I don’t know. But they shifted without hesitation, making a space for me in the soft sand near the fire’s warm glow. Someone touched my arm, and I looked over to see a steaming cup of tea. I nodded my thanks and lifted the drink to my lips. The liquid was miraculously hot and sweet.

There were some two dozen men in all, all like the trio I’d seen earlier at the Café Becerra. And on other beaches? Doubtless there were more fires like this. What had Brian said that first night in Joshi’s apartment? You know how many Africans disappear into the Strait of Gibraltar each year?

I finished the tea and handed the cup back to the man beside me. I would make it, I told myself, looking out past the fire to the dark water. We would all make it. And then what? I would go to Paris. I would do what Helen had asked. This man would help me. Someone had to know me. And if not? The threads I had to follow seemed even thinner than the ones that had brought me to Morocco. My mother’s face on a video, a man I didn’t know. And there was Hannah Boyle as well, dead some ten years earlier. I had chosen her. Perhaps I had known her.

Someone started singing, and a handful of other voices joined in, the tune melancholy as a hymn or a lullaby. I closed my eyes, and I could feel the child, the shape of its body in my arms, the unsteady weight of its head.

It was very early in the morning when the boat came. At first it was just a single light, a spot blinking in and out of the chop. Then, slowly, the outline of the craft appeared, the boxy cabin, the prow and stern. The boat pulled up in the surf and weighed anchor.

I scrambled to my feet with the rest of the group, shaking the cold from my legs, stumbling across the sand and into the water.

“Quickly!” a voice called, and I felt a hand on each shoulder, two men lifting me onto the deck. I lay there for a moment, heart pounding, chest heaving, like a fish fighting the air. By the time I gathered myself enough to stand, we had hauled anchor and were moving. I looked back to the shore, but there was nothing to see. The moon had long since set, and the cliffs of Ghandouri beach were invisible in the darkness, the lighthouse at Cap Malabata only a memory.

When I turned to face northward again, the deck was clear, the open hatch my fellow passengers had disappeared through gaping like a dark maw. The captain stood silhouetted in the dim lights of the cabin’s instrument panel, his hands on the wheel, his gaze firm on the invisible Spanish shore.

Beside the captain was a second man, his body tall and graceful, his hands crossed over his chest. He was turned in my direction, his face in shadow, but still I knew him without question. He started forward, surefooted on the pitching deck.

“Nebesky,” he called out, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of the engine.

I shook my head and took a step back, contemplating the dark waves, the distance to the shore, the beach receding farther from swimming distance each second.

“Nebesky,” he said again, coming closer. “You wanted to know my name. It’s Brian Nebesky. My grandparents were Czech immigrants.”

The top buttons of his shirt were undone, and in the boat’s pale running lights I could see the dark shape of a bruise on his throat.

“You were right,” he said. “I want to know.”

“They’ll kill us both,” I told him.

Brian grinned, showing a row of perfect white teeth. “I’ll take my chances.”