Flashback

EIGHT

The American stopped, frozen except for one muscle in his jaw that flexed and released like a misplaced heartbeat.

Keeping the Beretta steady with his head, I stepped behind him, caught the edge of the open door with my toe, and nudged it closed. “You ran out on me earlier,” I said. “Very impolite.”

He was wearing the raincoat in which I’d first seen him and, beneath it, a sweatshirt and jeans. I ran my free hand up inside the coat, then down along his legs.

“You won’t find anything,” he said, and he was right.

“It’s Brian, isn’t it?” I asked, standing. “I’m not sure I caught your name at the Pub.”

He nodded carefully.

“Well, Brian,” I told him, helping him forward with the barrel of the Beretta. “Why don’t we chat in the living room?”

“Is he dead?” the American asked as we started forward.

“I’m afraid so.”

We crossed into the living room, and I directed him toward the settee. He sat down and looked over at Joshi. “Did you kill him?”

I didn’t answer. If Brian hadn’t killed the little man, I figured any allusion to my own violent tendencies might give me some leverage.

“What were you doing in my room?” I asked.

“It is you, isn’t it?” he said, ignoring my question. “When I first saw you at the terminal, I wasn’t sure, and then in your room that night I thought I was wrong, but I wasn’t.”

I took a step toward him with the Beretta. “Cut the bullshit,” I said, “or you’ll join our little friend here.”

Brian crossed his legs and stretched his arms out along the back of the sofa. He had the body of a swimmer, tall and fluid. “You won’t kill me,” he said, leaning back into the pillows.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Joshi told me you paid him to keep tabs on me.”

“Who are you?” he retorted. “Marie Lenoir? Hannah Boyle?”

I leaned over him, laying the tip of the Beretta’s barrel just behind his ear. “Who’s Hannah Boyle?”

He moved his head to look up at me. His eyes were as blue as mine, clear and flawless, cold with contempt. “I was hoping you could tell me that,” he said. He made a movement with his right hand as if reaching for something in his coat.

Shaking my head, I nudged him with the Beretta’s barrel.

“My wallet,” he said, glancing toward his chest. “It’s in the left breast pocket.”

“I’ll get it,” I told him. Reaching into his coat with my left hand, I pulled out a worn leather billfold.

“Open it,” he said.

Keeping my eyes and the gun on Brian, I stepped back, pulled one of the wooden chairs out from the little table, and sat down. If he had wanted to kill me, I thought, he could have done it that night in my room at the Continental. And yet, it struck me, death was not the only danger to be aware of.

“Open it,” he repeated.

I laid the wallet on the table and opened it. A handful of dirham notes peered out from the top of the billfold. A half dozen plastic cards were tucked neatly in the leather slots. In the centermost panel, secured behind a piece of clear plastic, was a California driver’s license with Brian’s face on it. Brian Haverman, the license said; 1010 Bridgeway, Sausalito, California.

“There’s a picture,” he told me. “In the fold behind the license.”

I reached in with my left index finger, slid the photograph out, and unfolded it. The print was color, the edges of the paper worn from being handled too much, the image creased where it had been folded to fit into the wallet. It was not risqué, but it was an intimate picture, meant to be tucked away as it was, meant for the person who had taken it. It had been taken on a train; that much was clear. The woman in the photograph had a travel-weary tiredness to her. Her hair was mussed; her eyes were still sleep-swollen. She had her hand out as if to ward off the photographer, but she was smiling nonetheless, a smile I could not remember smiling, though I must have, on a train somewhere, on a trip I could not remember taking.

She was me, and she was not. She was my face, my body, my clothes even. The same North Face jacket I’d been found in was draped over her like a blanket. And yet, whatever had happened to this woman had not happened to me; whatever experiences had shaped that drowsy smile were hers alone.

“I found it in my brother’s apartment,” Brian said. “He wrote me about you, before he disappeared.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that you were the girl of his dreams.”

“What else?”

“Not much. Only that you were an American, that he met you at the pool at the Hotel Ziryab. He used to go there sometimes for a cheap swim.”

“How long had we known each other?”

He hesitated, puzzling over the question, over why I would have to ask.

“How long?” I repeated.

“A month or so.”

I looked down at the picture again, at this ghost of myself. Was this the same woman who’d drunk vodka martinis at Caid’s, who’d left a Beretta and a wad of cash in the safe at the El Minzah? The girl of someone’s dreams?

“And your brother?” I asked. “Do you have a picture of him?”

Brian nodded, and this time I handed him the wallet. He pulled a second photo from the billfold and gave it to me. It showed two men in ties and dress shirts, arms hooked over each other’s shoulders, smiling widely. Their affection for each other was obvious.

“It was taken two years ago. At our sister’s wedding,” Brian explained.

Stifling a shudder, I looked down at the worn photograph, at the darker of the two brothers. Here was a face I knew and knew well. Here were the same pale lids I’d seen closing over and over on themselves, the one bloodstained relic my shattered mind had preserved. The man on the rooftop. The man of my dreams.

“Why did you run from me at the Pub?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I was scared, I guess.” He nodded toward my gun. “Not without reason, it seems.”

I glanced down at Joshi’s body sprawled out on the carpet. I didn’t think Brian had killed him. If he had, it made little sense for him to come back to the apartment. Standing, I backed across the room, pulled the coverlet off the bed, and laid it over Joshi.

“Thank you,” Brian said.

“I didn’t kill him,” I told him.

Brian smiled. “I know.”

I sat down again. “Tell me about your brother.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m the one with the gun,” I said. “What was he doing in Morocco?”

Brian sighed. “He was working for All Join Hands.”

I gave him a blank look. “Humor me,” I said. “I know less than you think.”

“They’re a nonprofit group,” he explained. “They work to bring technology to the emerging world.”

“Computers?” I asked, remembering what the English girl at the Pub had said.

He nodded. “You can’t belong to the global marketplace without belonging to the World Wide Web.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I remarked.

“I’m in the business, too,” Brian said.

“Another altruist?”

He shrugged.

“Do you think he’s dead?” I asked. It was a terrible question, and as soon as I spoke I wished I hadn’t.

Brian looked at me as if I’d just slapped him. “Did you kill him?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. I relaxed my grip on the Beretta and lowered my hand and the gun till they were resting on my thigh.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t remember,” I said. Handing the picture back to Brian, I turned my head slightly and pulled the hair just above my temple aside, revealing the pale scalp beneath. My fingers brushed the raised edge of my scar, the neat circle of the healed wound. “Can you see it?” I asked.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brian lean forward. “What happened?”

“I was shot,” I said.

“Why?”

“That’s the big mystery, isn’t it? I woke up a year ago in a field in France with a bullet in my head and nothing else. Before that, I don’t remember.”

“Amnesia?” Brian asked, skeptically.

“I wouldn’t believe me either.”

“But you knew Pat. You remember Pat.”

It took me a moment to answer, and when I did it was with a lie. “No,” I told him. “I don’t remember your brother either.”

“What are you doing in Tangier?”

“There was a used ticket stub in my pocket for the Tangier-Algeciras ferry. I thought I might remember something, that someone might know me.”

“Why now? After a year.”

I thought about what to say, how much to trust this person. “It wasn’t safe to stay where I was.”

He shook his head, still disbelieving.

“When’s the last time anyone saw your brother?” I asked.

“The end of October, a year ago.”

“Do you know the date?”

“The twentieth. He was a regular at the Pub. They had a darts tournament that night. A bunch of people saw him there.”

“Alone?”

Brian nodded.

“Then what?”

“According to All Join Hands, he had a meeting in Marrakech on the twenty-fourth, then headed down to Ourzazate. He was supposed to check in again on his way back, but he never showed up. They called my mom and dad in the States about a week later asking if they knew where Pat was. That’s the first we knew something was wrong.”

“Where’s Ourzazate?” I asked.

“South of Marrakech, on the other side of the Atlas Mountains.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Work stuff. Evidently he was looking into starting a project with some of the date plantations down there. All Join Hands doesn’t know much more. Pat was pretty much on his own.”

“Did anyone see him in Ourzazate?”

“Not as far as I’ve been able to tell.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“And, you know how many Africans disappear into the Strait of Gibraltar each year? There’s a limit to the amount of time the police here can or want to spend on some wide-eyed American who took a wrong turn in the medina.”

“What about the consulate?”

“There’s no American consulate in Tangier, but I’ve made at least a dozen trips to the embassy in Rabat. There’s not much they can do. They figure nine times out of ten when someone disappears like this, they don’t want to be found.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t know. You see these old men in the cafés in the Petit Socco sometimes. White guys in burnooses drinking mint tea. At first I used to think maybe that’s what happened to Pat, that he read too much Paul Bowles and decided to go native. But that’s just not him. Don’t get me wrong; he wanted to do this. But he wanted to come home someday, too. Get married, have a couple of kids.”

“With the girl of his dreams,” I said.

“Yeah,” Brian agreed.

We stood there for a moment, each of us silent as the corpse at our feet.

“Where do we go from here?” Brian asked finally.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Right now, I’d say anywhere but this place.”

I took one last look at Joshi. The coverlet had failed to cloak his outstretched hand, and it lay there, pale and disembodied, still reaching for something.

“There’s something wrong with his finger,” I said.

Brian stepped toward the body and took the hand in his own. The dead man’s pinky flopped downward at an unnatural angle. “It’s broken.”

I winced, thinking of my own encounter with Joshi the night before. The barest hint of violence had been more than enough to get the little man to talk, and yet someone had hurt him. What had that person wanted? What kind of information had Joshi had to give? The same information he’d sold to Brian? My room number at the Continental?

“Let’s get out of here,” Brian said.

I nodded in agreement. “I can’t go back to the hotel.”

“You can stay at my place.”

“No,” I told him.

“Whatever you want.” He shrugged, then glanced back toward where Joshi lay, as if for emphasis. “It just seemed to me that you and I might be after a lot of the same answers.”

“It’s not safe,” I said. “You’re not safe with me.”

He turned away and started for the door. “I’ll take my chances.”