Tangier

The Spy

Early one morning in the middle of July Hamid Ouazzani was driving along Vasco de Gama when he spied the Foster Knowles' jogging group moving like an apparition through the mist. He stopped to watch. They were running on a trail parallel to the Jew's River. He could make out Foster in the lead, taking awkward, gangling strides, followed by a bobbing line of men and women of assorted heights. Hamid recognized some of them: Clive Whittle, Madame Fufu, Jack Whyte, and, at the end, the ferocious Jackie Knowles yelling harsh encouragements to speed up the pace. He fixed on her swinging ponytail, watched it grow smaller as she was swallowed by the mist. He thought of Europeans locked in their danse macabre and sighed over the fate of Daniel Lake.

He knew from his surveillance that the Consul General was involved with Mrs. Knowles, a ridiculous affair, it seemed to him, considering the abandonment with which Lake was carrying it on. His indiscretions were now the talk of Tangier. He'd been observed kissing her in the balcony of the Mauritania Cinema, and groping with her in the official American car. Hamid didn't want to judge Lake. His posture as a policeman was to understand the foreign mind. But the Consul's behavior was inexplicable. Whenever Hamid thought of him he sighed with sympathy for a human being in distress.

Sympathy: For years he'd lavished it on foreigners. Now he resented them for taking up his time. His capacity, which had once seemed infinite, to hear confessions and then absolve, was diminishing little by little as each July day passed. The summer was at its height, his office was flooded with cases, but his attention was focused on Kalinka, his search to understand her, uncover her dreamy past.

Every night now they talked, though both of them were tired, she from her work at Achar's clinic, he from his hours at the Surete. She was assisting Driss Bennani with a "census" of the slumdwellers-she called it a "census" though Hamid felt it was more than that. But when he hinted to her that he disapproved, she waved his objections away. "Are you jealous?" she asked playfully. "Do you want me to stay home like a Moroccan squaw?" He shook his head and did not persist. Her tongue had become sharper since she'd started to work, and she didn't forget things anymore.

Most of her memories were based on conversations she'd overheard, or things her mother had told her, but still there was a sharpness to these scenes as if she'd observed them all herself. There were inconsistencies, of course, pieces that didn't fit, but when Hamid listened to her and closed his eyes her memories came alive.

He had a vision of Peter Zvegintzov: he is in hiding when the Viet Minh come to power, crouching by day in the boarded-up back room of his parents' shop, going out at night, foraging for bread. But then, a week or so later, after order is restored, Peter embarks upon an obsessive search for Marguerite and Stephen Zhukovsky's child. He walks the back streets of Hanoi, the rutted dirt streets where the Vietnamese live, passes abandoned trucks and tanks, and Catholic families packing up to leave. He asks questions, walks and walks, but can find no trace of them at all.

At last, one evening, beginning to think that they are dead, he returns to his shop, where he finds a waiting boy. The boy leads him to a roofless shanty in the refugee district on the southern edge of town where he finds Marguerite and Kalinka shivering in the rain.

A year later-the end of 1946-the French are back in control. The Viet Minh have been double-crossed by De Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek. The French have slaughtered twenty thousand Vietnamese in Haiphong. Ho Chi Minh, retreating to the jungles, has begun the Indochina war.

Peter sits in the back room staring at the wall. Kalinka, an infant, plays with groceries on the floor. Marguerite sweeps out the shop with a bamboo broom. It scratches against the wood-Kalinka recalls the noise.

Peter is shattered. A man destroyed, he screams in the night, then moans and weeps. His torture by the Japanese has left him with fear and scars. But Marguerite nurses him and somehow finds them food. "Survive, Peter!" she tells him. "A man can recover from wounds. Take sustenance in ideals, fraternity, revolution, the struggle to forge a society that is just."

Early in 1947 Peter reopens his parents' shop, a glorified grocery store, a prototype for La Colombe. He is busy for weeks replenishing his stock, building new and higher shelves. He has strung the curtain that divides the back room, separating Marguerite and Kalinka's bed from his. He decorates the outside of the store with flashing Christmas lights, then announces the reopening in the French-language press. Customers come in. He offers them special service. They ask about Marguerite. "My concubine," says Peter, "and Kalinka, my child."

Thus begins the network of lies that is to become a screen around their lives. The shop is a front, a center for espionage carried out from the back room by Marguerite. Hamid has a clear vision of her-a fascinating woman he wishes he could have known. She is strong, made of iron, burning with revolutionary zeal, but also kind and capable of great tenderness, a woman who always smiles.

Peter runs the shop; Marguerite runs the agents. They come and go, bringing instructions, carrying back her information to the jungles and the war. One day at dawn a man in black pajamas appears. He is a courier come to deliver her commission. She has attained the rank of major. She is among the most effective cadre in Hanoi.

Peter bounces Kalinka on his knee, up and down, up and down. Through the window she can see her mother bicycling up the street. Marguerite has gone on a mission. Peter doesn't know when she'll return. That night he reads Kalinka a fairy tale, then kisses her and turns off the light. She lies on the big bed, the bed she shares with her mother. She can hear Peter undressing on the other side of the curtain. He is humming to himself. She feels safe.

Years pass. Kalinka grows up. Business at the shop expands. The front of the store is crowded with officers' wives leaving their letters to be weighed and mailed and talking among themselves. Peter, a busybody, a gossip, shrewdly draws them out. He giggles at inanities. People take him for a fool. Always he is darting back and forth, disappearing into the back room. He is relaying information to Marguerite on troop movements, transfers, local politics, morale.

When the shop is closed for lunch Marguerite sets a teapot on the fire. Peter steams the letters open. He has discovered the secrets of flaps and seals.

All goes well until 1952, when suddenly there is consternation in the shop. Kalinka, nine years old, comes home one day from school. She greets Peter and her mother, sets her satchel down, but neither one of them looks up. For days after that she can feel their tension-French counterintelligence has discovered Peter's Soviet connections before the war. They suspect him of being a Russian field officer coordinating deliveries of arms to the Viet Minh. He is being watched. Strangers come in. They make small purchases and drill Peter with their eyes. There is a car parked across the street. Two men sit in it reading newspapers. The deliverymen who carry Marguerite's reports are warned to stay away.

Conferences. Meetings. Hushed conversations. Kalinka hears them plotting through the night. It is Marguerite, after all, who poses the real danger to the French, but it is Peter, finally, who is arrested-the French have taken her for an ignorant Tonkinoise.

Peter's interrogation-no beatings this time, nothing like his treatment by the Japanese. Bright lights in his eyes, hours without sleep. Finally he confesses to great and monstrous crimes, all rehearsed so many nights with Marguerite. The French, bewildered by the scope of his confession, take him for a major spy. He is too important to be imprisoned. They decide to expel him to Russia, a homeland he's never seen.

Much emotion that final hour when Marguerite and Kalinka visit him in jail. No possibility of Marguerite leaving too-she must stay behind to continue with the fight. But Kalinka is another matter. They discuss her future while she holds her mother's hand. If anything were to happen to Marguerite, Kalinka would be orphaned and alone. Finally it is decided-she will leave with Peter. Someday, sometime, when the war is over, they will all be reunited in Hanoi. A last exchange of hugs. Kalinka and Peter board the boat. Her last memory of her mother is the sight of her standing beside her bicycle waving to them from the pier.

Thus Kalinka's story was completed up to the time of her arrival in Tangier, a jigsaw puzzle of a life in which Hamid had searched for matching edges, gradually filled in holes and gaps. Still, for him, the biggest gap was not yet filled: Why had Peter settled in Tangier, and why had he insisted that Kalinka pretend to be his wife?

He wondered why this was so important, why, having learned so much, he couldn't leave these matters alone. Am I, he asked himself, behaving like a lover or a detective? Both, he decided finally-I can't help myself; I have to know. Was it because Kalinka was getting away from him, growing, changing, beginning to contradict the personality he thought he had understood as, so laboriously, he'd unraveled her early life? He couldn't say. He knew only that solving the relationship between her and Peter had become an obsession, the problem to which his great troubling questions about all the foreigners had finally been reduced.

At 2:00 A.M. one morning the telephone rang, jarring Hamid from sleep. Eyes still closed, he grasped about for the receiver, then accidentally knocked it to the floor.

Kalinka turned on the lights. "I can hear someone talking," she said.

Hamid strained his ears and heard it too, an urgent garble of Arabic, distant and indistinct. "Yes?" he said, retrieving the receiver. "Yes? Yes?"

"Aziz, Inspector. I'm at the Surete."

"You want me to come down there too, I suppose." He sat up, adjusted his pillows. Kalinka covered up her ears and yawned.

"We need you, Hamid. We've got a fiasco down here. I wouldn't call at this hour if I weren't facing special difficulties-"

"All right, Aziz. I'll see you in a little while."

He hung up and began to dress. "There's a certain ironic tone," he explained to Kalinka, "that finds its way, occasionally, into Aziz's voice. Then I know I'm in for it. Absurd passions. A glimpse at the rot of the West." He slipped into his moccasins. "It's the best part of my job."

There was not a car on Hassan II as he drove quickly through the night, only a few souls still lingering at the cafes off Place de France. Aziz was waiting on the steps of the Surete, pacing back and forth, puffing nervously on a cigarette.

"This one's something, Hamid-prominent persons, overtones of sex. I have the principals separated now. A few minutes ago, when we put them all together, they started to fight like medina cats."

Poor Aziz, he thought, so loyal, so intelligent, but when it comes to the foreigners he still gets flustered and confused.

"Don't worry." Hamid slapped him on the back. "We'll straighten this out soon enough. We'll go to my office. I want to hear everything in sequence. We must conduct our business in an orderly way."

He stopped off at a lavatory to splash cold water on his face. He wanted, always, to appear clear-headed and set a calm example for his staff.

When, finally, they were seated in the office, Aziz began to talk. Hamid was pleased by the cogency of his delivery and by gestures he recognized as his own.

"About an hour ago our operator received a call. The night clerk at the Hotel Continental reported a disturbance in one of his rooms. Since the Continental is in the Dar Baroud sector of the medina, the operator referred the complaint to the First Arrondisement. A pair of officers responded, arrests were made, and since foreigners were involved all the parties were brought down here. This is what we have: Mohammed Seraj, better known as Pumpkin Pie; an old whore who goes under the name of Sylvia; two young prostitutes, a boy and a girl, each about sixteen years old; Mr. and Mrs. Codd."

"Ashton and Musica Codd?"

Aziz gave a triumphant grin. "The Codds claim the role of complainants, but there's a difference of opinion on that. For one thing, they were arrested nude. And our investigating officers say Codd tried to thrash them with his walking stick. Pumpkin Pie claims they hired him to convince the teenagers to perform unnatural sexual acts. He says the whole fracas began when he refused and they turned on him in rage. The old whore claims she just happened to be in the next room and came out only when she heard the noise. The teenagers say she's their mother, and that she's in the business of renting them out."

"What do the Codds say to that?"

"They're claiming they were framed. They were 'interviewing' the kids, they say, when the whore arrived suddenly with Pumpkin Pie. These two tried to blackmail them, and when they refused to pay out they were brutally stripped and robbed. Codd says he assumed our men were other members of the gang. He merely tried to defend himself with the only implement he had at hand."

"Whew! All right, Aziz. Arrange six chairs in a crescent around my desk. Bring everybody in. I'm going down to the canteen. I need a cup of coffee before I deal with this."

He knew he was in for it on his way back upstairs, even before he reached his floor. The clamor of their shrieks echoed in the corridor. He could hear Aziz shouting at them in Arabic and French, warning them that when the Inspector arrived they'd better be still and behave.

"Shut up," he yelled, walking back into his office. "This is a department of criminal investigation, not a zoo."

He looked at them, fixed each one of them in turn. Pumpkin Pie, in a soiled undershirt, held himself with the arrogance of a hustler who felt himself desired. The old whore was pathetic-fat and wasted, her face contorted in a toothless grin. The two children were beautiful, but Hamid knew they were capable of infinite lies. And the Codds-Hamid recognized the grimace of shame. Their clothing was disheveled, their faces stained with mercurochrome dots. The famous old Irish playwright and his wife sat as proudly as they could, determined, he could see, to brave things out.

"A sorry-looking group," he said to Aziz in French. "Is anybody injured? Is everyone all right?"

"Superficial cuts, Inspector. Our officers were beaten worst of all."

"The old bugger hit me with his walking stick," said Pumpkin Pie. "I'm going to sue him for damages as soon as I'm released."

"What makes you think you're going to be released?" Hamid asked.

"They're perverts, Inspector. Can't you see?"

"He says the two of you are perverts," Hamid said in English to the Codds.

"He did, did he? Well-he's a blackmailer." Codd brandished his fist. "He tried to frame us. He ought to be locked away."

"Publicly thrashed, I'd say," said Mrs. Codd.

"Piss on you, bitch," said Pie in Arabic. "Your cunt stinks like a rotten fish."

"Shut up!" screamed Aziz.

"What did he say?" asked Codd.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Codd, he was insulting your wife."

"This is absurd, Inspector. I demand that we be released. Surely you're not going to take the word of scum like this against people like my wife and me. We're tired. We're willing to drop our charges. All we ask is that you release us so we may return to our home and go to sleep."

"That's all very well, Mr. Codd," said Hamid. "But your charges aren't the only ones we're dealing with tonight."

"It was all a misunderstanding. I'm sorry about the officers. I'll gladly pay them damages. It was a trivial misunderstanding-nothing more."

Hamid shook his head. "Not so trivial as all that. Solicitation of minors, attacking a policeman, engaging in a brawl, false registration at a hotel. These are serious crimes that could lead to your expulsion. What a tragedy for you to end your residency here that way."

Hamid sat back then and watched them squirm. Musica Codd held back a sob. Ashton sat stiff and pale.

"Before we begin our investigation, I can call in Clive Whittle if you wish."

"That won't be necessary." Codd vigorously shook his head. "I'm quite certain we can straighten this out for ourselves."

"Very well," said Hamid, "but I insist on hearing the truth. This absurd story about your 'interviewing' these children is not something I'm prepared to believe."

"But-"

"Let me finish. It's a foolish, impractical lie. If you're going to stick to that, you'll only force me to pursue this case. Then this matter, in all its obscene detail, will become the delight of our local press."

Musica choked. Ashton bowed his head.

"It's a well-known fact, Mr. Codd, that both you and your wife have, for some time, been trying to arrange yourselves a partouze. It seems as though you've finally succeeded, though perhaps not with the result you had in mind. Do you deny any of this? What were you doing with these children? Do you really expect me to believe you were set up for blackmail by ignorant thugs like these?"

He turned away before Codd had a chance to answer, switched to Arabic, and addressed himself to the whore. "What have you got to say, you bag of bones?" he asked.

Sylvia set her mouth to show she wasn't going to talk.

"You set this whole thing up with Mohammed here. He made a deal with you, didn't he? How much money do you get for selling the bodies of your kids?"

"That's a lie, Inspector!" Pumpkin Pie screamed out.

"Shut up! I haven't gotten to you yet!"

"They're perverts! This is my country! We're brothers in Islam! You cannot side with them!"

"If he says another word, Aziz, take him back downstairs."

Aziz nodded, delighted by the whole affair. Hamid rubbed his eyes. Already he was bored.

"All right," he said, "we have testimony that contradicts. Clearly you children are the key. Now listen, and tell me if I'm right. Your mother told you to go with Mohammed and meet this English couple in the room. She told you to do whatever the English wanted. Isn't that correct?"

Both children nodded eagerly.

"So," he said sympathetically, "tell me what went wrong?"

"We didn't want to do it," said the boy.

"Yes. I understand. But why the fight?"

"Him!" The girl pointed at Pie. "He told us we had to or he'd beat us up."

"Go on."

"Well," said the boy, "we were scared so we went along. But when we saw the infidels we didn't want to anymore."

"They were too old," said the girl.

"Their flesh was gray and fat."

"We refused. And then the infidels got mad."

"They started to scream at us."

"Our mother and Mohammed came in to find out what was wrong."

"And then what happened?"

"Then the infidels and Mohammed began to quarrel. Mohammed told the infidels they'd have to pay extra because they were so ugly and old. The infidels refused to pay, and then they started to fight. A little later the police arrived."

It all sounded perfectly reasonable to Hamid, including the part about asking for extra money from the Codds. The case was simple. It more or less solved itself. All of them were guilty. He wondered what to do. He felt a strong disgust and was gnawed at by the notion that no matter how he handled this affair it would end up being a waste of time. He turned to the Codds, translated what the children had said.

"Well," he asked, "have you anything to add?"

"We've been stupid, Inspector," said Codd, "terribly stupid. And of course we're deeply ashamed." The Codds looked at each other, then averted their eyes. "I don't know what more to say."

Contrition-Hamid had heard it all before. Suddenly he was tired of Europeans, their nasty escapades, their evasive, pleading eyes.

"I don't know either, Mr. Codd," he said. "All my life I've tried to understand people like you. You come down here, set yourselves up on the Mountain, and then, not content with your luxurious lives, you insist on disgracing yourselves in the gutters of Tangier. Why? Can you explain it? Is it something about our town? Or is it nothing more than the natural weaknesses of your all-too-imperfect flesh?"

He waited for them to answer, and when they did not he shook his head. "I don't know what to do with you. There's a side of me that wants to be harsh. But I find I have no desire to listen to your confessions or lock you up and watch you writhe. In fact, I think that would be meaningless. You've made fools of yourselves. You've been absurd. You are what you are, and you've done what you've done. You don't even offer me an excuse."

He looked at them again, taking no particular pleasure in their embarrassment or in his power, as an Inspector, to settle their case as he liked. They were so pathetic, such grotesque antiques, that he felt sick looking at them, sick of their lechery and wounded pride.

"All right," he said suddenly, "leave. Go home. Next time there'll be no mercy. Now get out of here quick, before I change my mind."

Ashton Codd started to say something, but Hamid waved his hand. He was not interested in gratitude. He felt tired and filled with scorn.

"So," said Aziz when they were gone, "do we release the others too?"

"Yes. Throw them out, all of them. Let's go home and get some sleep."

When they were all released he gave Aziz a lift. Finally, at home, standing on his terrace, he stared out at the Mountain and listened to the wind.

The only pleasure he found those hot July days occurred during his noontime marches down the beach. He liked swaggering on the sand, pointing at people and ordering them removed. He felt then that he was doing something, perhaps purifying Tangier, but he learned from Aziz that these actions were not universally admired in other bureaus of the police. One day the Prefect himself suggested Hamid could overplay his hand.

"Look, Hamid," he said, "what are you trying to prove? Your cleanups don't accomplish anything. You just chase the scum someplace else."

"Perhaps," said Hamid, "but at least the beach is clean. There's less crime now around the hotels."

"My advice is to stick to foreigners and not worry so much about vice. Inspectors sometimes go too far and then they find themselves transferred. Ever been to Ksar es Souk? In the Sahara the sun shrivels up your tongue."

It was a threat without substance, and it failed to fill him with any fear. Still he wondered if he was doing good, if his cleanup was anything more than a charade.

The day he spotted the joggers on Vasco de Gama turned out to be the hottest of July. As he drove about Tangier, feeling the heat rise hour by hour, he had an inkling of what August would be like, and bit his lip in dread. It would be Ramadan, coinciding with the hottest month as it did once in twenty-five years. Sunrise to sunset without food or a drop to drink-in August that would be more than fasting; that would be agony without respite.

He spent the day visiting his men, trying to sort out crimes of substance from a backlog of unresolved complaints. He was tired of sex crimes and smugglers of hashish, tempests on the Mountain, vagrant hippies, trivial disputes. Something was happening in Tangier, but he didn't know what it was. He could feel the tension all around but couldn't put his finger on its cause.

He passed people as he drove: Robin Scott giggling in a cafe, Laurence Luscombe walking wearily on the Boulevard, stooping in the heat. The old actor's face was pale as chalk. His wisps of whitened hair blew crazily in the blowtorch wind.

He noticed the Freys' limousine parked before a bank. Though he knew they were the notorious Beckers, he also knew there was nothing he could do. Since they were rich, they could keep an extradition order from ever getting to the courts. His only hope, he felt, was to keep up a patient watch. If an Israeli agent ever did turn up, he might manage to catch them all in a tour de force.

Heading back to the Surete he saw Vicar Wick leaving Madame Porte's salon de the. The man's gait was nervous, his face haggard, tense. There was something about him that struck Hamid-as if he were enduring an enormous strain.

Finally at seven, exhausted by another incoherent day, he picked up the book Farid had found for him, left his office, and walked downtown. He fought his way through the throngs that crowded Boulevard Pasteur at dusk, passed a band marching back and forth blowing trumpets and beating drums.

When he walked into his brother's store, Farid's assistant was showing a necklace. His customer, a French lady accompanied by a boxer dog, was debating the merits of the piece and the astronomical asking price. Hamid interrupted, asked the assistant for Farid. The bartering continued. The assistant pointed to the stairs. Hamid mounted them quietly-only later he asked himself why. He hadn't intended to surprise his brother, but he didn't want to disturb the negotiations in the shop. He had just stepped into the dim upstairs room, the room where Farid stored and showed his rugs, was looking around, wondering where his brother was, when he heard a groan quickly followed by a gasp. He moved slowly, quietly, toward a mound of rugs piled near the wall. He heard the sound again and, following his policeman's instincts, moved closer so he could look behind.

He guessed they'd heard his footsteps-the next moment their startled eyes looked into his: Farid and Herve Beaumont, the olive-skinned body of his brother, the pale one of the European boy, entwined, naked on the floor.

The bargaining downstairs had become shrill-he could hear the high-pitched cries of the Frenchwoman demanding a concession in the price. Herve began to giggle, then to rock his body back and forth, but Farid remained still, his face impassive, a look Hamid remembered from their boyhood, as if he expected to be hit.

A long moment passed between them as they searched each other's eyes. Later Hamid had the impression that they'd tried to peer into each other's brains. But then the mood was broken by a bark-the Frenchwoman's boxer downstairs.

"I just came by to return the book," he said. He laid it on top of the rugs, turned, and walked away.

Downstairs Farid's assistant was standing in the doorway talking to another assistant shopkeeper from across the street. "What a bitch," he was saying as Hamid brushed by. "When I met her price she laughed at me, yanked at her dog, and left."

"Yes," said the other, "they're all like that this year. Pigs' vaginas, tourist trash-"

A few days after he surprised his brother, Hamid decided to abandon his cleanup of the beach. He also decided that the time had come to confront Zvegintzov without letting him wriggle away.

He pulled up in front of La Colombe at ten o'clock, long after the shop had closed. This time there'd be no interruptions, customers intruding, or telephone ringing in the back. Pausing in his car, he studied the iron grill pulled down over the store's facade. He remembered sitting out here one afternoon in May wanting to warn Peter about following Kalinka, then hesitating and finally driving off. This time it was different. He knew the questions he must ask. He also knew that Peter was afraid of him, though he had no desire to exploit that fear.

When, finally, he walked across the street, he heard drumming and music clashing within Dradeb. There were many weddings in the slum that summer night. If he and Kalinka decided to be married, would they celebrate the traditional way?

He looked in through the grill. The lights were off, and there was no sign of movement in the shop. No bell either, so he shook the grill, then noticed a ribbon of light beneath an inner door. He's in the back room, he thought, that back room where Kalinka spent so many years. He walked around the side of the building to a window where a shade was drawn.

He rapped on the glass. Nothing. He rapped harder. Still no sign. He was about to call out Peter's name when suddenly the shade snapped up.

"Peter-"

"Who's there?" His face was only inches away, but the reflections on the glass must have confused his sight. "It's me, Hamid."

"What do you want?"

"Open up."

"It's late."

"I want to talk to you. Open up."

Peter glared out, blinking his eyes. Then he yanked down the shade.

Hamid walked to the front of the shop. A minute later a fluorescent light sputtered on. Peter opened the inside door and spoke to him through the grill.

"I'm closed, Hamid. Come around in the morning."

"No, Peter. Now. We must talk together now."

Peter hesitated, then he knelt to unclasp the padlocks which attached the grill. He fumbled but finally managed to undo them. He raised the grill just high enough so Hamid could enter if he stooped.

"You frightened me half to death, Hamid. You should know better than to frighten a man at night."

"I'm sorry, Peter, but the night is best. We're always interrupted during business hours."

"Well-you're inside now. You might as well sit down."

He pulled out a stool, set it in the center of the room, then sat down himself on the yellow hassock where Kalinka used to perch.

"So, Hamid-you've come to expel me. I've been expecting this. I've even packed a bag."

"I'm not here for that."

"Oh? Really? Then how much longer is the suspense to last?"

"Look, Peter, you must get this through your head. I've no intention of expelling you."

Peter was silent.

"You don't believe me."

"Why should I believe you? You've been after me for months."

"You have it wrong. I've only come to talk."

"You want the facts, don't you-the incriminating facts?"

"Incriminating to whom?"

"To me, of course. I'm not stupid, Hamid, though you may think I've been at times. Your dossiers-I know all about them. And that all these months you've been building up your case."

Hamid squinted at him. The light in the shop was dim. Peter seemed so loathsome, such a loathsome little man.

"Really, Peter, you have things wrong," he said. "Kalinka and I have been trying to reconstruct the past, and since you're a part of it, you're involved as well."

"Am I supposed to believe that's why you're here?"

"Why not? I could have kicked you out anytime."

"Yes. That's true."

"Why are you so frightened then?"

"Because you have power, Hamid. I know all about that, you see. I've been kicked out of a country before." He paused. "Now there's no place for me to go. There's barely a country left that will take me in. You've already got Kalinka, Hamid. If you expel me I'll lose everything. I'll even lose my shop."

A silence. Hamid wondered how he could break through so many layers of fear.

"Peter, I give you my word. I have no wish to see you lose your shop. Tell me what I need to know and I'll never trouble you again."

"And if I incriminate myself?"

"You won't. Not with me. Everything you say will be in confidence. I'm sincere, Peter. You must take me at my word."

Peter stared at him a long while-Hamid imagined him weighing out his trust with the same caution he used when he weighed a letter on his postal scale.

"All right," he said finally, "ask your questions. I don't promise that I'll answer them, but we'll see-"

"I know most of it already, I think-your membership in the party, your friendship with Zhukovsky, Kalinka's mother, Zhukovsky's death, your expulsion from Hanoi."

"And Poland?"

"Yes. That too. Kalinka's years in school. You were working in a factory there, she said."

"A shoe factory near Warsaw. It wasn't much of a job."

"But then you left and came down here. That's my question, Peter. Why Tangier?"

"Ah-" Peter shook his head. "That was a difficult time for me. I was really up against it-up against the wall."

"Tell me about it."

Peter shook his head again, paused as if to clear his memory. Then he coughed and exhaled.

"It was 1954, just after the settlement, the Geneva Conference that ended the Indochina war. I was summoned to the Vietnamese legation in Warsaw. A man there, an old partisan, told me that Major Pham Thi Nha had been killed at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. She'd volunteered to join the siege and, on the twentieth day or so, had somehow gotten killed. I never found out how-a bomb from an airplane, a shell from the French fort. It didn't matter anyway. All that mattered was that she was dead. I was still reeling from that when this man told me his government wanted Kalinka back. At first I tried to argue with him. Kalinka belonged with me. I'd promised her mother. I'd put her in school. I was prepared to bring her up. But there was no arguing. A directive had been issued. Kalinka was an orphan, the daughter of a heroine of the resistance. She qualified for special treatment now. Her place was in Vietnam. Well, in that case, I said, I would go back there with her too. The man smiled at me and shook his head. 'We've won the war,' he said. 'We don't need foreign agents anymore.'

"I knew then they'd never let me back. Marguerite was dead, and they wanted Kalinka too. I was desperate. You can imagine how desperate I was. The thought of losing her-I couldn't accept it. And I knew I had to do something fast if I was to keep her from being taken away.

"I stayed up all that night, thinking, thinking, and the only thought that came to mind was the Bureau, the KGB. They'd sent me to Poland in the first place, found the school, helped me get my job, and they'd told me that if I ever needed help I could always count on them. I was an old agent, you see. They take care of us in a way. I didn't want to go to them. I wasn't even a Communist anymore. I didn't give a damn about any of it, but I was desperate and the Bureau seemed the only place to turn.

"Their offices were in an annex to the Russian Embassy, an old palace cut up into a thousand tiny stalls. There were three of them who interviewed me. I told them my story and begged them to help. There was no problem, they said. All I had to do was reinstate myself. Then all my troubles would be solved, and Kalinka would be safe.

"It wasn't long before I realized what that meant. They offered me a deal. I had certain skills, remember, knew lots of languages and had had experience in intelligence work. All I had to do was agree to work for them again and they'd see to it that Kalinka stayed at school.

"Of course, I'd presented them with the sort of situation they like the best-someone very close to hold over your head, so you do everything they ask. Now understand me, Hamid-I didn't want to be a spy again. But I was desperate, and that was the only way I knew to keep Kalinka out of Vietnam. So I agreed, and a few months later I was sent down here."

"Why? There's nothing here."

"That's true now, though in those days it wasn't clear. I came down in 1955. North Africa was on the verge of change. The Algerian rebellion was starting up. Moroccan independence was nearly won. Tangier was an international city. It had been filled with spies since the Second World War. No one knew what was going to happen. It seemed a good place for a deep-cover agent to set himself up and burrow in. So I came down. I had a Polish passport-nothing special about that. I worked as a clerk in a bank, establishing my residency. Then I got a job as comptroller for a small import-export house. Well, suddenly the situation changed. The French and Spanish pulled out, Mohammed V became the Sultan, and Tangier became part of Morocco once again. With the end of Tangier as an international city there was hardly anything for me to do."

"Then why didn't they pull you out? Send you someplace else?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. Perhaps they thought I was perfect for this place."

Hamid, watching him, knew precisely what he meant. There was something second-rate about Peter, something obviously mediocre that helped him blend with the other working foreigners, the Spanish shoemakers and Italian barbers, the Dutch clerks and French auto shop repairmen in the town. Who would ever suspect that he was anything but what he seemed, a second-rate European with a vague and mediocre past?

"I had nothing to do all that time. Really nothing that could incriminate me now. I want you to understand that, Hamid. I never did anything against your country. I was just here to keep an eye on things."

"What things?"

"Oh, the ships, you know, coming and going through the Straits. I had some boys who watched them for me, and I wrote down what they saw. I never knew what passed through at night, of course, or when it was foggy and they couldn't see."

"But that's ludicrous-to cover the Straits like that."

"Yes, yes-I know. But I subscribed to the shipping newspapers and got lots of information out of them. I mailed my reports to a postal box in Rome. Just lists of ships and the approximate times they passed. Anyone could have done it. Sometimes I just made it up."

"They never checked?"

He shook his head. "I guess it didn't matter so long as it sounded right. Anyway, I was busy. I was setting up this shop. You see-I'd saved a little, looked around, and decided a shop was needed here. I'd always wanted another shop, like the one my parents had. I'd inherited their place, spent wonderful years there with Marguerite. So I set up La Colombe, modeled exactly on the Hanoi store. And I was successful almost from the start."

Peter took great delight explaining how he'd expanded his business through the years, from merely selling merchandise to offering his customers grand service. Soon he became a clearinghouse for servants, a man who could be depended upon to find a good night watchman or fix a telephone. And all that time he'd worried about Kalinka-her letters were so infrequent, lonely, and strangely sad. He wanted her back, but knew he must be patient. He kept up his reporting on the ships until, one day, a man appeared.

He was an important man-Peter was sure of that. A man named Prozov, a man accustomed to command. He spoke in Russian and knew all about Peter's past: Indochina, his expulsion by the French, his hopes of being reunited with Kalinka too. He was prepared to arrange that, he said, if Peter would provide a little service first. A little job. A little mission. Nothing especially dangerous, though there was always a certain risk. And if Peter refused-well, Kalinka might have to stay in Poland for many years.

He took Peter's car, drove off, disappeared with it for several days. When he returned he told Peter to drive it to Algiers. Peter was scared then, really scared. There was something, he knew, hidden in his car. He didn't know what it was, and he didn't want to know. The French had a dossier on him-in Indochina they'd marked him as a Soviet spy. Now there were rumors they were using torture in Algeria. Remembering his experiences with the Japanese, he trembled at the thought of being interrogated once again.

But still he did it. It was his only chance to get Kalinka back. And his mind was sharp-he was canny when he had to be. It occurred to him, driving across northern Morocco toward the Algerian frontier, his hands shaking as he gripped the wheel, frightened to death with no idea of what might be welded to the bottom of his car, that if he did get across, did fulfill the mission, he had no guarantee the KGB would keep their word. They could doublecross him, refuse to keep the bargain-so long as they had Kalinka they could use him again and again. So driving along, checking to see he wasn't followed, glancing every few seconds at the rear-view mirror, he realized that the only way he'd ever get her back would be to end his usefulness to the Bureau by making them think the French knew who he was. If he could do that they'd have no further use for him, and therefore no reason to hold Kalinka anymore.

It was a fascinating notion, and he toyed with it the entire way, wondering how he could manage it, if in fact it was worth the risk. He was proud of the way he behaved at the frontier, like any ordinary European heading toward Algiers to have some fun. He stopped in Oran, bought the newspapers, and then got an idea of what might be in his car. The French were conducting a series of nuclear tests in the Sahara. Perhaps he was carrying equipment to monitor the blasts.

He thought about betrayal, could think of nothing else, as he entered Algiers through a driving, torrential rain. Then he got lost in a maze of traffic circles and one-way streets; finally found his meeting place by the Jardin Exotique. He waited there, shivering in his car, until his contact came. It was an Algerian this time, someone he'd never seen, who directed him up a hill to a region of villas with walled-in grounds. The Algerian pointed to a house, got out, swung open a set of gates. Peter drove straight through into a garage, took out his suitcase, and was driven back downtown in another car.

They'd booked him into a businessmen's hotel. He spent a night of torment there on a sagging mattress, slapping mosquitoes off his chest. All he had to do, he thought, was call the French police. If he turned informant, offered himself as a double agent, they'd make it look as though they'd been watching him for years. The Russians would see he had no further use, and then would let Kalinka go. It was a gamble, of course, the gamble of a lifetime, but one he was willing to take. He was about to call the French, had actually picked up the phone, when suddenly he remembered something which gave him second thoughts. Why had they let him see the garage where presumably they'd take apart his car? They didn't work like that, kept things compartmentalized-unless, of course, it was all a trap. Yes-then he was sure of it and knew he couldn't take the chance. If he called the French, told them about his car, and they went to the villa and found no trace, the Russians would know he was a double agent and he'd be dead within the hour. So he did nothing, sat in his hotel room, stared out mournfully at the rain. And on the morning of the third day Prozov finally called.

"We're pleased with what you did," he said. "Your work is finished now. You'll find your car parked in front of the hotel, and you can expect delivery of the Polish goods."

That was it-a miracle. They actually kept their word. He never heard from them again. Kalinka arrived two months later with a Polish passport bearing his own last name. He fixed up the back room of the shop so it would remind her of Hanoi.

"So you see, Hamid, you really have no good reason to throw me out. I never spied against Morocco-I never had the chance. Everything was for Kalinka, to get her here and keep her safe. I pretended we were married, and no one suspected we were not. She was only sixteen then, but her face was timeless like Marguerite's. Even the Vietnamese wouldn't take her away when they found out we were man and wife."

Had Peter really thought the Vietnamese would care enough to send someone to Tangier to snatch her back? It was ridiculous, absurd, yet Peter had rigorously carried this fiction out, even, years later, coming to Hamid's fiat to demand an explanation, because, as he'd put it at the time, "I'm the husband. I have certain rights."

Kalinka, Hamid thought, must have been extremely troubled to have submitted to such a situation for so long. But she was indifferent, as she still was to so many things, and if it had pleased Peter to introduce her as his wife, then she'd played out that role without complaint. Peter had fed her, protected her, made her the focus of his life. And all that time they'd slept in separate beds in the back room of his shop.

"I admire you, Peter," he said. "That was brilliant the way you calculated things. Not calling the French; seeing through the Russian trap. Yes, I admire you for that."

Peter beamed.

"You know," Hamid said, "I've known you for many years, but I've never been in your back room."

Peter laughed. "Nothing there," he said. "No secrets, Hamid. Just my papers and accounts. But come in, if you like."

They stood-up, and Hamid followed Peter to the door. It was a shabby room, and Peter looked shabby standing in the middle of it, talking, gesturing, scratching at his head.

"Here's the curtain, pulled back now, but in the old days we used it to separate the room at night. This was her bed, bigger than mine, you see-Marguerite and Kalinka shared a big bed like that. I've set things up pretty much the same in here. Their bed was always on the right, and mine was near the window, just as now-"

He mumbled on, lost in his memories, while Hamid stared at him and gaped. Suddenly he understood: it was nostalgia for the life Peter had led with Marguerite that had caused him to force Kalinka to take her mother's place. So pitiful, this fantasy, and so cruel the way he'd made her play it out. Just the thought of Kalinka sleeping here and wandering around Tangier so many years playing his preposterous game-Hamid shook his head in grief. The hashish probably saved her, he thought. Only in its fog could she escape Peter's twisted, terrifying love.

"Oh, I know you love her, Hamid. You're strong, you treat her well. But still I need her too, if only to talk with her in the old language we used to use. All this time, you see, I've been afraid you'd find out I was a spy. Then you'd throw me out, and I wouldn't see her anymore."

A spy-he was afraid I'd find out that! It was so pathetic, his fear, all his illusions about himself. He'd been nothing, an inaccurate spotter of ships, a clerk, and once a messenger to Algiers.

"Don't worry, Peter. Nothing will happen to you now. And of course you may speak with Kalinka sometimes. I won't feel compromised."

Peter beamed again.

"One more question, though, before I leave. I know the Japanese killed Kalinka's father. I've wondered why they didn't kill you too."

"Ah-well, you see, Hamid, Stephen was a real Communist. He held his tongue. But I–I talked a lot."

As Peter hung his head then, out of shame, Hamid felt all his anger melt away. He knew now for sure that Peter was harmless, a broken man, a burned-out case.

They shook hands, and then Hamid left, pausing a moment outside the shop. He thought of Peter inside, so deluded, so obsequious, somehow managing to function in Tangier. He's found his niche, he thought, and he'll survive, so long as Kalinka remains nearby. He'll operate this shop, this little museum, listen to gossip, perhaps steam open a letter or two a week, endure insults from his customers, flick his feather duster to hide his scars, and go to bed each night haunted by memories and ghosts.

Thinking about that, driving through Dradeb, through the wedding throngs which jammed the narrow street, Hamid felt a wave of sympathy break from the reservoir he'd thought was dry. It washed over Peter, so battered, so wounded, by the forces that had shaped his life.

At last, he thought, I understand.

He wept then in his car, driving through the slum, wept with pity for Peter Zvegintzov, the fussy little shopkeeper, and for Kalinka wandering the city trying to escape her nightmare in hashish and dreams. He wept too for the pain of Stephen Zhukovsky, screaming in a Hanoi jail, and for Marguerite Pham Thi Nha, loading artillery at Dien Bien Phu, smiling beneath the brim of her conical straw hat.

Emerging from Dradeb, honking his way through the last of the revelers that summer night, he still had tears in his eyes. He was in a rush to get home, hold Kalinka, ask her to marry him. He wanted to shield her from the savage storms of life.