The Butcher of Casablanca

by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

  The waste picker looked at him with the stunned gaze of someone who had just emerged from a horror film. He shook his head, unable to speak. Hanash gave him an encouraging nod, to no avail. So he commanded, “Open your mouth. Speak. What were you doing here?”

  “I . . . I was just trying to make a living as usual.” His body trembled, almost feverishly. “I open up bags to see if they have anything worth taking. Those two bags looked weird at first sight.”

  “Did you open them?”

  The young man shuddered. But he nodded and continued as though accustomed to offering help. “I thought the first bag might contain an infant. I once saved a baby’s life. I found him in a dumpster in a cardboard box. The cats would have torn into him if I hadn’t gotten there in time. I called the police. They came and thanked me. Their chief even gave me a pack of cigarettes.”

  “I said, did you open the bag?”

  “Well . . . yes and no, sir. It was already slightly open. I took a look. Then, when I reached inside . . .”

  Tears streamed from his eyes. He gulped for air, staring at Hanash as though he had seen a ghost. He clamped his lower lip between his teeth and let out an agonized whimper.

  Hanash gave the young man time to catch his breath.

  “If only I hadn’t,” the man went on. “I felt soft human skin. I thought maybe it was an animal. But when I saw the toes . . . Oh, I wish I’d never seen that!”

  “Did you see who put the bag in there?”

  “No, sir.”

  Hanash fixed him with a stern, skeptical glare. “What time did you get here?”

  The young man looked down at his watch and answered confidently, “At a quarter to six.”

  “Now, think carefully. Did you see anybody here or in the vicinity, even in one of the streets nearby?”

  The young man spoke nervously, caught off guard by the question. “If this weren’t a Saturday, there would have been some activity around that time. People on their way to work . . . But this being a Saturday, people were sleeping in. So . . . no, sir, I didn’t see anyone. The streets were completely empty. Whoever put those bags in there must have done it sometime in the middle of the night.”

  Hanash eyed him suspiciously. “How do you know that?” he asked and scrutinized the young man’s face as he answered.

  “It’s my job, sir. I can tell each of the residents here from their garbage. I’m absolutely sure that the man who did this is not from this part of town.”

  Hanash’s eyes widened in surprise. He thought about holding on to this young waste picker for a bit, perhaps even adding him to his list of CIs. Maybe he knew more than he let on.

  Their eyes met and Hanash flashed him a smile. The waste picker quickly averted his gaze. Hanash decided to leave the question as to whether to bring in CIs until later. He didn’t have enough to go on yet, and in general, homicides such as this are crimes of passion. They’re committed for personal reasons, often by people with no criminal record who had been living calm, ordinary, and respectable lives until something made them snap. He recalled the last case of this sort. The horror of it had stunned the entire country and preoccupied newspapers and social-networking sites for weeks. It involved a simple quarrel between the owner of a popular kofta restaurant and a neighbor who grew so fed up with the smoke from the grill that he began to blackmail the restaurant owner. One night, the latter lured the neighbor into the restaurant, stabbed him, chopped him up, and sold his flesh mixed into the ground beef.

  At last the search team returned, weary and dirty, failure written on their faces. Hamid went up to Hanash and shook his head sadly. “Negative on the dumpsters in this vicinity. I instructed another team to broaden the search and to coordinate with other teams, even if they have to cover the whole city.”

  Hanash nodded sympathetically. Then he curled his lip as he cast a last critical look around him. This wasn’t where the murder was committed, after all. The crime scene was elsewhere. The body was only dumped here. Why this place, exactly? Where did he dispose of the upper portion of the body? You can’t ID a victim without a face or hands to get prints from.

  As he turned toward his car, he jerked his head at the waste picker and instructed the policeman guarding him, “Take him to the station, run an ID check, and take his statement.”

  3

  Casablanca, the consummate city of contradictions. Natives call it “the Ghoul” because of its power to frighten all newcomers and because it contains all the worst of underdeveloped capitalist societies. Though a city of high finance, big business, astounding economic growth, and rapid urban expansion, one is left mouth agape at how its elegant upscale neighborhoods, with their luxurious villas, nightclubs, and posh shopping centers displaying international brand names, stand cheek by jowl with overcrowded slums consisting of crudely made houses without proper sanitation facilities. It is those miserable hovels that supply the city with its many types of sellers of love, from the young beauties who staff the nightclubs to the old flaccid wretches who specialize in oral sex in doorways and dark alleys. From there, too, come the overworked factory girls for the industrial zone, not to mention the panoply of delinquents, religious extremists, and professional criminals.

  *

  Hanash parked his car and entered the police headquarters, located in central Casablanca. Actually, they were only a couple of kilometers from where the half a corpse was found.

  Back in the Years of Lead, police stations (apart from the offices of the higher-ups) were almost as dismal and depressing for the staff as they were for inmates. And the Commissariat of Police was no exception. Corridors were dark and dank. The dilapidated offices had ramshackle desks, often without chairs. Files and folders were stuffed into cabinets without doors. Inspectors wrote their reports on antiquated typewriters that clicked and clacked as loudly as railway carriages. Light bulbs were either missing or layers of dust inhibited all but the feeblest light. Sinks were a rare commodity and those that did exist were generally out of order or dripped incessantly. Given the abysmal state of facilities in general, there was no need to speak of the toilets or the detention wards, let alone the torture chambers.

  Before Hamash reached his office, his phone rang. When he saw the number, he decided it would be wiser to wait until he was alone. It was his wife. He really didn’t have time for this right now. At first he was going to ignore the call, but he changed his mind when he recalled her anguish.

  As he settled into his plush leather chair behind his desk, he summoned the will to call her back and speak gently regardless of how irately she spoke.

  Her voice was filled with pleading. “Is there any hope we can still go?”

  He fought back a surge of anger. He too would have preferred to be on the way to their daughter in Marrakesh. How he longed to see his grandson, hold him in his arms, and coo at him. Struggling to keep his voice under control, he said, “If only you knew, Naeema. I have a mountain of work. There was this horrific murder. We found half the body of a woman tossed in the garbage. Can you imagine? We still haven’t found the second and most important half.”

  He didn’t usually give his wife such information so early on in a case. But if he could spark her curiosity he might divert her from the subject of the trip. Normally she would have leaped at this piece of news and begun to shower him with questions, formulate hypotheses, and pester him for more information. The world of crime had become a part of her world. She had acquired a passion for the details, following investigations and devising theories. She had picked up so much of his inspectorial style that in the neighborhood she was nicknamed “the Viper,” the wife

  of “the Snake.”

  But not today. She was on to his ruse.

  “I don’t want to hear about your work,” she snapped.

  “You’re no longer interested in the latest crime?” He checked all hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  “The crimes you inflict on me are quite enough!”

  Hanash scowled. He picked up hi
s office phone and punched a number. “Miqla, come to my office right away.” Slamming down the receiver, he resumed the conversation with his wife. He spoke as gently as he could. “I appreciate the pain you feel, but—”

  Suddenly she could no longer contain herself. All the pent-up resentment erupted in a torrent as she fought back her tears. “You only appreciate your work. You’ve always let me down. You’ve never been there when it really counted. You always leave me to cope on my own. My life with you has been nothing but hardship, misfortune, and disappointment. I wish I’d never married you. I wish I’d never even met you. What a rotten fate! A woman who marries a policeman knows nothing but hell. She’ll never see a happy day in her life!”

  Hanash remained calm and silent. He didn’t try to cut her off and snarl at her as he usually did when he disapproved of what she was saying. This time he sympathized. He bowed into the storm and let it run its course, fighting any urge to interrupt her. He was sure that if he said anything at all, he would cause a breakdown. As she continued, she began to ramble and her voice grew vague as though she were speaking more to herself than to him. Eventually she managed to calm herself down and utter some words of apology.

  The office phone rang. He ended the call with his wife and picked up the receiver of the office phone, looked at the number of the caller, let a few seconds pass, and then said gruffly, “What have you got?”

  Officer Hamid’s voice was filled with regret. “Canvassing led nowhere. No one in the vicinity heard or saw a thing.”

  “And the upper half?”

  “The search is still in progress.”

  “Continue the search and keep me posted on every bit of information you get.”

  As soon as he hung up, he heard a knock on the door. Officer Miqla entered with an awkward greeting. Hanash’s eyes narrowed in a long and lethal appraisal. Miqla was short and fat, with a small black mole protruding from the side of his nose. His suit was ridiculous, as drab and shapeless as a pair of pajamas.

  Hanash snorted. “Did you roll out of bed and into the station? Didn’t you take a look in the mirror? Are you sure you’re even awake?”

  The officer gave an unusually bold shrug. “This is the third time I’ve been deprived of my weekend, sir.”

  “Yes, I know,” Hanash sneered. “And you’ll be deprived of it a fourth time, a fifth time, and so on to eternity.” He flashed a smile to let Miqla know that he’d only been feigning anger. He signaled the officer to a chair and assumed a sympathetic tone. “No one gets any rest in this job until they’re dead and buried. Meanwhile, I want you to compile a list of all the open files of adult females reported as missing in the greater Casablanca area.”

  “Is there a picture of the victim or any identifying features?”

  “Negative. As soon as I learn the tiniest detail I’ll let you know.”

  Miqla performed a clumsy salute and shuffled out of the room. Hanash smiled to himself as he became absorbed in his own thoughts. He had to consider all possible angles. First, he wanted to identify the motive behind this murder. Evil pervaded the very marrow of this case. The perpetrator would have his own pathological rationale. Undoubtedly he thought he had a right to kill, took pleasure in the act, and reaped an emotional release from it. He would have taken great relish in mutilating and dismembering the body and savagely brutalizing the genitalia. Now he must be congratulating himself on his work. He was probably preparing a large breakfast for himself as he exulted in his triumph and the trouble and work he’d created for the police on the morning of the first day of their weekend.

  Hanash glanced down at his watch, got up quickly, and left his office.

  As he entered the Ibn Rushd University Hospital, which now had a new wing dedicated to the forensic sciences, Hanash recalled his friend Dr. Wahli, who had emigrated to Canada after despairing at the unimproved conditions of his profession at home. It was not until recently that there was direct contact between the chief medical examiner’s office and the criminal investigations unit. In fact, strictly speaking, there hadn’t been a forensics department until now. A group of doctors had been assembled to fill a gap for the past few decades, but that was it.

  Despite improvements in this field (such as this new wing), there was still a lack of infrastructure and system. Every doctor had his or her own way of performing an autopsy, depending on their specialization—that is, if a court decided to bring in a doctor for an autopsy or a medical opinion to begin with. The prevalent view was that forensics was only about corpses or identifying kinship by DNA analysis, and that was it. Still, it was an improvement over the Years of Lead, when this field had a nasty reputation: the purpose of medical examiners was to serve the powers that be, to provide evidence to justify police actions, and to forge medical reports to cover up the torture and murder of people in custody.

  Dr. Wahli’s replacement was a graduate in forensics from one of the leading French universities in this discipline. Currently, she was also a professor at the Casablanca Faculty of Law, and devoted more time to teaching than she did to her work at the morgue. She refused to go out to a crime scene and, instead, delegated one of her trainees. She introduced herself officiously in rapid-fire French: “Dr. Wafa Amrani, chief of forensics.”

  This was the third time she had spoken with Hanash, yet she acted as though she didn’t know him and his position in the police.

  “Hello, professor. How are you doing? Even you have had to change your weekend plans because of this atrocity. Those limbs are all we found. We’re still searching for the rest.”

  She conducted him directly into the autopsy theater. With its gleaming white-tiled walls, the room resembled a miniature mausoleum. The autopsy table was clean and shiny but exuded a peculiar odor. The medical examiner whisked the sheet off the half-corpse with a flourish as though she wanted to impress Hanash. She then extracted a small notepad from her pocket and recited her initial findings, indifferent to Hanash’s grimace of disgust.

  “Your victim is probably in her early twenties. Full-figured. Judging by the length of her legs she can’t be more than five and a half feet tall.”

  She spoke confidently and matter-of-factly, without looking at Hanash, who she knew was holding his breath and attempting to look composed.

  Trying to hide his discomfort at the pair of legs laid out before him, Hanash said, without budging from his place: “Are there no distinguishing features on those parts of the body?”

  “Only rarely do the lower limbs, in themselves, serve to identify a person,” the professor responded as though delivering a press statement. “Human feet and legs are very much alike, which makes it difficult to establish identity on the basis of them alone. In this case, the difficulty is compounded by the disfigurations that were inflicted postmortem on these limbs and the genitalia.”

  Hanash frowned as he struggled not to shift his eyes away from the table. “Maybe the excision of the reproductive organs was to hide a rape,” he said. “Or perhaps it was to exact extra vengeance.”

  The medical examiner nodded, and added, “Whoever committed this atrocity is thoroughly cold-blooded. I find it hard to rank him among the human race.”

  Hanash suddenly felt very weary. “Could the victim be a prostitute? Or maybe a homeless woman?”

  Dr. Amrani came around to the other side of the autopsy table and spoke as though the question didn’t even merit a response. “There’s nothing to suggest that.”

  She pulled the sheet back over the limbs and preceded Hanash toward the exit.

  “I’ll send you all my findings in an itemized report.

  But I can’t promise you much until you find the other

  half.”

  As he was about to insert his key into the office door, he caught sight of a lone figure slouched on a bench a little farther down the corridor. It was the waste picker.

  “Hey, you!”

  The waste picker shot to his feet.

  Signaling to him to stay put, Hanash asked, “H
asn’t an officer taken down your statement yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Stay there.”

  Entering his office, the detective flicked through his list of informants. But he had no reason to call any of them. He had nothing useful to give them yet. Not a shred of evidence or a fragment of a clue.

  He was annoyed by the silence and lack of activity in the department on that weekend day. The FTs must be analyzing the paltry items that came their way. He glanced at his watch. It was getting on to one p.m. and he still had nothing to sink his teeth into.

  He thought about phoning Hamid to check on the

  progress of the search for the rest of the corpse, but changed his mind. If they’d found anything, he’d be the first

  to know.

  After a moment, he picked up his cell phone and dialed his home phone. His wife picked up immediately as though expecting his call.

  “Are we going to go? Have you finished your work?”

  He spoke slowly, trying to convey additional layers of meaning through the tone of his voice.

  “I told you, it’s impossible for me to leave. I’m up to my ears in work. I’ll call up Atiqa and apologize to her and her husband. But if you want to go to Marrakesh together with Manar and Tarek, feel free.”

  Naeema hid her disappointment beneath a long sigh. He felt that she understood his situation.

  Without a hint of reproach, she said, “You still haven’t found a lead?”

  Hanash smiled. He shifted some documents and relaxed back into his chair.

  “We haven’t found a thing yet. Nothing that can shed a bit of light on this case.”

  Naeema sighed again. Hanash sensed that she had lost her customary curiosity that would prod her to ask more questions.

  “May God help you succeed,” she said.

  “It’s best that the three of you go to Marrakesh without me,” Hanash said despondently. “This case could drag on. We have a mutilated corpse and only the bottom half of it so far. We’re still looking for the rest. I’d expected to have made some progress by now.”