‘He offered you the chance you’d always wanted to act,’ I said. ‘How could you refuse? What was it—some sort of coon number? Your dancing skills alone—’
He lifted a tired hand which begged me not to interrupt. ‘We came to a deal. It seemed good to me since it would give me control of the Marrakech theatre. I’d begun to figure out that Africa wasn’t going to be a whole lot different to America. Nobody welcomed me as a long-lost brother. They just wanted to know why I’d been fool enough to leave and how much dough I’d brought with me. Mainly it was like Valentino said when he got back to the States—”In the world, I was a hero, in Italy, I was just another wop.” Here, I’m just another nigger—and in Tangier that means about what it means in Tennessee. So I’m cheated blind by my business partner who is about to get hold of my stock in the company and I decide to get the hell out of there and come to Marrakech myself where I’d heard the boss was almost a nigger and it was possible for a gentleman of colour to get along better than in the North. So I finally got there, overland, making a little money as I went. By the time I arrived three months ago I had enough to open The Ciné Palace in what used to be an old slaughterhouse off Djema al Fna’a near the Katoubia Mosque. It was all remodelled. Believe me, Max, it’s the ritziest little theatre outside Casablanca. We opened in June and business boomed. I’m not kidding you, Max, we had to have big buck Berber hillmen to keep those boys out. I’ve seen the alternatives. Believe me, Ace Among Aces beats snake-charmers and the two-thousandth re-telling of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These boys’ll pay good money to see a movie. Any movie! It doesn’t matter a damn what the moulas say, they go anyway. All I had to do was square a couple of the big religious guys and make sure we scheduled the programmes between prayers. That’s five shows a day, morning till night, seven days a week, and every one packed. The same guys came back show after show. These people don’t believe they’ve got the best out of a story unless they’ve heard it told a hundred times. They never got tired of the programmes!’
It had begun to dawn on me that the reason for my reception as we entered the city, indeed the alacrity with which the Pasha put his aeroplane scheme to me, all had something to do with Mr Mix’s business venture. But why was my old compañero now forced to work off a debt to the Pasha?
‘What I didn’t know is that T’hami has a financial finger in almost every pie in the city. He’s the managing director of the mining companies, the import and export companies, banks, newspapers, whatever’s lucrative. The smaller businesses he lets his big boys squeeze, while the little ones only have to pay a rake-off to a local official. Me, I wasn’t paying anyone except the guys from the mosque. I guess nobody ever thought the Palace’d catch on. Well, it didn’t take T’hami long—he’s quicker than Al Capone to pick up on a new angle—and one day I get an offer. He’s going to buy me out, he says, and make me manager. Or, he says, he can throw me in jail as an illegal immigrant, or he can send me back to the US, or he can fine me. That’s when I found out he’s not just the Mayor of Marrakech but the whole damn’ Justice Department, judge and jury rolled into one. My case is already tried. I owe him a hundred thousand dirham in fines for my illegal business and The Ciné Palace is confiscated with all its stock. Well, Max, I had fifty thousand francs in my hotel room which his gorillas found and “taxed” and I was flat broke again!’
‘You did not seek the aid of the American Consul?’
‘They couldn’t help me,’ was all he would say to that.
‘And The Ciné Palace?’
‘I took some screws out of the projectors and they broke down in a couple of days. I thought I was being clever. I told El Glaoui I could get it running again but I had to take it to Tangier for repair. He said he would send for a new one. It still hasn’t arrived and meanwhile two local engineers had a look at the projectors which now work pretty good except that most of their lenses are missing. I can’t even get to the stock. T’hami’s hidden it somewhere. So here I am. I’d even sent to Casa for some English and Egyptian movies. It would have made a change from White Aces with the middle reels missing and The Lost Buckaroo with a scratch down the middle of the final chapter.’
‘They seem to have a preference for Max Peters movie plays,’ I said with some satisfaction. Realisation had dawned! I saw from Mr Mix’s expression that it had been he who had taken the missing films when he absconded. It was my films, shown over and over again, the length and breadth of Morocco, their titles changed to dramatic Arabic, that had been the basis of the darkie’s lucrative business! I experienced a peculiar stirring in my stomach—the strangest mixture of betrayal and gratitude. This was why we had not been captured as Italian spies. This was why El Glaoui remained so firmly under the impression that we were American moviemakers, why he so solicitously courted me and cunningly trapped the black man.
I remained silent for several moments as Max shrugged his apologies. ‘It was the only way out I had, Max. I knew there were other prints. I guess I was only stealing a little of your vanity while to me it was a way of keeping alive.’
‘Easier to have remained aboard,’ I said at last.
‘I couldn’t, Max. I’d tried to wise you up. My feet was itching. I was bound to go.’
I understood this impulse, though I could hardly sympathise with it.
‘And my films are now the personal property of the Pasha?’
‘I guess so. Maybe we could buy them back.’
I sighed, hardly able to blame the black man for what he had done. One must not judge other races by one’s own high standards. I told him I was glad the mystery was cleared up. I was, I said sadly, still pleased we had been reunited.
‘Believe me, Max,’ he said. ‘I was glad to see you. You don’t know the half of it. My luck’s been worse than a bull’s in a bullock truck. I need to get to Tangier!’
‘But I’m not going to Tangier.’ I hardly knew how to respond.
‘You will, Max,’ he said. ‘And when you do, I’ll be right there with you.’
He thanked me for the cocaine. It would help him, he said, with his official duties. He looked at his pocket watch. ‘I got to fly. Don’t think too badly of me, Max. We’ll get your movies back.’
When he had gone I became, for some reason, increasingly cheerful. Now I knew the cause of my current success and was relieved. What was more, the record of my Hollywood career, if not complete, was at least safe. I decided that part of my price for my services would be the films he held as security against Mr Mix’s absconding. Doubtless it would not be easy to get him to agree and I must bide my time, choose my moment. With this decision firmly made I gave my whole attention to the job before me. I had made all my initial plans and projections, estimates and costings (in dollars and francs) long before the Pasha sent for me. There was trouble, apparently, with the succession, and he had been involved in the enthronement of the new Sultan. I made the most of my time. My normal lusts at last fully restored, and Marrakech famous for her beautiful whores who came to stand at night around the perimeters of the Djema al Fna’a, a short stroll from my hotel, I lost myself in possessing several partners every night.
Save that Marrakech had no coast, the city somehow seemed to be an uncanny echo of Hollywood. She set up astonishing resonances in me. Just as I had felt in Hollywood, I felt now in Marrakech as if I had come home. And still I could not readily identify any real points of similarity between those two very like cities and the very unlike city of Kiev where I spent most of my childhood.
Marrakech might eventually become Carthage’s film-making capital, and spread the ethic of Islam across the Earth, as we tried to distribute the ethic of Christianity. But one ethic is Death and the other is Life. Today Life falls back before Death’s steady gallop. It is time, I said to Mrs Cornelius, we had a miracle. She replied cryptically that she thought I’d had enough of miracles. And she laughed so heartily she began to experience one of her coughing fits, so I never could get her to explain. ‘Your lungs will get you in
the hospital,’ I said. ‘You should smoke filters.’ But she is careless of such things. And anyway I think she is sometimes as happy now as she has ever been, sitting in her old armchair in her damp basement full of mildewing magazines, sipping from her gin glass and talking to that little black-and-white cat her son dotes on. It is unfortunate she does not notice the smell. But she insists on doing her own housework. ‘I’ve orlways bin neat but not fussy,’ she says. ‘There’s no point gettin’ upset over a bit o’ catshit on the carpet, is there?’ She laughs and her fat moves like the ruffles on a seaside pierrot, reminding me of her brief return to the stage in the forties, when she entertained the troops and did six straight weeks at the Kilburn Empire with the Miller Brothers—Karl, Jonny and Max—when they were still all comedians.
I think I was happiest with her during our Hollywood days and later in the 50s when she began to seek my company more frequently. I had moved to Notting Hill because it was where she lived. I was still very active and hopeful in those days, although she complained I looked too readily on the gloomy side. Then we began to go on holiday together. At first it was just the occasional trip to Brighton or Margate or Hampton Court, but as time went on she discovered she enjoyed my company and found it amusing to book a boarding-house for a week just to talk, in the evening, about our adventurous past, before the War. ‘Ther Wor sorta sobered us up,’ she thought. ‘But ter tell yer the troof, Ivan, I get as much fun art o’ a charabang to Butlins as I do art o’ swiggin’ champers at Biarritz.’ I must admit I have not been able to share her enthusiasm, though I always did my best to get into the spirit of her fun. We went to Minehead in Somerset two years running in 1949 and 1950 and had very good weather. We went to St Ives in Cornwall in 1952 and spent a miserable day on a boat to the Scilly Isles while she regurgitated (mostly over the side) the accumulated dainties and savouries of the previous twenty-four hours. A veritable cornucopia of half-digested tarts and pies. Arriving at the Scillies we found nothing but sand-dunes and a few unremarkable houses and I had been led to believe these were the remains of the Isle d’Avilion where Arthur came to die. ‘No question abart that bit, Ivan,’ she assured me between gulps of ozone and dramatic bodily eruptions as she plodded helplessly back towards the boat. The Sea of Scilly might have been the Styx.
T’hami el Glaoui, respected chief of his clan and undisputed ruler of half Morocco, power-broker to the other half, sent for me after I had been his idle employee in Marrakech for almost a month. He was in his study overlooking the palace’s great courtyard in which shady shrubs surrounded a splashing fountain of the most splendid mosaic. On mornings like this I could imagine myself in Byzantium, paying a call upon some Greek dignitary. Unfortunately T’hami, for all his virtues, continued to have the reality of a suburban usurer and, until he spoke at least, was inclined to disappoint expectations. Moreover, he was dwarfed by the heavy Spanish antique furniture which gave the room the appearance of a crowded museum. Part of his great library was here. He was rumoured to read only with difficulty and to have stolen most of the books.
He wished people to think him wise, true, but T’hami had actually read much of his library and understood some of it far better than I. Like a real bookman he took pleasure in the feel and smell of his volumes. Today we stood by the window looking down at a print table on which he had spread my designs. Behind us were the lovely arches, domes and tiles of the best Moorish architecture, which again reminded me of a Hollywood tycoon’s offices. It is, sadly, an architecture which has been readily vulgarised by every modernist who ever designed a suburban picture-palace or a picnic park. ‘I have been looking through these just now,’ said El Glaoui, smiling up at me. ‘They are very good, I think. I have had one or two exberts give them a glance. I hobe you don’t mind.’
I murmured something about the patents being already registered.
‘Well,’ he said, adjusting his little silk collar, ‘in sbite of young Lieutenant Fromental’s view of the matter, I think we can begin building some aeroblanes, Mr Beters.’ He was delighted by my response and laughed aloud.
‘You are a man who loves these things!’
‘More than my own life, I sometimes think.’
He enjoyed this. Like most tyrants, wherever they occur, he approved of strong expressions and opinions as long as they did not conflict with his own. He became by turns avuncular, brotherly, respectful, intimate, yet always the confident authority. As I knew from Mr Mix, he had, though it would be impolitic to employ it, the power of life and death over everyone in Marrakech and her surrounds; more power than the nominal ruler in Rabat; enough power (and he desired no more, for he was by nature a cautious man) to hold the balance between the French, the rebels and the Sultan. Even while I marvelled at the Glaoui’s sudden decision, he made a further suggestion. ‘I think we should have one of each tybe at first. Meanwhile brint a catalogue which will describe the virtues of our machines. Use as many colours and photos as you like. As the orders arrive, we shall make the aeroblanes. That way the cabital investment comes from the customer. What do you think?’
I was merely glad that I was again going to be busy doing the thing I loved best. I would bide my time before I raised the question of the confiscated Buckaroos. There was no point in arguing with the Pasha, who would jovially have promised anything and then declared that it was a police matter and out of his hands. So has the East learned to use the language and cherished institutions of the West to its sublime advantage.
‘We will number them, I suggest,’ he continued, ‘and berhabs give them names. As I see you have done in your sketches. The Desert Wind is one I had in mind. Or is that a little too brovincial, do you think?’
‘We should select a theme,’ I suggested, ‘as you see I have done over here. These are the names of animals—you will recall Sopwith’s famous Camel—and these are of oceans—The Pacific, The Atlantic, The Indian—or weather conditions—Typhoon, Hurricane, Maelstrom, Sandstorm.’ I admitted my own preference was for birds—The Hawk, The Swallow, The Owl and The Snowgoose. My ship is called The Silver Cloud. She is crewed entirely by bright-eyed Slavs. He settled for the birds. He said he had heard that I, in fact, was nicknamed ‘The Hawk’ in certain quarters. I admitted I had been honoured thus by the Bedouin of the Eastern Sahara.
‘I, too, have been likened to a bird of brey.’ He turned to the window and the music of his fountains. ‘I am sometimes named “The Eagle of the Atlas” while my boor nephew Hamoun, alas, you know, is “The Vulture”. So we are “of the same feather”, I think?’ I have made no effort to reproduce his peculiar mixture of elaborate Arabic, rather simple French and broken English. I know women found this especially charming. ‘What do you say, Brofessor Beters?’
His manly clap on the back filled me with an odd sense of pride. I had no doubt that I had discovered a fellow-genius. It was always of deep regret to me that he used it in such shortsighted and un-Christian ways. I was never a hypocrite. While I came to attend the mosque at least once a week and to be as dutiful in my daily worship as El Hadji T’hami himself, frequently to be found reading from the Holy Q’ran, my deepest prayers were addressed to a somewhat more progressive God. I did not, however, live a lie. My faith matured during my time in Marrakech and I had many debates with myself concerning the nature of God and His rôle for me. I learned to accept the responsibilities of my position. I was after all a great international celebrity according to the Pasha’s extraordinary court. I was as often at his palace as I was at my desk. Almost every day brought a new visitor from Europe. Our work proceeded with the leisurely pace which at first frustrates the European until, one day, he discovers he has learned to prefer it and regard it as the only civilised way. I was, I now see, lured by something very like the luxuries and the flatteries of Satan.
The Pasha’s advisers were all Jews. One of the youngest was a great enthusiast of my Masked Buckaroo films and saw me as something of a hero. He insisted, to the amusement of his fellows, on quizzing me on every detai
l, every mystery of young Tex Riordan’s career. I did my best to answer him and was a little flattered by his attention. He was a Europeanised Jew of the more intelligent sort. He had been educated at a French school. I knew him as Monsieur Josef. These Jews were frequently seated beside me during meals and were friendly enough to me. Some understood Yiddish. They were clever, quick-talking men, who made the Pasha laugh. To these alone he would give his full attention, for they advised him on all his many interests throughout the country, whether they were agricultural, mining or manufacturing. It was through listening to his Jews that I began to understand something of his master-plan. He was not interested in challenging the Sultan by force of arms. He was instead building himself a modern commercial empire as vast and as varied as Hearst’s or Hughes’s. Like them, like Rothschild or Zaharoff, he had discovered the crucial importance of modern engineering to the improvement of his fortunes and would in time come to own the Moroccan press. He would develop power and influence in the democratic style. Increasingly the echoes between my masters in Hollywood and my master in Marrakech became louder and better defined, and at first I found this amusing. Thinking it might solve our mutual problems, I suggested to Mr Mix that we make some good old-fashioned picture-plays while awaiting the Pasha’s pleasure, but he threw cold water on the idea. ‘Already,’ he said, ‘I’m running out of film stock. Some was ordered from Pathé in Casa, but it’s still not here. Soon I’m going to have to start faking it. Or try for some interesting double-exposures!’
So I devoted myself to my aeroplanes. I moved into a marvellous house on several levels in the new French Quarter being built on the far side of the walls, beyond the Bab Djedid, the gateway through which the Avenue Katoubia ran. The house was fully staffed with slaves from the Pasha’s own palace, including several young creatures who were provided purely for my pleasure. I had my own carriage at my permanent disposal, bearing the Pasha’s arms to show that in every case I had right of way. Through the healing routines of the leisurely Moorish court I began to forget my ordeal in Egypt. I thought sometimes of Kolya, that wonderful friend, and his noble stubbornness which had left him in such a difficult position. But I had faith in Kolya! Slave or free man, he would survive somewhere and I knew in my bones we would one day meet again and share a joke about our hallucinatory desert escapade. Although continuing to avoid any public closeness to me, Miss von Bek remained the Pasha’s mistress for longer than anyone could remember. His negro vizier, Hadj Idder, who was El Glaoui’s closest confidant and a freed slave, was delighted. He said that his master had found a playmate. It was true, it seemed to us, that the Glaoui had, according to his habit, selected fresh sport for his evenings, but Miss von Bek always occupied a good deal of his daily life. His horses, his golf course, his cars were at her disposal. Again, typically, he remained jealous of their friendship and more than once had turned a severe eye upon a man he suspected of admiring her. She and I had become adept at disguising our brief communications, with the result that a new intensity of feeling existed between us. Only Hadj Idder suspected us. Like so many Marrakchis, he was himself a devotee of The Masked Buckaroo and had complimented me several times on my acting but this enthusiasm did nothing to shake his loyalty to the Pasha to whom he was as devoted as Mr Mix was to me. Hadj Idder had the manner of a Christian nun, except that he delighted not in God’s work but the Pasha’s. It was rumoured that they were half-brothers and lovers, and we could believe almost anything of a relationship by far the closest El Glaoui had with any creature. Hadj Idder’s great African head would grin with delight at each new pleasure his master took. At these times he and Mr Mix would look very much alike. He would chuckle and yell or grow sad in appreciation of every passing humour. And yet when acting on the Pasha’s part he became as dignified as any butler of a great Southern mansion in the years of Dixie’s tranquillity. At these times he was a diplomat, discreet and incorruptible—perhaps the only living human being aside from myself at that court who could not somehow be bought. He was trusted for the same good reasons the World Service of the BBC is still trusted in many quarters.
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