Whitefly

by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

  “Sit down, sit down,” he said. “I just had two phone conversations. The first was with Central. They dug up Issa Karami’s info. He really does have Spanish citizenship, even though he was born in El Jebha. Before I called you, I talked to my friend, Hajj Mohamed el-Ibrahimi, chief of El Jebha police. He confirmed Issa is well known in town. Issa has agents working for him there and in the regions where marijuana is grown. He said these agents represent Karami in buying crops and turning them into hash while Karami sits pretty in Europe.”

  “And the second piece of news?” asked Laafrit.

  “I got it from the border police. Issa Karami left from the Tangier port last Monday using his Moroccan passport.”

  “I think we’re dealing with an international hash-smuggling syndicate,” said Laafrit.

  He summed up for the commissioner what he had found out from the victim’s father. When he mentioned Carlos Gomez’s name, the commissioner cut him off.

  “No doubt the victims were just stooges in a huge operation. This Gomez is hiding behind his agriculture business and he’s using immigrants for his smuggling operations. I think the scenario’s clear now: a boat full of hash took off from our shores with Issa Karami at the helm, while one of Gomez’s boats carrying the victims left from the other side. During the handoff in the middle of the Strait, some kind of misunderstanding happened and that’s what we’re up against now.”

  “A syndicate with two bosses,” said Laafrit. “But we have someone who’ll help us get information on the second boss.”

  “Luis?” asked the commissioner, surprised.

  “I’ll call him tonight. But there’s something else I don’t get. When Mohamed Bensallam came back the last time, he didn’t stay with his family in Beni Mellal. He spent an entire week in Doukkala and didn’t tell anyone why he was going there or what he was doing. I think we’ve got to check this out.”

  “I’ll ask the Beni Mellal cops to take care of it,” said the commissioner.

  “Let’s wait and see what the rest of the victims’ families have to say,” said Laafrit after a moment’s pause.

  “When you’ve finished with the father,” said the commissioner, “send him in to me.”

  9

  LAAFRIT GOT HOME AT EIGHT that night. He was exhausted, and decided he needed to take his mind off the case. He wanted to play the role of the ideal husband since he’d been completely neglecting Naeema these days. So, after dinner, he praised his wife’s cooking, cleared the dishes, talked with her about household things, and showed some enthusiasm for repainting the walls. He changed his clothes in the bedroom and played with his daughter until she fell asleep. He then came on to his wife. After they had sex, he took a bath and relaxed in bed under the warm blankets.

  Naeema was a few younger than him. They had been students at the university in Rabat. She majored in French literature and he in anthropology. They met by chance at a student protest against the torture of Marxist students. The Moroccan Marxists didn’t recognize perestroika or the global fall of Marxism. They were calling for the reform of socialism and an end to imperialism. Naturally, these university protests weren’t devoid of a certain amount of romanticism. They were more like parties during which students sang the revolutionary songs of Sheikh Imam, and both men and women would hold hands and sway to the rhythm of oud songs by the activist Said al-Maghribi, who was in exile at the time in France. They’d also read solidarity communiqués and end the parties by repeating the anthem of the Socialist International while holding up pictures of Marx and Lenin.

  It was at one of these parties that Khalid Ibrahim, now known as Laafrit, first met Naeema. At that time, he was a senior and she was a freshman. She was dazzled by the atmosphere among the students and delighted by the idea of belonging to something bigger than herself. She was headstrong and excited, repeating slogans from the bottom of her throat and holding hands with her comrades. At the end of the party, she felt a hand still gripping hers. When she tried to let go, Khalid Ibrahim held tight and so she lifted her head toward him. She saw a handsome young man with a Che Guevara beard smiling at her with a revolutionary gentleness.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen you at an activist party,” he said to her with delight.

  “It’s my first year here,” she replied, having difficulty extracting her hand from his.

  He held her hand tighter.

  “It’s your first year and you’re so enthusiastic!” he said, feigning surprise. “I wonder how you’ll be in your senior year . . . probably a leader.”

  From that day, he insisted on waiting for her in front of the women’s dorms, and with an amazing quickness their relationship solidified: they were two comrades brought together to change the world. The conversation among the students was always about politics, class struggle, and the dream of a socialist world free of exploitation. Together, they watched a lot of revolutionary films at the cinema clubs, participated in meetings that lasted until dawn, and played cat and mouse with the police, who broke up their gatherings by force. In all that, they barely left each other’s sides, but it wasn’t until the end of the year when it was time to say goodbye that they exchanged passionate kisses. Their love was something they assumed without needing to acknowledge it. From the beginning, it was clear Naeema wouldn’t have sex with him until their relationship was made official by getting engaged. Despite the liberation of their thinking from a political perspective, the strictures of their conservative traditional upbringing kept them in check.

  After Khalid graduated and summer vacation came, they each left Rabat and returned to their homes, Naeema to Tangier and Khalid to Casablanca, though they agreed they’d stay in constant contact.

  But this contact didn’t last through the summer, let alone until the time came for Naeema to go back for her sophomore year. Khalid Ibrahim disappeared suddenly and news about him broke off. She’d just decided to go to Casablanca to find out about him when that great clash happened between the two student groups, the Marxists and the Islamists, whose movement began to strengthen. These clashes gave the police a pretext to torture all the students, intervening violently. They detained Naeema for an entire week, together with others, at secret police stations. She was subjected to methodical torture to get her to reveal information about her comrades. She was kicked, slapped, pulled by her hair, thrown against the walls, and hung up by her feet for hours. While she was blindfolded, her torturer sexually assaulted her, first by kissing her forcefully, then by squeezing her breasts and grabbing her behind, telling her with disgusting words that she had the choice between his cock in her ass or sitting on a glass bottle. This psychological and physical torture deeply disturbed her. She’d never imagined her political activity was so dangerous or that she’d be punished for it in such a barbaric way.

  When they released her, she went straight back to her family. She was in shock but didn’t reveal anything of what happened to her. She withdrew into herself and isolated herself in her room, where she preferred to stay in the dark, sitting on the ground and holding her thighs, as if she were afraid. Her father, who was a traditional man (the owner of a clothing store), thought she’d been subjected to an act of black magic and sorcery. As for her mother, she suspected her daughter had been through some sort of emotional shock, in which she might have lost her virginity, and that her lover might have broken up with her.

  Her feelings of shock dissipated bit by bit but she never thought about going back to finish her degree and she refused all her suitors. She spent all her time on the couch, watching TV series or reading women’s magazines. She took no interest in her appearance and put on the hijab, though she had no deep religious convictions. She never thought she’d see Khalid Ibrahim again. She stopped thinking about him completely and didn’t even recognize him when she found him standing at her door one day.

  Over a number of conversations, he told her what had happened. His father had died and his family didn’t have any way to get by unless he provided for the
m. He felt he had to get a job as fast as possible, so he took the police academy test and became an inspector. He took the job even though he was overqualified. He said he was ashamed of himself at the beginning and that he felt he’d betrayed his principles, which held the police as nothing more than torturers and guardians for the privileges of the rich. He buried his head in his hands and confessed he’d been ashamed to look for her out of fear she’d think he’d committed a crime against their beliefs, especially when some of his friends found out she’d been arrested and subjected to barbaric torture. He then praised the reforms that’d happened in the political system and convinced her that the years of lead—the decades of human rights abuses in Morocco—had ended and that his acceptance into the police academy, despite his past political activities, proved the country had entered a new phase, cutting a path toward democracy and human rights. He tried to convince her the police stations were cleansed of torture and that even though he was in the police, he was still an activist at heart and was bent on applying the law. He said he refused all bribes and took no part in the pilfering that went on. And, at that moment, he asked her to marry him, declaring his love for her and saying that the only reason he’d asked to work in Tangier was so he could be close to her.

  For Laafrit, Naeema was a gift from heaven. She embodied the captivating Andalusian beauty that distinguishes the women of the north. But after marrying her, he began to feel that she was too sensitive. She’d start crying at the drop of a hat. At times, he’d get annoyed that she couldn’t let go of that terrible week she’d spent at the police station, and whenever they had a fight she’d see a kind of mockery of fate in her marriage to a cop. Their relationship got so tense that they split up after a year of marriage, but their families intervened to reconcile them. Naeema felt she wouldn’t be happy even if she married someone else and that her experience of arrest, torture, abuse, and humiliation was a deep wound that’d never heal. No one understood this, of course, and everyone thought all her problems would be solved if she only got pregnant. Fate smiled on her, and indeed everything changed once she had Reem.

  For his part, Laafrit was focused on his profession more than his personal life. Because he was working so hard and showed an unexpected aptitude for his job, he got promoted to detective in record time. But this was at the expense of his family life, since he was spending all his time at work and would usually come home drunk. Naeema started worrying he wasn’t satisfied with just drinking and that maybe he was cheating on her. Nonetheless, she tried as hard as possible to rid herself of her anxiety and to make their daughter the center of her life.

  Later that night, Laafrit went into the living room and sat down in his lounge chair. He sat there in the dark and didn’t feel like turning on the TV. He was enjoying the peace and quiet, but his cop nature forced him to start putting together what the shooting victim’s father had said earlier that day. Laafrit thought the most intriguing aspect of the story was that Mohamed Bensallam came to Beni Mellal four times in the span of only a year. Laafrit then wondered about Bensallam’s marriage and how he’d managed to buy a house. Where’d Bensallam gotten the money for all that if it wasn’t from smuggling hash?

  Laafrit tried to go over the case from the beginning: four bodies washed up in three days, the last one shot four times. The bullets indicated the kind of gun used to kill Bensallam, which happened to be the same kind found in Issa Karami’s apartment in Martil. As for Karami, he had a Spanish passport and belonged to the “new generation” of hash dealers.

  Investigations showed all the victims were living on the other side, in Spain, and were all doing farm work in Almería for a man named Carlos Gomez. Bensallam was the only one who’d gotten papers. The others were illegals. The last time Bensallam came back to Morocco, he spent a week in the Doukkala region without telling anyone why he went there.

  Laafrit licked his lips, craving a lozenge, but in an attempt to keep it from becoming a habit, he’d promised himself not to have them at home.

  Up till now, Laafrit thought everything was proceeding clearly and that the key to the investigation had to center on a meeting between the victims and Issa Karami. In the long run, he told himself, it’s a case about hash. His best guess was that the four victims had set out on a boat from the Spanish side while another boat set out from Moroccan shores carrying hash. This meant the coast guard either turned a blind eye or simply hadn’t noticed anything.

  But why had Karami shot only Bensallam? Why had he put his jacket back on him after killing him, especially when he was simply going to toss him into the sea? Was it to divert attention? And why’d Karami left the gun at his house without the least precaution? Did the choice of the four victims, all from the same neighborhood in Beni Mellal, have any significance?

  The coroner’s report established that the victims hadn’t eaten the same last meal. Bensallam’s was varied and gourmet while the others’ was miserable and cheap. So where’d the meeting taken place? Before the attempted deal? Was Carlos Gomez a big-time smuggler hiding behind his agriculture business? Were the victims only stooges in an international syndicate, just like the commissioner said?

  These questions swirled in Laafrit’s head before he called his friend Luis Fuentes, the Spanish detective in Almería. It had been a long time since they talked. Laafrit remembered all the good times they’d had together in Tangier when Luis was working for the Spanish DEA. He came to Morocco as part of bilateral cooperation to fight this plague and as evidence the Spanish were standing in solidarity with all the efforts that Morocco was exerting. His team was concentrating on some Spanish truck drivers who were complaining they were victims after getting caught transporting drugs. The plan was not to arrest them until after they penetrated the network. Laafrit was chosen for this job on the Moroccan side since he spoke fluent Spanish, and Luis got the job for the same reason: he spoke fluent Arabic.

  Luis was Moroccan by birth. He was born in El Hoceima and left for Spain when he was seven. As he told Laafrit, his father loved to hunt. He used to dedicate all his time to it, going out with friends from the Rif Mountains. For this reason alone, Luis’s father insisted on staying in Morocco but Luz, Luis’s mother, felt that if they stayed, she’d never regain her husband’s attention. She’d simply become one of “the Moroccan women” whose job it was to cook, clean, and raise the kids. So in order to get her husband away from his second wife, hunting, Luz asked him to go back to Spain. But he stubbornly refused. Her only choice was to take the kids and go back to Almería, her native city. Luis’s father was determined to resist his wife, so he stayed on in El Hoceima for three years, alone on his farm, until loneliness got the better of him and he went back to his family. Even now, Luis told Laafrit, the man continued to live on the memories of those bygone days in Morocco.

  Laafrit smiled to himself as he remembered Luis’s infatuation with Fifi. When Luis went to see her show, he’d turn into a different person. He’d jump onto the dance floor and shake his hips as he danced in front of her, making people laugh. Luis wasn’t drunk. He was just giving his emotions free rein and letting loose. If Laafrit hadn’t warned Fifi about Luis the first time and told her not to get too involved with him, Luis definitely would’ve gotten carried away coming and going between Almería and Tangier just to see her.

  Laafrit looked at his watch. It was 10:15, which meant it was now 11:15 in Spain. Was it too late to call? It didn’t matter. How many times had Luis called him after midnight Moroccan time? He took five minutes to collect his thoughts and then dialed the number. After the third ring, Luis picked up.

  “Sí,” Laafrit heard him say in a soft voice.

  “Sorry if I disturbed you,” said Laafrit in perfect Spanish.

  “Who’s this . . . ?” asked Luis, surprised. “Laafrit?”

  “Sorry,” said Laafrit. “I forgot the time difference.”

  “We might as well be on your time here,” he said in Arabic, letting out a laugh. “How are you?”

  �
�Good,” responded Laafrit in Spanish. “And you? How are things over there?”

  “Great,” said Luis in Arabic.

  “So,” said Laafrit, “I won’t keep you long. I’m busy these days with a tough case. Half of it’s here and the other half’s over there in Almería. Maybe I can tell you the details quickly.”

  Laafrit summarized the case in a few sentences. Luis interrupted him when he mentioned Carlos Gomez.

  “Carlos Gomez,” said Luis in Arabic, “is a friend of my father. He’s crazy about hunting too. He’s probably the biggest farmer in Andalusia. He alone exports enough tomatoes for all the European markets—more than your entire country does. It’s impossible he has the slightest connection to hash or the smuggler you mentioned.”

  “And the others?” asked Laafrit.

  “Give me their names.”

  Laafrit told Luis about all the victims, concentrating on the name of Mohamed Bensallam, the one who was shot dead and had legal papers. Luis wrote the names down quickly.

  “Got it. I’ll call you back as soon as I have something. Tell me,” Luis said, letting out a slight laugh, “have you seen Fifi recently?”

  “I saw her this week,” said Laafrit. “She asked about you and told me to say hello.”

  “I won’t ever forget those nights . . . oh!” said Luis, sighing audibly.

  “We’ll talk more about Fifi when it’s on your dime,” said Laafrit, cutting him off.

  “If I were in Tangier,” said Luis joking, “I’d get dressed right now and head over to the Macarena! How can you sleep when Fifi’s so close? What’s wrong with you?”

  Luis chuckled and then hung up.

  Laafrit spent all day Sunday with his family, something he hadn’t done in a long time. He suggested to Naeema that they have lunch at a pizza restaurant owned by one of his friends. Outside, he took her by the arm and clung to her. She hid what she could of her face so he couldn’t see her annoyance. She knew he felt burdened and that he was holding on to her only out of a heavy sense of guilt for being gone so much these days.