‘We all have a flaw when it comes to matters intimate. Faiza’s was her need to control at all costs. Within two months of their involvement she was already starting to make demands, to criticise Paul’s lack of order, to argue with him over just about everything. Frequently Paul told me that he was finding it all de trop. I advised him to cut his losses and get out. But on the two or so occasions that he suggested ending things, Faiza turned all tearful and apologetic, saying: “You are the man of my life.” From what I also ascertained, though she was not experienced in the world of sex, she’d become a very fast learner. And Paul, being a man who likes sex—’
‘You think I’m not aware of that?’
‘I’ve spoken out of turn.’
‘I was just making a point. An exceedingly defensive point.’
‘I like a woman who can laugh at herself.’
‘Now . . . let me guess. Paul being Paul, he couldn’t deal with her emotional meltdowns in the face of him trying to leave her, and was too cowardly to walk away. Given the way she was making him feel like a sex god, he trusted her when it came to little matters like contraception.’
Ben Hassan emitted a curious giggle, reminiscent of a little boy who’d just heard something ‘naughty’.
‘It’s you who should be telling this story,’ he said. ‘Yes, Paul believed Faiza when she told him she was on the pill. So when she announced: “Mon chéri, j’ai une grande nouvelle à t’annoncer. Je suis enceinte” . . . well, Paul was stunned by the news that she was pregnant. When he didn’t exactly sweep her up in his arms and proclaim that she was the love of his life and, that, bien sûr, a child together would be the ultimate expression of their amour éternel, she began to hector him, insisting that they get married. When he hesitated she told her family. Her father showed up with her two somewhat virulent brothers at the École des Beaux-Arts just a kilometre or so from here, threatening to castrate Paul if he didn’t marry Faiza. They also raised so much stink with the head of the college that Paul was suspended on the spot, but told by our enlightened principal that he could have his job back if he made an honest woman of her. For around twenty-four hours the two brothers actually had Paul trapped in his flat. Then their father showed up with Faiza, an imam and a lawyer. They insisted on being let in, Faiza crying wildly, telling Paul that she was going to die if he didn’t marry her. Paul panicked and let them in. He went through with the shotgun service there and then. Said the vows, signed the legal document, and tried to kiss the bride who shouted insults at him and stormed off with her father, saying she’d see him tomorrow when her brothers returned to move him into their new home in Rabat. “I have found you a job teaching English there,” his new father-in-law announced to him. The brothers informed Paul that they would be downstairs, guarding the front and back doors – so there was no way he was going to be able to do a run for the airport. As soon as they were gone, Paul phoned me in a total panic. I told him he’d been insane to go through the marriage, but that I would find him a way out of this nightmare. Which is what I did. Around three hours later I called Paul back and told him to get his passport and a small bag and head to the roof of the building at precisely midnight. I put on a djellaba with a hood. I didn’t know if Faiza had alerted her brothers to Paul’s fat gay artist friend who might try to rescue him, but I was taking no chances. Dressed in my djellaba – my face hidden by the hood – I drove down to his quartier. He lived in an area where the buildings were so packed together that it was only a one-metre jump from one roof to the next. But you had to do the jump right, as it was a ten-storey fall if you didn’t. I bribed the superintendent of the adjoining building to give me access to the roof. It cost seven hundred dirhams – a small fortune back then, but I had just sold a painting and I knew that if I didn’t get Paul out of the country he would be throwing his future away on a woman who, for all her bohemian, “second sex” cant, was a future harridan in waiting.
‘Faiza’s brothers were not stupid. I discovered that they had hired some stooge to guard the rear of the apartment building where Paul lived. That rear entrance was located next to the building onto which he was going to jump. Anyway, I left, returning around quarter to midnight. One of Faiza’s brothers was positioned outside Paul’s building. When I entered the adjoining building – still wearing the djellaba with its hood tied close across my face – the superintendent told me that their stooge was still guarding the back door. Up I went to the roof. Even thirty years ago, walking up ten flights was torture for me. There was Paul on the other roof, looking down with fear at the gap between the two buildings, terrified of making the jump, rooted to the spot. I had to signal him with a cigarette lighter. When he wouldn’t move, I remember hissing at him:
“It’s just one metre. If you don’t jump you are sentencing yourself to a lifetime of marital servitude with a woman who will grind your talent, your gift, into the ground. Stand still and die. Or jump and live.”
‘Of course he jumped – and managed to twist his ankle on landing, which made things just a little complicated when it came to getting him down ten floors. But we eventually made it. The superintendent brought us through a series of corridors to the rear exit. Before Paul set foot outside he changed into the hooded djellaba I’d brought for him. He hobbled out the back door, leaning on my shoulder for support, walking right past the stooge who’d been posted by the brothers to look out for their sister’s fleeing American lover. When the guy saw Paul limping he actually took his other arm and helped him to where I’d parked the beat-up Peugeot I drove back then. To his credit, despite being in terrible pain, Paul kept his mouth shut. And he’d tied the djellaba so tightly across his face that his very Caucasian identity remained hidden from view. The stooge was asking me why Paul was limping. I informed him that he was deaf and dumb and had been set upon by bandits. Fortunately for us the man was so stupid, with a shred of kindness for a cripple, that he never once questioned the absurdity of the story I was spinning. He even wished us both luck as we drove off.
‘I knew that Faiza’s father – having connections, owing to his position at the Moroccan Central Bank – was probably having the airport watched, or at least had made certain that Paul wouldn’t be able to board a flight back to the States. Which is why I drove him the six hours – no autoroutes in those days – up to Tangier, and got him on the six a.m. ferry to Malaga. I even gave him enough pesetas to get himself a doctor for his ankle, a hotel room for the night, and a train ticket up to Madrid. And then . . .’
Ben Hassan snapped his fingers.
‘Whoosh. Paul Leuen vanished from my life.’
‘Surely he contacted you when he got back to the States?’ I asked.
Ben Hassan shook his head.
‘Did he ever repay you?’
Ben Hassan shook his head.
‘What happened when the baby was born?’
‘What happened? Faiza endured the shame of being a single mother. She wasn’t allowed to work at the lycée for several years, and struggled to make ends meet through tutoring and even cleaning other people’s apartments, as her family largely disowned her.’
‘Surely she tried to contact Paul.’
‘She tried. She failed. She went to the US Embassy with her father, demanding some sort of action, see if they could get him extradited back to Morocco to play house with her. The US consul said that, outside of finding an American lawyer who could chase Mr Leuen for child support, there was nothing they could do to get him back here. Though Faiza wrote to him several times, enclosing pictures of their baby daughter, he maintained his veil of silence. Even when I wrote him after . . .’
He reached for his glass of wine, draining it in one go and pouring himself another substantial slug.
‘After what?’ I asked.
Ben Hassan hesitated before speaking.
‘Faiza’s father was furious to discover that Paul had managed to slip out of the building undetected. He vented his rage on his sons who, in turn, beat up the sad little stooge wh
o’d been guarding the back door. Beat him up so badly that he was hospitalised for months. Then, on their father’s orders, they strong-armed the superintendent of the building next door and found out who had whisked their brother-in-law away. The superintendent gave them my name. They cornered me leaving the École des Beaux-Arts that evening. They dragged me into an alley and, using a hammer, they smashed all my fingers.’
‘You’re serious?’ I asked, my voice a stunned whisper. ‘They did that?’
He held up his hand.
‘Every finger. Smashed to a pulp. All bones broken. The pain was so overwhelming I passed out. I was found hours later by a street cleaner. Thank God he ran into the École and found two of my colleagues still on duty, teaching night classes. They called the police and the pompiers, and both came with me to the hospital. Thank God they were there, as the doctor on duty was so appalled by the catastrophic state of my fingers that he wanted to have them amputated. My colleagues – both artists – insisted that he do nothing so rash. But the fingers were so pulverised that I was in a pair of casts for over a year. I was lucky. There was a French orthopaedic surgeon who had decided on a change of scene and was on a three-year secondment to the big hospital here in Casablanca. He took an interest in my case and convinced me to undergo a series of experimental bone-reconstruction operations. Ten in total, followed by around three years of physiotherapy. It took just two or three minutes for those pathetic men to destroy my hands, and over thirty-six months of agonising surgery and reconstruction for me to be able to hold a pen again.’
I truly didn’t know what to say. Except:
‘Was Paul aware of the price you paid for helping him escape?’
‘I wrote to him. Correction – I dictated a letter to him, as it was around two months after the attack. I explained what had befallen me in the wake of driving him to Tangiers. I didn’t ask for any money or recompense. I just wanted him to know what had happened, what those bastards did to me.’
‘What was Paul’s reply?’
As Ben Hassan reached for his wine, I noticed for the first time just how much work it took him to grasp the stem of his glass, and how his large fingers were more misshapen than corpulent.
He took another long sip of wine, and I could see that he was steadying himself, tamping down some of the anger within.
‘Paul’s reply was . . . silence. Even when I wrote to him again another eight weeks after my first letter, even when several of our fellow colleagues at the school tried to contact him about what happened, even when Faiza – who, to her credit, disowned her father and two brothers after this “incident” – tried once more to contact him, begging him to at least write me . . . nothing but silence.’
‘Were the brothers and father ever prosecuted for what they did?’
‘Yes, the police did arrest the three of them. But Papa had connections. And the two boys said in court – there was a hearing in front of a judge – that they had attacked me after I attempted to come on to one of them. This being the 1980s they accepted gay bashing as a defence. They reached an out-of-court settlement with me for one hundred thousand dirhams—’
‘But that’s only just over eleven thousand dollars.’
‘Back then it was enough to buy an apartment – which is what I did with the money. The apartment in which you will be staying tonight.’
‘What about your hands?’
‘The French surgeon was a miracle worker. He did reconstruct the bones, and he did reconnect certain nerve endings so I could have some feeling in them. But not an exceptional amount. Even today . . .’
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a disposable lighter. Igniting the flame he held it directly under his left pinky – and didn’t flinch once as the flame came into direct contact with his flesh.
‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘there is considerable permanent numbness. And my ability to hold a paintbrush, even after the ten operations and all that physiotherapy . . . well, to be blunt about it, my career as a painter was decimated. Those paintings you see in my apartment . . . à la recherche du temps perdu. Ancient history.’
‘I don’t know what to say. It is such a terrible story.’
‘That it is. Still, in Chinese calligraphy, the symbol for “crisis” has two meanings – danger and opportunity. My opportunity in the wake of the attack on my hands was to become – how shall I put this? – a facilitator. Someone who could pull strings, grease palms, work wonders with travel documents, settle scores.’
There was a question I wanted to ask, but didn’t dare bring up. Ben Hassan did it for me.
‘I sense you want to know what happened to Faiza’s father and brothers, after they bought me my apartment. Faiza, as I mentioned, wouldn’t have anything to do with them again, while regularly visiting me in hospital and also insisting on bringing in friends to do the initial decorative work on the apartment. I can’t say that we were ever friends. She’s quite the bitter, disappointed woman. She truly never got over losing Paul, especially as the next man in her life was a stockbroker who was, in my opinion, Prince Not So Bright, though I gather he could play a decent round of golf. Her attempt to act the role of the bourgeois wife to a stupid man – even though he did make good money. By the time Samira was an adolescent their mother-daughter relationship was like something out of a bad Joan Crawford film – all gay men, even in North Africa, love Joan Crawford. Then the stockbroker lost everything, including the home they called their own. Samira lived in my guest room for several months, then went to France for a spell, but didn’t have a carte de séjour so she couldn’t find work. Even though she could have got an American passport through her father, the fact that he never claimed paternity and refused to answer the letters from Samira asking if they could meet, or at least tell the US authorities that, yes, she was her daughter . . . that made it administratively difficult for her. And her bitterness just grew.
‘Faiza, meanwhile, managed to alienate the director of the lycée where she taught. But then, at a cocktail thing here in town, she met a man named Hamsad who was the director of the film studios in Ouarzazate. Within months she was living down there on the edge of the Sahara – a place which, though somewhat picturesque, has always struck me as a recipe for despair after seventy-two hours. Still, with her daughter estranged from her, with another relatively well-heeled man willing to look out for her, and even a job opening at a language school there . . . off she went to the desert. That was five years ago. The relationship fell apart after around eighteen months. Hamsad showed her the door. I gather that she’s still teaching at the language institute, and she was supportive of Samira when she fell pregnant and her foreign lover returned to France.’
‘So history repeated itself.’
‘Except that in this instance, the gentleman – whose name is Philippe – acted reasonably. He’s paying close to the equivalent of five hundred euros a month in child support, and also offering to part-finance an apartment for Samira and her child.’
‘With my husband paying the other half.’
‘As I said earlier, when Paul contacted me out of the blue last autumn – clearly in the wake of his little surgical procedure to secretly deny his new wife a child – I was flabbergasted. When I heard him sounding sad and guilty about being such a bad father to Samira – well, how can I put this? I saw an opportunity . . .’
‘For revenge?’
‘For payback.’
‘By which you mean?’
‘We communicated for several weeks by email and spoke twice on the phone. He actually sounded increasingly unstable and just a little haunted. Especially as he’d written twice to Samira who informed him by return email that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with him, that he couldn’t simply drop back into her life after thirty years and think there was any chance whatsoever of a relationship. That’s when Paul asked me directly if there was anything he could do for his daughter. At which point a plan fell into my head.’
My mind was racing.
As someone who had spent much of her accounting career second-guessing malevolent tax inspectors and certain fraudulent clients, I did have an intuitive nose for a scam, a subterfuge, an ambush.
‘You decided to set him a trap.’
‘I decided to give the man what he wanted – which, on a certain existential level, might be interpreted as being what Monsieur Paul also subconsciously thought he deserved. Payback for abandoning his daughter, and for not once offering assistance or even basic compassion for his great friend whose life was, on a certain level, ruined. Not least by his thoughtlessness and callous disregard. I told him that his daughter needed an additional one million dirhams to buy her apartment and that she couldn’t afford a mortgage of that magnitude.’
‘Was that the truth?’
‘Put it this way – she wasn’t asking for the money and her lover had given her enough to put down a deposit on a small two-bedroom apartment in this quartier.’
‘Did you lead him to believe that, having given her essentially half of the apartment, he could repair his relationship with her?’
The Heat of Betrayal Page 17
