The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “He says that while he watched the sentries he heard the sound of an airplane. He had seen them before, flying over the desert. He heard it long before the sentries did, and wondered if they were deaf. The airplane landed on the plain and rolled to the buildings. The two sentries went into the small building and he didn’t see them again. Three men with rifles came out of the big building. They were fair-skinned like the others, but wore black uniforms. The door of the airplane opened and some steps were lowered. Many women, more than a dozen he thinks, got off the plane. They wore robes but were also fair-skinned. The three men in black marched them to the big building. Out of the small building came two men wearing khaki uniforms. He did not know at the time, but realized later, that they were French. He knows because they wore the képi. One of the men was tall, the other quite fat. They went into the airplane, the door closed and it flew away to the north.

  “Was the fat one also bald?” Rachel interrupted. Rashid translated. The man said something and slapped his thigh. He began laughing. He repeated what he said to his grandsons. They smiled politely. He made a little bow to Rachel. He seemed to recognize her now.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “He says how could he see if the fat one was bald? He was wearing a képi,” Rashid replied. The man looked at Rachel expectantly, but she didn’t play along. He stopped laughing and assumed a somber expression.

  “After the airplane left a man in a white coat came out of the big building. He walked along the line of women. He looked at them very closely, making some of them open their mouths or lift their robes. The old man was very impressed by their pink nipples.” Rashid seemed suddenly embarrassed. Rachel knew he was thinking of Madame Ratelle.

  “And then?”

  “They all went into the big building—first the man in white, then the women, then the men in black. After a while the two sentries came out of the small building and began patrolling again. He didn’t like it. He went back to his camp and led his family west. They stayed for many years near Tarfaya, by the ocean. When they returned he went back to the rock and found only the pile of cement. He told one or two people what he had seen, but no one was interested.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ask him if there were any markings on the plane.”

  Rashid asked. Rachel could see right away how much the question pleased him. Not like the one about the bald man, but it was a good question all the same. He nodded happily.

  “Tell him to describe them.”

  The man extended a lean forefinger and traced a rectangle on the rug. Then he divided it in thirds with two vertical lines. He pointed to each section in turn, each time saying a different word.

  “What did he say?”

  “Blue. White. Red.”

  Rachel drove back across the hard sand. The clock said six minutes before two. There were almost three hundred miles between her and Marrakech.

  “Stop here,” Rashid said. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s safer. No one will hear me.”

  “All right.” Rachel put her hand on his arm. “When you get back you have to forget this night ever happened. Don’t do anything about the Land-Rover. And tell Madame Ratelle to bring food to the jail for me in the morning.”

  “Professor DePoe is dead, isn’t he?”

  Rachel reached in the back for her handbag and counted twelve hundred dirhams. “Here. Don’t make a fuss.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “It’s not for you. It’s for her. We made a bargain.” Rashid took the money and got out of the jeep. “Come here,” Rachel said. He walked around to her door. She put her hand around his neck, brought his face close and kissed him on the cheek.

  “I hope you find the boy,” Rashid said.

  Rachel drove away. She headed straight north until she reached the track that joined Mhamid with Zagora. She stopped the jeep and got out. Behind the back seat she found a coil of thin rope and a tire iron. She knotted one end of the rope to the tire iron and walked underneath the single telephone wire that sagged from pole to pole along the track. She swung the tire iron like a pendulum until it gained momentum and let it go. It cleared the wire by inches. Both ends of the rope hung from the wire. Rachel untied the tire iron and looped the ends of the rope around the rear bumper. She maneuvered the jeep until it was perpendicular to the wire, and then ran it forward. The wire gave with little resistance. It fell writhing in a shower of sparks, like a fiery severed snake.

  At dawn she began the descent through the mountains, still more than fifty miles from Marrakech. She wore a coat of encrusted dust and sweat. Her eyes were opened unnaturally wide. She knew that if she closed them they would remain that way for a long time.

  During the night she had encountered no traffic at all, but now a few cars appeared. She watched each one warily, looking for a colored light on the top, or a uniform behind the windshield. In a foothill village a rusting green bus was parked outside a tar-paper cafe. Rachel drew up beside it, and took her baggage from the jeep.

  “Marrakech?” she asked the driver. He nodded behind the sports pages of the morning paper. Rachel paid him and sat by a window at the back.

  The bus stopped at ten villages on the way to Marrakech. Rachel counted them. People got on and off. They carried live chickens, dried salt fish, and dead rabbits. They ate a lot and got sick, sometimes out the window, sometimes on the seats. The bus entered Marrakech just before noon.

  Before it reached the station an enormously fat woman sitting in front of Rachel shouted to the driver. He stopped the bus and opened the door. The fat woman got to her feet and made her way along the aisle. Thinking it would be a good idea to avoid the bus station, Rachel followed in her wake. The fat woman gave the driver a dirty look and lowered herself to the ground. Rachel got off behind her. She found a taxicab rank and hired the first taxi.

  At the airport a small but noisy crowd of French tourists assailed the clerks behind one of the ticket counters. They wore cameras around their necks, tans on their faces, and many had added henna to their hair and adopted Moroccan dress as well. None of it made them happy.

  A disembodied voice announced that flight five thirteen to Paris would leave in thirty-five minutes. The announcement stirred the crowd like Mark Antony’s oration at Caesar’s funeral. Rachel waited behind them until they had been pacified with tickets and herded to a boarding gate. Then she bought a ticket to Paris.

  “Hurry, madame,” the clerk said, handing her the ticket. “There isn’t much time.”

  A uniformed man sat behind a desk in the passage that led to the gate. He didn’t want to see her passport or find out how long she had been in the country. All he cared about was whether she had enjoyed her visit.

  Rachel boarded the plane and fell asleep.

  19

  Sunday morning the twenty-eighth of March a blue delivery van parked in front of Simon Calvi’s villa. A painter wearing a broad-brimmed hat to shield his face from the bright sun put aside his brush and took a small notebook from his paint box. In it he recorded the license number of the van, a description of the driver who carried a large rectangular cardboard box to the front door, and the time, ten twenty-two. The painter wrote that Calvi himself opened the door, that the delivery man held out a piece of paper for him to sign, and once he signed, gave him a copy, that he handed Calvi the package, that Calvi said something which made the man laugh as he closed the door.

  Simon Calvi carefully unfolded his new suit and threw the cardboard box away. He could not remember when he had last bought one. The new suit was splendid, far more luxurious than any clothing he had ever owned, and far more expensive. He had paid almost four thousand shekels for it, less a ten percent discount from the shop beside the King David Hotel which encouraged patronage by members of the Knesset, and anyone else who got his picture in the paper without breaking the law. For the best suit of his life he had chosen a f
ine charcoal gray worsted, with a very thin red stripe that would be visible only to someone crying on his shoulder in direct sunlight.

  Calvi carried it in his arms to the upstairs bathroom and locked the door. He hung the suit on the shower-curtain rod, beside the white silk shirt and navy blue tie which were already there. It was the best-dressed shower-curtain rod in the Middle East.

  Calvi stripped to his socks and undershorts. He opened the towel closet and stood on the tips of his toes to reach the back of the top shelf. His fingers found the small circular hot-water bottle he had bought on the way home from his meeting with Major Grunberg, and a thin leather strap with a simple fastening mechanism fitted to the ends.

  After passing the strap through the two narrow eyelets on the rim of the flesh-colored water bottle Calvi held it under the tap until it was half full of warm water. Then he fastened the two ends of the strap together and slipped the water bottle over his head and shoulders. He adjusted the strap so that the flat rubber container sat tightly on his sternum. In the mirror it looked like an ugly tumor. He also saw in the mirror that he had forgotton something.

  He unlocked the door and stepped into the hall. The house was quiet. Gisela had left to go to the market after breakfast. Wearing socks, undershorts, and the hot-water bottle Calvi went downstairs to the kitchen. From a drawer beneath the counter he took a sharp, thick sewing needle and a short piece of string. As he was closing the drawer he heard the tumblers revolve in the lock on the front door. The door faced the bottom of the stairs. Calvi spun around, raced from the kitchen, grabbed the bannister and catapulted himself up the stairs, the water sloshing wildly in the container on his chest.

  “Is that you, Simon?” he heard Gisela call.

  “Yes,” he said from behind the locked bathroom door.

  “Come help me carry in the packages.”

  “I can’t,” he yelled down. “I’m in the bathroom.”

  “I don’t know how you can spend so much time in there. If you want to read you have a very comfortable study.”

  “I’m not reading. I just this minute sat down.”

  Gisela said something Calvi didn’t quite hear. Holding the rubber stopper of the water bottle in place, he poked a hole through it with the sewing needle. He passed the string through the hole, knotting one end and letting the other dangle against his groin. He put on the trousers of his suit. They were fancy enough to have an inner buttoning flap as well as an outer one. You had to pay for that kind of absolute guarantee against accidental self-exposure. Calvi tied the string to the inner flap so that it was not quite taut.

  He put on a silk shirt, and the navy blue tie, which he tied carefully in a Windsor knot. It required three tries. In the mirror he could barely detect the bulge on his chest. When he slipped his arms through the sleeves of the jacket and fastened the middle button he was unable to see it at all.

  Calvi looped his fingers in his belt, the way men do when they are talking tough. He leaned back slightly and pushed down gently with his hands. A dark stain spread slowly over his chest. It wet the silk shirt, the blue tie and the charcoal gray jacket with the tiny red stripes. He felt the warm water trickle across his stomach and under the waistband of the trousers. He undressed, dropped the suit, shirt, and tie in the clothes hamper, replaced the hot water bottle on the top shelf and dressed again in his other clothes.

  “Simon, I’ve got to use the bathroom,” Gisela said from the other side of the door, startling him.

  “Coming right out.”

  “That took long enough,” she said when he opened the door. But she gave him a long kiss on the mouth to show that she was his lover, not a nagging wife. After a few moments they both stopped thinking about why they were kissing; Calvi’s big hands were drawn as if by magnets along her back and up the slopes of her strong buttocks. Once Cohn had told him that fondness for large buttocks denoted an infantile mentality. And what is grownup, Calvi had asked him. The elbow?

  Gisela pushed him away. “Wait for me,” she said a little breathlessly as she went into the bathroom and closed the door. Calvi entered the bedroom, took off his clothes again and lay in bed. Gisela came naked into the room. She could have stepped out of a Titian if her hair had been redder and her desire less obvious. Over terrain which never became completely familiar they fought a not too gentle combat, and then like soldiers after a battle slept dreamless sleeps.

  The late afternoon sun shone steadily through the bedroom window onto Calvi’s eyelids, making him see red until he opened them. The room was full of gold. Calvi sat up and lit a cigar. The rising smoke coalesced with the gold to form a shimmering sfumato thick enough to stop time. Beside him Gisela lay still in the twisted sheets. He didn’t love her, she didn’t love him, but it was better than he had any right to expect. After a while the sun sank below the window, taking the gold and leaving a room full of smoke behind. Calvi stubbed out the butt of his cigar. The earth spins on its axis. It circles the sun. The sun revolves around the center of the Milky Way. The Milky Way races the other galaxies to the edge of the universe. Calvi understood why time marches on, but it didn’t make him like it any better.

  He reached under the sheets and patted the fleshy rump. “Gisela,” he said. “How would you like a holiday? You and me.”

  She murmured, “Wonderful,” rolled over and put her arms around him.

  “Good,” he said. “I haven’t had a holiday in years. I thought we’d go to Germany. Stay for a long time. You can really give me the grand tour.”

  Gisela opened her eyes. “Oh, Simon, what a good idea.” She hugged him tightly. “I’m so happy I don’t know what to do.” But she thought of something. It led to something else.

  When his heart returned to its normal rhythm Calvi wanted to sleep again, but Gisela was hungry.

  “Take me out to dinner, Simon.”

  “But you just bought groceries.”

  “They’ll keep. Let’s go celebrate.” She gave him a series of quick pecks on the forehead to drive the idea home.

  “Celebrate what?”

  “The trip, of course,” Gisela said. “How about Rubin’s?” she suggested, naming a small restaurant bar on the roof of one of the new hotels on the Mount of Olives. “I’ve never been.”

  “You’re not alone,” Calvi said. “No Israeli has ever been there either. It’s for tourists.”

  “Please, Simon.”

  “Very well,” he said, wondering whether his artistic friend could afford it.

  But when they left the villa the man in the broad-brimmed hat made no attempt to follow them. He didn’t even look up as they passed, oblivious, it seemed, to everything but his canvas, his brush, and the dying light of the day. It made Calvi uneasy. He hadn’t taken Grunberg for one who hires careless or lazy men. His mind tossed up the thought that the painter might not be Grunberg’s man at all. There was only one alternative, and Calvi liked it less. The painter had to be Grunberg’s man.

  Three decorators had tried their luck on Rubin’s. As at Troy, or Jerusalem itself, they did not throw away what had gone before; they built on top. Rubin’s was an Arabian Nights version of an English men’s club as seen by a Scandinavian minimalist on LSD.

  You paid for the view. From their table they looked down on the Mount of Olives, touched here and there by the last rays of the sun. The Mount of Olives was a hill, a hill of gravestones—weathered, cracked, overgrown, submerged. A few even stood upright in the rubble.

  The souls underneath were said to have first crack on Judgment Day. The waiter, a middle-aged Arab whose wet eyes had but one expression, eagerness to please, fed them the whole tourist spiel when he came to take their order.

  “There,” he said excitedly, leaning over the table to point. “Between the bottom of the slope and the Old City walls. You see? The Valley of Jehoshaphat. That is where we will all be judged on the last day. All of us,” he repeated, in case anyone was clinging to the hope of exemptions drawn along ethnic or class lines. “Both the Koran
and the Bible agree,” he added rapturously.

  “I guess that settles it,” Calvi said, ordering Scotch for himself and dry sherry for Gisela.

  But it didn’t. With an impatient movement the waiter waved Calvi’s request into thin air.

  “Both agree on what will happen,” he said. “But—” He held a stubby finger to the tip of his nose, indicating that he had arrived at the tricky part. “But,” he continued, forgetting for a while to drop the gesture, “on how it will happen there is not the same agreement.” He began an analysis of differences in the two accounts. He was unable to disguise his preference for the Koranic.

  “Look over there,” he commanded. “The Dome of the Rock. Like a golden hat, I like to say to those who sit at my table. On Judgment Day the Prophet will sit on top of the hat. A wire will be stretched from here on top of the Mount across the valley to the Prophet. All mankind, all, will walk that wire. The wire to eternity. The faithful will cross in safety. The rest will fall and perish in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.” He lowered his face to Calvi’s. “Perish,” he repeated in a hushed voice.

  Calvi didn’t like the waiter’s chances. His breath reeked of cheap wine and the Koran took a categorical position on that subject. But he kept his mouth shut. He wanted dinner. As for himself he felt little concern. He had been on a high wire since childhood.

  They drank two bottles of overpriced Sancerre, and ate fresh shrimp, overcooked roast lamb, and mocha cake that was so full of brandy it could barely stand up. Gisela had two pieces.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Calvi said.

  Gisela looked worried. “Should I go on a diet?”

  “No. Don’t do that.”

  She scraped the last sticky remains of icing onto her fork and licked it clean with her pink tongue. She lifted her face and said seriously, “You’re very good to me.”

  “You’ve had too much to drink.”

  “No. You are,” she insisted. “We don’t have to go to Germany just for me.”

  “It’s not just for you,” Calvi said. “I want to go too. I’ve already bought tickets to Munich.” His eyes searched the room for the waiter. He was talking about golden hats to two very drunk American businessmen. Their condition didn’t matter to him: he was drunker than they were. When Calvi attracted his attention he ordered two glasses of cognac.