Tangier Bank Heist

by Sean McLachlan

  So Roussel decides that if he can’t bring the Greek ship into port, he’d wave his magic wand and turn it into another ship. This he did by rejecting a small Yugoslavian merchant vessel over some trumped up safety violation, sent the Yugoslavians on their way, and then had the Greek captain hoist a Yugoslavian flag, paint the Yugoslavian ship name over the original, and sail into port and register as the ship that just left.

  He pulled it off like a pro. I suppose he would have had to give the chief safety inspection officer, Dan Ossip, a cut of the take, but Ossip was a compulsive gambler and never questioned easy money.

  Hey, a man’s gotta make a living.

  Tangier’s port is only a bit less chaotic than some of the firefights I got into during the war, and slightly louder. It stands at the end of a broad corniche fronted by hotels. At the moment, the piers held a small cruise ship, the ferry from Tarifa, and several large pleasure vessels. The ferry was just letting out, and a mixture of Spaniards and overland travelers from other parts of Europe streamed out of the gate and into the tender mercies of Tangier’s tourist hucksters.

  “You need hotel? Restaurant?”

  “Guide! Good guide here! Medina! Casbah!”

  “Ah my good friend, you are staying at the Minzah, yes? I was sent to get you!”

  I write this in English, but the verbal barrage came in all tongues, the dockside crowd having an expert eye for the nationality of their next mark. And with those languages came a hierarchy. The Moors who had only learned to speak Spanish tended to be the poorest, their marks having the least money and the most local knowledge. Most Moors ignored the Spaniards and learned enough French to go after richer prey. The French, too, could be tough sells, often having local friends who sent a servant to hack his way through the crowd and save them.

  At the top of the heap were the locals who could speak English, because the English and the Americans made the best marks. Clueless, eager to be liked (at least the Americans), their pockets stuffed with money, they were the Holy Grail of the ferry crowd, and any huckster who nabbed a couple of them could rest assured that by the end of the week he would be wearing a new djellaba with his pockets stuffed with the best quality kif.

  I spotted Sultan al-Magrebi, his name as phony as the warmth in his smile, greeting an English couple like they were long-lost relations. Compared with the pushy “guides” crowding in on the new arrivals, most of these guides being shifty-looking young men or obvious drug addicts, Sultan al-Magrebi appeared as a beacon of sanity, a lighthouse amid the stormy waters of Arabia Incognita. The couple walked off with him as Sultan al-Magrebi fended off a few of the more persistent hucksters.

  Pushing my way upstream through this flow of naked greed, I made my way to the customs office. My superficial reason for being here was to untangle a tax issue over a small shipment of watches I had ordered. The customs people were debating among themselves if five watches were too much for personal use, and therefore should be taxed as merchandise, or too few for me to be considered a watch dealer. The red tape had been going on for a couple of weeks now, encouraged by the fact that I purposely made mistakes on the forms time and again. Everyone at the customs office was beginning to think I was an idiot.

  Everyone except Burdet Roussel.

  Roussel was a Frenchman who had fought in the first war, sat out the second here in Morocco, and was padding his retirement account with an endless string of under-the-table dealings. I found him in his little closet of an office, the desk buried under high stacks of paper. His bushy white eyebrows twitched as he read some densely typed form. He looked up as I came in, his eyes lighting up with the sight of an opportunity.

  “Ah, Monsieur MacAllister, I am afraid your watches are still held up in customs. You forgot to sign the document you filled out. This is the third time. May I suggest a different ruse this time?”

  “All right.”

  He handed me a form identical to the one I’d loused up several times already. I duly signed it, then proceeded to fill out the line for my address with my old place in Scranton rather than my local address. That should keep those watches in limbo for another week at least, and give me plenty of excuses to come back down here.

  Once that was out of the way, Roussel and I got down to business. He turned on the wireless to Radio France International, on which Edith Piaf was moaning out a tune about love and loss, turned up the volume, and addressed me in a low voice.

  “Your crate is in the warehouse. It is under the name Maxwell von Hindenburg.”

  “You gave me a German name? You got a hell of a sense of humor.”

  “You can pick it up tonight, but you must take care. The assistant chief of police has been down here asking questions.”

  “Chason has been here? What did he ask?”

  “About why you visit this office so often. I think he is watching you. I explained about the watches but he did not seem convinced.”

  “Damn, that’s a fly in the ointment. Did he say anything else?”

  “Asked if we ever talked politics. I said no. Asked if you spent time with García’s gang. I said no to this too.”

  García had fought Franco and was lucky enough to get out before Madrid fell. He had assembled a gang of Spanish dockworkers in a similar plight and now ran a lot of the day-to-day business on the docks. I steered clear of him. He was loudly socialist in a city where that was not welcome, and he got no sympathetic listeners other than those who had fought by his side in the war. I preferred the subtler approach. Tirades at the Cafe Fuentes did nothing except draw unwanted attention. A thousand copies of the Communist Manifesto in Arabic, distributed in the International, French, and Spanish zones, might just nudge the newly awakening nation of Morocco in the right direction.

  “When can you pick up the crate?” the customs agent asked. “It is better for both of us if it will be tonight.”

  “All right.” I’d have to talk to Electric Eddie, my connection for distributing the books.

  I stood, shook his hand, and slipped him a hundred francs, the last of his fee. He palmed the money and slipped it into his suit pocket with the deftness of a pickpocket.

  “Take care. Chason has his eye on you. He suspects that you are smuggling illicit literature. If that is true, and I have no idea if it is because of course I am entirely ignorant of what is in your crate, and if he catches you, your friendship with his boss will not save you.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  That was a lie, unfortunately. Because now I had to go talk to the people I most needed to keep Chason and his spies from seeing me with—García and his crew.

  If anyone knew about Ronnie the Pusher hanging out on the docks, it would be them. Roussel would know too, of course, but his reputation rode on the fact that he never gossiped. A rare trait in Tangier, and one that made him indispensable to countless people.

  Now I somehow had to talk with García, not get seen by any plainclothesmen, and get back here tonight and spirit away that crate of books before the law got any the wiser.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Easier said than done. As soon as I came out of the customs office, I spotted one of Tangier’s many plainclothes police officers, an unassuming little Moor who hung out on the docks selling tourist trinkets such as little camel dolls and gaudy tin canteens. I know most of the city’s secret police by sight. Most but not all. That made me careful.

  I had the import manifest in my hand for the crate of “bedding and wooden frame for bed” that the crate supposedly contained, and I walked holding it in plain view as I headed to the warehouse. Luckily for me, the cruise ship chose that moment to vomit forth a great gush of tourists, faces sunburned, wallets fat, who swarmed between me and the plainclothes officer and hid me from view.

  I hurried to the warehouse while he was still trying to break free of the mob.

  As I showed my paper to the warehouse guard and entered through its vast door, I gave the eye to one of García’s crew manning a forklift not far off. He
acted like he didn’t see, but of course he had.

  By the time I made it to the aisle and row where my crate sat in the vast hanger of the warehouse, García himself just happened to be taking stock right next to it, a clipboard and a checklist in his hand. He was my height, broad shouldered with a deeply tanned face and little black moustache. He’d been a farmer before he took up arms to fight fascism.

  “Buenos dias, camarada,” he said.

  “¿Qué tal, camarada?”

  I still remembered my Spanish from the war, so we continued in that language.

  “I have a couple of questions for you, comrade,” I said, slipping him a few pesetas. García never gave away information for free, but he did give a discount to veterans of the civil war, at least those who fought on the right side of history. “I’ve heard Ronnie the Pusher has been seen around here some nights?”

  “It’s true. He’s never come down here before. I didn’t even know who he was until one of my workers told me. Aren’t wine and women enough for a man? I’ve never understood why people take such things.”

  “What was he doing here?” I asked, eyeing my crate of Marx. It looked like it hadn’t been opened, but you can never tell. I gave it a push with my foot. Sure felt heavy enough.

  “He came down three times that I know of. He was asking the fishermen about hiring a boat.”

  “Is that so? Did he get one?”

  “I’m not sure. He wanted a big one, not one of the little vessels. Said he was going to have a bunch of his friends go on a fishing party.”

  “A heroin dealer taking his friends fishing? I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t believe it either. He didn’t go to any of the usual smugglers. They have small, fast boats perfect for the kind of things he deals in. A fishing boat is slow and obvious. It’s the wrong kind of boat for night work.”

  García knew all about night work. His men made plenty of extra cash helping the smugglers load and offload. Plus they charged a fee for looking the other way. Yeah, they looked the other way from what their own hands were doing. A common practice in Tangier.

  “So what could he have been using it for?” I asked.

  “Fishing!”

  We both laughed.

  “Did Pieter Vlamin ever come down here?”

  “The man with the bank? I heard about that. No, he never did.”

  I shook his hand. “Thanks, comrade.”

  “It’s nothing. Oh, and I’ll keep an eye on this crate for you, Herr von Hindenburg.” He let out a little chuckle.

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “Wiseass.”

  Just as I was coming out, I saw a Moor in a djellaba holding a string of prayer beads look right at me. It wasn’t the usual blank curiosity of the idle native, but a proper searching look.

  My suspicions were confirmed when he glanced in the direction of the plainclothesman, still pretending to sell trinkets to the thinning rearguard of cruise ship tourists, who were just now moving off en masse, looking like a Panzer division on its way to Moscow. The trinket seller casually turned around as if to go back to the port gate, his eyes not resting on me as he did but certainly seeing me.

  Damn it, spotted! Now I really did have to get that crate out of here before Chason figured out which one was mine and took a peek inside. Why couldn’t he be investigating the murder or bank disappearance like a proper cop instead of messing around with me?

  The old guy with the prayer beads must have realized I had scoped him because he didn’t follow. Instead, as I walked along the corniche heading for the stairs that would take me back to the Medina, I noticed a third plainclothesman, this one a little guy in a fez, littler even than me and that’s saying something. The Moor was good at his job. I only noticed him when I was almost to the stairs that climbed the seaside slope up to an arched gate that led through the old medieval wall.

  Good thing I spotted him before we got into the medina. It would have been tough shaking him at that point.

  I climbed the steep stairs with a casual gait, weaving my way through the Moroccans and a few Spanish laborers. I took it easy, stopped on the second landing to light a cigarette and look out to sea. The guy in the fez did not stop immediately. That’s an amateur move that’s sure to get you noticed. Instead he continued until he got past me and stopped at a little stall selling grilled fish.

  Just as he was making a show of talking to the man cooking the fish, I walked past him and up the last flight of stairs and through the arch.

  Now things would get tricky. I didn’t want to let him know I was onto him, so I couldn’t look over my shoulder. Instead I moved into the thickest part of the crowd. The road widened, branching off in three directions. I took an immediate left down the narrowest of the three lanes.

  I picked that one because I knew it angled to the right after a few steps. I made it past the angle and quickened my pace. For a few moments I’d be out of sight.

  An alley lay to my right, but it shot too straight to keep me from being spotted by my tail once he caught up, so I hastened to a door just beyond it, a cheap bodega for the dregs of the Spanish population.

  “Un vino,” I said to the fat man in the stained shirt behind the counter, not slowing down until I got to the foul-smelling bathroom in back.

  I closed the door behind me, endured a few seconds of torture, and then came out. The proprietor was just pulling the cork out of a bottle. The few drinkers in there paid me little attention and would not remember my face, let alone give a description of me to some half-sized Moor in a fez.

  I went to the front and peeked out. I didn’t see my tail. Either he had continued on the main path, thinking I had started to run and was now running to catch me, or he figured I ran down the alley and went down that.

  Whatever mistake he had made, he’d realize it soon enough. I ducked out of the doorway. The proprietor didn’t say a word. I pictured that old Spaniard shrugging his shoulders and putting the cork back in the bottle, completely uninterested in whatever drama had just taken place in his bar. It had moved somewhere else and no longer concerned him.

  I went back the way I came. When I got to the side alley I peeked down it, just in time to see a small fellow in a fez hurrying away from me. I walked quickly but not suspiciously quickly back to the main road and gate, then uphill toward the Petit Socco. I passed the main mosque and took a right as soon as an alley permitted. That meant a long winding route through the medina before I could get to a street where I could hail a cab, but I did not want to pass through the Petit Socco. Too many eyes, including two plainclothesmen constantly posted there under the guise of cigarette salesmen. My tail would be sure to ask them once he realized he had lost me.

  I made it to a cab without any further trouble and went to Electric Eddie’s place, a small house on the Mountain surrounded by a tall hedge of thorns. The Mountain was a high hill just to the west of town, away from the bustle of the Casbah, medina, and the Tangerville New Town. Electric Eddie liked his privacy.

  Electric Eddie was an American speed freak who in his short life had been just about everywhere. Early twenties, with thick glasses and a disheveled appearance, he sweated profusely while speaking too loudly and waving his skinny arms all around, his oversized hands looking like the signal pennants we used to use before tanks got equipped with radios.

  Electric Eddie occasionally worked as a stringer for various magazines and newspapers back home, writing juicy stories of Tangier gossip and tales of visiting stars and leading members of society. He avoided politics in his writing as much as he embraced them in his real work—distributing banned books to whomever wanted them.

  Electric Eddie was not a Communist. He called himself a “First Amendment Evangelist”, wanting to bring the freedom of speech that America claims to have to all corners of the globe, even America. If a book was banned somewhere, he felt it was his duty to ship it there, regardless of whether he believed in it himself or anyone wanted to read it or not. The International Zone’s lax
laws gave him a bit more freedom to operate than he’d have in other countries.

  The Communist Manifesto wasn’t my first gift to the Moroccan reading public. I’d also sent them a French translation of Trotsky’s The Lessons of October 1917, and a pamphlet in Spanish on Stalin’s betrayal of the Second Republic. The Moors had also gotten copies of the constitution of the Spanish Republic and the American constitution. Electric Eddie had helped me on most of those. As screwy as that guy was, he sure knew how to move books across borders. He’d taken it on as a lifestyle. It was almost a religion with him.

  I envied Eddie. He had what so few of the foreign community had here—a purpose and a direction. Most of us didn’t set out to live in Tangier. A lot of the Spaniards had fled Franco, and then there was a big influx of people from all over Europe during the war. In a way, the queers came here as refugees too. It was the only place where they could be themselves and not get thrown in the slammer. The idle rich came here because why not? Made no difference to them except they didn’t have to be as rich as they would have to be to dazzle the crowds in New York. The schemers and con men were here because the law is loose, but they were even less connected to the place than the drunks and druggies. Those Skid Row types follow the cheapest party like lemmings.

  Living like this felt worse if you tried to live it up. The partygoers were always the saddest, at least it seemed to me. Their constant round of lunches and drinks and functions and parties and trips to Dean’s and slumming in dive bars was all done with this sort of desperation, like they were afraid it would all end and look ugly, like a light switched on too bright in the back room of a cheap bordello. Some things don’t look too good when you see them clear and square.