Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  I was afraid, though I saw that my physical manifestations of fear—pounding heart and damp hands—were out of proportion to the actual danger. Khaled was not a killer, presumably, and I had plausible explanations at the ready. It was more that I saw that I wasn’t going to be good at this kind of illegal, risky activity in my chosen profession. It was too late for me, I lacked the anarchic core, some fuck-it mentality that Taft had; I was too goody-two-shoes. But maybe you improved, got used to crime the way I’d gotten used to being Lulu Sawyer.

  The keys lay with coins and a watch on the dresser. I got out my patty of wax and studied the keys without touching them, trying to decide which one went with the safe. There was one obvious choice, thin and oddly shaped, among normal-looking car and house key shapes. Next, how to pick up this bunch of keys without jingling them? The stillness was suffocating, and now there wasn’t even splashing from the bathroom, though at one moment someone might have hummed. In the manner of playing pickup sticks I moved the keys one by one around their ring to isolate the right one, then immobilized the others with one hand and lifted the bunch. It was necessary to take the target key off the ring; it couldn’t lie flat enough on the mold because of the ring itself.

  I had to decide whether it would be better to risk the noise or to take the whole bunch outside. I risked the noise, because I couldn’t have stood to come back in. It was the wrong choice, as it turned out, but in the event, I could almost silently fiddle the key ring open. Then it was only the work of a few seconds to get a pretty good impression—as nearly as I could tell in the dim light—put the key back, and get out of there, not breathing for so long I thought I might pass out. Just as my fingers were releasing the keys, there was a noise, and Khaled was standing before me, towelless, naked as the moon.

  We both screamed in unison; I remember only his look of horror.

  I’m sure mine was the same. I fled out the door and across the courtyard; the image of his pale body in the dark room was etched on my retina. He would have to put his clothes on to pursue me, which gave me time to rejoin Posy and Suma, saying, “Oh my God, I went in the wrong room.” Maybe that’s what he thought too. Maybe he didn’t recognize me in the black scarf. Why would he imagine it was me? We could hear him bellowing something in the courtyard.

  Posy was already standing, ready to leave. I wondered how long I’d been gone; it had been like being underwater, seemingly forever, but was perhaps only a couple of minutes. My chest hurt now. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Tomorrow we’ll come for you in the car at ten,” I said to Suma, tense, waiting for Khaled to burst in wearing some provisional clothes, damp and furious.

  “It’s against my principles,” Suma grumbled, “but I can’t stay in Morocco, c’est certain, so, what ever it takes.” Her sigh expressed the fatigue perhaps felt by all people torn between two cultures; for her, it was exhausting and bewildering to be Muslim and French—I would have thought to be anything and French—having to uphold some standard of civilization all the time.

  Khaled didn’t come out of his room.

  I didn’t think I could ask Taft to help with making the key; I couldn’t see where he would get it done quickly. I knew of no company resources in town, so he would have to drive it to Rabat, and it would probably be me appointed to do the drive. Anyway I thought I could trust the colonel, who most obligingly took the envelope containing the mold, no questions asked except one, which I was prepared for.

  So when the colonel said, “I hear you have some visiting relatives,”

  I didn’t panic. Since Taft had left such decisions to me, and I thought it highly likely the colonel knew Taft was in town anyway, I decided I could tell him, both to prove my good faith and to answer the question in my own mind about what game the colonel was playing. I thought we were unlikely to lose Amid now, as Taft and the others had him in constant view and the pickup—extraction, rendition, whatever we were calling it—was so soon. I couldn’t help but think about Amid, being delivered by us into a limbo of torture and confinement. But now was no time for compunctions, and I didn’t have any really—I believe in what we’re doing and that people shouldn’t blow each other up or murder their sisters. I pitied him all the same; a thin person, with dark eyes I could imagine staring hollowly from a cell, his ribs sticking out, like a starvation victim in a Goya.

  “Or so I’m told,” the colonel said cheerfully. “What will they be doing during their visit?”

  I decided to be truthful. “It has to do with Suma Bourad’s brother. I was hoping you could tell me why he’s of interest.”

  “Moi, no, I was hoping you’d have some idea.” He shrugged. “All we can say is that there appears to be no connection to the Casablanca bombings. That’s what would interest us. He has a French passport, he’s here as an ordinary French tourist. We welcome French tourists here.”

  That’s as much as I learned: Amid had no connection to the bombings in Casablanca. Still, it was revealing that, of all arriving French tourists, Colonel Barka knew about Suma’s brother, which meant either that he was visible in some connection other than his connection to Suma or that the colonel was aware of all French tourists, which seemed less likely. I was glad I’d been candid with him, augmenting my credentials as an ally and friend.

  35

  As to those women

  On whose part ye fear

  Disloyalty and ill-conduct,

  Admonish them first,

  Next refuse to share their beds.

  And last beat them (lightly).

  —Koran 4:37

  The next morning when Posy and I picked Suma up in the car with Rashid, she had a younger girl with her, who seemed thirteen or fourteen, both their heads demurely covered. The pudgy, sweet-faced little girl kept her eyes resolutely down and said nothing.

  “You remember Desi,” Suma said, only that, with a nod of her head toward Rashid to indicate she couldn’t say more in front of him.

  Rashid had trouble with the address, and we had to back out of a little wrong street and were a few minutes late for the appointment in Guéliz. The clinic was a stucco, one-story structure with a respectable, clean appearance and a classy brass nameplate on the door, DR. MOHAMMEDINE AZIZ, GYNÉCOLOGUE. The little waiting room was filled by one nurse behind a desk, three chairs, and the inevitable dwarf palm in a pot. I had expected a woman doctor, I had heard that only women doctors examined Muslim women, but, alarmingly, a man in a white coat crossed the room behind the nurse’s desk and vanished into his office.

  The nurse greeted us and went to tell the doctor that Mademoiselle Suma Bourad was here. Beyond the open door, we saw the examining table—more like a chair—slightly reclined, like a dentist’s chair, with stirrups that would hold the knees widely splayed apart to afford the doctor an up-close view of the vulva of the victim, who was obliged to lie like a split pomegranate, her lower legs flopping unsupported from the knee brace. A wicked array of specula and spoon-looking devices lay on a tray nearby. The poor little girl Desi seemed to pale when seeing all this, and I thought she uttered a little sob in her throat. Suma pushed her toward the man, who beckoned, without a welcome, as if in his mind he already knew she had committed the transgression she’d been accused of. There was a strange odor of clinic and female that emanated from the doctor’s examining room. I thought of terrible recipes in The Perfumed Garden. “Boil well in water, locusts,” said the book. “This immersion is to be repeated several times. The same result may be obtained by fumigating the vulva with cow-dung.…”

  Then a new doctor, a woman after all, appeared and closed the door on our anxious gazes. The nurse stared balefully at us. Almost immediately we heard poor little Desi scream. I wondered who was doing what. The woman doctor would examine her, and then the man doctor would sign the certificate, the nurse explained.

  “She is frightened, elle a peur,” Suma said. “She believes she is hurt forever.”

  “They are often frightened,” the nurse said in French to Posy
and me. “The doctor is very careful, she is very gentle.”

  They were gone no more than ten minutes. The nurse was already preparing a document of some kind, and the woman doctor came out after Desi, waving a drying Polaroid photo. Desi gave Suma’s name and birthday, as she had been told to do, and the nurse looked at her sharply.

  “Bien sûr, I’m paying her mother,” Suma said to us as we walked outside and waved to Rashid, who was parked. Suma had her arm around Desi’s shoulder, and Desi’s relief at still being alive and, apparently, undamaged had shown in smiles now. Suma spoke to her in Arabic.

  “Or you could say Monsieur Khaled is paying,” she said to us. “Of course the doctor was careful not to damage… anything.” We all looked inside the envelope containing the certificate, at the photo that showed a viscous pink anatomical something, like a tonsil or the underside of your tongue. Desi stared at it, as fascinated as we.

  “I was afraid he’d insist on taking a picture of Desi’s face, too,” Suma said. “That is, of the person who has sat for the photo. They do that, to make sure it is really vous‐même. I hope this is good enough for Amid.” Of course we had questions, Posy and I, but we didn’t ask them. For instance, what had she meant, Khaled was paying?

  I suggested we should go get it copied now, and I would see that Amid got a copy, and we’d get one for her parents.

  “Thank you, madame,” said Suma. “Please tell me what Amid says and what you think he feels.”

  36

  Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak.

  —William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, act 1, scene 1

  The next night, the eve of our planned rendition of Amid, le tout Marrakech would attend a well-publicized concert at the French Cultural Center to benefit the Hassan II hospital and associated charities. The Paris Baroque Ensemble, chorus, and soloists would perform Moroccan and French sacred music, and the French consul would host drinks beforehand and a reception at the entr’acte in the courtyard. My status as Ian’s official companion, as opposed to mere house guest, was confirmed in public for the first time by my being there on his arm. This should have pleased and reassured me, but I saw only its utility for him in deterring speculation about Gazi being at his house, if any such existed. I knew it was my role as the beard.

  Half of the invited guests were Moroccan, the other half French, with a few Brits and Americans thrown into the mix. Strand was there, but not Tom. The Moroccans were mostly wearing European clothes, with important jewelry, but some wore splendid embroidered djellabas and caftans. I half wished Americans had a native costume for ceremonial occasions, though I suppose it would be jeans. One of the king’s sisters was to look in, at least for the first part of the concert, which would feature works by Messiaen, Telemann, and Verdi, and the Moroccan composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and extracts from the nouba Ochaq, what ever that would turn out to be, all to be performed on the piano, violin, oud, qanoun, and ney.

  “The princess’ll sensibly miss the works of Olivier Messiaen, Trois Petites Liturgies of the Divine Presence, ” said Ian, reading from the program. “The most deeply horrible music imaginable, I should think, Messiaen.” I was impressed that he was so musically literate but apparently of conservative tastes. I wasn’t familiar with the music of O. Messiaen.

  But I must have been more aware than others of the presence of the DST, the Moroccan secret service, stout men in suits hovering near windows and exits, obvious to me by their burly size and expressions of alertness dissembled by nonchalance. That wasn’t surprising, given the royal attendance, but I was totally dumbfounded to see Taft, elegantly dressed in a dark suit. To see him, moreover, moving toward us, accompanied by a well‐dressed CIA‐wife type (gray‐blonde, slim, and fiftysomething, in a cocktail suit). He wore a hearing aid, or so it was meant to seem.

  “Lulu! How nice to see you!” He kissed me on one cheek and waited to be introduced to my companions. The woman was called Peggy Whitworth. I introduced Ian, Posy, and Robin with elaborate correctness, unsure, though, whether to present them to Robin first, as the famous and oldest one, or to Peggy, the female, finally choosing the famous poet.

  “Peggy drove down from Rabat just for this. Her husband, Dick Whitworth, and I were together in Korea. Honored.” Taft nodded at Robin and shook all the hands.

  “Dick’s not much of a music lover,” Peggy said, to explain her solo presence. No attempt was made to explain how they and I were acquainted, though I tried to think of one for later.

  “Ian was just saying he wasn’t a great Messiaen fan,” I said.

  “It’s bloody hell, I’m sure,” Posy said brightly. “French. The whole program is designed to goad me into blurting my most philistine thoughts. I know Robin hates it when I do utter them. Perhaps he sincerely doesn’t have them!”

  “Messiaen you have to have heard a few times,” Robin conceded. “I heard his Mass for Double Choir at the Madeleine in Paris, and it was overwhelming,” he said, not contradicting her on the cultural correctness of his inner life. Or maybe he didn’t hear her. It wasn’t the first time I’d had the suspicion that Robin was slightly deaf; he had that way of declaiming to forestall conversation. “Is it great music? Just possibly. It’s hard to know. Or is it ‘an empty, high-spirited trip through a complicated score,’ where nothing happens, as, I think it was Adorno, said. And what we can expect from the Parisian Baroque—is it?—Ensemble cannot be guessed.…” He went on with his monologue in this incomprehensible way.

  What was Taft doing here? Was this his way of telling the DST he was here on the up and up, with nothing to hide? Looking around the room as best I could, I didn’t see Colonel Barka, but I knew he’d been worried about Taft being in town, a circumstance puzzling in itself, since it was our people who had put me in touch with him.

  “Don’t worry, we all want to roll these people up,” Taft had said, meaning, I took it, Amid et al. Now he said, “Peggy is a talented pianist herself.”

  We found seats, which were not reserved, and somehow I was sitting next to Colonel and Madame Barka and the Crumleys, with Ian and Pierre Moment behind us. I was acutely aware of Madame Barka, whom I had never met; I had never been sure there was a Madame Barka.

  Some efforts of beautification had conferred an air of musical seriousness to the basic auditorium style of the French Cultural Center. The small stage raised the musicians a little higher than the audience. Behind them two vases of flowers stood in niches against the back wall, which was decorated with framed photocopies of music manuscripts, perhaps Debussy or Satie. The soloists sat in folding chairs to one side, and a quintet of instrumentalists sat in the center, while the chorus crowded in and out as they were required.

  The music started, beginning with “Nouba Raml al Maya,” with the Chorale Josseur, for “violin, oud, qanoun, and ney,” followed by “Va Piensero” from Nabucco—perhaps this work is obligatory wherever French people gather—and a short choral extract from Telemann. To this piece, the oud, qanoun, and ney contributed their sounds with a peculiarly discordant effect so metaphorically appropriate to the idea of East and West attempting harmony. Next we stood at our places during a short break in the program while the royal lady departed, a youngish woman in brocade with a dozen people in attendance.

  The works after this pause were politely received. I was relieved that I was now able to hear Arabic music with more plea sure than when I first came, but I wasn’t sure how much pleasure the locals were going to take in this French work. Perhaps it could pass as ecumenical; though it did mention Jesus quite a lot, the words spoke more generally of love, and it seemed quite possible that it was supposed to be taken as referring in religious terms to profane love as internationally understood, the opposite of the Song of Solomon: “Mon arc‐en‐ciel d’amour / Désert d’amour chantez, lancez l’auréole d’amour…” All of which made me think only of profane love, of Ian, of Ian and Gazi, of other passages in my life, though the music itself tended to b
light any reveries with its intrusive cacophony of atonal sounds and peculiar instrumentation.

  You are the music while the music lasts. When the music was over, we all stood up for the real interval, with dreamy smiles of approval masking relief, and drifted toward the area where the drinks would be served. I couldn’t see Ian, who had been sitting behind me.

  “Heavy duty,” said Strand.

  “Mademoiselle Sawyer, let me present my wife, Aisha,” said Colonel Barka. I inhaled her perfume; she was a stoutish lady in European dress, with a beaming, pretty face and the dyed black‐red hair one sees so often on brunettes of a certain age. Apparently she spoke no English, so she did not attempt to speak to me at all but smiled in a welcoming fashion, understanding that I was an acquaintance of her worldly, estimable husband, he who went out every night. This took a few minutes of chat as we shuffled along in the slow-moving aisles toward the foyer.

  How are strange, upsetting things gradually borne upon you? It didn’t strike me in a flash, but just with a dawning sensation of dread, that Ian was no longer there. Wasn’t in the crowd, wasn’t looking for me, wasn’t to be found. At the same time I was aware that Taft, with a significant look at me, was moving rapidly toward the foyer and that some DST guys, who had seemed to leave at the interval with the princess, now moved in front of the windows of the lobby. The colonel, however, and Madame Barka shuffled along with the rest of us, unconcerned, talking of music.

  “Drinks” were fruit punch and a slightly rum-spiked version, signified by different glasses, passed by waiters with trays of them. When, after ten minutes, Ian didn’t come back, I felt afraid and flew to the side of Robin Crumley. Imagine a world in which Robin Crumley seemed a haven! I clung to him, and to Posy’s enormous bulky presence, hoping the three of us would make a target big enough for Ian to find us.