by David Dodge
Chapter Six
After that I could only wait for the new parts to come up from Rabat. While I waited I spent a lot of time at the table of an outdoor cafe on the edge of the Djemaa El Fna, watching the action. Djemaa El Fna means Place of the Dead, but in fact it’s the liveliest place in Marrakech, if not in Morocco; an enormous square, four acres of it, in which something is going on every hour of the twenty-four, seven days a week. It’s a four-teen-ring circus night and day, with acrobats, tumblers and clowns, magicians, medicine men, fire-eaters, story-tellers, snake charmers, dancing bears, muscle men, contortionists, water sellers peddling their wares in brass cups filled from dripping swollen goatskins, hashish peddlers selling theirs in squares of sweet candy, whores peddling theirs in the usual packaging —you name the merchandise, it’s odds on the Djemaa El Fna offers it for sale. On the far side of the square, away from the modern city of hotels, tourists and wide French boulevards, the world of the souks begins; a rabbit-warren of markets, shops and stores where you can buy whatever isn’t for sale in the Djemaa El Fna. Marrakech is quite a town, full of color, charm and odd smells. Winston Churchill used to go there winters to paint. Other people go there to enjoy the Arabian Nights flavor of the place. There are also a few others who go there for the same reason they go anyplace else, to con somebody out of a fast buck.
One afternoon I was sitting at my usual table, drinking beer and making a meal out of cheap kimiyah, a kind of not-so-free lunch, when one of the cafe’s crooked waiters tried to gyp an American tourist on the check. All Moroccan waiters gyp all American tourists on their checks as a matter of course, and normally get away with it. American tourists, generally speaking, are not only easy marks but unable to fight back properly in French or Arabic. One language or the other is all the waiters of Marrakech choose to speak when an argument starts. This particular tourist had a French doll with him, and she cut the waiter up but good. In French. The bagarre started behind my back, so the first I saw of the tourist and his girl was when I turned around in my chair to see who was applying the fire and brimstone to the garçon.
Michelle, as her name turned out to be, had just finished calling the waiter a sale cochon and a filou. She was stirred up. When she wasn’t stirred up she was as sweet and nice and attractive as whipped cream on strawberries. Not particularly pretty. You wouldn’t have been able to see her within a mile of the Honorable Regina, or eighteen miles of Boda. Her nose was a bit too big, for one thing. But she had a Frenchwoman’s talent for making the most of her good points while minimizing the bad ones, and her overall impact was of a cute, moderately sexy, attractive young woman, très, très française and in every way on the up and up. Which she was. It made it easier for her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was and me to use her as a roper when we got into action. As we did before long.
During the chewing out at the cafe her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was stood by looking like the biggest cornfed hick ever to come out of Horner’s Corners. His name, let’s say the name he claimed as his while we were doing business, was Elmer Wiggins. So help me. Phony as it was, it fitted his appearance. You never saw such a rube in your life. All he needed was oatstraw in his hair. He was kind of big and clumsy and shambling, with big hands and feet, guileless cow’s eyes, clothes that didn’t quite fit across the shoulders or cover his big wrists, pants a mite too short—oh, he was a work of art. Michelle didn’t have any idea of the kind of killer shark she was tied up with, or that he and his equally crooked business associate (me) were using her in the bunco we pulled off. She was truly innocent, as naive as she was nice. She loved the big jerk, and I think he loved her, too, in his own way. But he was the kind of jerk who couldn’t help using her any more than he could help conning people. Of course, I used her, too, but then she wasn’t my girl. (Did I still have a girl, or had the Ay-rab wolves already gotten her? I agonized a lot about that, and often found myself communing with Allah, since I was on his territory. Please, Allah. Keep her safe until I get there. Lay off the mektoob business and give her a break. Please.)
During the bagarre at the cafe the waiter gave Michelle some rough backtalk in Arabic, which she didn’t understand and I did. Mine had sharpened considerably during my time in Tangier. I moved in and gave the waiter a piece of his own back by telling him he was a manyuk and an akrout. The first meant he sold himself to other men, the second that he pimped for his sister on the side. Then I called the owner of the place and chewed him for permitting his waiters to use coarse language to the customers. I made it loud enough so everyone in the joint and most of the tourists in the Djemaa El Fna could hear me. They wouldn’t understand the words but they’d get the music. The upshot of the whole business was that Michelle, Elmer and I ended up at the same table drinking beer and nibbling kimiyah together. Elmer stuck me for the beer with the Thirteen Match game.
“Oh, ‘e is so lucky wiz zis game, I ‘ate ‘eem!” said Michelle, gazing at the big apple knocker with adoration in her eyes. “I can nevaire win ‘eem, not one time! Please win ‘eem for me, m’sieur.”
She didn’t mean the game by ” ‘eem,” but Elmer. She used ‘win’ to mean ‘beat,’ and hashed up her English in other ways, all cute. Her accent was cute, too. Everything about her was cute except maybe her nose, and Elmer. He was as ham-handed and clumsy as he was crooked.
The Thirteen Match game, if you have never played it. is one of the simplest and most effective swindles in existence. The mark can’t ever win unless you want him to. You throw thirteen matches, thirteen toothpicks, thirteen beans, thirteen of anything you have available on the table. Then you and the john take turns extracting one, two or three matches from the pile at a time, each player’s free option each pick. The aim is not to take that last match or toothpick or whatever. That’s the aim of the game, I mean. The first aim, if you want to be sure of winning, is to make sure the john takes the first draw. After that he’s dead.
Whatever he draws, one, two or three, you take the reciprocal to make a total of four each time. As long as you do that, and start with a multiple of four plus one, it could be five or five million and one, it works out the same. As anyone can figure out by stopping to use his knob for three seconds. The sucker is inevitably going to be stuck with the old maid at the end. You let him win now and then (as Elmer was too dumb to do) so he won’t catch on to how mechanical it all is, and you go first half of the time while you’re breaking the boob in so he won’t read the importance of the first draw. But when money is down, you generously give him first pick. That’s all there is to it except banking the proceeds.
I let him stick me to see if, having taken me for a lousy four or five dirhams, he’d try to sell me the Djemaa El Fna. Maybe it does take one to know one, but I had Elmer taped in a hurry. He just didn’t get any fun out of life unless he was screwing somebody, even if only for four or five dirhams. We got together to do business as naturally as two buzzards gravitate to the same carcass.
What we worked out was pretty smooth, and very nearly legitimate. Elmer was a crossroads operator at heart, a skin-‘em-quick-and-blow-along man. He lacked subtlety. I held out for the more professional sell he finally agreed to. It was a good example of the artistic con that leaves the marks grateful to you for doing them a favor and you in a position where the speedy getaway is not necessary. The safety measures cost us part of the take, but they were worth it in my opinion. Elmer’s opinions didn’t count.
Except in summer, Marrakech is usually full of American tourists holding heavy fat books of traveler’s checks. Many of them stay at the big old Mamounia Hotel where Winnie used to hang out in his day. We put cute little Michelle in a bikini, took her over to the Mamounia pool, exposed her to the eve and let nature take its course. The Daddies loved her oo-la-la accent as much as they loved the rest of her. The Mommies kind of got their noses out of joint at first, but she was such a natural charmer that pretty soon she had the Mommies on her side too. I have to add, immodestly but for the record, that I help
ed more than some with the Mommies after Michelle roped the Daddies. She and I made a good team, although she didn’t know she was a part of it. Elmer just kind of hulked around looking like one hundred percent American green corn.
We sold camel-caravan trips to far-off romantic dreamy Timbuctoo; one way by camel, that is, return trip by air, four nights and five days at the Timbuctoo end thrown in. Price for the package, one thousand U.S. rasbuckniks or acceptable equivalent, cash down. No credit cards. Who doesn’t want to see glamorous far-off dreamy romantic Timbuctoo, particularly if he or she is the kind of adventurous citizen who already has made it as far as glamorous far-off dreamy romantic Marrakech from Weehawken, N.J.? The fact that Timbuctoo is a mangy flea-ridden mudwalled Nothingsville approximately as far from Marrakech as Brussels is from Madrid meant nothing. We didn’t have to bring that up. (Have you ever tried riding a stinking camel as far as from Madrid to Brussels, fifty-two uninterrupted days perched aboard your ship of the desert, without a single place along the way to have a hot bath?) We also kind of failed to invite the attention to the gimmick in which the gaff was hidden, down there in the fine print. I insisted that we draw up a formal contract, simple but clear and binding, so that there could be no question of bad faith afterward and maybe complaints filed with the legation in Tangier before I got my new passport.
The gaff was a proviso that if, by reason of war, riot, rebellion, civil disturbance or other Act of God we, the parties of the first part, were unable to get the camel caravan moving in the right direction within a certain period, then we the parties of the first part were obliged—get the wording?—without further charge to the parties of the second part to arrange for the transportation of said parties of the second part to as well as from Timbuctoo by air; a round-trip which, by the shortest route via Casablanca and Bamoko in Mali, cost around $400. The whole package, including the agreed upon hotel accommodations and the rest of it, wouldn’t amount to $5oo, and that amount would be reduced by the cut of commissions I planned to jack out to the travel agent who would do all the work of booking the reservations, arranging for the air tickets and the rest of the drudgery.
There never was any remote chance that Elmer and I might be soiling our hands with vulgar travail or a bunch of smelly camels, even by accident. This was back in the days before de Gaulle came to power to lop off what was left of France’s colonies, but there was already political unrest and talk of independence among the French colonials of North Africa. Algeria, a good piece of which the camel caravan would have had to traverse to romantic dreamy flea-ridden Timbuctoo, was stewing uneasily if not already red-hot and boiling; a condition which brought the escape clause into effect before the venture ever got off the ground or the camels up off their knees. It made Elmer and me an wasy $500-plus clear profit per customer without working up a sweat, bending the law or hurting anybody’s feelings.
“We will go, too, n’est-ce pas, cheri?” Michelle asked Elmer one afternoon when we were at a cafe table figuring the arithmetic. “Wiz zee camels?”
“Well, uh, gee, honey,” Elmer said, fumbling. “Somebody’s got to stay here and run things.” He gave me the eve to say, Take me out.
This is what I mean by clumsy. He had no finesse at all. All he had to do was say Yes to make it come true in her mind. The reality didn’t matter. That could come later. But the oaf didn’t even know how to lie smoothly. He was a disgrace to the profession.
For her benefit, not his, I said, “Of course you’ll go, Michelle. I’ll stay and carry the ball here. I know the language, the people, the ropes. Elmer doesn’t. There’s nothing at all to prevent him from going along with the rest of the camels and taking you with him.”
“Oh, sank you, Curlee!” Michelle grabbed one of my hands in both of hers. We were on first-name terms and better by then. ” ‘Ow can I ‘elp but love you?” And she gave me a great big sisterly kiss that meant nothing at all except that she was a natural born con-woman herself. Even without knowing it.
With her unwitting help we roped eleven johns and their ladies; gross handle, twenty-two thousand of the best, cash in advance. Some of the suckers were shy about laying it on us ahead of time all at once. Why not half or a third down and the rest C.O.D., something like that? Most of them were retired businessmen who had been around. We said No, we had to put up an advance for a string of camels, guides, tents, equipment, food, booze, hotel reservations, plane-fares, etc., etc. Sorry, sir, but that’s the way it has to be. Some of them still balked until their wives took them by the ear and said, Now you listen to me, George Spelvin. The Mommies couldn’t bear the thought of that sniffy Mrs. Jones being able to talk about that wonderful trip afterward and them not. Having hooked one Mommy, we hooked them all, and with them the Daddies.
For sweeteners we promised, flatly guaranteed, palm-shaded oases watered by gushing springs every afternoon, a full moon every night, nautch dancers, gourmet cooking, iced champagne, innerspring mattresses, color TV, everything, anything—what the hell, why not, they weren’t really going to go that way. In the end we had the full twenty-two thousand in our hands, less about $10,000 we had to lay out for the legitimate package they were actually going to find under the Christmas tree come Santa Claus day.
After that there was the small matter of cutting up the melon. We had the money in a lockbox, the lockbox in the safe at the Mamounia under an arrangement by which we had to take it out together or not at all. It was just too bad for the other guy if one of us dropped dead, but on the other hand it was the best possible insurance against a doublecross, or rat poison in somebody’s soup. We both had a lot of confidence in our business partner.
“I don’t see how I can rightly claim a third for Michelle,” Elmer said real generous-like. The yokel couldn’t even pronounce her name right. He called her ‘Mitchell.’ “What she done mostly was lie around in her bathing suit. I tell you what, neighbor, what do you say we cut her in for five bills, then you and me—”
“I tell you what, neighbor,” I said. “Stop shoveling horseshit for a minute and come out of the barn. I’ll put out to buy your doll a new dress and maybe a new bikini, because she’s cute and I like her. But that’s as far as she rides on this haywagon, so come off it.”
“Aw, now look, neighbor—”
“Aw, now look yourself, neighbor. Don’t try to bunco a bunco-steerer. It won’t work. We split down the middle or not at all, and I can outwait you. The cops aren’t looking for me.”
I didn’t know they were looking for him, either, but the chances were better than even.
He aw-now-look-neighbor’ed me some more, but I’d made him reach for the first match and we both knew I had him by the short hairs. Besides, he was anxious to get on with the business of conning me out of my cut after we had split. He was that kind of business associate. After all, if you can bag one john, what’s so immoral about bagging another? For my part— well, guess, neighbor. As noted earlier, it takes one to know one.
The money was mostly in dirhams, with a small mixture of dollar scratch. Some of the Daddies had tried to pay off with large leaves out of their books of travelers checks, but travelers checks are hard to convert into the real thing unless they’re your own and you have a passport with the right name in it. Also there is the small but significant matter of vigorish, or breakage on the exchange when you convert from one money to another kind of money. We didn’t want to assume any unnecessary expenses. So we had collected in cash; as aforesaid, mostly dirhams.
Elmer didn’t want dirhams. He meant to blow along fast, after he had conned me, and dirhams would be a handicap to him for several reasons. There was an exchange control on them at the time, prohibiting the export of Moroccan currency from the country. You could always smuggle it, but if you got caught you lost not only the loot but usually your freedom to move about unhampered for a year or two. For another thing, the dirham wasn’t too strong outside Morocco. You could trade it for something else in Tangier, but the Tangier price wasn’t too favorable
if you were after pounds, dollars, something hard like that. Elmer wanted dollars. He could have bought dollar traveler’s checks at a fair rate there in Marrakech, but he shied away from that because of the passport business. You’re supposed to be able to change a traveler’s check anywhere simply by countersigning it in front of the guy who’s going to give you the cash for it, but try and do it as a practical matter. They want to see your passport first, match the picture in it with your face, the signature in it with the signature on the check before you go any further. Since Elmer Wiggins was, for the moment, doing business as Elmer Wiggins, with
Michelle as with everyone else, things could get a bit hairy if he had to produce a passport with another name on it. Elmer was in a spot. It left him open to a little counter-bagging.
I made him an offer. I said, “Elmer, neighbor, I tell you what. I’ll buy your dirhams. You’ll have to make me a price, because I’m not going to do you any favors” he’d have shied away from me like a startled milk-cow at any hint of generosity), “but I’ll take them off your hands for pounds sterling and pay you in cash at a better price than you could get in Tangier or anywhere else. Want to deal?”
He was suspicious, naturally. Right away his instincts made him say, no; no deal. I expected that. But he thought about it—I expected that, too—and he began to see a way he could deal and con me at the same time. I expected that.
“Hey, now, neighbor,” he said, in his best cornpone drawl. “This here now deal you was talking about. What’s in it for you?”
Money,” I said. “What did you think?” “I thought money,” he said. “What kinda money?” “Vigorish money,” I said. “I’m spending dirhams here. I’m going to spend a lot more before I leave here.” (I had told him and Michelle about the teuf-teuf.) “I have to buy dirhams with other kinds of money. If I buy them from you at a better price than you can sell them to a bank but still get them at a better price than I have to pay the bank—you figure it.”
