Relative Danger

by Charles Benoit

  “Don’t underestimate men our age,” Yehia said. “Time may have made us patient, but it has also made us desperate.”

  “Douglas,” Sergei said, dropping the stage voice and looking Doug steady in the eye, “I’m not suggesting that the original killers are out there….”

  “They may be. I never found them,” Yehia said and added a burp.

  “Correct, but what I mean is that this diamond, well, it’s not that I believe in curses, but it has brought out the worst in people. And that can span generations, passed on just as surely as a genetic trait.”

  “So you suggesting I should go home? That I’m not up to it?”

  “Not at all Douglas. I don’t doubt your tenacity. I just want you to remain as safe as possible—don’t take any risks that you don’t have to. There was a local connection, here in Casa you know.”

  “If it makes you feel better I’ll be leaving Morocco soon, so don’t worry about the local connection.”

  “To Cairo? That’s where the jewel went, isn’t it Douglas, to Cairo?” Sergei said, his eyes fixed on Doug’s. Doug nodded and drained the rest of his first drink. Sergei sighed and fell back into his chair. “Your Canadian friend doesn’t know how lucky she is, you know that?”

  “Oh I don’t know if she’s all that lucky to have me working for her,” Doug said.

  “Lucky?” Yehia shouted, startling people several tables away. “Lucky is what the other guy has to be. Real men don’t need luck, they have their skills.”

  “Well then, gentlemen,” Douglas said, raising his empty glass, “wish me luck.”

  ***

  “Nice friend you’ve got there, Sergei,” Doug said as the taxi zigzagged through the identical-looking streets of downtown Casablanca. “Where’d you meet him? A flogging?”

  Sergei let out a sigh. “Douglas, don’t tell me that you don’t have a few friends who are a bit rough about the edges.”

  “Edges? Sergei, that guy is rough down to the center.”

  “Yes Douglas, I know this,” Sergei said. “Captain Yehia was a crook, a bully, a sadist and possibly a murderer. But you know Douglas, if you are not part of the culture, not part of an era, it is easy to look and make judgments.”

  “Yes, I understand Sergei,” Douglas said, “but come on, he all but told us he shot anybody who pissed him off. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Of course, what kind of man do you think I am? No, I understand, that’s not what you meant and yes, I agree, Yehia is difficult at best, but when he was faced with a tough situation, when he had his finger on the trigger, he did what he felt he had to do. How many of us would know what to do in that situation?”

  “I would know,” Doug said. “There’s no way I would just kill somebody. I’m sure of that. Bet on it.”

  “I’m just as sure as you that you would not,” Sergei said, slapping Doug’s knee. “And as you put it, I’d bet on it. You’re a good man, Douglas, you can’t hide it.”

  Doug smiled back. It was easy to feel self-righteous after a dinner with Captain Yehia.

  ***

  Two hours later, as Doug wandered around the red light district, he didn’t feel so self-righteous.

  At first he planned on a good night’s rest and tried again to read the guide book, certain it would work its magic and put him under fast. But in the middle of a general description of the city was a warning to avoid the area the guidebook called “decidedly seedy.” “As unlikely as this sounds,” the book said, “in the area between the Boulevard Hassan Seghir and Rue Mohammed Smiha, from where they join at Avenue Zaid to the roundabout a half a kilometer away, the unwary late night visitor may find himself accosted by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon plying their trade.”

  He just came to look, he told himself as he tried to use the map in the guidebook without walking into a lamp pole. How do you not look around, he reasoned, he went on this trip to see the world and wasn’t this part of it, a part he’d not really seen and only a fifteen-minute walk from his hotel? And with syphilis being the nicest thing he might catch—would catch—he wasn’t going to go for it, no matter how good-looking they were.

  He didn’t know what to expect but he expected it to be better than this.

  The street wasn’t bright and flashy, there wasn’t chest-thumping music coming from every window and there weren’t any red lights. But there were women. They were not sashaying up and down the sidewalk in clingy short dresses and seven-inch heels, they were not swinging tiny silver purses as they laughed with other hookers and shouted out racy offers to the fun-loving guys driving by in convertibles. They hung in the shadows of many doorways, backs to the wall and, while not conservatively dressed, none were dressed as provocatively as Aisha had been to go shopping. And nobody was laughing.

  They weren’t even Arab women. They looked like the immigrants he’d seen from eastern European countries, thick necks, double chins and hairstyles out of the Fifties, their phony smiles heavy with kilos worth of steel fillings. Their hard eyes and expressionless faces, the monotone delivery of their offers, let Doug know that to them fucking was a job, like scrubbing floors or bottling beer, a monotonous, dead-end, when-will-this-god-damn-shift-end type of job and that sex with them would be as much fun as pumping gas. Get in line, stick it in, hurry up and finish. Have a nice day.

  As he declined perfunctory offer after perfunctory offer, he wondered what shitty turn of events sent these women to these streets. They weren’t teenaged runaways tying to make it in Hollywood. The youngest was as old as Doug and the oldest—he didn’t want to think about that. Maybe they were teenagers, just turned old by the job, and that seemed plausible to Doug, who had watched himself age at his dead-end job.

  But as sad and pathetic as they seemed, the men gliding by in their cars were worse. Young guys, old guys, good-looking guys, guys who looked like they had leprosy, drunk guys, guys in BMWs and guys in their wives’ Hondas, and all of them leering without saying a word, getting some sort of secret rush out of seeing women reduced to screwing for money.

  But you’re here, too, Doug, he thought. Good point. Either there’s other guys here, just seeing the world like me, or I’m just like them….

  Doug took his first right, off the Boulevard Hassan and onto some no-name side street. He knew he might get lost, despite the guidebook in his back pocket, but he couldn’t bring himself to backtrack up the boulevard, past the same women who would recognize and know just the kind of guy he was. And while the street got darker and narrower he kept walking. He tried hard to think of nothing.

  He first noticed the two men when they startled a stray cat about thirty yards behind him. When they crossed over to the other side of the street when he did, he knew they were following him. Doug picked up his pace a bit and glanced back to see if they did the same. They were running.

  He didn’t want to panic but it was coming so naturally. He bolted down one side street and then another until he was sure he was lost. They were still behind him, closer and gaining quickly.

  He took another turn and knew this was it. A metal garage door stretched from one side of the narrow street to the other and the padlock on the small entrance door was visible twenty feet away. Doug spun around and waited for the two men.

  They had stopped running and came around the corner with a steady and confident gait. They knew the streets and knew he wasn’t going anywhere. They were large men, for Moroccans, which made them smaller than Doug. They looked about his age but perhaps the mustaches and the dark complexions made them look older. Like the prostitutes, maybe life had made them too old too young. Their fists were clenched, which Doug was glad to see. That probably meant they didn’t have weapons and it was going to be an old fashioned beating.

  As they came closer Doug planted his right foot behind him and got ready. There were two things to do in Pottsville on a Friday night—get drunk and fight—and Doug did both as well as anybody he knew. And, as back in Pottsville, he would just rather run away, but that wasn’
t an option now.

  The taller of the two men stepped in first and telegraphed a right hook that Doug ducked under easily, hitting the man hard in the stomach. As he pulled back the man aimed a kick at his crotch but Doug turned and took the kick on the thigh. The man got in a quick punch that caught Doug above his ear before Doug fired out two fast left jabs and a perfectly timed right that sent the man stumbling back. Before Doug could hit him again the second man charged from his right and wrapped his arms around Doug, trying to take him down. Doug had only a second to spin himself around to slam the attacker against the brick wall, bringing his knee up hard into the man’s gut. The man tried to stand back up but Doug held his head down with his left hand and got in two solid hits before the taller man, smacked him on the side of the jaw. Doug let go of the smaller man, who dropped to one knee, then slid down to lean against the wall.

  The taller man tried to rush Doug into the wall but it was an old bar fight tactic and Doug was ready. He turned sideways, grabbing the man’s shirt and belt, and rammed him into the wall. Before the man could move, Doug had him by the hair and was breaking his face against the white concrete. When the man stopped struggling Doug pushed him hard to the left, trying to trip him just in case he was going to charge again, but the man fell on his own. The smaller guy was still sitting and, when he saw Doug, he cowered down, covering his head with both hands.

  Doug ran out of the alley and down the road for a block or two. He wanted to run all the way back to the hotel but his pounding heart scared him into forcing himself to slow to a brisk walk. Ahead were the bright lights of a major intersection and Doug could already see the neon Coca-Cola sign he recognized from his walks near the hotel.

  As he lay in bed studying the ceiling fan, a sock full of ice propped against his cheek, he tried to figure out if this trip was truly the stupidest thing he had ever done. He’d been in Morocco for three days and what had he accomplished? He’d probably caused the death of a café owner, sponged a couple of meals off a retired German, met an asshole ex-cop, bought a fake Rolex, and beat up two men. Okay, granted, meeting a hot babe made up for most of these things, but how long before the balance tipped on that one?

  As far as the diamond—Al Ainab, or Jagersfontien, or what ever—he knew no more than what Edna Bowers had already guessed. His uncle was either an adventurous kind of rogue with the required heart of gold, or he was a psychotic killer with no soul. And in about thirty hours or so he’d be flying off to Egypt, wasting more of Edna’s money, doing nothing in yet another country.

  Maybe Aisha was right, if the old lady was happy with him spending her money maybe he should sit back and enjoy it, but he couldn’t help thinking that the whole thing, the trips—the “investigation”—was a waste of time. He’d never find the diamond, he knew that, and he began to feel that he didn’t care who killed Uncle Russ.

  He needed to get back to Pottsville, find a job, put his dead uncle behind him and get on with his own life. He missed his few friends, he missed the foods he grew up with, he missed watching baseball—he hadn’t even seen a box score since he left the States—he missed all of these things and it had only been three days. He was not an adventurer, not a traveler. He needed to get back, meet a girl like Aisha, and start over.

  A girl like Aisha.

  In Pottsville.

  Right.

  They think red diamonds are rare?

  He mopped up the melting ice with a towel and re-adjusted his position. The tall guy had clocked him pretty good. Doug opened and closed his jaw trying to keep it from stiffening up. The four Tylenols were starting to make him feel groggy and he switched off the bedside lamp and tried to forget the run-in with the two pimps or muggers or whatever they were.

  Or maybe they weren’t.

  Maybe it wasn’t him in the wrong place at the wrong time, he thought. Maybe it was something else. Maybe word was out that some dip-shit American was asking all sorts of questions that nobody wanted asked. Maybe someone thought he knew more than he really did. Maybe next time they’d come better prepared, stop trying to save money and send some pros. Maybe he was just imagining too much.

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  Doug lay awake watching the fan as it fought to rotate the air-conditioned air back down to the bed. It’s sad, he thought. Morocco, all this shit going on, feeling lost and confused and not knowing what was going to happen next, running from God knows who down some street in a country he had no place being, wondering if the next encounter wouldn’t find him dead in an alley. It’s sad, he thought, that this has been the most exciting three days of my life.

  After a long hour the Tylenol kicked in and Doug slept through the pre-dawn call to prayer that shook the windows three feet from his head.

  Chapter 10

  “Look at me a second,” Aisha said as she cut through traffic in front of the Hyatt Regency, her already dangerous driving made even more reckless. “Your face looks lopsided.”

  “Gee thanks, and you look gorgeous too.” But she did, in a sleeveless black turtleneck, as tight as everything else she wore, a pair of oversized sunglasses, and her hair meticulously styled to look like she just woke up.

  He had spent the morning doing nothing, writing a few postcards, tracking down a seven-day-old USA Today to read about a Pirate’s game he had watched at a bar at Pottsville. He found a guidebook for Egypt, just in case he couldn’t sleep on the plane, and bought his mother an ashtray that said Casablanca! on it, not that she smoked but she would expect something. In his concierge role, the manager went over Doug’s plane tickets, point by minute point. Doug was sure Edna had already taken care of the tip but slipped the guy a few bucks anyway. Aisha called at twelve and told him that she’d pick him and his bags up around six. He reminded her his flight was not till the morning. “I know. Make sure you get a receipt when you check out, we’ve got plans for tonight,” she said.

  When he came back from a final look around the souk, the doorman informed him that the manager had signed for a letter from North America and that he could pick it up with the concierge. Doug waited while the man took off his doorman’s fez, walked over to the front desk, removed the manager sign and placed the brass concierge sign in front of him before he asked for his package. Doug opened the cardboard Airborne envelope and saw a small stack of pages paperclipped together. Edna’s yellow Post-it note said that he should read this before he got to Cairo. When he got to his room he packed the envelope in his carry-on bag. He’d read it on the plane. At that moment he had better things to do. Like fantasize about Aisha’s plans.

  The Al-Kady mansion was empty, everyone at a family dinner in Rabat. “They go every week. I go once a month,” she explained. The living room was as large as the lobby of his hotel but decorated like a gaudy version of a European palace, with carved and gilded chair legs, velvety fabrics, and carpets with patterns so detailed they hurt your eyes. She walked him through the house back to the poolside patio where they first met. Set between two chairs was an elaborate water pipe like the kind he had seen in every café in the city.

  “The coals are still hot,” she said as she poked around in a small brazier behind the chairs, “it’ll only take a few minutes.” She removed the long brass neck of the pipe from the glass base. She filled the base with water from the outdoor bar, tossing in two handfuls of ice cubes before she reassembled the exotic contraption.

  “I’m assuming you smoke kif,” she said as she opened a small box on the table half filled with what looked like wet, sticky tobacco. A red-brown juice dripped from the small ball she made with her fingertips. She put this in the clay head of the water pipe and covered the opening with a piece of tin foil. She used a sharpened pencil to poke holes in the foil, the point of the pencil dyed red from many such uses.

  Although he had drunk gallons of mint tea, Doug had not yet tried one of the water pipes. The smoke at the cafes smelled different than the smoke from stale cigarettes he was used to in bars back home. Tobacco, yes, but with a hint of s
omething sweet, like smoking a strawberry.

  Aisha sifted through the coals with a pair of long metal tongs until she found four pieces she liked, each half the size of her little finger. One by one she set them on top of the tin foil, carefully blowing on each till most of the coal showed fiery red. She attached the flexible hose to the brass neck, midway between the coals and the ice. The hose was wrapped in different colored cords and finished in a flourish of tassels and beads knotted around a hand-carved wooden mouthpiece.

  Aisha put the wooden mouthpiece to her lips and drew in a long, deep breath. The ice tumbled in the base as it filled with a light gray smoke. She exhaled a cumulus cloud of smoke, her face hidden behind the billowing screen. She could make everything erotic, even the way she dabbed the corners of her eyes as she passed him the wooden handle.

  “You’ve got to draw harder than that, Doug,” she said, adjusting the coals. His second attempt brought a lungful of smoke down his throat, but it was smooth and definitely pleasurable. “Try not to exhale it out so forcefully, just let it slide out.” Doug took another draw and did as he was instructed, handing the pipe back to Aisha.

  “One of the things I missed most when I went to school in New York was sitting outside, smoking kif, watching the stars cross the sky. When I was younger I couldn’t do it enough. As I got older I learned to appreciate the subtle pleasure of it all and now know it’s one of life’s great treats. You don’t get it often, but that’s what makes it special, like hot fudge sundaes and multiple orgasms.”

  Doug coughed out the smoke he was trying to pull in. “You’ve got a way of putting things, Aisha. You pick that up in the States?”

  “There I was too conservative, here I’m too liberal. In college I was a tough date and in Egypt my uncles think I’m the Whore of Babylon. I need to find a place sort of in between. Maybe Malaysia. Bali’s nice too.”