“Only that he has a daughter named Samira and a wife named . . . ?”
“Faiza.”
“What does Faiza do?”
“She teaches English language and French literature in a lycée in Ouarzazate.”
“How long were they married?”
The drinks arrived.
“We’ll get to that matter—and many other matters—over dinner. Meanwhile . . .”
Omar handed me a glass of cassis-colored wine.
“The basis of this kir is a white from the Meknès region . . . which is the Moroccan Bordeaux when it comes to our vignobles,” Ben Hassan explained, also accepting a glass from Omar. “Your very good health, Robin—and a good flight tomorrow out of all this unfortunate mess.”
We clinked glasses. Ben Hassan whispered something again to Omar, who withdrew from the room, closing the door behind him. Once he was out of audible reach, Ben Hassan said, “It was rather unfortunate, attacking poor Paul with a bottle.”
“I never did that,” I said, stunned by this accusation.
“So you say.”
“I’m telling the truth. Paul threw himself against the wall of our hotel room after—”
I cut myself off, not wanting to go further.
“After what?” Ben Hassan asked.
I chose my next words with care.
“After I caught him out in an enormous lie.”
“But if you caught him deceiving you . . . I presume it was another woman . . .”
“It wasn’t another woman.”
“Then what was it?”
“That’s my business,” I said.
“And it’s also your business why you attacked him with a bottle.”
“Why won’t you believe me?”
“Why should I? Paul is my friend. He arrived on my doorstep late last night in a state of emotional disarray, telling me that he fled Essaouira when his wife attacked him with a bottle, and showing all the physical side effects of this attack. Had the person I shared my bed with attacked me with a bottle . . .”
Ben Hassan maintained a light, almost jovial tone throughout this banter—as if this was all a rather amusing turn of events.
“Why did Samira turn him away?” I asked.
“Because he was a very bad father who hadn’t bothered to show any interest in his daughter until just a few months ago.”
“How do you know this?”
“Samira considers me her surrogate father.” He looked straight at me as he said this.
“Where was her mother?” I asked.
“Here in Casablanca until Samira entered university—and they began to have all sorts of problems. Then Faiza, who was also having a variety of professional difficulties, lost her job. And lost her home, owing to many debts and a man in her life who was not honorable, let alone honest.”
“Not Paul?”
“No—Paul cut complete contact with his wife and his daughter when he left for the States some months before Samira’s birth.”
“Then why did he feel the need to reconnect if he hadn’t been in contact for decades?”
“You would have to ask Paul that.”
He raised his glass again, downing it all in one long draft. After a small, discreet belch, he raised his eyebrows as he told me, “Of course, the fact that he discovered he was a grandfather might have had something to do with it.”
“Samira has a child?”
“Yes, an eighteen-month-old son named Claude. The father is a French lawyer from Marseille. Married. Highly intelligent. Highly complex. But Samira has always liked her men intelligent and complex. Which is why she was always intrigued from afar by her absentee father—and also desperately hurt that he refused all contact. But it’s the strangest damn thing. Not a word to Faiza or Samira for decades. And he never once sent them anything in the way of money. He’d vanished across the Atlantic, out of sight, clearly uninterested. Then, a few months ago, he suddenly gets in touch with me, asking for news of his daughter. Not just news, but recent photographs and her email address. And he began to write to her, wanting to know everything about her life. Samira came to me, upset and confused.”
“Why would he contact her after all this time?” I asked. “Why now?”
“I told Samira she should ask that question of Paul in an email. His response was: ‘I have just discovered that I cannot have children with my new wife.’ ”
I was so thrown by this statement that my glass of wine went flying to the floor.
“He wrote that?” I whispered. “He actually wrote that?”
Ben Hassan pursed his lips, suppressing a smile.
“Yes, he wrote that he could not have children with you . . . that you were not fertile.”
“That is beyond a lie,” I said, starting to sob. “And the reason he came fleeing up here to Casablanca is because I found out that he’d had a vasectomy behind my back.”
He received this information with a momentary shocked stare—which quickly morphed into what I had now begun to discern to be his default state of wry passivity.
“That is quite an accusation,” he said.
I was now digging into my backpack, manically searching for the clutch of documents I had brought with me.
“It’s not an accusation,” I cried, “it’s the truth!”
I slammed the documents down on the worktable in front of Ben Hassan.
“There it is, in black and white.”
In a hurried, manic stream of words I told how the invoice for the surgery had found its way to me, and everything that had happened from that point on, leading to my being here now. Ben Hassan listened to me in silence. When I was finished he picked up a small bell nearby and rang it twice. Omar was back in the room within seconds. A fast interchange in Arabic. Omar disappeared and returned immediately with a new glass of kir for me. He also began to pick up the shards of glass that were scattered everywhere on the floor. When I tried to apologize for my angry clumsiness, Ben Hassan held up his hand and told me to go easy on myself.
“You have been subject to far too many shocks in the past twenty-four hours. Happily the glass in question is not Rosenthal crystal, just un verre ordinaire, so no damage done.”
More whispered words to Omar, who dumped the broken glass into a nearby trash can and left us alone again. As soon as the door was closed, Ben Hassan reached for the surgery invoice and held it up.
“Here is the proverbial smoking gun; further proof that you did attack him with a bottle upon discovering the nature of his treachery.”
I snapped my eyes shut, now cognizant of the fact that I should have never uttered a word of any of this to the crafty operator seated opposite me. I finally said, “You need to know that I am telling you the absolute truth when it comes to Paul’s head injury. And that I am desperately worried about him. I have to find him.”
Ben Hassan fell silent for a moment, sipping his wine. Then he said, “I hope you will take solace in the fact that your husband has worked very hard at making amends with his daughter.”
“By which you mean . . . ?”
“He helped buy her an apartment.”
Now I really was lost.
“He what?”
“He helped buy Samira the apartment she lives in now; the apartment in front of which you verbally attacked her this morning.”
“I was not verbally attacking her. I was simply . . .”
“. . . letting it be known that you believed she was your husband’s other woman. Samira called me while you were asleep, just a little aggrieved at such an accusation and the way you accosted her in public.”
“I did not accost her.”
“As before, madame, you are, I know, telling the truth.”
“Paul couldn’t have bought her an apartment.”
“He only paid for half of it. The other half came from her French lover.”
“How much did my husband give his daughter?”
“One million dirhams.”
Ben Hassan watc
hed me absorb that little detail.
“I can’t believe that,” I said.
“Why can’t you?”
“Because that’s, what?”—I did some rapid calculations—“something in the neighborhood of more than a hundred thousand dollars.”
“You are the human abacus, madame.”
“There is no way he could have borrowed that money in the States without my knowing about it.”
“Which is why Paul borrowed the money here in Casablanca.”
“But he has no credit rating here, no equity that he could have put up as collateral against a loan of that size.”
“Again you have hit the bull’s-eye. Which is why your husband didn’t turn to a bank or some other financial institution to loan him the funds.”
The penny (actually an ocean of pennies) dropped.
“Are you telling me he turned to a loan shark?” I demanded.
“Loan shark is a rather pejorative word, is it not? A financial facilitator is a far more elegant turn of phrase and not as derogatory.”
“Do you think I care about verbal niceties right now, Monsieur Ben Hassan? He borrowed money from a loan shark. Which also means he’s in even more trouble than I had imagined. I suppose you know the name of the gangster to whom he’s now probably paying three times the hundred thousand borrowed?”
“The man is no gangster. He’s just a businessman.”
“And his name is . . . ?”
A long pause as my host drained his glass, belching loudly and pointedly. Finally he spoke.
“His name is . . . Monsieur Romain Ben Hassan.”
FIFTEEN
BY THE TIME the second bottle of wine was emptied, Monsieur Ben Hassan was trying to insist that he was my new best friend.
At the start of the meal, however, he wasn’t oozing bonhomie and easy camaraderie. On the contrary, he was showing me his more menacing hand.
“When Paul heard from me that Samira might talk with him again if he helped her buy an apartment for herself and her son, his immediate response was ‘Get her the money.’ I told him that if he was actually serious about borrowing one million dirhams from me, he would have to take the consequences if he did not meet his monthly payments.”
“What sort of consequences might these be?”
“Unpleasant ones.”
“Surely you weren’t planning to send somebody over to Buffalo to rough him up . . . or worse.”
“Had that become necessary, of course there were ways and means—contacts, so to speak, in that corner of the world—who could have been called upon to intervene on my behalf. For a price, naturellement. A price which would have been tagged onto the monthly repayment.”
“I think the actual term in loan-shark-speak is vig. The monthly vig—which you had to meet or else contend with grievous bodily harm.”
“I presume you picked that term up from some sort of crime novel, un polar, yes?”
“In my business you occasionally run into a client who has made the mistake of borrowing money from a thug like you.”
Ben Hassan put his fingers together in front of his face, as if creating his very own cathedral, into which he now stared. I could see his lips twitch. Was he trying to contain his anger? Had I crossed a line of no return? If my husband had signed something quasilegal and binding, had he fled to Ouarzazate because he simply could not pay the vig, leaving me behind to clean up his financial mess, per usual? The sum involved—one million dirhams—was a vertiginous one; I certainly didn’t have that sort of cash in a bank account, let alone my back pocket.
Ben Hassan stopped looking through the lattice web of his thick sausagelike fingers. Then, favoring me with a paternal smile, he said, “There’s no need to be holding on to your bag, as if I am going to snatch it away. I know you still don’t trust me. But you have my word that I would not dream of harming you in any way.”
“My husband, on the other hand . . .”
“He will hopefully work out a way to honor our little arrangement.”
“You know he doesn’t have that kind of money.”
Ben Hassan covered my hand with his own—actually burying it under this soft mound of flesh.
“Let us discuss such matters later on.”
With that he insisted on ordering dinner for us, the waiter immediately at our table, treating Ben Hassan as if he were some godfatherly pasha, telling him that the patron wanted him to have a bottle of the Cuvée Hassan II “on the house,” and informing him that the chef had prepared a lamb tagine with preserved lemons “especially for Monsieur Ben Hassan and his lovely guest.”
Part of me wanted to ask my host, “So do they owe you money as well?” As if anticipating my question, Ben Hassan told me, “I made a small investment in this establishment some years ago—and the management remains exceptionally grateful for my aid at a particular moment when they sorely needed assistance.”
“You are quite the businessman, monsieur.”
“Such flattery,” he said. “But I find myself a less-than-interesting subject. Especially when seated opposite such a lovely, fascinating woman like yourself.”
He got me talking about myself—and I gave him the abbreviated version of my life, sidestepping much in the way of any telling detail about my father, my first marriage, the way I fled a journalistic career for the surer waters of accounting. But Ben Hassan turned out to be a master of subtext, immediately deducing much and using it to make me feel even more uneasy. The man was ruthlessly clever when it came to taking an inference (“Dad never could really settle down”) and turning it into a psychological revelation (“So you have always been attracted to unstable, unsound men”). I cottoned on to his game rather quickly. Instead of getting defensive, I started asking him about his own background, discovering that his French father had run a vineyard in the Meknès-Tafilalet region, had married a Moroccan woman from a bourgeois Rabat family, but abandoned her and his young son when an opportunity arose for him to return to Bourgogne; how his father refused to see his son thereafter, “excising me from his life as if I was a nasty boil”; how Ben Hassan had studied business in Paris and tried repeatedly to maintain contact with his father; how his “attempts to enter the world of international business in Paris came a little unstuck”; how he returned to Casablanca and began to make his fortune here . . .
“Did you get into some sort of trouble in France?” I asked, the exceptional food and wine emboldening me.
“Why do you immediately assume that the discrimination I encountered in France was, in fact, due to some sort of scandal?” he demanded.
“Aren’t there plenty of North Africans who have successfully integrated into French society?”
“It is still the country of Le Front National.”
“I think I read that one of Sarkozy’s senior ministers was a woman of Moroccan origin.”
“I couldn’t stay there.”
“But you must have a French passport, thanks to your French father. When were you last there?”
“My girth has mitigated against my ability to travel.”
The second bottle of wine arrived. The waiter opened it and, with great ceremony, placed two fresh glasses on the table and delicately poured a fingerful for Ben Hassan. My host again made great theater of sampling it, swirling it around the glass, sniffing in with such great force that I feared he might just inhale it, then taking a sizable sip and rolling it around his mouth like a gargle before gulping it straight down. Nodding his approval, the waiter poured out two glasses, then left us. As soon as he was out of earshot I posed a question that I had been wanting to raise for several hours: “How serious was Paul’s relationship with Faiza?”
Ben Hassan used his finger to encircle the top of his wineglass several times. The man loved creating a sense of drama before making a statement. Finally he spoke.
“We were all part of a bohemian circle in Casablanca: writers, poets, visual artists. I may have studied commerce in Paris, but that was to please my mother. As I sens
e you know, one can never please one’s mother. Still, before Paris, after Paris, abstract painting was my métier. I even had a gallery here in Casablanca that sold my work. Was I considered a serious painter? Quasiserious, but not a major artist like your husband. And Faiza—well, she was teaching in a lycée here and trying to write the great Moroccan feminist novel, seeing herself as a sort of North African Simone de Beauvoir. Truth be told, she had little in the way of literary talent. But she was rather fetching all those years ago, before disappointment and cigarettes began to work their toxic magic. Paul back then was the young American bohemian of every artistic girl’s dreams. Faiza comes from a good family in Rabat. Her father worked for the Moroccan Central Bank as an economist, and they were hardly rigorous Muslims. But even if you are a secular Muslim—as so many Moroccans still are—you are also the by-product of a conservative society, especially when it comes to sex. Paul was Faiza’s first lover. They were quite the handsome couple. She wanted Paul to whisk her off to New York and make her his wife and fund her writing while he became the famous artist.
“We all have our flaws. Faiza’s was her need to control at all costs. Within two months of their involvement she was already starting to make demands, to criticize Paul’s lack of order, to argue with him regarding just about everything. On the two or so occasions that he posited the idea of ending things, Faiza turned all teary and apologetic. From what I also ascertained, though she was not experienced in the world of sex, she’d become a very fast learner. And Paul, being a man who likes sex . . .”
“You think I’m not aware of that?”
“I’ve spoken out of turn.”
“I was just making a point. An exceedingly defensive point.”
“I like a woman who can laugh at herself.”
“Now . . . let me guess. Paul being Paul, he couldn’t face her emotional meltdowns in the face of him trying to leave her, and was too cowardly to walk away. Given the way she was making him feel like a sex god . . . he trusted her when it came to little matters like contraception.”
Ben Hassan emitted a curious giggle, reminiscent of a little boy who’d just heard something naughty.
“It’s you who should be telling this story,” he said. “Yes, Paul believed Faiza when she told him she was on the pill. So when she announced, ‘Mon chéri, j’ai une grande nouvelle à t’annoncer. Je suis enceinte’—well, Paul was stunned by the news. When he didn’t exactly sweep up Faiza in his arms and proclaim that she was the love of his life and that, bien sûr, a child together would be the ultimate expression of their amour éternel, she began to hector him, insisting that they get married. When he hesitated, she told her family. Her father showed up with her two rather violent brothers at the École des Beaux-Arts just a kilometer or so from here, threatening to castrate Paul if he didn’t marry Faiza on the spot. They also raised so much stink with the head of the college that Paul was suspended, but told by our enlightened principal that he could have his job back if he married Faiza and made her an honest woman. For around twenty-four hours the two brothers actually had Paul trapped in his flat. Then their father showed up with Faiza, an imam, and a lawyer. They insisted on being let in, Faiza crying wildly, telling Paul that she was going to die if he didn’t marry her. Paul panicked. Paul let them in. He went through with the shotgun service there and then. Said the vows, signed the legal document, tried to kiss the bride, who then began to insult him and stormed off with her father, saying she’d see him tomorrow when her brothers returned to move him into their new home in Rabat. ‘I have found you a job teaching English there,’ his new father-in-law announced to him. The two brothers informed Paul that they would be downstairs, guarding the front and back doors—so there was no way he was going to be able to do a run for the airport. As soon as they were gone, Paul phoned me in a total panic. I told him he’d been insane to have gone through with the marriage, but that I would find him a way out of this nightmare. Which is what I did. Around three hours later I called Paul back and told him to get his passport and a small bag and head to the roof of the building at precisely midnight. I put on a djellaba with a hood. I didn’t know if Faiza had alerted her brothers about Paul’s fat gay artist friend who might try to rescue him, but I was taking no chances. Dressed in my djellaba—my face hidden within its hood—I drove down to his quartier. He lived in an area where the buildings were so packed together that it was a three-foot jump from one roof to the next. But you had to do the jump right, as it was a ten-story fall if you made a misstep. I had to bribe the superintendent of the adjoining building to give me access to the roof. It cost seven hundred dirhams—a small fortune back then, but I had just sold a painting and also I knew that if I didn’t get Paul out of the country he would be throwing his future away on a woman who, for all her bohemian, ‘second sex’ cant, was a future harridan in waiting.
The Blue Hour Page 16
