With that he pulled over what clearly was a prepared statement. And began to read it to me. In it he recounted the “facts” of the case. How I had been searching for my missing husband in the Sahara and had been drugged with chloroform while leaving my hotel in Tata to catch the early bus to Ouarzazate. The two “criminals” were named Abdullah Talib and Imad Shuayb, both twenty-one, both from Marrakesh, both working on a road work project in Tata. They beat and robbed me, knocking me unconscious. But after that, the two thieves argued over how to split the money and goods stolen from me. A fight between them broke out, with Imad stabbing Abdullah to death, and then, in a panic, setting fire to the body and returning to Tata. When he tried to sell my computer and passport some days later in Marrakesh, a merchant notified the police. Imad Shuayb confessed everything after his arrest and was so ashamed of his crimes that he hanged himself in the prison cell in which he was being held, awaiting trial.
When the inspector reached this part of the narrative, my shoulders stiffened. I was about to say something—but again Assistant Consul Conway put her hand on my arm, letting me know that silence was the best option. Of course I knew immediately what the inspector was reading me: the official version of what went down, eliminating the nasty public embarrassment (especially in such a tourist-based economy) of the revelation that a Western woman had been abducted and raped and left to die under the Saharan sun. I could only begin to wonder if, after having had his confession beaten out of him, that dreadful young man had truly taken his own life or was conveniently “suicided” to close the case entirely. While part of me was outraged that the rape had been left out of the official statement, the other forensic part of my psyche also understood what the authorities were doing. They were giving me a way out, and one in which no possible legal charges could ever be directed at me, or an investigation demanded by the assailants’ families. The loose narrative ends were being tied up in a manner in which the case would be closed permanently.
The inspector continued on, explaining how, having been left unconscious in the desert, a Berber family rescued me, nursed me back to life, and eventually helped get me back to Casablanca. Again the thought ran through my brain: Did they actually know the name of my saviors or was this just more official-story-speak? I interrupted him at this point.
“That is what happened, monsieur. I owe my life to those people who saved me and the man who drove me up here.”
The inspector’s face twitched, as if he had been caught unawares by this revelation. That’s when I knew: they had been totally unaware of Maika and her family, of Aatif and the way I was smuggled up here behind the niqab. They had just invented the Berber part of the story as another way of explaining why I had gone missing for several weeks. So my Berber friends would not be receiving unwanted visits by the Sûreté posing all sorts of questions. They would be left alone.
Assistant Consul Conway shot me a look, telling me that I should let the inspector finish.
“I am pleased that you were helped by our citizens,” he said. “And I would just like to say—those men who attacked you, those criminals . . . they are not us.”
“Believe me, monsieur, I know that,” I said. “I know that so well.”
“So we have prepared an official statement in English, French, and Arabic, which Assistant Consul Conway has examined in all three languages to confirm they are one and the same, and which we would like you to sign . . . after, of course, you’ve had the chance to peruse them. We would appreciate it if you would pose for a photograph with me; a photo that will be released to the media to show that you are alive and well, as there has been considerable concern here and elsewhere in your disappearance. We were in contact with the hotel at which you and your husband were staying in Essaouira. All your clothes were packed up and sent north to Casablanca, where they will await you tonight at the Hôtel Mansour. It is an excellent hotel and you will be our guest tonight. When Imad Shuayb was arrested, we also recovered your passport” (which he now pushed across the table to me). “We also discovered that you had a reservation back to New York on Royal Air Maroc some weeks ago that you never used. We have contacted the airline. They have changed the flight, at no charge to you whatsoever, to tomorrow at midday. We will also arrange for complimentary transport to the airport—and anything that you want tonight at the hotel you just sign for.”
So Ben Hassan had probably called his police contact early this morning while I was still asleep, telling them he had me at his place, but to wait until I was up and ready before showing up to take me in. In the meantime the assistant consul had been contacted and everything put in motion to wrap this story up as quickly as possible and get me out of the country tomorrow.
“That’s all very thoughtful of you,” I said. “One important thing remains outstanding: Have there been any sightings of my husband, any sense whatsoever of his whereabouts?”
The inspector pursed his lips and reached for another file.
“On August second your husband checked out of the Oasis Hotel early that morning and was seen walking out of town. A local tour guide named Idriss was heading to work in his jeep and saw Monsieur Leuen heading directly into the desert. He stopped and asked Monsieur Leuen if he could offer assistance, as he was heading into a barren area without oases, and as he was wearing no hat and carrying no backpack or canteen. Your husband told the guide, ‘I’m fine,’ and kept walking into the Sahara. That was the last sighting of him.”
“And that was at what time?” I asked.
“The tour guide said it was around seven twenty.”
“But that’s impossible,” I said. “I arrived in Ouarzazate at seven and caught sight of my husband at least three times that morning.”
“Did you speak to him?” the inspector asked.
“No—he always eluded me. And the woman at the hotel told me he returned there at four o’clock and was heading to the bus depot to catch the four ten to Tata. I followed him. I saw him in front of me. I missed the bus and took the next one.”
The inspector pulled out more documents, scrutinizing them with care.
“I have here the statement from the tour guide and the woman at the hotel. Again I repeat, she said your husband checked out at seven, and the tour guide confirmed he had his conversation with him at seven twenty. It’s all here.”
“But I saw him.”
“But if you saw him,” the inspector said, “then why didn’t he answer you?”
“He was avoiding me. But that woman at the hotel . . . I remember the conversation I had with her when I came back from seeing . . .”
I stopped myself from saying anything more. Because to do so would, I sensed, begin to raise questions about my sanity, questions that I myself didn’t want to answer. I closed my eyes. There was Paul, eluding me on the streets of Ouarzazate. There was the scene at the hotel reception desk, after visiting his other wife. “You’ve just missed him,” the woman at the desk told me. And the sight of his bobbing gray hair and his tall frame in the distance as I raced to catch him before he boarded the bus. Everything else that had happened to me after that was so real. I still had plenty of physical scars from the attack. They’d found the burned body. Opening that passport in front of me, I saw that it was my own. All tangible, all real. I had lived this story. It was all verified. But those hours in Ouarzazate when Paul was everywhere and nowhere . . . surely that couldn’t have been a hallucination?
“Are you all right, Robin?” Alison Conway asked me, her hand on my shoulder.
“No,” I said.
Leaning toward me, she whispered in my ear, “I cannot give you official counsel, as that is not in my diplomatic remit. But, speaking personally, if I were you, I would sign the statement. I had one of our legal people and one of our translators look at all three versions. They all match up, and they all let you leave Morocco with the matter entirely resolved.”
So she too suspected (or, indeed, knew) that the burned body in the desert wasn’t the handiwork of the a
ccomplice who was then “suicided” while in custody.
“Give them what they want,” she continued. “Put your signature on the statement, pose for the press photograph, spend the night in the five-star hotel they’ve arranged for you, take the flight home tomorrow. They are being very smart about all this. Very conscientious. I strongly advise you to do the same.”
I shut my eyes again. Paul was there, sketching away on the balcony of our room in Essaouira, flashing me a seductive smile as I brought him a glass of wine, telling me he loved me. I blinked. Paul was gone. I blinked again. There he was dashing down that back alley in Ouarzazate, eluding me as always—but still so tangibly there. I blinked again. Nothing. A void as empty as the Sahara.
I opened my eyes. I saw the inspector staring at me with concern.
“Would you like some time to think about all this, madame?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I want to go home. Where do I sign?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
AT FOUR THAT morning I sat up in bed. I could not remember a single detail of the nightmare that snapped me into consciousness. All I felt was a dangerous, oppressive presence. Undefined. Entombing me.
But then I opened my eyes and found myself in this heavily over-upholstered hotel room. Hours earlier, upon being checked in here, I was brought upstairs to find the two suitcases that had been dispatched from Essaouira. It was a shock to see all my clothing intermingled with the garments of my vanished husband. Whoever had packed up our room had not separated his from hers. It took me just ten minutes to repack all of my clothes and lay out the items I would need until the flight tomorrow. While handling Paul’s items I didn’t feel rage or trauma. Just a profound numbness. Assistant Consul Conway—she insisted I call her Alison—had accompanied me to the hotel in the unmarked police car that the inspector had ordered after I signed the official statement and also posed for a photograph with him, showing the world “Case closed.” I had extracted one request from the police—that the photo would not be released to the press until I was en route to the States the next day. I didn’t want stares at the airport. I wanted to be home by the time it was revealed that I’d emerged safely.
“You handled that all very well back there,” Alison told me after we reached the hotel and the management offered us tea while the room was readied. “They wanted to wrap this up quickly, without fuss. They’re pleased you played ball.”
“What else was I going to do?”
“After an experience like yours . . . well, most people would be already showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I am very impressed that you didn’t break down in front of the inspector and were so contained.”
“I’ve had several weeks to sort through the worst of it. And I need you to do me a favor.”
I explained about the desert family who took me in. I told her the vague location of the oasis that they were calling home right now. I gave her the remaining forty thousand dirhams—and asked her to perform a minor miracle and get the money to them.
“I can’t promise anything, but I will try,” she said.
“I don’t want the law involved. They’re a bit wary, I sense, about anything to do with the government.”
“Berbers?”
I nodded.
“It will be an interesting challenge finding them,” she said.
“May I ask you a direct question?”
“Of course.”
“Have the police conducted a search of the desert near to where my husband was last seen?”
“Absolutely. And they’ve found nothing so far.”
By “nothing” I knew she meant: no body, no desiccated corpse, burned by the sun, fed upon by vultures.
“And that tour guide who saw him . . . he clearly identified Paul?”
“I read the report from the Ouarzazate Sûreté. He described a Caucasian male, around two meters tall—that’s six-foot-three—thin, with long gray hair and several days’ growth of beard. Does that sound like your husband?”
I shut my eyes and again saw his hair slapping the shoulders of his white shirt as he raced in front of me for the bus in Ouarzazate, my entreaties to him to stop only accelerating his pace.
“Yes, that sounds like him.”
“Of course there could have been another Caucasian male of the same age and build and hairstyle who went out hiking in the desert that day. And I did check with my colleagues at all the other Western consulates and embassies here. There was no one of that description missing.”
She chose her next words with care. “You still do maintain that you saw him on the streets of Ouarzazate, later that same day, several hours after he allegedly disappeared?”
“I saw what I saw. But what any one of us sees . . . is that ever the truth? Or is it just what we want to see?”
She considered this for a moment.
“Trust me—and I know this, because I lost my sister five years ago in a car accident in which I was the passenger—it’s when you are beyond the initial trauma that it jumps up out of nowhere and grabs you by the throat. Don’t be surprised if, now that you are out of danger, it begins to get tricky for a while.”
At four that morning the trickiness had begun. That sense of a dark force in the room with me, about to encircle me and wreak havoc. But I couldn’t pinpoint who or what it was. What I found myself doing, after getting up and pacing the room, was throwing on some clothes and heading downstairs with the suitcase containing all my husband’s clothes. I went out to the street, passing a homeless man lying near the gutter, his clothes threadbare. I put the suitcase in front of him and handed him five hundred of the thousand dirhams I’d held onto for tips and incidentals. His eyes went wide when he saw the sum of cash I pressed into his palm.
“Why me?” he asked in French.
“Why not you?”
Back in the room I ran a very hot bath and sat in it for the better part of an hour. A long soak, during which I started to cry and couldn’t stop until I was so wrung out that, after drying myself off, I forced myself back into bed with the hope that sleep might overtake me again. But I was wired and very wide awake. So I turned on my laptop and saw that Morton had answered the dispatch I’d sent to him after checking into the hotel, informing him that I was alive and would definitely be landing tomorrow (now today) in Buffalo at 8:10 p.m. I also mentioned that Paul was missing, presumed dead. Morton’s reply was all business:
Will be at the airport. Very glad you are out of harm. Re: Paul. You should know that, under NY state law, a missing person cannot be declared dead for seven years. But there are some legal things we can do to protect you. More when we meet. Best—Morton. PS—I can finally sleep now, knowing you are okay.
Trust Morton to practice ultrapragmatism at a difficult time.
The rest of the day passed in a strange blur. An unmarked police car picked me up at the hotel, as arranged, at 9:30. At the airport I was checked in and brought through a special security line by the two officers charged with getting me on the plane. A representative of the airline met us at this checkpoint and escorted us to a private lounge. The cops stayed with me until the flight was called, bringing me to the gate and ensuring that I got on the plane. They wanted to make sure that I was leaving the country.
Eight hours later I was in front of an immigration officer at Kennedy Airport in New York. I had expected to be bombarded with questions—but it seemed that my “gone missing” status hadn’t been filed against my name on the Homeland Security website (or maybe the US Consulate in Casablanca had already arranged for it to be pulled). The officer scanned my passport and asked me how long I had been out of the country. I said six, seven weeks.
“Were you only in Morocco?” he asked.
“That’s right, just Morocco.”
“Were you working?” he asked.
“Just traveling,” I said.
“That must have been quite an adventure.”
“Indeed it was.”
Three hours later I landed in Bu
ffalo. Morton was there to greet me. He gave me a paternal hug and told me I looked a lot better than he expected to find me.
Morton being Morton, he didn’t push for details. On the way to my house he told me that the Buffalo Sun Times had reprinted international press service reports about my being found alive and well in Morocco. He showed me the clipping, which featured that official photograph of me shaking the hand of Inspector al-Badisi in Casablanca and looking shell-shocked. Morton said that there had been several calls at my office for interviews from former colleagues on the Sun Times.
“I took the liberty of telling them you wanted to be left alone,” he said.
“That was the right call,” I said.
That first night I was back I found I couldn’t cope with the sight of all the detritus of my life with Paul spread around our dusty, shadowy house. Sleep evaded me. The next morning I called the manager of a downtown hotel whose accounts I helped straighten out. I asked him if he could give me a rate on one of his apartment suites for a few weeks. He came back thirty minutes later with a very reasonable price. I moved in that afternoon. I then contacted my doctor. She told me to get in to see her immediately. Dr. Hart had been my physician for a decade. A smart, no-nonsense woman in her late fifties, direct, canny, but also sympathetic. I could see her take in my face when I walked into her office. I asked if she had followed my disappearance in the press.
“Of course,” she said, “not that there was much in the way of detail, except that you and your husband had gone missing. And then I saw the report yesterday in the paper that you’d been found.”
I told Dr. Hart about the insomnia and the sense of oppressive darkness that had taken hold of me the last few nights. I came clean with her about Paul’s betrayal. I also told her about the abduction and rape. But I stopped short of revealing what I had done in response to this attack. That was a secret that I knew I couldn’t share with anybody. Not just because the Moroccan authorities had conveniently excised that denouement from the narrative, but also because a secret shared (even with the most trustworthy of friends or professionals) is no longer a secret. Even Alison Conway—who clearly knew the truth of the matter—gave me some advice, after checking me into the hotel.
The Blue Hour Page 32
