Bled Dry

by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

  “My life is in your hands, my love,” he said, his voice shaking, weak from the torture the gang had subjected him to. “I won’t leave you, I promise . . .”

  “You were just about to leave me,” she interrupted, feigning grief. “And now you say you won’t leave me! I didn’t find the briefcase. Try to remember better where it is. Maybe you left it at your new fiancée’s place.”

  He knew she was ridiculing him. He went silent, as if he were taking his final breath.

  “Say something.” She mocked him further. “Did something bad happen to you?”

  “I can’t explain now. Please forgive me . . . If you help me now, I’ll pay you back double, anything you ask. The sooner, the better . . . before they disfigure me, or kill me.”

  She could hear his scream echoing as if he were in a cavernous basement, and the call cut off suddenly. After a few minutes they called back, but she didn’t answer.

  After she hid the briefcase in a safe place in her hometown, her next step was to transform herself into a different woman before going to see Hanash. She first considered playing the role of a scared, forlorn woman—eyes teary and bloodshot, face pale, and trying to talk through her sobbing. This woman would wear any old jalabiya, cover her hair with a scarf, and rush to the detective crying, wailing, and screaming—“Help me, please! My husband was kidnapped!”—and she wouldn’t be able to explain what had happened. This woman would only be able to add that an evil gang had hunted him, kidnapped him, and then asked for something she didn’t have. But she thought that she would have difficulty keeping up this role of a grieving wife.

  Once Bushra left his office, Hanash made a couple of phone calls and was able to verify that she was telling the truth about her husband’s kidnapping and the gang who had taken him. Over the course of the following week the press devoted considerable space to what they called “the Sabliyuni affair.” Detective Hanash enlisted all his informants and waged an all-out pursuit of al-Sabliyuni in Tangier and its environs. His men killed one gang member, injured several others severely, and imprisoned dozens who were connected peripherally. But Bushra’s husband was killed by the gang members before Hanash could get his hands on him.

  In the news of al-Sabliyuni’s death, information indicating the presence of a briefcase that contained three million dollars never appeared and was completely erased from any official report. Even though this investigation was not as big as previous operations in which senior state officials were complicit, with the media being utilized as a mouthpiece to spread propaganda about how the government was “cleaning house,” Hanash tried to make the Sabliyuni affair the investigation of the year. He leaked information to the press to exaggerate its scope, and used it as a pretext to ensnare other notorious bosses.

  *

  Bushra had thought that visiting Detective Hanash was going to be an exciting adventure. Yes, it meant taking some risks, but surely all would end well. But there was no turning back the clock, and a stifling sense of remorse overcame her as she considered the fact that she had been indirectly involved in a murder. When she decided to confess her role in hiding the briefcase to Hanash, he insisted that the true source of evil was the drug traffickers, gang leaders, and so-called ‘businessmen’ who were responsible for destroying families, poisoning the youth, and tarnishing the country’s reputation. He explained that bringing these dangerous individuals to justice was a national duty that surely would be rewarded by God.

  When future historians research the events of the Grand Campaign and carefully comb through all the news reports and other analyses, they will find all sorts of explanations and motives, but they won’t find a single mention of Bushra and the briefcase.

  Despite some ups and downs in the couple of years that followed, and despite Detective Hanash’s transfer to Casablanca, Bushra’s relationship with him blossomed and never lost its intensity. Whenever the detective got a chance, he would visit her in Tangier, and in turn she would visit Casablanca and stay at his secret apartment. When she visited, he would cut himself off from the outside world to be

  with her.

  *

  It was the second night in a row that Hanash had spent with Bushra in Casablanca (although his family thought he was in Fez), and he had barely slept more than a couple of hours. So when his phone rang and awoke him, it felt like an assault on his ears. He recognized the number and knew immediately that something serious had happened.

  “Yes, sir,” he answered with the utmost respect.

  As soon as he finished the call, he put the phone down and turned to Bushra.

  “That was the head of state security himself. He’s requested that I lead the investigation of some heinous crime. . . . We’ll continue this when I return.”

  Before she could answer, his phone started ringing again.

  7

  Detective Hanash had to make a quick transition from his night with Bushra to the challenges of getting to the crime scene—the traffic, the red lights, the impassable streets that were in need of repair. To make things worse, the crime scene was on a narrow downtown alley. There wasn’t space for the police cars, ambulances, and forensics vehicles, let alone anything else. Hanash had to park his car some distance away and navigate through a dense crowd that filled the alley and surrounding streets.

  A police officer noticed him and ran toward him, gesturing forcefully to the curious bystanders to clear a path. He stopped a couple of feet away and gave the detective a fervent salute, bringing his heels together with a click that drew everyone’s attention.

  “Sir!” he said, standing stiffly in salute, before leading him to the building.

  The first thing that struck Hanash was how old the building was. It had damp, whitewashed walls. The windows looked out onto a dark alley that reeked of the acrid smell of urine, despite a sign that read “No Urinating” in coarse letters. He put his hand over his nose as he made his way inside. The alley was swarming with men, and as soon as they spotted Hanash, with his tall stature and bald head, they all straightened up and gave forceful salutes. They all knew that Hanash was a stickler for a proper salute. One of the officers rushed toward him and bowed his head in deference. He then led him toward the building’s rickety wooden door.

  “Isn’t there any light?” asked Hanash loudly.

  “No, sir. Should I get a flashlight?”

  He received no answer. Once Hanash made it into the entryway leading to the stairs it became clear that his vision just needed to adjust. A bit of light snuck in from a side window.

  The sounds of footsteps came from overhead, magnified by the wood flooring. When, with his usual confidence, he placed his foot on the first step to head upstairs, the sound made him fear that the whole building was going to fall on his head. He ascended gently, tiptoeing like a thief.

  The apartment was teeming with so many officers that Hanash could hardly get in the door. The investigative team was hard at work, and the camera’s flash was constant. The forensics unit, which had recently been reorganized, was moving around arrogantly as if they were some expert team from the show CSI. For a second he felt no one had noticed him, and wondered if his late arrival allowed the others to feel like they could run the investigation without him.

  The first thing that annoyed Hanash was the draft. Upon arriving at a crime scene, he always closed the windows, so he wouldn’t catch a cold. He stood in the doorframe as if he had the wrong address. He was astonished by the officers’ silence, and almost yelled at the lead officer.

  Inspector Hamid noticed him and, surprised, approached him like a lightning bolt, offering his apologies. He gave a firm salute to draw everyone else’s attention to Detective Hanash.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said, bowing his head with the utmost respect. “You got here quickly.”

  Normally Hanash took three days off, minimum, when he was with his mistress and claimed to be traveling.

  “I got back last night,” he said, unconcerned. “What do we have, then?”<
br />
  “A gruesome double murder. The victims are one female, one male. The male is named Said bin Ali, thirty years old, and the resident of this apartment. He worked in an electrical cable production factory in Ain Seba. The girl with him was Nezha al-Gharbi, twenty years old. According to the identity card we found in her pocket, she is a student, and lives in the Saada neighborhood.”

  “The murder weapon?” the detective asked, moving routinely to the next question.

  “We haven’t found it yet.”

  Before entering the bedroom to examine the two victims, he was struck by the sight of Officer Qazdabo, who was trembling in the corner. He went up to him and fixed his gaze on him. Qazdabo looked as though he might fall to the ground in discomfort. Hanash had prohibited him from saluting because, in his loose-fitting uniform and with his tiny stature, he looked like a comedian playing the part of a policeman.

  “I . . . I’m sick, sir,” he stammered, before Hanash could even ask. “I have a fever, a headache, and diarrhea, God help me!”

  Hanash fought back a grin. Qazdabo looked like a cartoon character. He was nicknamed Qazdabo—an unkind reference to how short he was—and he always wore tattered uniforms that he bought secondhand. They were always extremely loose over his thin, short frame. He was in his forties and had been transferred to Casablanca from his native city of Taza as part of disciplinary measures. He took up residence temporarily in a vacated office on the top floor of the police station. For three years now he’d lived in this office because he couldn’t afford to rent an apartment. He sent all his meager wages to his wife in Taza, who was raising their five children.

  As he stood in front of the detective his hands were trembling and he was sweating in his thick wool coat, a completely unnecessary garment in this pleasant weather. This coat, in and of itself, was the source of a series of jokes at the precinct. Qazdabo looked off into the distance, not saying anything.

  “I’ve told you numerous times not to wear that coat on the job,” Hanash said, looking at him severely.

  “Yes, sir . . . but I’m sick today. I was going to arrive late, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea for both of us to be absent. If I’d known you were coming, I wouldn’t have come. Sir, I’m really sick. I feel like everything is spinning. I’m barely keeping it together.”

  Under a different set of circumstances, Hanash would have found this funny. “You wore this clown jacket because you thought I wasn’t going to be here?” he asked sharply. Without giving him time to answer, he turned to enter the bedroom where the murder had taken place.

  “Detective, sir.” Qazdabo stopped him pitifully. “Can I go? I have to visit the bathroom nearly every minute.”

  Detective Hanash glared at him, but his anger subsided a bit when he examined Qazdabo’s woeful features, wilting eyelids, and fatigued posture.

  “Get out of here,” he said, pointing to the door.

  Qazdabo turned to leave, put his hands in his huge jacket pockets, and rushed down the stairs, making a racket.

  The moment Detective Hanash stepped into the bedroom a look of disgust spread across his face. What he saw surpassed anything he had expected. Blood was everywhere—on the bed, the walls, the clothes strewn about, and all over the floor. He realized some had even reached the ceiling. The two corpses were on the bed, one next to the other. The bodies had been naked, but a sheet had been placed over them. The detective withdrew the sheet and stepped back. Except for the suicide bombing scenes he had attended, where bodies and limbs were scattered everywhere, he had never seen such horror. The male’s abdomen was split open and his intestines were hanging out like those of a lamb on Eid al-Adha. Stab wounds covered every part of his body. It looked like he’d received a blow that had smashed his teeth and broken his nose. The female next to him had a perfectly intact face—she looked like she was asleep. But he couldn’t bring himself to inspect her torso for more than a couple of seconds—her breasts were almost completely detached from her body, each clinging by a thin piece of skin—and he pulled the blood-soaked sheet back up toward her head. He stepped back, speechless.

  As he looked again at the girl’s face, he froze. It was familiar to him. The girl with the disfigured corpse on the bed was the girl from Hotel Scheherazade whom he’d caught with the bank manager—he was absolutely certain. He put the sheet back over her face as he tried to hide his reaction from the others. Even in death, her face retained the vigor of its youth. His senses went numb and his lips became dry.

  He had to forget that he had previously met the victim, and make sure no one else knew. None of his men had been part of the raids this past Saturday night; that operation had been carried out by the morality police, who rarely worked in the investigative units. If the details of what had happened at the hotel came out—a senior police officer taking bribes—it would be a huge scandal that the press would run with for weeks. He knew he had to take control of this investigation with an iron fist, and he’d have to check all the details, big and small, himself, while allowing it to appear to proceed naturally without undue intervention. There must be no indication that he knew one of the victims, or that there was any link to the raid on Hotel Scheherazade. What happened there hadn’t entered police records, and there was no way that bank guy was involved in this. He was certain the two incidents were not connected.

  Detective Hanash understood why an eerie silence had settled over the room. In the face of such brutality, words seemed to lose their meaning. He shook his head in horror and left the bedroom. Hamid led him out, carving a path between the many officers milling about in confusion. He ordered a group of forensic specialists to stop working for a moment so that Hanash could cast his expert eye over the scene. The detective saw a coffee table with empty bottles on top, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. He counted under his breath as he pointed at the bottles one by one.

  “There was one other person, or more, with the two victims,” he said, with absolute certainty. “No matter how long they were partying, this is far too much for two people.”

  “You’re right, sir,” said Hamid, nodding vigorously. “There are even more empty bottles in the kitchen, and some of the neighbors heard loud noises and music until one in the morning, or later.”

  Inspector Hamid was an obedient, opportunistic employee. He was very concerned with his appearance, from top to bottom. His hair was always perfectly combed back to Detective Hanash’s satisfaction and he kept a permanently skeptical look on his face, all in an attempt to get himself noticed. He was in his forties and lived alone with his mother. He wouldn’t even consider marriage until she passed away. Hamid was Hanash’s right-hand man, and tried to memorize his every move as if there would be a test.

  “Our men are out taking statements, apartment by apartment. There is another team interrogating neighbors from this alley and the surrounding area. And another is looking for the murder weapon.”

  Hanash wasn’t interested in these mundane issues of procedure at this point. “The attorney general?” he interrupted. “Has he been notified?”

  No sooner had he asked this question than he heard the sound of voices, footsteps, and greetings coming from the entryway and the stairwell. The atmosphere changed with the arrival of the attorney general and other officials, including the head medical examiner, who only came to the scene of the crime when it was extremely serious.

  Detective Hanash hated it when the spotlight shifted off him and landed on a higher-ranked official in the room. Not to mention that he now had to kiss the attorney general’s ass and fill him in on the details. He essentially repeated exactly what Hamid had told him. When the delegation of officials returned from the bedroom their faces were drawn, and everyone was in utter shock. They crowded around Hanash as though they were waiting for him to identify the killer, or killers, in one fell swoop. He didn’t have a clue, but he had to propose something.

  “Based on the configuration of this room, there’s nothing indicating any sort of violent
struggle. The furniture is in place and there are no broken bottles. Not a drop of beer or wine has been spilled on the rug. It seems that this is the room where the two victims, and someone else, maybe more than one other, hung out for a long stretch. This is clear from the number of bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. My preliminary assessment is that the murderer, or murderers, took the two victims by surprise as they were naked on the bed.”

  “There have to be fingerprints,” said one of the officials.

  “The forensics unit will find them,” said another, with pride. “They have the latest tools and training to extract them.”

  “Right,” the attorney general interjected. “The war on terror has forced us to modernize. Now we have the best forensics lab in all of Africa.”

  A heavy man holding a flashlight and wearing what resembled a space suit turned to them. It was clear to everyone that he was the head of the forensics unit.

  “Since our lab was modernized we no longer have to seek outside help. Before that, we would have to wait more than a month to get DNA analysis confirmed from labs in Italy. Now we do these analyses locally, thank God. As you can see, the forensics experts are extremely meticulous. They find fingerprints, single hairs, and even traces of saliva. We now focus on details that were considered useless in the past, since we didn’t have the tools to analyze them.”

  Hanash noticed that the officials—some of whom he didn’t know—were whispering to one another about the horror of the crime as they shifted closer to the head of forensics. The detective wasn’t about to lose center stage to this guy. He looked over the heads of the officials and caught a glimpse of one of his officers in the apartment’s entryway.

  “Zarouq!” Hanash shouted, regaining center stage. “Who is responsible for interrogating the neighbors next door?”