The Heat of Betrayal Read online

  Fouad had warned me while we were still in the café that Simo was the wrong side of taciturn. Before we got up to leave and meet him I went over to where Mohammed was sitting. I told him that I was having to head off somewhere, and asked him to not say a word about this to anyone.

  ‘But Mira might be concerned if you don’t come back.’

  ‘You can tell Mira I had to go find my husband. She won’t tell anybody. She assured me of that. Please say that you will keep this secret.’

  I then brought out two 100-dirham notes and pressed them into his hand. His eyes grew wide.

  ‘Shukran, shukran,’ he said.

  ‘That money is for you, not your father. Do you think he’ll wonder where I’ve gone?’

  ‘I will give him the fifty dirhams you gave me. That will keep him quiet.’

  ‘I wish you well, Mohammed.’

  ‘Bless you, madame.’

  Then I hurried back to the café. Fouad escorted me through the kitchen – a small, cramped, hellishly steamy place where two men in stained and sodden white T-shirts were frying falafels and scooping hummus onto plates. They glanced up at me. Fouad favoured them with a scowl and their eyes returned to the task at hand.

  Within a moment we were in the back alley, into which the ancient Peugeot had been squeezed. A man was standing in the shadows, smoking a cigarette. Fouad introduced us and explained that Simo would be driving me to Casablanca. He then asked me for the address. I opened Paul’s notebook and showed him the spot where it had been written. He, in turn, took out a small crumpled notebook from his back pocket, pulled a pencil from behind his ear, licked the lead and transcribed it into Arabic. Handing the address to the driver he barked several instructions, then motioned with his hand for Simo to get lost for a few moments. The man walked deeper into the shadows.

  ‘I didn’t want him to see you handing over the money,’ Fouad explained. ‘I will pay him later. I chose him because, although he doesn’t say much, he’s not the sort who will try to hit on you for money. He knows that he’ll have to answer to me should anything go wrong, or if he tries anything – which he won’t.’

  I reached into my pocket and counted out 4,000 dirhams. My crazed hope was that, on arrival in Casablanca, I would find Paul at the apartment of his mistress, verify that he was all right, give him the chance to get on that midday flight with me to New York and, at worst, have the door slammed in my face, ending a marriage that was, in my mind, already finished.

  Fouad counted his way through the money. When he was satisfied that he had the complete amount he called the driver over and spoke to him in a low, firm voice, once again showing him the address in Arabic, gesticulating towards me several times, then making a point of writing out a series of numbers on another scrap of notebook – licking the lead of the pencil yet again. This page he tore along its perforated edge and handed to me.

  ‘If there is any problem, you phone me on this number. But there should be no problem whatsoever. Simo . . . he is OK.’

  Then he handed me the plastic bag.

  ‘Your husband left this behind when he showed up late this afternoon. I’m not saying he wanted you to have it, but I’d rather that you keep it safe for him.’

  ‘You still won’t tell me where your other driver dropped him?’

  ‘I cannot . . . because I gave him my word I would not.’

  ‘Can you at least tell me if I am right to be going to this address?’

  Fouad considered his response for a moment, then answered with one word:

  ‘Insha’Allah.’

  Allah willing.

  Five minutes out of Essaouira I discovered that the reading light in the back of the car was not functioning. When I asked Simo if there was a problem with it he just shrugged. Then I asked if he could pull over and fix it, as I was completely in the dark and very much wanted to see what was in the shopping bag that Fouad had given me. Just as I wanted to use the four or so hours on the road to read through Paul’s journal, even though the prospect of delving into the inner sanctum of his mind made me uneasy. Maybe the blown light was a hint that I shouldn’t even begin to pry. But the very fact that I was in this beaten-up car, fleeing our hotel in search of this lost man . . .

  ‘J’ai besoin de lire, monsieur,’ I told Simo when he reported that he could do nothing about the busted light. He responded by reaching into his pocket and tossing a disposable lighter into the back seat.

  ‘Ce n’est pas suffisant. Vous n’auriez pas une lampe-torche?’

  He shook his head and accelerated, causing the first of many belches from the exhaust pipe. I sank back into the seat, conscious of springs sticking up through the vinyl upholstery. Then I reached into the plastic bag. I felt something close to massive relief when I pulled out one of Paul’s large sketchbooks. Flicking on the lighter – its flame meagre – I opened the hard black cover and felt myself tearing up as I looked at page after page of his Essaouira line drawings. Whatever agony or fury or self-destructive rage made him rip up several of his notebooks back in our room, some sliver of self-preservation had clearly kicked in, for this was the book containing his best work by far. Over fifty drawings, so innovative and daring in his use of line, in his mingling of the abstract and the representational, in the heat and dust authenticity that Paul brought to the souk, underscored by his absolute need to draw these scenes in such an original way. At one point I had to shut the album and sit silently in the dark, absorbing the sense of loss that was careening through me like a fast-acting toxin. I looked out at the scrubby landscape, the clouded sky that blocked out all celestial light. The sheer immense stress of the past few hours, the fear and anguish of what (if anything) I would find in Casablanca . . . all of it suddenly sideswiped me. I found myself overcome by the realisation that the terrain of my entire life had changed. And the hope of a child . . .

  I began to cry. Weeping in the dark of this shabby car, being watched in the rear-view mirror by a silent man, uncomfortable with this show of emotion. He lit another cigarette. When I subsided he reached into a bag on the front seat and handed me several cubes of baklava wrapped in paper.

  ‘My wife . . . she makes these,’ he said in basic French. ‘You eat them.’

  ‘Shukran.’

  He nodded acknowledgement. Not another word passed between us until we reached Casablanca.

  I closed my eyes, hoping sleep might overtake me. It didn’t – so I snapped them open again. Then, thinking what a bad idea this was, I reached into my backpack and pulled out Paul’s journal. Holding the lighter so close to its pages I was afraid that a bump might set it all aflame, I began to go through it page by page. Most of them were taken up with quick sketches, doodles, visual improvisations on the life he was incessantly observing. Interspersed with these were jottings, musings, confessions – never more than a line or two at most. The flame from the plastic lighter threw strange, spectral shadows as I read page after page of my husband’s frequently epigrammatic confessions. The fact that they were all undated . . . that was so Paul, wasn’t it? Numbers, deadlines – he eschewed them all. There was no definitive chronology to this cavalcade of self-doubt and self-reproach and . . .

  Robin looked so shocked and disappointed when I told her, on arrival in Casa, that I wanted to run back home. I don’t blame her for being disappointed. She married a man who shouldn’t be married and who knows that his wife is far too good for such a two-faced loser like himself.

  Then, a few pages later, a sketch of me nude in our hotel bed.

  Amazing sex, as always. My ambivalence to her, to all this, ebbs away when I am deep inside her.

  I snapped my eyes shut. This is why you should never trespass into your loved one’s journal.

  Robin sometimes looks at me like I am a five-year-old who has just thrown all his toys out of the crib. Which is not far from the truth.

  Close the book now.

  She overpraised the new drawings today. I felt humbled by her kudos. Why does her reassurance about
my alleged talent make me feel so small?

  There was another fast-rendered sketch of me, standing on the balcony of our room, staring out into the great distance.

  She’ll leave me when she finds out. She’d be an idiot to stay. I will mourn her. Then I’ll turn the page. And tell myself it’s better this way. Because I don’t deserve happiness. I can’t even begin to fathom what it would mean to be responsible for a new life.

  So he knew that, by having the vasectomy in secret, he’d loaded a gun that was eventually going to go off in his face.

  I can’t ever say what I want. No, the real problem is: I can’t say what I don’t want.

  Like assuring me he wanted a child when he clearly didn’t want a child.

  This place is full of too many shadows for me. And reminders of all that promise squandered. I must get Samira back in my life. Can Romain B. H. aid my cause?

  Who is Romain B. H.? I had an answer to that question a few moments later when I came across a page with the name Romain Ben Hassan scrawled across the bottom, followed by an address also in Casablanca 4e. I searched my memory, trying to remember where I had heard that name before. Then the penny dropped. Ben Hassan had been his fellow-artist friend during Paul’s Casablanca year; French-Moroccan, and something of a louche character who kept Paul endlessly amused and frequently drunk. Luck was on my side: there was a phone number below the address. He lived in the same district of Casablanca as Samira. Was there some sort of connection between them? Didn’t Paul tell me that he had fallen out of contact with Ben Hassan when his name came up a few weeks ago? One more lie to join all the other falsehoods he had been feeding me.

  Something still puzzled me. Why did Paul take his last remaining sketchbook, but vanish without his passport or any clothes or personal effects whatsoever? The fact that he left without even his all-crucial pencils and charcoals unnerved me. Paul never went anywhere without a notebook and his beloved French pencils, which he meticulously curated from several key art-supply stores in Manhattan. The trauma of all that self-harm . . . perhaps the fact that he was concussed or, at the very least, disorientated after slamming his head against the wall – was that the reason he left the hotel carrying nothing but the sketchbook? Or did he already have clothes and toiletries at his girlfriend’s house? How would he have gotten them there? Unless he gave her a suitcase to bring back to Casablanca when they were having their assignations in Buffalo, and he was just looking for an excuse to stalk out of the marriage, which I certainly gave him today.

  Will you listen to yourself, engaging in crazed speculation . . .

  But how otherwise could he have gotten involved with this woman? In the three years we’d been together he’d never travelled anywhere without me bar three quick two-day trips to his gallery in New York. We’d spent a few days in Montreal when he was in a group show there at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Beyond that we’d never been outside the country either alone or together. So he couldn’t have met his mistress anywhere but Buffalo. Which must mean that he got to know her at the university where he taught. The photograph in the journal showed that she was only in her early twenties. Did he get the vasectomy to ensure that she didn’t get pregnant as well?

  Stop, stop, stop. This is getting you nowhere.

  But the problem with discovering a lie – especially when you cannot yet confront the liar – is that it leads into even greater hypothetical scenarios.

  I lied earlier when I said that Simo didn’t address another word to me all the way to Casablanca. Actually he said one word:

  ‘Police.’

  Up ahead there was a roadblock and two cops were standing in the middle of the road, one of them using a powerful flashlight to indicate that we should pull over. Oh God, they’ve found out somehow that I’ve fled the hotel and am on the run. I’m going to be brought back to Essaouira and made to face Inspector Moufad whose suspicions about me have trebled since I disobeyed his order and fled town. Now he’s going to have someone guarding my door until he gets a judge to sign an order allowing him to relieve me of my passport. I am definitely going to be his prime suspect. And he will argue in court that only a guilty person would have tried to run.

  But another part of me thought that Mira wouldn’t have betrayed me like that. Because she would simultaneously land herself in immense trouble. And also because she was, I could tell, someone who believed in keeping her word.

  Still, here we were, being pulled over. I could see Simo’s lips tighten. He sucked hard on his cigarette and his back and shoulders noticeably stiffened. The beam from the powerful police flashlight filled the windshield of the car, semi-blinding both of us and forcing Simo to slow right down.

  He pulled up in front of the parked police vehicle, stubbing out the cigarette in the brimming dashboard ashtray. The window was already down and I could hear the static of a police radio nearby. As the flashlight beamed around the car I could see two youngish policemen in ill-fitting uniforms, the lateness of this night shift in the middle of nowhere augmented by their immediate curiosity on discovering a woman – a Western woman – in the back seat. There was a lot of talk in Arabic and Simo handed over his identity papers and driver’s licence. One of the officers disappeared for a long five minutes, then returned and talked at length with his colleague. This officer turned his attention to me, saying: ‘Vos papiers, madame.’ I had my passport ready and handed it over. The two cops spent far too long studying it, going through it page by page. There was so much blank space on those pages, evidence of how little I knew of the world outside of my own country. I saw them reach the page on which my Moroccan entry visa had been stamped. They studied this intently and talked among themselves. Then the more senior of the two asked me if I spoke French. I nodded affirmation. He asked:

  ‘The driver says you hired him as a taxi to take you to Casablanca. Is this true?’

  ‘Yes, I have paid him to do exactly that.’

  ‘Why are you travelling in the middle of the night?’

  I had already reasoned that this was a question they just might ask. I had an answer already prepared.

  ‘My husband is arriving in Casablanca off an early flight tomorrow – and I am meeting him at the airport.’

  They then disappeared with my passport. I watched as they walked over to their vehicle, lighting up cigarettes, passing my travel document back and forth. Meanwhile Simo had lit up again – and I could see that he was sweating over the outcome of their deliberations as much as I was. I knew if one of them reached for a phone – or the handset attached to the crackling police radio in their car – to verify my identity I would be screwed. A good five minutes passed. The older of the cops opened the door of their vehicle. Here it comes – the beginning of the end. But then he pulled out a bottle of water. More talk between them. Then he approached us and knocked on the back window. I rolled it down again.

  ‘Donc, madame . . .’

  He handed me back my passport.

  ‘Bon voyage à Casa . . .’

  With a nod to Simo, he saluted us as we drove off into the night.

  Two minutes after we’d passed the roadblock Simo let out a pronounced sigh. Did he sense that I was on the run? The stress of those past few minutes hit me sideways. So too the lateness of the hour, the immense strain of the day. Stretching myself along the back seat, again manipulating my body so as to avoid the protruding springs, I passed out. Though the lack of suspension in the car, and the roughness of the road, jolted me awake several times, my exhaustion was such that I vanished instantly again into the underworld. Until there was a massive lurch, followed by the loud braying of an animal and the even louder braying of a car horn. We were on a city street, tall apartment blocks defining the horizon, no traffic except a cart with a donkey parked right in front of us. A man in a djellaba was attempting to move the donkey, but the animal was refusing to budge and was blocking the road. Its driver was using a whip to get it to move, but the beast was obstinate even in the face of pain. Simo – who co
uld not get around the donkey and cart, given the narrowness of the street – was blasting his horn. Jerked back into consciousness, but still foggy, I glanced at my watch. It was just a few minutes before six. Light was beginning to claw back the night sky. It took me a moment to work out that we were in Casablanca.

  ‘Arrêtez, s’il vous plait,’ I told Simo, indicating that honking the horn was doing no good. His reply was to point to a building across the street, a semi-crumbling apartment block, art deco in style, with an all-purpose neighbourhood shop on the ground floor that was already open. Directly opposite was a café with a terrace. I also took in an optician’s and a boutique displaying white and maroon leather jackets in its window, along with stonewashed jeans and paisley silk shirts. A cavalcade of expensive bad taste, playing visual games with me after a night of brief, fitful sleep in the back seat of a rusted car. The donkey-cart driver finally got his beast moving, clearing the road. Simo pulled the car over, pointing again to the building across the way.

  ‘Votre adresse,’ he said, motioning for me to leave. I reached into my pocket and dug out a 100-dirham note. When I proffered it to him he just shrugged and accepted it with a fast nod. As I slid off the back seat, he uttered two final words:

  ‘Bonne chance.’

  When I and my backpack were on the street and the car door shut, the engine belched one last time before disappearing into the already congealing traffic. I checked my watch again and wondered if I could go up to Samira’s apartment now, bang on the door and confront her, force my husband to leave her bed and come with me.

  But all my instincts told me to walk away now. Cut my losses. Accept the sad finality of it all. Try not to save him – as much as I still wanted to. However frightened and worried I was that my husband was heading towards some point of no return.

  I knew I was negotiating with myself, talking myself into some sort of compromised position from which nothing good would come.

  Go to the café. Order a coffee. Ask them to call you a cab. Immediately. Get to the airport. Get on the plane. Hit the portal marked: ‘I’m out of here . . . permanently.’