The Heat of Betrayal (25 page)

I stood up.

‘Thank you for wasting several valuable minutes of my time.'

The man looked shocked at this rebuff.

‘There's no need to talk to me that way.'

‘You never saw him, did you? You were just hoping to take advantage of a woman in distress.'

‘Are you always so aggressive?'

‘Are you always so oily?'

‘Now I know why your husband went missing.'

He said this with a smirk on his face, then added something in Arabic to the men who were seated nearby, watching this scene with amusement. That's when I lost it.

‘What the fuck did you say?' I hissed.

He was taken aback by my use of that expletive.

‘
Madame
has an ugly way with words.'

‘Only when being hustled by a little man with a small penis.'

Now he looked as if I had kicked him directly in the crotch.

‘Go on, translate what I just said to your friends,' I said, hurrying off down the street, trying to contain my considerable fury.

But then I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks.

There, on the far side of the street, was my husband.

He was wearing the same white shirt and shorts he'd left the hotel room in two days ago. He was seriously unshaven, his long grey hair askew across his head. Even in the white light of the Saharan morning I could see that he was exhausted, lost.

‘Paul! Paul!' I yelled. But as soon as those words were out of my mouth a vast truck – the length of a city block – came rattling down the Avenue Mohamed V. Paul didn't seem to hear my cries, or maybe they were drowned out by the approaching lorry. Not thinking, I tried to dash across the street, but was thrown backwards by the deafening blast of the truck's horn, the driver gesticulating wildly. I found myself now almost in the path of a Renault van coming in the opposite direction. The driver slammed on the brakes and started shouting things at me through his rolled-down window, while men in the nearby cafés stood up to watch the spectacle, caused by a deranged American woman trying to get to her missing husband who now stood just feet away.

When the lorry pulled away fifteen seconds later, I prepared to rush over and take my husband in my arms and assure him that, despite everything, I still loved him; that we would be out of this craziness and in Paris tonight.

But when the lorry pulled away . . .

Paul was no longer there.

It took me a dazed moment to register this fact. He had vanished.

I hurried across to where I'd seen him standing. I looked north. I looked south. I ran into the little patisserie directly in front of which he had been momentarily rooted. There were only two people in the shop, along with the baker behind the counter.

‘Anyone seen an American?' I shouted. ‘Very tall, long grey hair?'

They all looked startled by my outburst. When the baker shook his head I ran back into the street, scanning all corners of the immediate horizon, certain he was there somewhere. There were two cafés nearby and I charged up the street towards them. No Paul. A fast trot back to the exact place I'd seen him, thinking maybe there was a rear laneway directly behind this spot into which he had disappeared. No laneway. No Paul. Up the street I hurried, turning left into the first side street I could find. It was open and spacious, with blocks of modern apartments on either side. No Paul. And no shops or restaurants or cafés into which he could have ducked. Back to the Avenue Mohamed V, now getting increasingly stricken by all this running about in one-hundred-degree heat. No Paul. Again I stood in the spot where I'd seen him less than three minutes ago, beyond perplexed as to how I could have lost him moments after finding him.

I still had the half-litre of water in hand. Standing under the shade of the patisserie's awning I leaned against the wall and downed it in moments, wooziness overtaking me. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. Paul!

But no, it was the baker, who'd come out with a small folding stool, a pastry and a bottle of lemonade. He insisted on helping me onto the stool. After ensuring that I was eating and getting some necessary sugar into my bloodstream, he went back inside and returned with a linen cloth soaked in cold water. He put this around my neck – evidently a fast desert remedy for anyone suffering from dehydration. It worked. I felt a bit better within a few minutes. Refusing my offer of money he asked in French again if I was certain that I was all right; that he could get one of his assistants to help me back to my hotel. I thanked him repeatedly, telling him how truly touched I was by his kindness.

‘I wish you luck,
madame
.'

Could he too read the despair in my eyes?

I stood up, testing my legs. Their present status was somewhere between rubbery and resilient. I headed out across the boulevard, intending to go back to the hotel and see if Paul had returned in my absence, and suddenly cursing myself for forgetting to tell the woman at reception not to mention that I'd been looking for him. But as I made it to the other side of the Avenue Mohamed V and cut down the same narrow laneway where I saw the boy milking the goat, a figure maybe fifteen feet in front of me veered to the right, taking an even narrower by-path. The man's height and free-flowing grey hair left me in no doubt that it was Paul. When I shouted his name he seemed oblivious to my voice. I started to sprint, determined to catch up with him. But when I reached the laneway – a tiny passage, no more than four feet wide – no Paul. There were no immediate doorways into which he could have disappeared. Even when, after around a hundred feet, I reached an archway, all I saw inside were two elderly men brewing tea on a little gas stove. Again I showed the passport photo. Their reaction was bemusement. I returned to the lane – so narrow and confined – trying to figure into what nook he could have vanished. Or did he clear out of this byway further on? I hurried to the end of the lane, only to discover it was a dead end. The wall had some rusted barbed wire on it, which made the idea of getting over it just a little daunting. When I touched it I discovered that it had the density and grip of damp chalk. There was no way whatsoever that even a particularly adept cat could have scaled that wall.

I shut my eyes, wanting to be anywhere but here and also knowing that I had to get out of this blind alley now. So back I went, retracing my steps until I found the main alleyway again, glancing frantically everywhere as I made my way back to the hotel.

The woman who'd greeted me earlier was at the front desk.

‘No luck?' she asked.

I shook my head.

‘Maybe he'll come back soon. If you want to go upstairs . . .'

‘I would like that.'

‘Housekeeping hasn't been in to clean the room yet.'

‘I'm sure it will be fine. Just one small request – when my husband does come back, please don't tell him I'm upstairs. He's in a delicate place and might run off if he finds out I'm here. My hope is that, when he does come upstairs, I will be able to talk him into leaving this afternoon.'

‘I have good news on that front. There are still seven seats open on the Paris flight. They are expensive, being last-minute – five thousand two hundred dirhams apiece. Still, if you want them you should let me know no later than one o'clock.
D'accord?
'

‘
D'accord
.'

The room was air conditioned. And reasonably spacious, though given the narrowness of these back streets its balcony only afforded a view of a wall some ten feet away. But was what immediately distressing was the chaotic state of the place. Twisted sheets with streaked bloodstains on the pillows – was his head wound still bleeding? Crumpled paper everywhere. An ashtray brimming with cigarette butts (he gave up nicotine around the same time we got together). The remnants of two bottles of wine. And in the bathroom – no, this was too grim – an unflushed toilet.

I pulled the cistern chain. I picked up the house phone and rang downstairs, asking if the maid could be sent up now. I then returned and dumped the contents of the ashtray into the toilet and flushed it all away. I found a box of matches and lit two of them, walking between the bathroom and the bedroom in an attempt to mask the faecal smell and the lingering aroma of sweaty sheets which permeated these two rooms. I emptied the remnants of the wine bottles. I began to uncrumple the many pieces of paper that had been balled up and tossed everywhere. Tortured line drawings of a lone man in an empty space that seemed to be a desert. The drawings were half-finished. In each one of them it was evident that Paul was having trouble finishing the figure's face; a figure so tall that he seemed to be towering over a sand dune. But this self-portraiture was underscored by a face that had turned grotesque. Drawing after drawing showed this representation of Paul with his face half-melting away, or being scorched beyond recognition by the sun. Amidst these discarded, unhinged sketches, there were several half-started letters.
My love . . . Dearest Robin . . . You have married a catastrophe . . .
Most chillingly, there were two notes, already partially burnt, with the same word repeated on both scraps of paper:

Finished
.

The second of these notes unnerved me – because the word appeared to have been scratched on the page with blood.

The maid knocked on the door. I told her to give me a minute and quickly finished dumping all the paper into a bin, pulling off the bloodied pillowcase, gathering up the soiled towels so she wouldn't be exposed to such extremity. Yet again I was cleaning up after my husband – and even slipped the very young cheery maid 30 dirhams, apologising for the state of the room.

‘
Mon mari est bordélique
,' I told her.
My husband is all over the place.

The maid seemed nonplussed by the state of things.

‘I've seen worse,' she said.

She told me to come back in a half-hour: ‘Everything will be all fine again.' Would that a magic wand could be waved.

All I could think of now was that one word –
finished
– interspersed with those wildly destructive self-portraits. And my fear that unless rescued . . .

No, don't enter that terrain. He's still here in Ouarzazate. It's only a matter of time before he shows up back at the hotel. I glanced at my watch. It was just a little after nine a.m. As long as he returned within four hours we could secure those seats on the Paris flight and be out of all this.

But first . . . I went down to the lobby. The woman behind the desk asked if she could get me anything. She also told me her name was Yasmina. I suddenly needed to confide in someone – not about the grubbier aspects of the story, but about the fact that my husband had suffered a breakdown, had disappeared from our hotel in Essaouira and, through the wonders of the Internet, I had traced him here.

‘Anything you can do to help me find him – or, at the very least, hold him here and get us on that plane to Paris . . .'

‘I don't have a pair of handcuffs,' she said with a half-smile. ‘But I do have a man who runs things here at night. His name is Yusuf, and he usually sleeps until eleven a.m. But if you would agree to give him, say, three hundred dirhams, I think he wouldn't object to me ringing him now and getting him out of bed to search Ouarzazate for your husband. He knows every corner of this town. He knows everybody here. If he can't find him then he is lost to the sand.'

I handed over the 300 dirhams, thinking this was a small price to pay for someone who might be able to root out Paul.

The maid came downstairs to tell me that the room was clean, and that she had lit a jasmine incense stick to ‘purify' the place. She actually used that word. Again I thanked her and Yasmina for their benevolence.

‘If you leave your clothes outside the door we'll have them washed and dried in less than two hours.'

I felt absurdly tired – the short night, the adjustment to the ferocious Saharan heat, the fruitless hundred-yard dashes all morning in search of Paul . . . all I could think of now was a cool shower and then a spell in clean sheets. I headed back upstairs. Once inside I stripped everything off and dropped it outside the door. Then I stood in the shower for a good ten minutes. Before climbing into the freshly laundered bed, I called downstairs and asked Yasmina to give me a wake-up call at one o'clock . . . unless Paul arrived before then.

I fell asleep instantly. Then, out of nowhere, the phone rang. The little alarm clock on the bedside table glowed in the shuttered room: 13:02. And here I was, alone. No sign of Paul. I reached for the phone.

‘Your wake-up call,
madame
,' Yasmina intoned.

‘And my husband?'

‘No sighting of him so far. But Yusuf is still out looking, and he is phoning in regularly. Alas, not a trace.'

‘I'll be down in a few minutes. Might you be able to call me a taxi?'

‘But the Paris flight isn't until five o'clock.'

‘I'm not going to Paris. I'm going to . . .'

Reaching over to a pile of paper I'd dug out of my pocket before tossing my dirty clothes outside the door, I found the scrap on which Ben Hassan had written Faiza's address. I read the details into the phone. Yasmina told me that it was a five-minute drive – and that my clean clothes were now on the way upstairs with the maid.

A quarter of an hour later I was in a taxi headed to an apartment complex not far from the entrance to the Atlas Film Studios. The complex was semi-modern, semi-brutalist in a 1970s reinforced-concrete style. There were three separate blocks, all no more than seven or eight floors tall. I asked the driver to drop me in front of Block B. I paid him and headed up four concrete flights of stairs to Apartment 402. I took a long steadying breath before pressing the doorbell, expecting either no answer or an angry woman refusing to see me and telling me to go away and never come back.

But on the third ring the door opened. There stood a woman who was surprisingly tall and stylish, albeit wildly thin, with a face once beautiful, now cracked and leathery. She had a lit cigarette in one hand, a glass of pink wine in the other. When she spoke her voice sounded nicotine cured.