Ten

ICHARD LIT A CIGARETTE AND COLLAPSED ON HIS sofa. He was already exhausted and dying for the charade of a weekend to be over. It was a total failure. Things carried on, but there was a feeling of deceit and unease hanging over everything. The old man in the garage, the gang waiting by the gates, and the muttering, superstitious staff suddenly turning against him. David was the bringer of jinxes and bad luck, and Richard’s sympathy for him was diminishing by the hour. Paid? He would now have to have a mad scene with David about this. The doctor would throw a fit; Richard would play devil’s advocate while actually believing the advocacy. “Pay him,” he would say, “and make him go away.” And when David was actually in the room half an hour later, that was exactly what he said.

“Never,” David insisted, shaking his head like a pissed-off schoolboy. “You don’t pay someone because of an accident.”

Richard made sure the doors were closed and he also made sure Hamid kept everyone else away. David was sweating again, and he adamantly refused to put on a costume.

“I’m not putting on a costume until we have this sorted.”

“Fair enough. Let’s sort it, then.”

“I’m not paying him.”

“Did you meet him?”

David shook his head.

“You should meet him. He’s a grieving father, for God’s sake. I called Benihadd. He says it’s the custom here. You don’t have to do it, but if you don’t, it could make things so much more awkward.”

David looked at him coldly. So it was a setup, he thought wildly. It felt to him that moving walls were closing in on him, squeezing him tighter and tighter. The Arabs just wanted money out of you. It was a squeeze. Their grief and annoyance were always exaggerated.

“I don’t even know how much he wants,” Richard admitted, walking around the room in his slippers. “It might just be a thousand euros or something.”

“Or a fuck of a lot more.”

“We could just ask him, couldn’t we?”

“It’s blackmail,” David said. “It’s blackmail pure and simple.”

Richard was gentle with him, because he agreed with it. But so what if it was? So what if it was blackmail? What was the word for blackmail in their language—did they even have one?

“You seem very equanimous about it,” David remarked, his face suddenly twitching. “What if it was a thousand euros? It’s not nothing. Anyway, it’s the principle of the thing, plus a thousand euros.”

“If it was a thousand, it wouldn’t be very much.”

“What are they going to do otherwise?” David sneered. “Lynch me? They do have an army here, don’t they?”

“I wasn’t thinking about them lynching you. I was thinking about them not going away.”

“Oh, your precious weekend, of course! We mustn’t forget that. So we’ll have a nice weekend in the country while they screw me out of a thousand euros?”

“I think it’s better than the alternative, don’t you?”

The heat between them had quickly risen and Richard felt his face go hot and red. David looked like a plump, sullen toad on his leather chair, his legs wide apart, his Thomas Pink shirt wrecked by the heat and perspiration. He stared around him with an alert, knowing desperation. Squeezed, he was being squeezed, and there was no one to defend him but himself. He hated the way white people gave in to blackmail in places like this. The Muslims had the upper hand and they used it mercilessly, but the cowardly whites beaten down by decades of guilt and political correctness couldn’t admit how ruthlessly they were being dealt with. What did they think, that villagers in the Sahara living in shit thought like themselves? It beggared belief.

There was deep inside David a core of the officer class, the colonial officer class to which his grandfathers on both sides had belonged. There were many more men like him than one assumed, largely because they were so careful to conceal their opinions in moments of stress. But when he felt threatened, he lost his reserve and his disguise. He became supercilious and defiant, and he relished the breaking of the contemporary taboos, which in any case had never seemed to him convincing. He thought political correctness was an invention of spineless Americans wallowing in their racial hellhole. It was just that the British had adopted it with an even sillier intensity. It was guilt for its own sake, and it changed nothing. And now Richard.

He sat back with seething sarcasm.

“And what are the alternatives, Dicky? Do they practice castration out here? Or do the police come and screw you as well? Have we thought of contacting the consulate in Casablanca? What about your contacts in the Ministry of the Interior?”

“My contacts? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. The consulate won’t help you. They think of this place as the far side of the moon. We do want to cut down on the red tape. You could be far worse off going that route.”

David looked at his nails, as people do when they are on the passive offensive. “I could take that risk. You see, you feel guilty and threatened because you live here. I feel nothing of the sort. I don’t owe Moroccans anything. I’m not French.”

“David, I dare say you aren’t really thinking about your own interests. Or Jo’s. If we call the consulate, there would have to be a thorough, I mean thorough, look at this whole thing. It would be under the microscope. I don’t think you’d want that.”

“I …”

“No, no, David, I don’t think you would.”

Richard went to the drinks cabinet and snapped it open angrily. Give the toad a stiff drink and force him round. He had a few ancestors in the East India Company as well. Most of them were into watercolors, archaeology, and Eastern religion. It didn’t necessarily make you into a hard-ass.

He didn’t bother asking what David wanted. He just made up a hugely alcoholic gin and tonic, no ice. He rattled it about to mix it and controlled the outburst of rage that was fast approaching. Suddenly he remembered an incident from school thirty-five years earlier. It was a funny incident, but it seemed less funny now. One Parents’ Day at Ardingly College, one of the boys started throwing mice off a rooftop at the parents and masters assembled below. Each mouse was equipped with a little parachute decorated with a swastika. Naturally, the parachutes didn’t work. The mice hurtled to their deaths and were squashed against the flagstones with the swastika parachutes draped over them. The rumor was, it was David Henniger. He was caned for it, wasn’t he? Richard tried to remember. But was David announcing his love of swastikas or—much more likely—vilifying the masters and parents as swastika types? Richard turned and offered the toad his booze.

The toad’s greedy eyes mellowed at once.

“Cheers, guv’nor,” he growled and grabbed the glass gratefully. He took a swig straightaway.

Richard walked to the windows. There was a puzzle before them. How would they unlock it? It was a puzzle of diplomacy, of tact. He had made his point about David’s not wanting a real investigation. So he was hiding something. The father of Driss could not know that, however. Or did he know it? “The men of the desert know everything,” Hamid said once, like a quote out of Lawrence of Arabia. But they didn’t, really. They were just efficient pessimists, and therefore astute readers of human nature. They always assumed the worst, and that made them correct nine times out of ten. Their pessimism, however, was not like David’s. David was someone who believed that the past was superior to the present, and that was a different sort of pessimist. It was not the entire past that was superior, of course; it was mostly just the British nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The Moroccans, on the other hand, believed as Hamid did when he quoted the famous proverb “The past is gone, what is hoped for is absent and there is only the hour in which you are.” Richard sat down next to him and clacked his glass.

“Sláinte,” he murmured, offering the Celtic toast.

“Bums up.”

They drank morosely. Candles were being lit one by one in the grounds of the ksour, like a sky coming alight at night. David looked at his watch. He was thinking about his wife.

“I think,” Richard said more conspiratorially, “that we should go down and talk to the old crow. Perhaps we can work something out. I’ve been here for a while, let me tell you, and that’s how one works things out here. No rages and fits. No self-righteous finger wagging. It doesn’t work. It’s always best to listen to what they want. Usually they just want something and they’ll tell you. When you give it to them, you can forget everything.”

David continued drinking with surly swigs.

“Once they sense how weak we are, they’ll go for broke. Since they’ve got nothing.”

“It doesn’t always work like that.”

“I’m glad you’ve agreed, then,” Richard concluded tersely. “We might be both pleasantly surprised.”

“Pleasantly?” David said as he tipped his glass empty.

Richard wanted to berate him, to get it off his chest. If he had been honest all along, they could have called the consulate and left it at that. But the arrogant shit had lied and kept something to himself, and consequently Abdellah, the mourning father, had the upper hand. One is the author of one’s own misfortunes, he wanted to say loudly. But David wouldn’t listen.

“I mean,” Richard corrected himself, “that it might not be as bad as we think.”

“I know when I’m being robbed,” David thought.

“You’re not being robbed,” Richard would have replied. “You’re being spared.”

David stared at the ice cube at the bottom of his glass. He knew it was his fault and he kept his silence. If only he could be transported back to Putney by a devious machine of the future, with a single flick of a switch.

THEY WENT DOWN INTO THE PARTY TOGETHER. DANCING had broken out with horrifying sincerity in the library. Richard had given orders about this, but the French contingent was drunk and they didn’t see why not. They had some Joe Dassin on the turntable and were doing the twist to “Bip-Bip.” Half the guests were in costume, sashed and hatted, and the gin fizz at the outside bar had run dry. Champagne and orange juice was being mustered, and the small triangular mint sandwiches over which he and Dally had pored for a day were making their appearance alongside bowls of beet leaf salad. The fire-eaters from Taza had arrived and were sitting glumly by themselves with their apparatus, waiting for instructions. Richard went up to them and shook their hands with the smattering of Berber words he had learned. They bowed and touched their chests. The outdoor sofas that night were draped with goatskins and piled with sequined cushions, and large monochrome tribal carpets connected them. David walked over their geometrical eyes carefully, as if squishing them underfoot. He hoped it was taboo, that the jinns would get pissed off. He hated all this ethnic pretense and affectation. One could treat people decently without aping them, without rolling out their carpets everywhere. He himself treated all races at St. Ann’s, and the Hippocratic oath made multiculturalism come alive, for once. But there were no grounds for aesthetic surrender. When we saw western knickknacks in their houses, we laughed at them, didn’t we? Dismal kitsch, we said to ourselves. This was no different.

Yet Richard seemed at ease with it. He was a bit of an orientalist snob, obviously, even if you conceded that most of it came from his insufferable boyfriend, who, they said, liked the servants on the side. But then gays always came to North Africa. It was an Edwardian tradition. David’s own grandfather Edwin had done so, to great scandal. Had they all followed Oscar Wilde to Algiers? “Because they could,” he thought. “Because they had the power.” The braziers licked against dark air, which somehow was not at all dark. A boy staggered past with a crate of ice piled with apricots, with stiff leaves still attached to the fruit. One always looked up, searching for the moon.

As they walked side by side, David wondered if Richard despised him, because it certainly seemed that way. He was used to it. People nearly always thought David was something he wasn’t. A man driven by rage and curmudgeon emotion. But then England was now a country dominated, he felt, by childish propaganda and feel-good campaigns designed to facilitate a harmony that never arrived in quite the form that the engineers hoped. There was little room for people who just thought what they thought, and said so, even if what they thought could not be summarized in slogans or even in books. Many of his colleagues were Muslims. Internally, his dialogue with them was comical and rich and largely tolerant. It was not murderous except when he felt them siding with their ummah after an outrage committed by their own, for a bomb on a train did not make him any closer to them, but he saw no reason to feel apologetic for that and they did not reproach him. There was decency between them of a sort. A decency that was mutually enjoyable on odd occasions, as when he congratulated Dr. Mutaba on a perfectly performed ear operation on one of his old ladies. As for his own image as the roly-poly Tory with his boozy red nose, it was a stock figure to which he was not attached and, moreover, one was in good company and it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t bad to have a streak of the late Evelyn Waugh in one’s veins. It was a facade, a diversion, and an excuse for others not to look closer. No human being is that simple or that repulsive. A man sets himself up as a cartoon, but it is always for a reason that will become apparent down the road. As he walked through the heat, he felt himself distancing himself from what might happen to him shortly. He would now be free to drink himself to death, at least. His image as a curmudgeon might actually be useful if the Arabs got unpleasant, and, besides, it was just what liberals liked to think about others. Dogmatic as always. But then liberals never understood anything about anything deep down, because they didn’t really understand cruelty and power except through being in opposition to them. Their body language revealed them. It was easy to oppose those things when you yourself didn’t have to use them. But when you did …, the tables turned with the speed of a knife being tossed into the air, and being disgusted and opposed and indignant didn’t cut it anymore. Any fool could feel those things.

They weren’t wise enough, he thought smugly as they sweated between the restored houses alone with the sound of their sandals crunching white-hot dirt. They thought everything in the world was like them, driven by ideas. How stupid can you get? Power in the racial sense was merely how many of you there are. That was simple enough, no? Everyone on earth seemed to understand that except white liberals. It wasn’t a simple or coarse rejection of others. Because he didn’t hate others; he was simply indifferent to them or regarded them as rivals. There was a vast difference between those two emotions. And they were rivals. Human beings are always rivals. He remembered a comment made by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes about Hispanic illegal immigration into the United States. It was, the great man had observed mildly and approvingly, “chromosomatic imperialism.” So there you had it in black and white.

He patted the cold sweat on his face as they walked outside. He hated the heat. He hated the sand in the air, the smell of earth and cooking fat. He hated the fucking turbans they wore at night.

Richard turned to him. “This won’t take a minute. We’ll see the fire-eaters from Taza later on. They are really alarming.”

“Oh, great.”

They went past an open space with people dancing. David watched them as if he were deaf, as if the music didn’t exist, which made it a horrible sight. People jigging about like epileptics. He loved only the smell of the expensive perfume on the women’s bodies, sweated off and floating free. Why hadn’t they gone to Rome instead? This very moment, they could be sitting down at Ristorante 59 on Via Angelo Brunetti and ordering a nice cold bottle of Greco di Tufa. What a mistake he had made in coming here. But he had made it for Jo, and he was sure it would “mend her,” as he so often put it to himself. Everyone can be a fool.

She needed a break, a real break. She hadn’t written anything in years. She was bitterly unhappy, and maybe it was mostly because of him, but there it was—one should never deviate from what one really likes. The whole idea of “exploring” as an earnest moral project is pitifully ridiculous, and it always leads to failure, if not acute suffering. What a fool he’d been. There was no need to travel at all, really, except to go somewhere more beautiful, which for David meant an Italian or a French city with a better way of life than London or New York. Places with better food, calmer dynamics, better architecture. You went there and recharged your batteries. You drank and ate unreasonably, with no thought to what you would look like next week with fatter love handles, and that was good. Life was better for a while, so you got your money’s worth. Most of the rest of the world, on the other hand, was just hassle. Perhaps he just didn’t understand it.

“I admit all that,” he thought, looking at his dusted shoes, which no longer responded to polish. “So I’m not exactly a chauvinist, am I? I’m a perfectionist. I just think some Muslims treat their people like donkeys. I’m sorry but they do. They manifestly do treat their people like donkeys. It’s not our fault, never was. It’s their right if they want to.”

BY THE GATES, THE TOYOTA STOOD IN SEMIDARKNESS, ITS back hatch open, and around it, a few villagers stood as if waiting for some dramatic relief to the tedium of the day, which was just like the tedium of every other day. They listened to the seventies disco music coming from inside the ksour with their usual indifference, no longer bothering to imagine that anything decadent was going on. They were more interested in the solitary policeman lounging on the wall and eating a sandwich and in the prospect of the swaddled body of Driss appearing through the gate. The sun had dropped out of sight behind the distant horizons, and the air above the sunken springs had turned gray and moist. The dragonflies had quieted down. Among the ruined houses along the Tafnet road, the wildflowers stood unwilted in morose bunches, their heads made of deep gold petals that broke the dark. The men smoked their long clay pipes, holding the bowls in their left hand, and they had nothing to say. Gossip had exhausted itself.

As Richard and David came to the garage, the men from Tafal’aalt were there drinking mint tea and squatting at the base of the wall. They looked up with a soft, withdrawn curiosity. It was Richard who was nervous, for he felt nervous around Moroccans when Hamid could not be found immediately. And now Hamid was not around, drawn elsewhere, no doubt, by his innumerable duties. Richard therefore hesitated at the door of the garage. He sensed at once that the men from Tafal’aalt were unlike anyone he had encountered in this country. They were bone-dry and minimal in some way, like pieces of driftwood that have been whittled down to their essential shapes. They moved very slowly but with that purposefulness that makes even humble people seem formidable and relentless and aristocratic. Their poverty only accentuated this dangerous, fluid nobility. The intense darkness of their skin was like something acquired by effort, like carbuncles or scars. They talked in a subdued, gracious manner, as if nothing was worth shouting for or could be obtained in this way anyway. One couldn’t say what they were ever thinking, or calculating, because it was possible that they did neither. They were moldy and dusty, arthritic and dried out, and when they spoke, the eyes suddenly came alive, their hands moved like paddles flapping up and down, and one didn’t know what to think about them.

“Where is the father?” he said to them in his blunt, rusting Arabic, and they made a gesture that said “Where do you think? Inside.”

He waited for Hamid, who soon appeared, huffing and puffing, though quite splendid in a ceremonial djellaba. The guests were complaining about the cucumber canapés, and Hamid had had to have a whole set remade at the last moment. Can cucumbers, he’d been thinking for the last hour, really go off?

“Monsieur,” he gasped, holding his sides, “I have been running all this time. I am sorry.”

“It’s all right, Hamid. Catch your breath.”

Richard took a quick look at David, who was pale and ice-cold.

“Are you ready for this, David?”

David nodded disdainfully and took his own steps toward the garage door, which was open and somewhat thronged. Richard ordered the bystanders back and took Hamid and David with him into the garage.

The lights were all on. The father stood by the body, shaken by his own expressionless tears, and Richard saw at once that there was nothing calculating about him. That was unfortunate, and his heart sank a little. The old man simply stared at them, his hands clenched by his sides. David was unable to stop himself staring openly at the body of Driss, which he had never really looked at during the night. He couldn’t find within himself the appropriate emotion, but at least he could look sincerely grave, astounded. He was not invited to shake the man’s hand, and he knew intuitively that such a gesture had to wait. He waited, and he allowed his heart rate to rise, then fall again. Gradually, his sweat cooled. He lost his fear and he began to calculate the probable financial damage.

It was Hamid who had to speak, and in broken Tamazight.

“This,” he said solemnly, indicating David, “is the man who was driving last night. He declares his innocence, before God.”

But his tone indicated to the Aït Kebbash that Hamid, too, had his doubts, and they were not doubts that could be easily tamed.

ABDELLAH LOOKED AT DAVID WITH A CHILDISH CLARITY, his eyes wide open and questioning and yet somehow refusing to pose any question at all. For a moment David thought that they were remarkably free of acrimony. How could it be? The old man seemed to be simply examining him as one would a stone or a locust hanging in a tree. He looked right through him, too, as if the internal organs were visible and could be judged. He looked through him and there was no expression in his face.

The air conditioners hummed loudly in the confined space and the old man was actually shivering slightly, his burnoose gathered tightly around his head.

It was Hamid who said, “Are you taking the body home now?”

“We are, God willing.”

Richard strained to understand these odd words in Tamazight, but failed. He shot David a worried look.

“Do you want to talk to the Englishman?” Hamid went on, bending solicitously toward the old man.

Abdellah turned to face David more fully.

“You may speak to him,” Hamid said quietly, “and I will translate.”

“No, I will speak to you,” the father responded.

Hamid stepped over to Richard for a moment. “He says he will speak to me. Perhaps it is because you are not believers.”

David shrugged. “Here we go.”

“It’s fine,” Richard reassured him. “Go ahead.”

Abdellah spoke with his eyes fixed on Hamid’s round, pleasant face, with its waxy, comfortable complexion. His voice was gently coaxing in some way but also hard, and either way, it never lost its exquisite sense of measurement. He talked as if he had prepared his speech over many hours, as if every word had already been worked out and fitted into an irresistible argument. There was no visible effort in what he now said to Hamid, so that as he listened, the latter simply nodded and thought to himself, “It’s the most reasonable thing imaginable.” The old man occasionally emphasized a point with a jab of his index finger. He spoke more intensely now, and Hamid leaned forward even farther. The two Europeans were excluded completely. Richard rested his chin in his hand, cocking his head to one side and trying to disguise his befuddlement. He knew enough about locals to realize that the old man was proposing something quite complicated and that Hamid was going along with it. At length, the talking between them subsided, the old man turned away, and Hamid stepped to the Europeans, subtly changing his demeanor as he did so. A little abashed but also foxy, he protected himself with some obsequious apologies before reporting that the father had made a rather unusual suggestion, though Richard was not sure that suggestion was the most appropriate word. Insistence might be more like it. Abdellah, Hamid said, wanted David to return with them to Tafal’aalt to bury Driss. He thought it as only right and proper that the man responsible for his death should do this, and he was certain that David would agree to it, being a man of honor as he most obviously was. Indeed, how could he not agree to it? It was a father’s request to the killer of his son, but it was made with respect, with reserve, with a deep sense of propriety. It was customary in these parts, Hamid went on uncertainly, and his voice betrayed the extent of that uncertainty. Richard squinted, and he felt the question posed by Abdellah’s demand widening and deepening in some new dimension that could not be framed and resisted by the usual objections.

“Is it?” he whispered in disbelief.

“Well, Monsieur, I cannot quite say. It is the deep desert. These are not people I know, in all honesty. They say it is their custom, and I will have to believe them.”

Richard reflected. Nothing about the old man inspired suspicion. Nothing whatsoever. He was, after all, the aggrieved party, the victim, so to speak. But he couldn’t believe it was just a matter of David’s paying his respects to the grieving family. There had to be something else, and he said so.

“Perhaps,” Hamid prevaricated, “the family might appreciate a sign of Monsieur David’s remorse.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Not at all. But it will be understood. We do not say such things.”

“But David has to know what is going on. He has to know the amount.”

Hamid shrugged ineffably.

“I cannot ask him, Monsieur. It would be gross. Monsieur David just has to take a certain amount with him.”

“But Monsieur David,” David said, “has not agreed to this absurd plan. Go back with them to their unknown village? Are you crazy?”

Hamid turned to him with a steely, harsh courtesy.

“Monsieur David, I hate to say it, but it may be that you have no choice. They are not entirely asking you. They are being polite. I think they will insist.”

There was stupefaction in David’s mind for a few minutes, but in truth he had been expecting something of this kind all along. Of course they wouldn’t just take a handout. They’d extract as much out of him as they could. They’d hold him in some village until he agreed. It was pathetically predictable, with their bandit mentality and their extort-the-infidel ethic. He knew it would be useless to keep arguing against it, because Richard would insist, and would argue that, all in all, going back to the village for a night and paying his respects would be a damn sight easier than doing anything else. A handout would be easily affordable for a man of David’s income. And all of that was true. He felt immensely tired by the whole thing, almost worn out, and he already knew that he would give in. The idea in some way offered him relief. Since everyone seemed to tacitly think that he was guilty anyway, it would actually be a relief to be forgiven in some way. And nobody could forgive him except this shabby, stony old man in his dark brown burnoose. If this implacable father didn’t forgive him, no one could. Being forgiven and being exonerated by the authorities were two very different things, and it was because the people themselves felt that difference that he was forced into doing as Abdellah asked. It was a way out, and it was the only way out.

“Unforgiven,” he thought, “I’ll be a marked man.”

Richard read his face accurately enough, and the host felt a quick relief that David understood what he had to do.

“I was expecting worse,” Richard whispered into his ear. “You could make a trip out of it. You’ll be back in a couple of days.”

David twitched, and remained dignified, but Hamid caught his quick, disgusted nod.

“So you will agree?” he urged.

“I suppose I do.”

“It is an excellent decision, if I may say.”

“We’ll see about that. How much money shall I take with me?”

Hamid looked slyly over at the father. “Take everything you have. Then give it all and say it is what you have. They will accept it. They are poor people, poorer than you can imagine.”

“Poor makes greedy,” David wanted to add.

“It’s not ideal,” Richard said, with an unavoidable sense of relief, “but it’s not so bad. It’ll be interesting.”

“Has it occurred to you, Richard, that they are planning something a lot nastier than you anticipate? I mean, it’s just a thought, old boy. There wouldn’t be much stopping them once they’ve fleeced all the cash off me. They might have rather unwelcoming feelings toward me, since, you know, I bumped off their boy and all that. Did we think about that?” He glared at Hamid.

“Well, Hamid? Do you have any thoughts along those lines?”

“Monsieur, you are exaggerating.”

“Am I? Am I really?”

“Yes,” Richard intervened, “you are. That’s the last thing they’re going to do. God, David. Are you paranoid all the time?”

“Jo will take it badly.”

“She’ll understand. I’ll talk to her if you want.”

David raised an abrupt but unconvincing hand. “No, no more interventions, please. I’ll do it myself. Well, what a jolly weekend.” He beamed horribly at the old man. “I say, Mr. Deep Villager, when do we leave?”

Outraged, Hamid provided him with the real name, but David couldn’t get his tongue around it.

“Just say Monsieur Taheri,” Richard snapped finally, letting all his accumulated irritation burst out at last. “Or just Monsieur.”

“Monsieur,” David said to the old man, who did not even look at him. “Quand voulez-vous partir?”

“Tout de suite,” the old man replied without missing a beat.

David felt the condensation of his own glands growing cold all over his body, the sticky coolness of a thousand bumps of sweat. He steadied the sudden giddiness that overcame him and he did this by using his closed fists as ballast. This made the overhead light, which had been swinging wildly, become still again. He blinked. Richard wanted to disengage, to leave it at that. He was being cut off, abandoned. It was damage control. It’s your circus, old boy, Richard was thinking. Go dance in it.

“I have to talk to my wife,” David said to Abdellah, as Hamid translated. “She’ll be extremely unhappy.”

“She might be,” Richard agreed sadly.

“A gazelle is a gazelle,” the old man said, as if this needed no further explanation, and Hamid smiled, and if it had been polite, he would have laughed. “Ghanchoufou achno mkhebilina ghedda,” he murmured—we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

JO WAITED FOR HIM ON THE PORCH OF THEIR CHALET. AS the light faded, the staff came by to light tall mosquito tapers, though she had the impression that the air was so scorching that even mosquitoes couldn’t survive in it. They brought with them painted plates of melon and Italian prosciutto, stemmed glasses with a pricked peach in each one submerged in champagne. It was the German cocktail Kullerpfirsich, the peaches rolling as the bubbles entered the fork grooves and made the fruit turn. The Moroccan boys were highly startled by this invention, which might have seemed to them like a sleight of witchcraft, and they set down her drink as if they were dying to be rid of it. They wore tarbouches that night, and she felt for them.

“Why do the peaches turn?” they asked with big eyes.

“Because Monsieur Richard made them,” she replied.

Out of nowhere, a firework rocket shot up into the sky, narrowly missing the moon. Silver sparks floated back down, and by their light, she saw the edges of the outdoor disco and its seething mass of heads and arms. They had set up fake silver palm trees around it ribboned with rose-colored lights, and between them were narrow silk tents with high-pitched roofs, inside which there were probably refreshments or dope. Richard and Dally made a point of making naughty stuff available to their guests in insouciant ways that obviously gave them a good laugh. There were plates of majoun crackers in the library at all hours, reefers expertly made up stacked in cedarwood boxes on the hallway tables. You’d see some elderly roué pause as he swept by on his way to dinner, sniff the goods, and pick one up with a mincing elegance. The idea was to get them all stoned all the time, and it had worked because they were all stoned now, she was sure, all except for David and her. A collective mood had come upon them. A couple staggered by trailing fallen olives and cocktail sticks, very young, the girl incredibly glamorous and the boy soaking wet. They cast a quick look at her and the girl said “Coming?” Their faces were like young wolves. The girl looked like Isadora Duncan just before the strangulation. Jo shook her head and raised her spinning peach. See, no need for anything else.

“It was what I was saying about the Americans in Iraq …”

The girl’s voice trailed off, and she lost her balance, falling to one side, but held up. Another rocket zoomed up and expired in a shower of special effects. She looked at her watch. Where was David? A large plastic beach ball appeared over the heads of the dancers, kept aloft by successive pokes and slaps, rolling around just like her peach. A wave of laughter. Her anxiety would not relent, however. It was an exhausting guilt that had no issue, no resolution. Who could she beg to be forgiven? There was not a soul to beg, if not the old man at the gates, and David was dealing with him. And she hadn’t begged anything from anyone her whole life. How did you do it?

She felt herself losing distinctness. Though her body remained still, her mind whirled round and round on an increasingly unstable axis. The body can turn to sand, dissolving at its extremities and mixing with its surroundings, gradually disappearing, merging into other things. The moon rose, thank God. And then the familiar form came hunkering down the strange repaved paths that crisscrossed Dally and Richard’s fantasia like so many black snakes. She tensed. David was grim, as always.

She sometimes wondered if she really hated him. You know, she’d say to herself, that jittery hatred that is a perfect counterfeit for an exhausted, dissolving love. You can hate a man simply because you let him in, and then he didn’t do what he was supposed to do. It was insulted feminine egotism in some ways, but other than that, she thought primly, the sacrilege was all his. He blustered and bullied. His pride was insurmountable. Men are the sinners, not us. She believed she had minor faults, not sins.

She gulped down the whole glass of fizzy and then took a wet bite out of the alcoholic peach.

“They’re dancing like babies,” he said coldly as he came up, searching at once for a towel with which to wipe his hands. “I’m so glad I can’t dance.”

HE SLUMPED DOWN NEXT TO HER, AND HIS FACE WAS grainily damp and sickly looking. The resignation in his voice now was startling, and she waited to see what it might be. One never knew with him. Disasters broke over him like dust storms and were gone before you knew it, leaving behind them his rugged, obstinate form that reminded her of a great pile of boulders.

He sat back, and his bitterness made no bones about itself.

“Dicky and the Arab servant have cooked up a perfectly wonderful plan for me. I’m to go back with the old crone to his village in the middle of nowhere and do some atonement. I have no idea what they have in mind. I have to take all the cash. Dicky says he’ll lend you whatever you need here, which is nothing. I agreed to go. Everyone seems to think it’s the only thing to do. The nomads might get nasty.”

“They’re not nomads, darling.”

“Well, whatever they are. I am being hauled back to a place I can’t pronounce. Still, at least there’ll be no dancing.”

“That’s what you think.”

He groaned, and they managed a moment of black humor.

“When are you leaving?”

“Right now. He wants to leave in an hour. The body …”

“I am coming, too,” she announced after a dead silence.

“Out of the question. Pas de gazelles, the old geezer said. No women, which means no you. You are staying. You would be an insufferable complication.”

She tried to make a faint argument out of it, but it was like rolling a ball uphill, and soon enough the struggle fizzled out. She didn’t want to go, after all, and no amount of rhetoric could hide the fact. She felt a sadistic triumph. It was right that he went, and somehow she didn’t think it was dangerous at all, merely worrying. For the following few minutes she packed a shaving bag for him, taking care to do it well. She stowed away his toiletries and toothbrush, his aftershave and razors, his vitamin pills and his cotton balls. She folded a few clothes into his sports bag and zipped both bags up. It was like packing a kid off to school. Her mind raced ahead. It never occurred to her that they might harm him. But for a moment, she stuffed a knuckle into her mouth and felt the tears surge. They weren’t for him. They were for their past, which had suddenly disappeared. When she came back outside, he was drinking heavily, staring fixedly at the gold outline of the house and its filigree windows.

“You shouldn’t,” was all she said.

“I don’t care about offending them. I am an infidel. I am allowed to drink.”

“But you shouldn’t … for yourself.”

She cupped his neck in her hand, leaned down, and kissed the wet forehead.

“That’s precisely the reason I drink,” he murmured.

She didn’t know what to say to him. Come back safe? Don’t mortgage the house?

“Have you seen the place on a map?” was what she did say.

He shook his head. He said he didn’t much care where it was.

“I’m sure Richard wouldn’t let you go if there was a risk. It’s not that big a country.”

He took her hand for a while, and in some sick way he was also quite relieved to be going. One wanted to cross the bridge and have done with a lot of things. He stared glumly down at the two ice cubes at the bottom of his glass swimming about in a diluted Johnny Walker, and his mind clouded. It’s all my fault, he wanted to say, so it’s for the best. Stay and have fun.

“I order you to have a good time.” He smiled. “I’ll be fine. Tutto bene. Think of it as a jaunt in the desert. Tea in the Sahara. The whole thing will be silly and I’ll probably enjoy myself in the end.” He almost snarled. “I think they just want closure. A gesture of solidarity. They want me to say I’m sorry. That’s what people always want. It’s like being on Oprah.”

“And will you say sorry?”

“I’ll say sorry, yes. I am sorry.”

“That’s a relief to hear. For a while I thought you weren’t sorry.”

He rolled his eyes, and her fingers went through his heat-coarsened hair, springy with salt and pepper curls. He was sulking, feeling like a victim. His hand trembled as it gripped the drink that was gradually poisoning him. They were playing Lucio Dalla in the disco, pop of the Italian seventies. He wouldn’t miss that, would he? He turned to her, caressing the knuckles of her hand as it pressed against his shoulder, and there was the unspeakable thing passing between them, the dribs and drabs of the old complicity. Laugh at the world together. Enjoy the same wine. Remember the little hotel in Rome? But the bag was packed in the other room, and up at the gate the men of the Aït Kebbash were waiting for him. Their mood was not grim, but they were anxious to perform a legitimate burial. When they got there, the car was already running; the body had been scrupulously wrapped like a mummy and had been loaded into the back of the jeep, its awkward length bent in the middle slightly. Abdellah waited impatiently for the murderer of his son to appear with his traveling bags. His mood was indescribable, even to himself. But, then, he would never have tried to describe it to himself.

His soul was in darkness, just as his mind was. He licked his lips and cast a dry, scornful look at the pitiful Source des Poissons. But deep down, he was envious of it, bitterly covetous.