In the basement of the Tangier Sûreté there were a number of large holding cells and several small ones reserved for madmen or politically contaminated detainees. On the second day of May Hamid Ouazzani had one Spaniard down there, denounced by a thirteen-year-old boy for rape on the Malabata beach, and a long-haired American youth who'd been caught that morning at the airport trying to board a plane for Paris with a suitcase full of hashish. Neither prisoner interested him very much, and toward the end of the afternoon he was poised at the third-floor window of his office staring down at a mob of veiled women waiting patiently for a glimpse of their incarcerated sons.
He'd been brooding the whole day. A vague malaise, accentuated by the harsh insistence of the wind, which had been blowing for a week and which had turned the May Day parade into a feast of dust, gnawed at his even temper, made him nervous and aloof. His assistant, Aziz Jaouhari, sensing this unease, worked quietly at the smaller desk, adding notations to dossiers. But occasionally he glanced up at the Inspector's back, framed in frozen tension against the unwashed glass.
After a while Hamid turned back to the office. Its only decoration was a cheaply framed photograph of the King. "I'm going out, Aziz," he announced, starting toward the door. "If you need me, you'll find me at La Colombe."
Turning down Boulevard Pasteur, he plugged a cassette of Egyptian love songs into his dashboard recorder, then slowed his car. At Bazaar Machala he saw his brother standing aimlessly in the doorway of his shop. Tourists were prowling the Boulevard, blond Scandinavian girls with huge, awkward packs on their backs, accompanied by unburdened youths on the lookout for sellers of kif. The usual hustlers were eying them, while a pack of children, offering badly made caftans and fake Berber jewelry, surrounded a tour group trudging wearily toward the Chellah Hotel. At Claridge he caught sight of the American Consul General, Daniel Lake, deep in conversation with his assistant, Foster Knowles.
At the Café de Paris the four Anglo-American novelists Kranker, Klein, Townes, and Doyle—gesticulated wildly like an out-of-tune string quartet. On Rue Belgique men were already dismantling the plywood arches erected for the May Day parade. He passed a mad Spanish lady he'd been observing for several years: she promenaded each evening at six o'clock, marching like a robot, her face white as chalk.
He stopped at Bourbana to buy flowers from a Riffian woman who'd set up shop beneath a eucalyptus beside the road. Tessa and David Hawkins rode by on their magnificent matching Arabian geldings, cantering lightly up the Mountain, their blond hair gleaming in the failing sun.
He turned and followed the Jew's River to the base of the Mountain Road. Then he parked, a few doors above La Colombe, snapped off the Egyptian music, and scanned the front of the shop. It was past six then, but still he could make out the silhouette of Peter Zvegintzov bustling inside. From time to time Zvegintzov's head was obscured by a poster affixed to the glass. It announced the Tangier Players' latest production, due to open in two weeks at the auditorium of the Spanish Polytechnical School.
It was impossible to see who else was in the shop, but Hamid could recognize most of the cars parked in front: the white Buick of the Manchesters; the black Fiat of Françoise de Lauzon; and the silver Mercedes that belonged to the retired French general Gilbert Bresson.
Patiently he waited for them to leave. It had been five months since he'd been inside the store. He was not at all sure why he'd chosen this day for a confrontation that he knew would be difficult, and that he'd been dreading the entire afternoon. It had simply seemed to him that his relationship with Zvegintzov should be resumed, that five months was long enough to dull the sharpness of their break.
And, too, he was curious to see how the Russian would react. Zvegintzov was unpredictable, a man of many moods. The scapegoat of foreigners to whom he offered his elaborate service—handling their mail, taking care of their villas, providing them with luxuries few Moroccans could afford—he knew more about what happened on the Mountain than any man except Hamid. He talked to everyone, steamed open letters, offered himself as a confidant. Though most of his customers abused him terribly, they told him things they would not dream of telling anybody else.
Hamid had discovered him years before, then carefully developed him as a source. In the old days he had stopped by the shop every day, but then there came a time when he could enter it no more. Aziz took over, while Hamid waited in the car outside. For five months it had been like that.
When he finally walked in, triggering the little bell that clasped the door, Zvegintzov was at the counter with Countess de Lauzon demonstrating some expensive preparations for cleaning rugs.
"This one's quite good," he said, looking up. For a moment he stared, searched Hamid's face. "Makes a good foamy lather, then dries out in the sun. Afterward you vacuum the foam away."
"But that's so complicated. Why not soap and water?"
"Of course," said Zvegintzov, "I can sell you soap if you wish. But even the dullest servants, I assure you—"
"Some good mild soap will do very nicely. And I'll take this Connaissance des Arts."
Zvegintzov shrugged, rang the charges up. General Bresson was next—he had come with a bitter complaint.
"Three days ago I told you my telephone didn't work, but still you haven't set it right."
Zvegintzov screwed up his canny Russian face and stared across at the old warrior's chest. He was used to humiliations, even seemed to welcome them, as if by his patience he could shame his tormentors into acknowledging his infinite good will.
"Excuse me, General. My man's been sick. I'll have it fixed tomorrow night."
"I don't like to think about little things – that's why I subscribe to your service. But I insist on promptness and that you keep your word. Otherwise there isn't any point."
The General stalked out of the shop, grasping a Le Figaro on his way. For a moment there was silence, then Hamid shook his head.
"What a difficult man. And so abrasive."
"The General needs his phone. I understand."
"But he's very rude."
"No, no, Inspector. My clients are wonderful people. A little hard at times, but underneath they have good hearts. They're human, after all. We all have our moods. Really I think they appreciate what I do. I make their lives here easy, give them peace of mind. I'm a cushion for their difficulties, and always they're grateful in the end. They know that if I weren't here, their lives would be too complex. I have no doubt that some of them would leave."
As he spoke Zvegintov danced behind the counter, straightening his display of cigars, arranging and rearranging his jars of English jams and marmelades. Hamid watched him, pitying his tension, but Zvegintov's platitudes made him want to wince.
"Tell me," he said. "How do you manage to fix their phones?"
Zvegintzov smiled. "I know a man who works at the PTT. I slip him a little something and he works for me at night."
"Yes," Hamid nodded. "Clever—I admire that."
"It's the only way to get them repaired. Morale is bad at the company. It takes them weeks to process a complaint. There are, at this moment, over six hundred lines out of order in Tangier. Did you know that? Extraordinary! So you see, if we were to go through channels, the proper way, half the lines on the Mountain would be out right now. And that would be a tragedy for my clients, of course, but not only for them. If you think about it a moment you'll see what I mean. I'm speaking, of course, from your point of view." He winked. "If there were no phones, after all, then there wouldn't be anything to tap—"
He stopped then and let out a little gasp. He realized he'd been babbling and had dangerously overstepped.
"Kalinka," he said suddenly, in a whisper. "How is she?
Hamid stared at him.
"Yes, yes, I know," said Zvegintzov. "Your life together is good. I know that. I've heard. I hear everything, you see. They tell me she was sick last month. I wanted—but still I care for her. It's foolish. I know it's foolish."
Hamid wanted to say something, to put this conversation to an end. But Zvegintzov continued, at a new, more frantic pitch. "I wish she'd come by the shop sometime, early in the morning, before my customers come in. I so long for that—to see her face, feel her hand, her cheek—"
The telephone rang. Zvegintzov turned abruptly and fled to the rear of his shop. Hamid looked after him for a moment, then backed out into the street. It was dark then, still windy. The air was cool, but his face was flushed. He'd seen tears behind the thick lenses that shielded Peter Zvegintzov's eyes, and this glimpse of pain, so sudden and acute, filled him with alarm.
As he slid into his car, he noticed a Volkswagen with diplomatic license plates parked farther up the street. The American Vice-Consul, Foster Knowles, sat behind the wheel. As Hamid passed, he had the impression that Knowles was watching the shop.
He began to drive about the Mountain aimlessly, wandering up and down the little lanes. The Manchesters' Buick was parked in the gateway of their pink stucco monstrosity, and at General Bresson's sumptuous villa he could see light behind the grills. He wandered past the homes of numerous foreigners, Camilla Weltonwhist's gray fortress, the Cotswold cottage of the Australian inventor Percy Bainbridge, and the home of Peter Barclay hidden behind a privet hedge.
The thought, the very thought of Zvegintzov's wrinkled hand on Kalinka's cheek.
He drove then to the region of walled estates, the homes of Tangier's rich. He passed the great old manor of Rachid El Fassi, built a century before by his ancestors from Fez; the beige extravaganza of the Paraguayan painter Inigo; the black-floored palace of Patrick Wax. He passed Jimmy Sohario's "Excalibur," built on a fortune's worth of Chinese laundries; and at the end, at the Mountain's highest point, he paused before the great gates of "Castlemaine," where the American millionaire Henderson Perry was in residence a few weeks a year.
From here it seemed to Hamid that he had a commanding view of his terrain. He knew them all, these rich Americans and Europeans, knew their houses, their cars, their habits, and roughly how much each of them was worth. He knew who they saw and what they did, their cliques, their vices, their complicated whims. And there were many others he knew as well—hundreds more, diplomats and commercial people who lived in apartments in the town, hippies and dope peddlers who lived in the medina, the eccentrics of the Casbah, the doctors, barons, retired naval officers, and desperate divorcees who lived on the Marshan or on the Charf. From here he could see everything, from the Mountain to the foothills of the Rif, the whole raging town and, between Peter Zvegintzov's shop on the Jew's River and the Italian cathedral on the edge of modern Tangier, the place where he was born, the great sprawling slum, Dradeb.
Zvegintzov, Zvegintzov! Who could understand a man like that?
Since he'd been a boy, Hamid had been enamored of the European colony of Tangier—its impoverished duchesses, vicious homosexuals, doctors without medical degrees, artists, hustlers, fools. He was fascinated by these expatriates, their endless danse macabre. He observed with wonder all their attempts to acquire stunning lovers, their intrigues, their bizarre affairs. For years they'd been his obsession, and now, facing the wind before the huge gates of Henderson Perry's estate, he saw them laid before him like a banquet, ready for him to taste, digest. He looked to his left across the water, toward the beckoning lights of the coastal towns of Spain. Europe was close—it seemed as if he could touch it if he wished. But the Straits of Gibraltar loomed in the night like an uncrossable abyss between. And that, he thought unhappily, is the way it is for me.
He knew these strange people, and yet he did not. Though he had spent years learning their languages, studying the women and boys they fought over and loved, hearing their confessions, observing the results of all manner of their crimes, still there was a wall that separated him from them, a wall he longed to breach.
It made him furious when he thought of it, but an instant later he was resigned. There was no point in considering the possibility that sometime when he was small and had gaped at everything foreign and longed to comprehend it, he'd taken upon himself a terrible burden, wandered by error into an inescapable maze. He had lavished too much of himself already to even consider the possibility of that. Rather, he knew, he must continue to strive until, in some night of insight, their mystery would be revealed. But if at times he was amazed by emotions he could not understand—Peter Zvegintzov's tears over Kalinka, as fresh as if five months had never passed—still he was driven to look deeper, uncover more, examine all the combinations until he discovered the secret of their unfathomable European game.
He drove back down the Mountain, then slowed as he passed La Colombe. Foster Knowles was still waiting in his car. Why? What was he doing? Now, too, he would have to think about that.
As he drove through Dradeb, a hundred yards or so before the mosque, his headlights caught the figure of a man standing in the middle of the road. He was waving his arms, motioning traffic to the side. A crowd of men and youths surrounded a large tourist bus ahead. Hamid rolled down his window, caught the sound of angry cries. But the wind was too loud and he could not make out the words. He pulled over, parked, then walked into the mob. Looking up, he could see the tourists, their frightened faces peering out. Angry men were pushing at the driver, who was babbling furiously to two uniformed police.
He strode quickly up Rue de Chypre, the lane that led to Achar's clinic. The moment he entered he could smell the disinfectant. It came upon him like a blow across his face. It was eight o'clock and still there were people waiting to be helped. They sat in rows of hard benches, some in casts, others holding their stomachs, a tall, thin girl with a soiled bandage wrapped about her head. He avoided a wet patch on the floor, something thick and yellow sprinkled with a layer of sawdust that had not yet soaked it up. From the cubicles where the doctors worked he could hear moans and a few kind words.
He ran into Achar at the operating room door. The doctor's white gown was spotted with dark red stains. His large hands, firm and covered with black curls of hair, grasped at Hamid's arm.
"What happened?"
"A little girl. Impossible to save her." Achar shook his head. "Come," he said, leading Hamid into his little office in the back. They sat down amidst the clutter. Achar smoothed his mustache, then yelled for someone to bring them tea.
"Did you see the accident?"
"No. I was driving through. It must have happened a few seconds before."
"Pointless, of course. The bus was going much too fast. They have no business taking tourists through these streets."
"It's the best way back from Cap Spartel—"
"Yes. Of course. Do you know what they say—the guides on the buses? They have to keep talking, you see. If there's nothing 'touristic' to point out then they have to make something up. When they come through here they say 'This is a typical Moroccan village, settled by people from the Rif who have left their farms to seek their fortunes in Tangier.' How absurd! I have no doubt the cameras click away."
Hamid nodded. He was used to Achar's rage. "What happened tonight?"
The doctor shrugged. "A typical incident. There's no water in Dradeb during the day, so when the public taps are turned on at night the children are all waiting with their jugs. Probably this little girl was late, and ran across the street to get a place in line."
Hamid began to think of his boyhood in Dradeb, fetching water for his mother, carrying bread to the ovens on a board on top of his head.
"Suicide Village."
"What's that?"
"That's what they call Dradeb."
"Who calls it that?"
"The foreigners, Mohammed. My friends on the Mountain."
The tea arrived and they both began to sip.
"My beautiful friends. They zoom through here in their cars, and always there are donkeys and sheep and little children running about. There are old women who are deaf, and old men who ignore their horns. So it seems to them that this is a place filled with animals and people who want to throw themselves beneath their wheels. Suicide Village—do you see?"
"Oh, I see," said Achar. "An amusing little name for a place which unfortunately they can't avoid. Well—I'm a surgeon. One of these days all your friends will have to leave. Or else we'll have to cut them out."
Hamid looked at him, neither nodding nor shaking his head. There were men at the Sûreté who would use such a statement as a pretext to start a black dossier.
"Aside from all that," Hamid said finally, "have you had a good day?"
"Terrible! This afternoon a woman was brought in. Literally she was bleeding to death. She'd tried to abort herself with an uncurled coat hanger. She punctured herself, of course, infected her entire womb. I gave her massive doses of sulfa drugs and tetanus, everything I had. Tomorrow I'll operate—if she's still alive, and if I can get sufficient blood."
His anger over all this misery showed brightly in his eyes.
"I envy you," said Hamid.
Achar began to laugh.
"No. I envy you. You're a scientist. You can be certain about the truth. The diagnosis may be right or wrong, but moral questions don't arise."
Achar gave him a curious look. "Really, Hamid, that's one of the silliest things you've ever said. Here in Dradeb all the questions are moral ones. This woman with the coat hanger—don't you see? She was pregnant and wanted to abort. That's a social issue. She committed a political act. No, don't envy me. Here we have far messier days than you in the police."
They finished off the tea, then Hamid rose to leave. He was at the door when Achar suddenly looked up.
"My love to Kalinka," he said.
The tourist bus had left, and now people were running back and forth across the street as if the accident had never occurred. Big cars blew their horns, but nobody turned. Foreigners were driving to dinner parties on the Mountain or in the town.
Hamid parked outside his apartment house on Ramon y Cahal, gathered up his flowers, and carefully locked his car. The wind, blowing even more furiously, seemed to have upset the neighborhood. Pausing at the front door of his building, he could hear the cries of children and insanely barking dogs.
The elevator, a black cage, moved slowly with irregular jerks. When he entered the apartment he found it dark, except for a thin bar of light beneath the bedroom door.
"Hamid? Is that you, Hamid?" She was lying on their bed, her pipe in her hand. The thick, sweet smoke of hashish hung about her like a veil. "Soon I'll get you dinner, Hamid. But first sit down, tell me why you're late."
"There was an accident in Dradeb. Then I stopped to see Achar."
He sat beside her, and she began at once to caress his hands. Her dark Oriental eyes and ivory-colored skin, diffused by the smoke of her hashish, held the promise of mysterious ways of making love.
"I bought a nice fish for you today. And strawberries for dessert."
He picked up her pipe, put it on the little table beside their bed, then bent down to kiss her lips. She was Eurasian, half Russian, half Tonkinoise—his fragile, strange métisse.
"I'm hungry."
“Soon you will be fed."
"What did you do today?"
“I smoked all afternoon."
When she finally pulled herself up, he followed her to the kitchen, stood and watched while she heated oil in a pan.
"I saw Peter today," he said. Between themselves they always spoke French.
"Oh? Does he still look the same?"
"Exactly the same, of course."
"He was surprised to see you. I have the feeling he was surprised."
"Yes, he was surprised. But he pretended he wasn't and talked too much. He became impertinent toward the end."
"The same shabby suit?"
"What?"
"Was he wearing the same suit—the brown one, frayed at the cuffs?"
"He wants to see you."
She flung the fish into the pan. "I don't want to see him. Sometimes I feel him following me, but I never turn around."
"He follows you?"
"I don't know. I think he does. But since I never look back I can't be sure."
It was typical of her, this sort of dreamy remark that offended his sense of order, his restless need to observe everything and seek out its cause. But she was different, full of things half sensed, visions she could not be sure she'd seen, or only imagined while she smoked.
He left the kitchen, took the flowers, arranged them in a vase. When she brought out the food he waited for her to notice them, and when she didn't he pulled one out by its stem.
"A good bouquet, don't you think? These are the first agapanthus of the year."
"Yes," she said, staring closely. "I saw some at the market. I knew you liked them, so I brought them home."
"No, no, Kalinka. I bought these for you. I bought them from an old woman late this afternoon."
She looked across at him and smiled. "Oh! Then I forgot. I paid the flower lady, I remember that—but then I must have left them in a taxi, or maybe at the butcher's stall."
It was possible, he thought, and then again she might have been thinking of a purchase she'd made a year before. He would never know—her vagueness was endemic, a sort of poetry that maddened him yet gave him the sensation that in her presence he could always rest, enveloped in her soft cocoon of dreams.
For a long while he lay awake in bed, listening to the wind. It rattled the windows, loose in their old frames. Dogs barked like madmen in the night. He turned to Kalinka, who was breathing evenly by his side, her eyelids fluttering like the petals of a yellow rose. Who was she? He had never understood her, and supposed he never would. She was a cipher, and he a mad cryptographer fumbling for the key to her strange utterances, the pattern of her actions, so random, so obscure.
For years he'd seen her in Zvegintzov's shop, huddling in the back on the stool which Peter used to reach the upper shelves, or else on the yellow hassock he kept between the ice cream freezer and the counter of children's toys. For years Hamid had seen her, but not really well—she was like a fixture in the shop, a part of the decor, an Oriental girl who'd come with the Russian, a relic of his past life, his life before Tangier.
Then, for some reason, their paths began to cross. She'd be walking the streets aimlessly, wandering in her long Oriental dress, white silk trousers flashing through the slit, moving like a sparrow or a butterfly, sometimes with flowers in her arms. When he'd see her he'd pull over in his car, sit and watch her as she passed. Her face was oblivious and gay, as if she had no notion she was being watched.
One night the previous autumn he came upon her in the Casbah standing in the shadows of the wall, looking out across the Straits. He couldn't remember why he'd come, except that he was feeling lonely and wanted to gaze down upon the city lights. The Place de Casbah was deserted, except for the one-legged man who watched the cars. Hamid's footsteps rang on the old stones, but she did not turn when he came near. Then, when he greeted her, she nodded at him and smiled.
"It's a good evening," he said.
"Yes," she said, "thanks be to God."
They stood side by side in silence for a while, then she floated away across the vast, dark square, disappearing through a massive arch without a sound.
Suddenly, it seemed, they saw each other every day—in the market early in the morning, before a gas station, or in unexpected places, on narrow side streets, in odd corners of the town. It became a game with him: Where could he go, what obscure quarter of the city could he visit, without seeing her pass? Even in Beni Makada one day, where he'd gone after a man who'd stabbed a tourist with a knife, even there, amidst rotting garbage and dust, in the maddening, punishing heat, he caught a glimpse of her talking with a potter in his shed, their heads close together, her hand squeezing clay. He could not stop then, but afterward, when his quarry was safely handcuffed, he questioned the old man, who showed him a sketch she'd made, a design for a vase for flowers. He was amazed—it was so perfect. It must have taken her hours to draw. All the shadings were fine, and she'd even drawn in the shadows and made the high points glow as though they reflected light. The signature was tiny, fragile—KALINKA, the letters compressed to form a seal.
So, he thought, there is some purpose to her walks; she moves about on errands, fills her days with little things. But there was something odd too—a feeling he had that she was lost.
He became interested and wondered if she noticed how frequently they met. Why? Why did he, busy with police work, and she, on her little errands—why did their paths so often intersect? What was there in common about their lives? What drew them together in this teeming town?
He tried to study her when he visited La Colombe, tried to watch her as he and Peter talked. Sometimes he'd catch her eye and then she'd smile as if to say: "We have a secret—we see each other, have knowledge of each other's life." Did he imagine this?
Around Zvegintzov she was docile, never said a word. No wonder he'd never noticed her there—she came alive for him only when he saw her walking by herself.
One day, on a tip from an informant, he and Aziz Jaouhari raided a strange café in the medina. They raced up three flights of dark, stale-smelling stairs, then suddenly burst out onto a roof. The sunlight was blinding, the air sweet with the fumes of hashish. A dozen Chinese puffing on long cane pipes lay on reed mats beneath a panoply of freshly laundered sheets. No one turned as they stood watching from the door, panting from their climb.
"Who are these people?"
"Isn't that Zvegintzov's wife?"
Aziz pointed, and Hamid recognized her at once. Her head was covered by the hood of a black djellaba drawn about her dress. It was all so strange—he'd never noticed that there were Chinese in the city before, never imagined that there was a Chinese group. He stared and then withdrew, muttering to Aziz as they descended that they should start a Chinese file.
What was she doing there? Impossible to know. When their eyes met in the shop he felt confused.
He saw her sipping tea with an Italian smuggler in a small café near the bus terminal at the end of Avenue d'Espagne. He knew the man, knew for a fact that he was ruthless and corrupt. What was she doing? Why?
Another time, when he was driving down Pasteur, he saw her talking with his brother, Farid, in the doorway of his shop. He raced around the block and parked, then ran to the corner just in time to see her leave.
"So," he said to Farid, "you know Madame Zvegintzov?"
"Yes, Hamid, she's come by several times. Thank you for sending her, but I don't think I can help. The sort of horn she wants—copper and very long—I haven't seen one like that in years."
"She said I sent her?"
Farid narrowed his eyes. "You did, didn't you? I'm sure she said you did."
He turned away, his hands trembling. She'd sought out his brother, used his name. What did she want with a long old-warrior's horn? Perhaps she wanted to convert it into a lamp.
After that she was fixed firmly in his brain. Her implacable gaze, her masklike face—he saw it everywhere, even when he closed his eyes. What was happening? He was in love with her. Yes, he loved her—he realized it then. But what to do? Was she playing a game? He must find out, must corner her somewhere, force her to speak. Where? She was always moving, slipping away. In the shop? Impossible! With Peter watching? No!
He began to lose interest in his work, to wander about by himself at night, hoping to run into her, to find a situation where they could talk. He went to the dark place by the Casbah wall, but she did not appear. He stood gazing down at Tangier and its bay, watching the night pour over the Mountain like thick, black ink, watching until he could no longer see the towers of the mosques.
He became obsessed, and during the day at unexpected times he would think of her, imagine her coming toward him down a street, smiling, stooping every so often to pick a wild herb or rip a flower from a hedge. Yes, she was tracking him, tracking him inside his mind. At the shop their eyes would lock and she would smile. As he stood talking to Peter he felt tense, certain she was watching his back. Afterward he would go to his car, or move to the shadow of some doorway, and rub away the moisture from his palms.
He thought only of her and whispered her name over and over to himself: Kalinka, Kalinka. Her name sounded like the ring of a bell.
One day he went to Farid's bazaar, prowled for an hour among the antiques. Finally he couldn't contain himself—the words pulsed with passion as they escaped his chest. "Find me the sort of horn she wants," he panted. "Find it and sell it to me."
"Oh, Hamid, she has cast a spell on you. I can see it in your eyes—she has made you mad."
"Find me this horn, Farid," he begged. "I will pay anything, but find it. Find it soon."
He found a chicken's foot in his mailbox. Who put it there? A thief, perhaps, someone he'd caught and sent to Malabata prison? Why?
The next night it was cold. The wind was blowing hard, and he could barely sleep. Suddenly a knock on his door. He was living on Rue Dante then, in a small apartment on the top floor of a building full of Spaniards. He stumbled out of bed, tried to turn on the light. Nothing. The electricity had failed.
He opened the door. Peter Zvegintzov stood in the dark hallway, a thick, black overcoat hanging from his arm. Hamid could feel tension. The taste of brass filled his mouth.
"Why do you come here, Peter?" he asked.
"My wife wants to leave me. She tells me she's in love with you."
They stood facing each other in the darkness. He could feel menace in the Russian, and also great despair.
"I know nothing of that," he said. But at the same time he felt joy.
"What has happened, Hamid? What has passed between you?"
"I don't know anything about it. I doubt we've exchanged a dozen words."
"But she says—"
"Yes! Yes! Tell me what she says."
Zvegintzov was silent. Had he betrayed himself? Hamid stepped back.
"She says you meet all the time, everywhere in the city. She says she's been lying to me, that when she goes out it is never to the places she has said. She says she follows you, and that when you come into my shop you pretend to listen to me but use your eyes to speak with her."
Zvegintzov stepped into the doorway. A bit of light from the street cut a triangle across his face. There was anger in his face. Down the hall someone yelled "Quiet!" in Spanish. Hamid took another step back.
"I don't understand why you've come here in the middle of the night."
"How can you say a thing like that? My wife tells me she's leaving. Of course I've come to you. What difference the time of night? I have come for an explanation. I'm the husband. I have certain rights."
Hamid stared.
"For a long time I have helped you, Hamid—invited you into my place of business, told you things that have helped you with your work. You could not force me to do this. There is no pressure you could bring against me. I talked to you of my own free will. Now I learn that you will take away my wife. I confront you and you deny it. Is Kalinka a liar then? Tell me, tell me to my face."
He stood blocking the door, defiant, enraged. Finally Hamid answered him, but not without exerting an enormous effort to meet his eyes.
"Yes, I love her. But I never knew she loved me until you told me so tonight."
"Ah—then it's true." His voice was filled with resignation, all the anger drained away. He brushed past Hamid, walked to the center of the room. "I'm a fool," he said. "A fool. You're an inspector of police and I'm a fool."
From a sleeve of his coat he drew a short, stiff riding crop. Then he dropped it on the floor. "I brought this so I could slash your face. She does this to me, you see. Drives me mad, makes me miserable, makes me act the fool."
He stood for a time, his head bowed. Hamid watched him, unable to tear away his eyes. Zvegintzov began to gasp and then to weep—strange sounds, whimpers of agony stifled finally by his heavy Russian cough.
"Forgive me for coming. I can't control myself. I am helpless. You see that."
He wept some more, then left. Hamid watched him from the window, watched him move slowly down the street. The wind was blowing hard, the street lights flickered. Then a hailstorm began. Pellets the size of marbles were falling upon Tangier.
He and Peter did not speak again. The next day he sent Farid to fetch Kalinka and bring her to Farid's bazaar. In the back room she told him she was in love with him, and that if he wouldn't take her to live with him she would leave the town.
"For years I saw you," she said. "Sometimes I waited the whole day thinking of nothing but that soon, perhaps within the hour, you would come to see Peter in our shop. I wanted to see your eyes, hear your voice. I trembled when I saw you watching me on the street."
He asked her about Peter, and she swore to him then that she was not his wife, had never been, either in law or in deed. He was amazed, and his policeman's temperament, his skepticism, all his control ebbed away. He felt helpless in the face of her passion, her strange inflections, her enigmatic eyes. He took her hand. They kissed and moaned. She lay her fingers upon the high bones of his cheeks.
Later he went to see his mother in Dradeb. She was ironing when he came into the house.
"Ah, Hamid, you have always been in love with foreigners. Ever since you were a boy. Now the foreigners will dislike you. It's bad for a Moroccan to steal a Nasrani's wife."
"No, mother," he said. "I'm an inspector of police. Now it doesn't matter what the foreigners think. It only matters what I think of them."
She nodded, but she didn't understand. To her Tangier would always be a city which the infidels controlled. Later, when he brought Kalinka, his mother looked into her eyes.
"This woman smokes hashish."
"I know. I know."
It had bothered him at first, but he came to realize that the smoke was a part of her, part of the aura of dreaminess and mystery that he loved.
"Perhaps," his mother said, "she will cause you pain."
She hadn't yet. She served him, cooked for him. She polished his moccasins and arranged them on the floor in pairs. Farid finally found the horn and gave it to them as a gift. They kept it standing straight on the floor beside their bed. It was as tall as Kalinka, and its end, shaped like a bell, reminded him of her name.
At the Sûreté they said she was the best thing ever to happen to him. Once he overheard Aziz speaking to a colleague in the police canteen. "Of course Hamid understands the foreigners," he said. "He lives with a Chinese woman now, has learned all their secrets from her."
A Chinese woman—she was not that, but he understood why they thought she was. Just as all foreigners were infidels, and all infidels were Christians, so all Orientals were Chinese to them.
The wind. The wind. It blew so often in Tangier. When he thought back over that time he remembered the wind and the tears that flowed from Peter Zvegintzov's eyes. It pleased him that he lived with a woman who could inspire great love and break mens’ hearts. To love a woman—yes, that he understood. A woman could charm a man, cast a spell upon him, drive him mad. He was himself, he knew, bound to Kalinka by invisible bonds of passion that only she could break.
Who was she? Why had Peter lied and said she was his wife?
The wind, blowing hard outside, steady, raw, drove him finally into sleep. His last thought before falling off was of Peter's misery and the way Kalinka haunted him, lived on in his heart even after her betrayal.