2

THE NEXT MORNING, LAAFRIT FOUND the medical examiner’s report on his desk, together with a plastic bag containing the three bullets extracted from the victim’s body and a description of their trajectory showing the murder victim took the shots from the front at very close range. As for the two bodies from the day before, the autopsy established they died from drowning, just like the first one, which had washed up two days ago. The report posited they’d all been in the water for between one and three days.

Laafrit tossed the report aside. It was hastily written, lacked precision, and didn’t shed any light on the investigation. He picked up the phone and called the medical examiner. After the fourth ring, he heard Si Abdel-Majid’s voice, indolent as usual and laden with formalities.

“Professor Abdel-Majid from the Autopsy Division.”

“Good morning, professor,” said Laafrit cheerfully, trying to lighten the formalities.

“Good morning. I sent you the report on the drowned men. There is only one problem. I don’t know how the shooting victim wound up with them.”

“We don’t know either. I’d take your report seriously if it actually helped us develop a single lead—”

“I carried out my job as required,” said the medical examiner, cutting him off. “If you had read my report attentively, it would have been easy for you to understand that the murder victim took the bullets in vital organs, except for the one in his side that didn’t cause a mortal wound. As for the others, they died from drowning and there are no signs of violence on them.”

“That’s clear from your report,” said Laafrit, annoyed with Si Abdel-Majid’s arrogance. “If you would, I’d like an analysis of their stomach contents.”

“For the shooting victim too?”

“For them all. Thank you.”

The detective hung up quickly so as not to give the medical examiner time to object. He put the first lozenge of the morning in his mouth and then called Abdellah into his office.

It was clear Laafrit hadn’t slept enough. He kept yawning and rubbed his eyes, which were surrounded by dark rings. Laafrit didn’t like the taste of the lozenge so he took it out of his mouth and put it in the ashtray.

Abdellah came into Laafrit’s office with a pale face, clenching his teeth. Laafrit glanced at him and told him to sit down.

“Something wrong?”

Abdellah shook his head.

“My stomach,” he said, in a voice interrupted by groaning. “I haven’t slept a wink. Every time I leave the bathroom I’ve got to run right back.”

“Allal complained about the same thing,” said Laafrit, with a look of surprise. “He asked for permission to go to the pharmacy.”

Suddenly he hit his forehead as if he’d just remembered something.

“Did you two go together to the banquet yesterday?” he asked.

“To the circle of amdah and dhikr,” said Abdellah, correcting him in a weak voice. “At a circumcision party, I ran into a gentleman who honored us with a banquet unlike any other.”

Abdellah forgot his ailment and continued talking exuberantly.

“A couscous you eat with your fingers because of its incredible deliciousness. Afterward, tagines with lamb and plums, then chicken with olives and pickled lemons. We broke up the meal with filali sweets and then had plates of all kinds of fruit. But what gave us diarrhea were the cups of milk mixed with rose water.”

Laafrit looked at him suspiciously.

“Okay, I’ve got other things to do than sit here listening to stories of Ashaab al-Tamaa, the unwanted dinner guest,” he said. “Take these things in front of me and add them to the fingerprints. Send everything to the crime lab in the capital.”

Abdellah took the bag with the bullets and looked at it carefully. He stared at the medical examiner’s report and was surprised to see it was only a few lines long.

“What does Professor Abdel-Majid have to say?”

“When you recover, we’ll talk,” said Laafrit despondently.

Abdellah’s face twitched and thick beads of sweat glistened on his cheeks. He sat pinned to the chair as if something serious was preventing him from getting up. Laafrit looked at him perplexed.

“Sorry,” said Abdellah weakly.

He left the office and ran to the bathroom.

Laafrit went downstairs slowly. He didn’t notice the greeting of the guard brandishing his machine gun at the station’s entrance. The detective stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the sky. It was a beautiful day with a clear sky and light, warm winds. Yesterday’s rains had washed off the streets and trees.

Laafrit looked at his watch. It was now ten thirty and nothing was moving in the case except for a lackluster report from the morgue. If things kept going this slowly, Central would send in a special unit to take over. That was the last thing he wanted.

Laafrit thought about going to the café across the street for a cup of coffee but he reconsidered. If someone saw him there, they’d think he was on vacation, and at a time like this. Finally, the black Fiat pulled up in front of him. Inspector Allal opened the door and Laafrit got in, hiding his anger.

“Please don’t tell me I’m late,” said Allal. “The tank was empty and I had to stop for gas.”

Laafrit cringed but kept silent. He knew he needed his assistants today and any tension between them might undermine their work. He pretended to be in a good mood.

“How’re your intestines now?” he asked.

“Fine. That banquet cost us a lot,” Allal said. “But it was worth it.”

Laafrit feigned interest.

“The Dwarf told me cups of milk mixed with rose water were the culprit,” he said in a tone filled with derision.

Allal glanced at the detective, but all of a sudden he fixed his eyes on the road as a black Mercedes driven by a man with an ugly face cut them off. Allal slammed on the brakes, which let out a screech. The car shuddered. Laafrit shut his eyes as a kind of madness hit the inspector, who began cursing, almost jumping out of his seat.

“Let’s get him!” he screamed. “Do you give the order?”

“No,” said Laafrit. “He had the right of way.”

Rage dissipated from the inspector’s face and calmness unexpectedly took its place, as if he’d outsmarted his nerves.

“There is no power and no strength save in God,” he repeated several times.

He drove through a number of side streets and stopped to let an old woman pass in front of the car. He was careful to slow down while moving behind a bus, even though he could have easily passed it. Laafrit got annoyed. He thought this meekness on the road was in response to him not letting the inspector go after the Mercedes.

“Stop at the newspaper kiosk,” said the detective, irritated.

Laafrit got out of the car, leaving the door open. A few minutes later, he came back with a stack of Arabic and Spanish newspapers.

“Hurry up,” he told Allal. “We’ve got to get to Ksar es-Seghir before noon.”

Laafrit flipped through the papers. There was no news at all about the negotiations that had broken up the demonstration of the unemployed graduates, even though the front pages of all the papers highlighted the cops’ violent intervention against the crowds in front of the employment office. He flipped through the rest of the papers carefully but found nothing in either Spanish or Arabic about a sunk patera. A strange front-page headline, however, made him smile. Laafrit read it aloud:

“Farming Tomatoes in Morocco, a Disease Curling and Yellowing Their Leaves. Morocco Will Soon Become a Tomato-Importing Nation.”

The headline didn’t pull Allal out of his thoughts, and Laafrit realized Allal was immersed in his dhikr.

The car slowly approached a street that merged on a terrifying slope with a two-lane road opposite the sea. On the right, tourist hotels with dark glass towers came one after the other, with red-brick buildings between them. At the end of the road, the hotels gave way to abandoned warehouses. The road then narrowed and the buildings receded into empty space: hills on the right and a rocky shore with a rusty sign warning against swimming because of pollution levels on the left.

Laafrit couldn’t finish the article about the tomatoes. It was too scientific and full of virus names. It was enough for him to read the sections describing the scope of the catastrophe and estimates on the loss of crops in the Doukkala region, which was just south of Casablanca. He folded the newspaper and put it in front of him. He then turned to the inspector and decided to draw him out of his silence by force.

“What do you think about this catastrophe?” he asked. “Imagine a Morocco without tomatoes!”

The inspector laughed bitterly and then was silent as he passed an old truck that looked like a moving wreck.

“Anything’s possible,” Allal said indifferently. “Here’s Morocco today, a country without fish because Spanish fleets have cleaned out our seas. Thousands of their fishermen make their living off our shores while our children fatten their fish with their corpses.”

Laafrit turned toward the inspector.

“I spent last night surfing the Spanish TV channels. No news about harraga or a patera sinking off their shores. You hear anything?”

The inspector shook his head. Trying to hide his annoyance, he asked: “Then why’re we going to Ksar es-Seghir? What’ll Layashi do for you?”

“It’s been a long time since I disturbed his calm little life,” said Laafrit sarcastically. “Besides, we don’t have any leads. Should we just sit around and do nothing?”

Allal didn’t buy Laafrit’s explanation. He knew from experience that Laafrit always downplayed what he did, without revealing his intentions. He’d pretend he wasn’t watching or listening closely and act like he was distracted. He’d move according to a clear plan but give the impression he was fumbling around.

Half an hour later, the car came up on Ksar es-Seghir. In summer, as in winter, the town was calm and pleasant. It overlooks the sea, which almost swallows it up. It’s the closest point in Morocco to Spain, and even on cloudy days the banks of Europe can be seen, enveloped in thick fog.

Laafrit told the inspector to wait for him at a café, which had a wall being repaired.

“Have a mint tea,” he said. “We’re not doing anything official, just checking things out.”

Allal was happy to oblige.

As Laafrit scaled stone steps carved into a hill, three guard dogs suddenly surrounded him, as if they’d been waiting for him. He thought about backtracking, but to get to Layashi’s he had to climb a surprising number of steps. Layashi’s house was built on a hilltop, as if it were a saint’s mausoleum.

The barking became louder and the dogs showed a real viciousness and desire to sink their fangs into him. Laafrit was forced to retreat as he cast about looking for something to throw at them. A rough whistle saved him from this hell and drove the dogs back immediately, sending them into the woods. Laafrit looked up and saw Layashi standing on the roof of his house wearing a short mountain djellaba, waving at him with his crutch. Laafrit rushed up the steps, only stopping after he passed through the open courtyard door.

From a distance, Layashi looked like an old sheikh but up close he had surprisingly incandescent blue eyes, bordered by thick eyelashes. He wasn’t older than fifty, though his face, which was covered by a thick, scraggly beard, harbored depressions and wrinkles that had been created not by the passage of time but by the horrors and mysteries of adventures. He had begun his life in the northern village of Wad Law as a fisherman without a port or fish—he worked in smuggling and went to jail for it a number of times. From a historical perspective, he was one of the founders of the harraga business in Morocco.

He greeted Laafrit on the roof, laughing, and embraced him like he was a member of the family.

“You’ve brought us a blessing, if the cops have any blessing!” said Layashi in his thick mountain accent.

“Your dogs would’ve torn me apart,” grumbled Laafrit, struggling to free himself from Layashi’s warm embrace. “Always send them out to greet your visitors?”

“My visitors?” asked Layashi scoffing. “They call out to me or whistle. Thanks to these dogs, I live here like I’m in Switzerland. Even at night, I leave my front door wide open.”

Layashi pointed to a mat with a rug and pillows spread out on it. Laafrit found it difficult to sit on the ground. He leaned back on the pillow and stretched out his legs, putting his shoes outside the rug. He wasn’t comfortable but he gave the impression he’d just taken a load off. When Layashi began getting ready to sit down, limping because of his artificial foot, Laafrit looked out at the sea so he didn’t have to pretend to offer to help.

“I left one of my partners waiting for me at a café,” said Laafrit. “I wanted to talk to you alone.”

Layashi took a deep breath and stared at Laafrit suspiciously.

“What’s the problem? Something to do with me?”

“No, not exactly. The problem concerns us all. In the last three days, four bodies have washed up, the last one shot dead.”

Laafrit kept an eye on Layashi’s face. He didn’t see any hint of surprise.

“We thought they were harraga,” Laafrit went on, “until we discovered the last one. So far, we haven’t gotten any news of a patera setting out from Tangier or the nearby coast.”

“The one shot dead can’t be a harrag but the others might be if their bodies were decomposed a bit,” said Layashi, freed from the tension that had taken hold of him. “If a boat went out a few days ago and sank in the sea or near the Spanish coast, more bodies might’ve washed up in different places, or at least they’d start washing up.”

“We want to be sure,” said Laafrit. “Has a patera set out from around here in the past few days?”

Layashi stared Laafrit in the eyes.

“I assure you,” he said resolutely, “no boat has left from Ksar es-Seghir or from the neighboring shores in more than three months. Even before then, these days harraga are arrested before they even get their feet wet.”

Laafrit deliberately stayed still. He turned his full attention to Layashi and looked at him carefully.

“Why so sure?” he asked, staring at Layashi provocatively.

Layashi gazed out at the sea and sighed with a frustrated look on his face.

“Want to know? Fine. I’ve got informants working for me.”

Laafrit laughed, not believing a word of it.

“So you’re deputized by the government to guard the most dangerous shoreline in Morocco?”

“I don’t have to reveal this to you,” snapped Layashi with a look of annoyance.

“What’s in it for you?” asked Laafrit, amazed.

“Just a good deed,” Layashi shot back.

Laafrit bit his lip, craving a lozenge. He hesitated, as if considering his words very carefully.

“You know about all the hash-smuggling activities in the area.”

“I don’t care about hash smugglers around here or anywhere else,” Layashi said, waving his hand toward the sea. “What concerns me are the pateras. I promised myself I’d fight this plague from up here on this hill. What I seek is God’s forgiveness. You know my repentance is pure.”

Layashi’s voice became full of grief.

“If I could turn back time,” he continued, “I’d have stayed in my village, making an honest living instead of having to drag this lifeless wooden leg around.”

He moved his artificial leg so the detective could see it.

“Why do all this?” asked Laafrit suspiciously.

“To atone for my sins and ease my soul,” he responded, sighing as if this confession relieved him of some pain. “This terrible business wasn’t around when I first settled in Ksar es-Seghir.”

Laafrit shook his head in agreement.

“I know the history of harraga begins with you,” he said. “But you repented and you paid the price. You lost your leg and went to jail.”

“That gives me little comfort,” said Layashi regretfully.

Laafrit remembered Layashi’s confession when he arrested him five years ago. The interrogation wasn’t difficult. Layashi confessed voluntarily to collaborating with some Spanish border guards. He’d bring them a few kilos of hash and in exchange they’d turn a blind eye to the pateras. At the time, Layashi insisted he had saved dozens of families from poverty. He boasted that hundreds of harraga now lived and worked in Europe, and sent money back to their families. Some of them even got papers. All this was thanks to him.

Laafrit snuck a lozenge into his mouth, placing it under his tongue.

“That’s not what you said during your arrest,” he said. “I still remember how you were bragging, claiming you provided a great service to the young people who could escape.”

“True,” said Layashi. “If I only could’ve stopped at that golden age. What I didn’t tell you then tortures me now. I can’t sleep any more because of my sins. Every night I hear harraga drowning and crying out for help, clinging to the boat as I beat them with an oar so they don’t tip the patera over. Every night I can picture them plunging into the sea, floating dead, the waves tossing them around. Every night their songs, their jokes, their laughs haunt me. When the lights of Tarifa glitter before their eyes, I can see they think they’ve made it safely, even though they’re really standing at death’s door. You haven’t lived these horrors, Laafrit. No matter what I tell you, you can’t imagine that hell.

“It was like the words of the Sublime,” he went on, quoting the Quran: “By the (winds) sent forth one after another (to man’s profit) / which then blow violently in tempestuous gusts / and scatter things far and wide.

“My heart doesn’t chastise me for the early days when people made it to Europe safely. It tortures me for what happened after, when I’d take harraga out on a patera knowing death was waiting for them, when I’d trick them by tossing them out in front of Asila, making them think they’d reached the hills of Tarifa. They’d jump around and shout for joy, while most of them died drowning or when the waves smashed them against the rocks.”

Layashi’s eyes welled up with tears.

“Why didn’t I stop when the mafia got more and more into the business and surveillance on the Spanish shores became tighter? I acted against my heart and my mountain values. I went into competition with those bastards who live like parasites on people’s suffering.”

He took out a tissue and blew his nose.

“I’m prepared to cooperate with you in anything having to do with harraga and human traffickers,” he added in a grief-stricken voice.

“So,” said Laafrit, returning to a calm tone, “you can assure me no patera set out from these shores in the past few days.”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Layashi. “But you know from your work nothing’s a hundred percent.”

Laafrit shook his head in agreement and swallowed his lozenge.

“What confuses me is that the last one was shot dead,” he said. “And he didn’t look like a harrag. But it’s hard for us to separate him from the others since we’re not sure any of them are actually harraga.”

“Take it from me,” said Layashi. “No patera has set out from here. Look somewhere else.”

Layashi shrugged as if the situation no longer had anything to do with him. He took a snuffbox from inside his djellaba and snorted from it so strongly his eyes filled with tears. Laafrit gave him a sidelong glance and then got up. Layashi made as if to get up too, but couldn’t balance himself.

“Lamfaddal, Lamfaddal!” he yelled out to his son in his thick mountain accent, turning toward the stairs.

He gazed out at the sea as if hiding his eyes from the detective.

“My son will keep the dogs away from you.”

The car left Ksar es-Seghir, heading back to Tangier. Laafrit leaned back in his seat and put his hands behind his head. Inspector Allal knew this was a sign that meant things weren’t going as well as they could and that the detective needed time to think. The truth was that Laafrit didn’t have much to think about since the case was still, up to now, at square one. There wasn’t any information to build even a preliminary hypothesis on.

Laafrit let out a deep sigh and looked out at the blue sea. He tried to think about what his wife might have cooked for lunch, but found his thoughts swirling around the drowned men and the shooting victim. What secret was this puzzle hiding?

He told himself he might have been too sympathetic and accommodating to Layashi’s spiritual ailments. How much could he trust his remorse? Shouldn’t he have provoked Layashi in an effort to learn something new about harraga? Maybe he would have discovered some things about the business no one else knew. But Layashi never said harraga die from anything except drowning. Should he give up on the harraga idea and concentrate all his energy on the shooting victim?

He tried to construct a scenario in which two hash-smuggling gangs exchanged fire in the middle of the strait during a drug deal gone wrong. The three drowning victims would have been the first to jump ship, while the fourth would have been shot dead after torpedoing his rival.

Laafrit then remembered neither the three drowned men nor the murder victim had any ID on them when the police combed their pockets. It was hard to get past the harraga theory, despite the problem of the shooting victim. Did they just wash ashore one after the other by chance? It would be hard to confirm that. He thought again how difficult it was to construct a convincing scenario without any reliable information.

Laafrit felt an oppressive hunger, but at this moment he was craving a cigarette. It had been only three months since he quit.

Inspector Allal knew being silent for too long would give Laafrit cravings. Allal decided to pull the detective out of it.

“How’s Layashi?” he asked, clutching the wheel to pull a sharp turn.

“He lives tortured by his heart,” said Laafrit mockingly. “He can’t sleep any more. Drowned corpses yell out in his head.”

“That criminal! If justice had hands, it would have put him to death,” said the inspector bitterly.

“Justice,” said Laafrit, “doesn’t criminalize those who help in immigration. It considers them as only having committed a misdemeanor. Layashi lost a leg in his last venture. He was convicted and went to jail.”

“And now here he is enjoying the millions he collected. Where’s the justice in that?”

“Layashi’s combating pateras from his tower to atone for his sins,” Laafrit said with more contempt.

The inspector let out a ringing laugh.

“He assured me no pateras have set out recently,” Laafrit added.

“And you believe a word he says?”

“What choice do I have? We’ve got no other source of information in the area.”

“Ask the coast guard.”

“If the coast guard had busted some illegals, we’d have been the first to know. What concerns me is finding out about a boat that got away.”

“While you were at Layashi’s,” said the inspector, “I talked to some locals at the café. I baited them into talking about hrig and they all said the border patrols have been reinforced in the area and that boats are counted every day. Not a single fishing boat sets out until everyone on board leaves his ID with the coast guard. Anyone new to the village has to confirm his identity and explain why he came and where he’s staying. Because of all this headache, human traffickers have moved on to greener pastures.”

Laafrit turned to the inspector, who took his sweet time before letting loose.

“The Belyounech woods are full of Africans who get there through the Algerian borders. There are gangs that specialize in meeting them. The smugglers take them to the Oujda train station at night and then help them get on the coal train arriving in the morning in Fez. From there, the Africans split up so they don’t attract attention and get on buses and taxis. They go to Tetouan and then to the Belyounech woods, where they find smugglers who sneak them into Sebta by sea through Fnideq, the Great Wall of China that Spain built to divide us completely from Sebta.”

Not wanting to belittle the inspector, Laafrit didn’t say he already knew all about this.

“More work for the border guards in the area,” he said instead.

“They comb the woods!” said the inspector angrily. “I’m totally against this. Why’re we guarding a border that isn’t ours? Sebta’s a Moroccan city and our real border is on its shores, not at that wall. If Spain wants us to help them fight illegal immigration from Africa, they have to leave their beloved ‘Ceuta.’ We’d be more than happy to take over guarding our shores there. Same’s true for Melilla.”

Laafrit knew all too well what the inspector thought about the two enclave cities. Whenever the topic of Sebta and Melilla came up, Allal always got tense. Outrage and feelings of injustice and having been defrauded seized him. How many times had he expressed hope there’d be a war to reclaim the two cities, saying openly he’d be the first martyr to die for the cause? Laafrit wasn’t ready to plunge into this kind of discussion but it was hard to calm the inspector down.

“So,” Allal continued excitedly, “by arresting the Africans, we’re giving legitimacy to the colonization of the two cities. Spain has deluded the world into thinking Sebta and Melilla are theirs. So when they arrest a Moroccan sneaking in illegally, they’re tossing him out of an imaginary border. And when they hand him over to us and we prosecute him on the charge of clandestinely leaving the national territory, it’s as if we’re not recognizing Sebta and Melilla are part of our soil!”

“But as far as I know,” said Laafrit calmly, “Morocco doesn’t officially recognize Sebta and Melilla as Spanish cities.”

The inspector hit the steering wheel with both hands and ignored the road entirely.

“And here we are, falling into their trap,” he said bitterly, “when we stop Africans from entering one of our own cities, charging them with the intent to immigrate illegally.”

Laafrit wanted to change the subject to something more interesting but Allal’s appetite for this subject only became more voracious. As they hit a steep decline ending in a dangerous curve, Laafrit reminded him to keep his eyes on the road.

“And worst of all,” added the inspector, practically screaming, “our children are dying in the sea like vermin to reach Spain while the Africans who manage to sneak into Sebta are collected in a transit camp there called Lacamorako.”

“Calamocarro,” Laafrit corrected.

Because the inspector was incapable of pronouncing the word correctly, he gesticulated wildly with his hands, completely ignoring the steering wheel.

“I don’t give a shit what its name is! What’s important is they collect these Africans in this camp and take them from there to Spain in groups, smoothing the way for them to get papers. But our children who survive the sea and make it to their shores without drowning, if they arrest them, they toss them back at us like unwanted fish.”

Laafrit decided it was time to cool the inspector down about liberating the two occupied cities.

“For the moment, our case is still at square zero,” he said, changing the topic.

“We shouldn’t hurry,” the inspector replied grudgingly. “We need to bide our time until we get the crime-lab report.”

“The lab report,” said Laafrit, “won’t tell us if the drowning victims were harraga or not. That much is sure. And I want to figure out that point before the crime lab sends its results. What’s confusing me so far is we don’t know yet if a patera set out sometime this week. As far as I know, it’s been two weeks since the last one. A Spanish patrol guarding the coast saved all twenty-three on board. It left from Sebta.”

The inspector slowed down and shook his head as if dispelling wandering thoughts.

“Why do you insist on linking the three drownings to the murder victim? It’s possible the drowned men were harraga and the one shot dead was a hash smuggler. Or some guy on a foreign boat.”

Laafrit paused, as if organizing his ideas. “First,” he said slowly, “the murder victim didn’t look like someone fleeing his assailant. The evidence shows he took the rounds from the front. This means he was dealing with his killer in some way. Second, the bullets were fired at very close range. This proves the intent to kill. Third, the shooting victim wasn’t wearing his jacket when he was killed. It was put on him after the murder.”

The inspector slowed down until they came to a stop.

“Who said he was knocked off at sea?” Allal asked, as if struck by a sudden burst of inspiration. “Why couldn’t he have been killed on land?”