Have you ever tried to get rid of a tick that you can’t quite reach?
That’s what Ramsai felt like the next morning.
I was up bright and early, ready for the bus, when he appeared, standing to attention at my table. “Good Morning, Monsieur Volland.”
“I…”
“I have arranged a German breakfast for you, instead of this Moroccan/French rubbish.”
I sat speechless, yet when the sausage, cheese, and bread with marmalade arrived, I did tuck in. Thankfully he left me alone to eat.
There was a taxi at the door at eight, which cost me a franc, and it took us both to the bus terminal, where he haggled the cost of the fare, and insisting on the right hand side seat, getting me a whole double seat to myself. I can’t say I particularly liked his attention, but Ramsai’s constant chatter on the journey gave me insights into life in this northern corner of Africa. He pointed out old Corsair forts, and gave a reasonable history of the Barbary Coast pirates of the 1600’s.
Having only looked at Sewell’s map, I hadn’t quite got the idea of distance yet, but by the time noon arrived, the bus’s seats had already eclipsed the LRDG’s jeeps as the worst thing I’d ever had under my backside. When Ramsai pulled one of his small cases from the rather rickety overhead storage, and produced a bottle of wine and paper-wrapped sandwiches, I almost kissed him.
“Ham,” he said proudly, “With mustard and apple, just the way you Germans like it.”
I looked at him suspiciously, as I knew that, being supposedly from Stuttgart, in Baden-Württemberg, he’d got it slightly wrong. “red cabbage pickle,” I said, biting into the sandwich, which I suspected had been made by my hotel.
“Pickle?” Ramsai looked abashed.
“That’s what I want right now. Mother used to make it in her kitchen. The smell would entice the neighbours for miles around.” I looked out of the window at the sea vista passing slowly by. Ramsai’s insistence of a right-hand seat had both gotten us a sea view and out of the direct sunlight. I had to admit; he was beginning to grow on me.
A rather doughy cake followed, almost like a stolen, but the wine was of a good vintage, and I consumed it all with relish.
At the junction town of Souk Tleta, Ramsai insisted we lose the bus, and guided me through busy streets to the rather primitive train station. Even though there were no platforms, I almost cried. Okay, the damn railway was rougher than travelling over freight lines in a back junction in Scotland, but it did get us into Rabat by the time the sun was setting on a calm blue Atlantic Ocean.
The only thought in my mind was ‘why couldn’t they have just shipped me down here, instead of dumping me up the coast?’.
As the train pulled me closer to the walled city of Rabat, I knew what it truly meant to be out of my depth. Although in Southern America I’d been temporarily further from Edinburgh than ever before, here in this weird foreign corner of Africa, I felt as if transported to a different time, almost a different world. I’d read quite a few of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars novels, and here was the very essence of it.
Rabat, according to Ramsai, was not the biggest city in Morocco, but it did hold all the political intrigue. With Embassies from many of the countries now at war with each other, Ramsai insisted that I contact the German Embassy as soon as I arrived, in case things got ugly during my stay.
“Ugly?” I asked. The word did not translate easily from the English counterpart; the closest I got was unbequem, which meant ‘uncomfortable’.
Rabat was undoubtedly a beautiful city, but like my own home, it seemed to have been constrained for a time behind its ancient fortified walls. Whitewashed towers grew from the cluster of one and two storey buildings, and modern structures vied with ancient for both supremacy and sunlight.
The streets were usually narrow and lined with small carts, providing a constant supply of vendors rather than a single huge bazaar.
With the now ever-present Ramsai at my side, I found myself at the best of hotels. The fact that it was within walking distance of the German Embassy hadn’t escaped me.
The Hotel Casablanque had an almost European vestibule, reminiscent of some of the prestige hotels of Edinburgh, but there the similarity ended. The man behind the counter spoke four languages in the short time that I signed in and got the key to my room; French, English, German (to me) and some form of African gibberish with way too many ‘sh’ and ‘gh’ guttural growls.
The attitude to his underlings bordered on a slave-owner’s. He snapped and snarled at them until they obeyed his terse commands, and berated them for both tardiness and speed. Once he’d completed his diatribe, he turned to me with a rubber smile, as if he’d never said a single word out of place.
I slept like a log for most of the night, although in the wee hours, I was awoken by a short staccato buzzing noise. Fearing a hornet had gotten inside my netted room, I rose to investigate, soon tracking the noise to my verandah doors, which looked out to the sea.
There was nothing immediately buzzing at the window, but my eyes were drawn to the small verandah floor. There, lying with a blanket over him was Ramsai, snoring lightly; the sound of the buzzing.
I had done him a disservice when I had adjourned to my room after a long day’s travel; I had paid him neither heed or pay, and he had done the obvious, climbed two floors on the outside of the building, and slept on a free space.
The next morning, as I sat at breakfast, I remedied my blunder and pressed five francs into his hand. “I will go for a walk by the docks this morning,” I said with authority. “And shop at the bazaar in the afternoon.”
As we walked down the hill to the port, Ramsai provided yet another service. In Tangiers, I had been beset with beggars, of which I tried my best to ignore. Here in Rabat, they abounded in spades, and Ramsai beat them off with a stick… literally.
With Ramsai’s constant observation of me, however, I realized I needed another part of disguise, one to draw a veil over my eye movements. I instantly began shopping for sunglasses.
“Oh, no, no, dear me,” Ramsai exclaimed as I pulled a pair from a vendor. He looked at the glasses in my hand, took them from me and almost threw them back in the poor man’s face. “Follow me,”
And of course, he knew a dealer, who produced various prestige pairs from under his counter. “Polarised” he said, as if that single word meant something.
I shrugged, but found the glasses comfortable to wear.
“Polairised?” Ramsai questioned the man mercilessly; the same man that had been his best friend a minute ago. He turned to me after a smattering of gobbledygook had passed between them. “You see clearer, even down into the water.” He pointed to a small sheet on the wall, encased in a glass frame.
Popular Mechanics Magazine. One-way glass stops glare.
The actual wording of the article was too small to read, but I got the idea. The paper was faded to yellow, and I could just make out the issue date; 1936.
Once outside I donned my new accessory, and breathed a little easier, knowing I now had a barrier between us. It wasn’t until we turned a corner and encountered a view of the bay, that I realized the technical aspect; the view was simply stunning, made all the clearer by my new lenses.
Down on the busy docks, it took one look to provide Sewell with one of his reports; standing out like sore thumbs were two grey hulls, their sterns very familiar to me. They were German torpedo boats, the very same as has taken me on the Forth Estuary to see the Bismarck.
I turned away from the hulls, their decks filled with fast working men in loose white trousers. We were too far away to hear commands, but I knew the stance of the men in charge; blond Europeans without doubt.
I took tea at a small café with tables onto the wharf. While Ramsai chattered about pirates and fishing, I watched the German boats, my eyes hidden behind my dark glasses. Also if my pick-up was to be from the port, I thought I’d best make myself a bit visible down here; a regular, so to speak.
Around ten, I walked some more, first to one end, then back towards the German boats, finding a German newspaper for sale on the way. I could see long beams of wood being shaped, men busy with planes and chisels. Behind the two boats they were preparing hull sections for more boats. I guessed that Robert Dijold was behind the venture, and filed all my notes mentally.
“Time for samples.” I said to Ramsai, and turned with a flourish, my back to the port.
Suddenly alarmed, I had to jump quickly to one side as an open-topped car slid past us; a shiny Mercedes. I had enough time to see a well-dressed man in the back, his eyes dark behind sunglasses like mine. But the crowning glory was his companion; a blond version of Lilith from Edinburgh, complete with flowing scarf, high brimmed glasses, and a tight sweater that left little to the imagination.
Complete with her scientifically designed brassiere, she was straight out of a Hollywood movie set; she’d just left the film crew behind somewhere in her wake.
I watched open-mouthed as the car turned to the right, in the direction of the German boats. I needed Ramsai out of the way. I slipped him another five francs. “Can you get some lunch ordered at the Hotel?” I said, “I’ll be along in a bit.”
But he gave me a knowing smile, tapped the side of his nose, and made cupping signs on his chest. “She is a beauty, yes?”
“Yes.” I said, shooing him away. “Bugger off.”
He headed off up the hill with a huge grin.
I walked down to the open wharf as if I’d forgotten something; a man on a mission. When I reached the waterline I stopped, tapped my shirt pocket, and smiled. It was all a pathetic ruse, and I doubted if anyone paid the slightest bit of attention to me, but I went through the play-acting anyway.
The Mercedes had stopped near the German boats, and I was pretty certain I’d just spotted two of the players in the spy-ring, Rupert Dijold and his girlfriend Geneviève Salou. I watched as Dijold exchanged words with a blond man who I’d seen earlier; it confirmed his role as the probable boss of the boatbuilding operation, or at least the foreman of the crew.
I then retraced my steps back to the hotel. If the identities of the couple were correct, I now had proof that Dijold was indeed involved. It also meant that if there was work being done openly in Rabat, there could be other bases up and down the coast.
Lunch with Ramsai gave me a distraction I needed to process some of the information I’d gathered. “What’s the best place in town for dinner?” I asked as we finished off our sweetmeats.
“The Descartes,” he replied without any consideration. “It’s best in town, but expensive.”
That evening, I walked to the hotel Descartes in search of Max Schönhausen, but saw nothing but boring businessmen, nothing that could be called a playboy.
It was a wasted evening, but the food was excellent, the wine too.
I sat that night in my room, looking at a calendar on the wall, mentally crossing off another day. I had three days before I would be going home.