DAOUDI WAS SQUATTING ON THE SIDEWALK, in the exact spot where Ichrak’s body had been found. He passed a finger over the ground and took a long look at the dust it picked up, as if it might give him a lead—a clue as to how to proceed. He looked around. Nothing connects with anything else, he griped to himself. How can a report be put together in these conditions? Not many people were about. Nothing was moving. What could be felt was the presence of Chergui, sweeping through the bowels of these alleyways like a Rolls-Royce Series 1000 jet engine. A further drop of pressure since early that morning had made the air even more unpredictable than before. A gust of wind from who knew where blew up and swirled around the inspector; he felt his suit sticking to him and vibrating like a pneumatic drill. The tails of his jacket and the cuffs of his pants flapped like ISIS banners. He was forced to turn aside by the hail of sand that followed, striking his face in an open-handed slap. Before any counterattack came, there was a brief moment of calm beneath the dazzling sun.
It was a vicious killing, but Daoudi couldn’t think what the motive could be. Ichrak came from a modest background and had mostly led an uneventful life. In such a case, how could the slit throat be explained? Rue du Poète Taha Adnan was quiet. The passersby and the ironmongers in their shops were going about their business as usual. As was the sun. It reflected off the walls painted acrylic white and flooded the area with a harsh light. The inspector, narrowing his eyes and still squatting, wondered how he was going to close the case. He’d long since read the report from the forensic institute, which had not provided any significant information. The wound had been caused by a sharp instrument, probably a blade, which had not entered deeply but had proved fatal: the carotid artery had been severed clean through. Apart from this cut and the marks from the victim’s fall down the steps, there were no other injuries.
Daoudi took out his phone to look at the photos he’d taken a few weeks ago. He flipped through them and found the ones he was looking for. He went back up the steps to the street at the top, then moved fifty yards or so to the left. Checking on one of the pictures, he found the place where the traces of blood had begun. The image showed them, spread over a small area. Had the victim tried to get away from her attacker by fighting back? Definitely not—he would have struck her again, and there was no sign of such a thing. Or else, after being cut she spun around in place, hence the spatter. Daoudi tried to connect the parts, like editing a film. Retracing his steps, eyes on his phone screen, he stopped halfway, where there was another concentration of brown marks.
Had the victim made a pause, so to speak, at this spot? It was strange to think of Ichrak as “the victim,” yet she was, even though Daoudi couldn’t get her out of his mind. He let out a groan to give vent to his morbid thoughts. He moved forward some more, went back down the steps, and returned to where the body had been found at dawn: the place where the young woman had fallen, unconscious, and had bled to death.
“Why does death arrive in such a simple way?” Mokhtar Daoudi asked himself. He believed firmly in the concept of maktoob, or destiny, but the speed at which the young woman had gone from being alive to being dead left him with a bitter taste, like those times where you’re certain something will never be brought to a close, whatever you might do. In this case, the inspector was experiencing contradictory feelings that still took him by surprise. In dying, she had deprived him of the chance to take his revenge for the worst humiliation he’d ever experienced at the hands of a woman. Daoudi still couldn’t forgive himself for his weakness that day, in the cell, when he’d spilled his seed, out of fear, like a coward, on Ichrak’s thighs, failing to take from her that which he had desired so intensely. He had wanted to have her in his grip, yet he had fallen into hers. After that incident, he’d had to withstand her scornful gaze whenever they passed in the street or, worse, be met with her indifference when she walked by, her own woman, feigning not to notice him. A dog would not have known such degradation. Her insolence was boundless. Who would not have wanted to force her to lower her eyes? Every time, the wound she inflicted was like a red-hot iron applied to his soul. To overcome this feeling, he would have needed to force himself on her the way a man should. Now that she was dead, Ichrak left him to his suffering. Mokhtar Daoudi had hoped for a while that the shame perpetually dwelling in him would finally abate, but so far that had not happened.
On one of the photos, his attention was drawn to a detail aside from the brown marks. He returned up the steps and along the street and stopped in front of a utility pole bearing a poster for a soccer game—the Casablanca match between Wydad FC and Raja CA. The pole also held up, or had held up, a metal cable—probably a phone line. The pole had shifted on its cement pedestal and was leaning at perhaps thirty degrees; given the narrowness of the road, it had probably been struck at some time by a vehicle. Daoudi took hold of it and moved it with one hand; it turned like crazy. The cable trailed across the ground along the roadway. Putting away his phone, Daoudi picked up the copper wire at the place where it had snapped. He examined it along three feet or so of its length. Around him, scraps of paper and dry leaves were shifting sluggishly about in a new eddy less forceful than the last. This one wasn’t disorienting. Quite the opposite, it helped the inspector to think; it inspired him, even. He pulled the cable to one side and slid it between his fingers till he reached its end. He held it for another moment like this, then let it go with a sigh.
“If the death of that young woman isn’t a pure expression of maktoob, I, Mokhtar Daoudi, cannot see how it could be anything else, I swear. And when maktoob steps in, it’s best to keep clear of the waves.”
Saying this to himself, he headed unhurriedly toward the Dacia that was parked close by.
For two or three days, the atmospheric pressure had risen from 1,013 or so to the exceptional level of 1,054 hectopascals in Casa, which gave many the impression that Chergui had lowered in intensity. In fact, Daoudi took it as a wish for an alliance. Something that could wipe away the last traces of dunes and oases in the Sahara would know how to get rid of memories that were flaying the hearts of human beings. Mokhtar Daoudi couldn’t get over the incident with Ichrak in the cell. Above all because, despite the bedazzlement that had driven him toward realizing his desire, a stubborn latent shame lingered in his mind: he’d disappointed himself. He had imagined possessing the young woman, but when he thought he was about to do it, nothing in the world could hold back the come that had spurted from him or the long moan he uttered at the very moment he was brushing against the lips of paradise. Daoudi would never forget the way the woman recoiled and her disdainful grimace as the lower part of his body, slumped against her, emptied itself in spasms. She detached herself from the mass pressing down on her, rose from the bunk of the jail cell where the act had taken place, and lowered her dress, which he had lifted to the level of her hips. She picked up her leather clutch, knocked to the floor a short time before, opened it, and took out a Kleenex. She unhurriedly wiped the inside of her thigh and examined the result. She then straightened her clothing, looking Mokhtar Daoudi scornfully up and down as she did so, and threw the Kleenex to him.
“You didn’t take anything from me. Check it out. It’s all there.”
Daoudi averted his gaze.
“Take a good look, don’t be afraid. You’re like a dog. Though even a dog wouldn’t have done what you just did. You can keep those,” she added, pointing to the crumpled piece of white lace that the cop had torn off and tossed on the ground. “You’re pathetic, Mokhtar; you tore them for no reason.”
Her expression unruffled, she moved toward the door, which Daoudi had not had the presence of mind to lock. Sitting dazedly on the bunk, he knew as well as she did that he had gotten nothing out of it except that sticky wad of tissue: a little pool of cold sperm wiped from the top of her thigh. His pleasure had overcome him and sunk him before he could even take her, however eagerly he had wanted to do so.
Sitting in Mokhtar Daoudi’s office, Zahira watched the inspector’s mouth formulating the outcome of the inquiry into her daughter’s death. But she no longer heard anything. Her brain was in turmoil. She was asking herself why this man kept talking even though no sound came out. When she became aware of the peculiar silence, her hearing seemed to return. A sound like a rumbling in the belly was informing her that after a difficult investigation, the facts that had emerged suggested that the incident had been a matter of chance: Ichrak had been in the wrong place at the wrong time; it was an unfortunate accident. In the first part of his speech, the inspector had mentioned a sandstorm, a game between Raja and Wydad, a wobbly pole, something about a broken cable, and a whip that cuts young women’s throats by night. Everything was topsy-turvy in Zahira’s mind.
“You just have to accept it, Hajja. Accidents happen all the time. Sign here.”
“Accept?” Zahira said, bridling. “Accept what?”
The repetition of the word accident was more than she could endure. She leaped to her feet in the fullness of her body and began screaming: “You killed Ichrak! You killed my Ichrak! But look at me—I’m not completely dead. Finish me off if you have the guts. Coward! You’re cowards, the lot of you! Finish me! What are you waiting for?”
Truly raving now, Zahira began to tear at her clothing as she barked curses upon Daoudi and all the men who inhabited the earth and upon the fathers, brothers, uncles who had betrayed her and been unable to defend her. The inspector was utterly overwhelmed. He was on his feet too, shouting for his men to come and take away this crazy woman. The door opened, and four officers dashed in, Choukri among them.
“Do you always go around in fours? Finish me off! Twenty-nine years! Twenty-nine years and I’m still here! You killed my daughter! She was given her name to wipe away that night. Ichrak was my only light, and you’ve taken her away from me.” She was weeping like a child. The police officers took hold of Zahira any way they could. Her size and her fury made it very difficult. Choukri’s cap tumbled to the floor. Zahira struggled, trying to throw herself to the ground. To get her out of the office, they virtually had to carry her, like a dead weight, or rather like a dying body whose limbs were still thrashing.
“Kill me!” she was shouting. “Kill me like the oud player did that night. Oud player, I curse you! A curse upon you!”
Then she began to sing:
La ana addi esh-shuq
Wi layali esh-shuq
Wa la albi addi azabu, azabu
Tol omri ba’ul.
As she kept on tearing her clothes and wrestling to free herself from the grip of the men, Zahira was singing the words of “Seret El Hob,” Umm Kulthum’s ode to love, which had moved her so back then and led to her grave being dug in a courtyard near Bab Marrakech. Since then, that grave had been awaiting its body, so far in vain. Daoudi, on the other hand, was no longer shouting. The words coming from Zahira’s mouth had made him sit back down at his desk, thunderstruck, and had forced him to think. In particular about the secret surrounding the birth of Ichrak, the identity of the man who’d gotten her mother pregnant, who had put his seed in her. During the tussle, Daoudi had heard what the woman was yelling; he also caught sight of an indigo tattoo of a moon and two crescents on the curve of her shoulder. The memory of his mouth fastening on something blue and the quivering flesh of an unknown woman came flooding back to him.
Now that the tumult in the room was over, Daoudi found himself facing that young officer who, twenty-nine years earlier, had played the oud so well and whose abilities drew beautiful women, like a powerful talisman, to the guardhouse of a municipal building. “I curse you, oud player!” still sounded from the next room, like a judicial sentence. Mokhtar Daoudi had believed naively that the agonizing sensation of red-hot irons on his soul was his final ordeal. He was now aware that the flames, as if fanned by djinns, had already begun to take hold of him but that they would never totally consume him—of this he was certain—and so it would go on for all eternity. Chergui had accorded him only a small favor in giving him the illusion of an alliance. His pride had made him think of a privilege like an endless cord, like the jars of paradise that can never be emptied. Eternity belongs to death; it belongs to the desert wind. How could such an entity make a pact with someone who was less than a dog? Daoudi interrupted his thoughts for a moment, because he was facing a huge battle: the djinns that were stirring the flames in his chest forced him to make extraordinary efforts to suppress the howl rising from his throat like a torrent of fire, and it hurt so much he wanted to rip out his own throat. Since he couldn’t do that, he wished that the cry would at least suffocate him entirely, so it would be over, so it would stop.
After the events in Casablanca, the atmospheric pressure dropped from 1,054 to around 1,013 over the city, and the air mass resumed its former state. Chergui now had every chance of undertaking a decisive action to lead to some movement. It had lingered over the city only too long. The inhabitants, already sorely tried, could not hold out much more, and no one knew what might happen next. There’d been a huge surge in the number of women struck by hysteria in the Bourgogne, Aïn Chock, and Sbata neighborhoods. The numbers of men who’d gone crazy had beaten all records everywhere, especially in Mohammedia and Sidi Moumen. Despite these alarming facts, it was still the neighborhood of Derb Taliane that had paid the highest price since the time the wind from the Sahara had been trapped and obliged to spin above the town. After the tragic deaths of Ichrak and of Abdoulaye’s friend, what else might lie ahead?
Over the Atlantic and in the stratosphere, the forces led by Climate Change and the Gulf Stream had weakened since Chergui and its southern allies had joined up to the east of the Azores High. These allies unleashed attacks aimed at shifting the region of low pressure that was stuck over Casa and pushing it off toward the Mediterranean to create an indraft sufficient for Chergui to use as a trampoline, allowing it to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. The mother of all battles was under way. In the meantime, the Benguela Current had come from the south and was keeping up its ruthless offensive along the coast of Africa, backed by the southeast trades. Because of the deadly hurricanes ravaging the United States, Climate Change had lost much of its power in the eastern Atlantic, being constrained by Chergui and its allies to concentrate exclusively on Texas, Florida, and New Orleans. The Gulf Stream, hemmed in by the Angola, North Equatorial, and Canary Currents, had to continue on its route and also head toward the US, thus intensifying the devastation there tenfold. At this point, Chergui took the risk of sacrificing the population of Casa under a heat wave approaching 110°F. To bring about low pressure over the Mediterranean, an abrupt rise in atmospheric pressure over the city had to be prioritized. The efforts of the southeast trades were far from sufficient; the winds of the region were called in—the Bech, the Levanter, and the Vendavel—and these banded together to provide Chergui with a kind of flying carpet, so it could finally head toward Gibraltar and the Mediterranean shores and, in the guise of the Sirocco, accomplish its destiny, which consisted of sweeping the Balearic Islands, Languedoc, Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, all the way to the territory of Greece.
Casa was recovering from the disruptions of recent days, but in Derb Taliane the shadow of Ichrak was ever present. In Cuba her memory was still alive; it burned in the flesh on Rue Souss, overran minds on Boulevard Sour Jdid. In this way eternity was expressing itself, and the metallic voice of the muezzin, carried on the winds blowing from the Atlantic, reminded everyone that infinity belongs neither to dogs nor to humans but is the exclusive privilege of souls. Who would dare deny that? Nobody. In any case, no one in the city of Casablanca, also known as Ad-dar Al Baidaa’.