Michael Pearce - A dead man in Tangier

Quite a crowd had gathered round, Seymour suddenly realized, to watch. They were mostly the ones unable to keep up with the hunt: the old, the fat, the halt and the lame.

A thought struck him. They would have been old and fat and lame on the previous occasion, too.

He began to move among them.

‘Were you here when the Frenchman…? Did you see…?’

They looked at him blankly

He had tried them in French. Up to now he had found that everyone in Morocco spoke French. Now, of course, it appeared that no one did.

He tried them in his less strong Arabic.

‘Pig-stuck?’ said a man helpfully, but then lapsed into silence.

‘Here?’

There was no response. He couldn’t believe that no one, absolutely no one, seemed to understand him. What he needed was an interpreter, or at least someone who could put the questions for him. Surely, among all these people, there was someone who…

His eye fell on Mustapha and Idris.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘Hello!’ said Macfarlane. ‘Given up the chase?’

‘I’ve seen what I need.’

‘Already? But you’ll have missed the exciting bit at the end!’

‘So did Bossu,’ said Seymour.

At the far end of the bar he saw Madame Bossu, surrounded by men all anxious to help her make up for her loss. He had no wish to add to their numbers but the sight of her put into his mind another of Bossu’s women, the petite amie who lived in town. Monique, was that her name?

He saw Millet, the horse doctor, and went up to him.

‘Monique? Yes, I expect she’s here. Would you like me to introduce you?’

She was another blonde, not, this time, pouting and fluffy but thin-faced and harder, as if the sun and the wind had worn her youth away.

‘Monique, can I present Monsieur Seymour? He is from England and has come here to look into Bossu’s death.’

‘He is more likely to get somewhere than Renaud is.’ She extended her hand. ‘I am pleased to meet you, Monsieur.’

‘You have been in the country long?’

‘All my life.’

‘You will know it well, then. And, of course, you knew Bossu.’

‘Of course.’

‘Could you tell me something about him?’

‘I don’t know that I can tell you anything that will help you on this-’

‘In general, then. Tell me about him as a man.’

She laughed.

‘As a man? Well, there I could tell you a lot!’

‘I have no wish to pry, Madame, but it would help me if I could get a picture of him. As a person. I know nothing about him, you see.’

‘Where to begin!’ She thought. ‘Well, why not! Everyone else knows, so why shouldn’t you? I will begin with me. Let me tell you the story of my life. It is a very ordinary story, the old story of a rich man and a poor girl.

‘My parents were settlers. They came out here to farm. And, like most settlers, they struggled. We were poor. We came out here to make our fortune but instead we lost it. So you can understand that my parents did not dissuade a rich neighbour when he began to pay attention to me. I was beautiful then.

‘No, don’t say I am beautiful still. That is the sort of thing all men say. And it is not true. This country is hard on women. But I was beautiful then and I caught Bossu’s eye. He had bought some property nearby. He began to pay attention to me and I was flattered. No, more; I was bowled over. I was, after all, only fifteen.

‘And my parents did not dissuade him. Even when they learned that he was already married. They were poor, you understand? Desperate. And he was a rich man. Very rich, for Tangier. So they did not dissuade him. And they didn’t say anything after he bought me an apartment in Tangier and I moved into it.

‘Well, that’s it. You asked me about Bossu, Bossu, the man. Does that tell you something about Bossu, the man?’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘Since he died, I have had time to think things over. And I realize that to him I was never more than a possession. Like the farm he bought next to my parents’ farm. He liked possessions. But he never did anything with them. He never built on them. I had hoped, when he put me in that flat, that one day we might build something together. But we never did. He wasn’t that kind of man. He never built anything. Not even in business.’

‘Not even in business?’

‘He wasn’t that kind of businessman. What he did was to bring people together. He knew everybody, not just in Tangier but all over the country. If you were a business which wanted to develop the interior, build railways, say, or roads, he knew who to put you in touch with. The local Caid, local contractors, local sheikhs. Bossu would always know someone who could help you. That is important in a country like this where everything is personal. If you wanted to do something, Bossu could make it possible. He became also indispensable.

‘But, of course, things could go wrong. He worked with a lot of people, and some of them weren’t very nice people. There were people in the interior who were little better than bandits. And there were developers from the city who were ruthless. He put them together and that could lead to — as in Casablanca. You know about Casablanca?’

‘No.’

‘There was trouble there. Big trouble. About five or six years ago. It was to do with a quarry and a railway. Bossu had put the two together in some project. Things went wrong and there were riots. It was very bad. The army was sent in and they killed a lot of people.

‘But some say that that was the idea. To get the city to explode, so that the army would have to step in, and then France could take over the whole country I don’t know if that is true, but that is what people say. And the Moroccans believe it.

‘So Casablanca and what happened there is very big to Moroccans. And Bossu was right in the middle of it. I don’t know exactly how he was involved but I know that he was involved. This was six years ago and I was still young. I did not understand these things. But I remember him coming home and saying, “This will either make me or break me.” Afterwards, he thought it had made him.’

She laughed.

‘They all trusted him, you see, after that. Trust! Bossu!’

She laughed again.

‘They used him more and more. All over the country. Whenever there was something big. Because they thought they could rely on him to look after their interests.’

‘Was that why he was put on the committee?’

‘Of course! The big businessmen all knew him and they wanted someone like him in a big position on the committee so that he could look after their interests. And the settlers, too. They thought: he is one of us, he will see that things don’t go wrong.

‘But perhaps — perhaps something did go wrong. And perhaps… Perhaps he was right. On both counts. It did make him, yes; but in the end it broke him. I don’t know. I don’t know about these things.’

She looked at him over the top of her glass, weighing it, considering.

‘But, shall I tell you something? I liked being possessed. Women do. And now that I am no longer possessed, I feel… disoriented. Not bereft. He never loved me and I never loved him. Just disoriented. But free.’

Chantale was over on the other side of the Tent talking to Sheikh Musa. Seymour was a little surprised. He didn’t know how it was in Morocco, or how Sheikh Musa was, but you wouldn’t have seen this in Istanbul, nor, he suspected, in many other Muslim countries. A woman talking so familiarly to a man. But, of course, she was half French, too. Perhaps it was the French half that Musa was addressing. And yet… and yet they were both drinking lemonade. That was a Muslim thing to do. Curious. Not just curious: intriguing.

She saw him looking at her and waved a hand. Shortly afterwards she detached herself from Sheikh Musa and came across to him.