William Bayer - Tangier

Peter runs the shop; Marguerite runs the agents. They come and go, bringing instructions, carrying back her information to the jungles and the war. One day at dawn a man in black pajamas appears. He is a courier come to deliver her commission. She has attained the rank of major. She is among the most effective cadre in Hanoi.

Peter bounces Kalinka on his knee, up and down, up and down. Through the window she can see her mother bicycling up the street. Marguerite has gone on a mission. Peter doesn't know when she'll return. That night he reads Kalinka a fairy tale, then kisses her and turns off the light. She lies on the big bed, the bed she shares with her mother. She can hear Peter undressing on the other side of the curtain. He is humming to himself. She feels safe.

Years pass. Kalinka grows up. Business at the shop expands. The front of the store is crowded with officers' wives leaving their letters to be weighed and mailed and talking among themselves. Peter, a busybody, a gossip, shrewdly draws them out. He giggles at inanities. People take him for a fool. Always he is darting back and forth, disappearing into the back room. He is relaying information to Marguerite on troop movements, transfers, local politics, morale.

When the shop is closed for lunch Marguerite sets a teapot on the fire. Peter steams the letters open. He has discovered the secrets of flaps and seals.

All goes well until 1952, when suddenly there is consternation in the shop. Kalinka, nine years old, comes home one day from school. She greets Peter and her mother, sets her satchel down, but neither one of them looks up. For days after that she can feel their tension-French counterintelligence has discovered Peter's Soviet connections before the war. They suspect him of being a Russian field officer coordinating deliveries of arms to the Viet Minh. He is being watched. Strangers come in. They make small purchases and drill Peter with their eyes. There is a car parked across the street. Two men sit in it reading newspapers. The deliverymen who carry Marguerite's reports are warned to stay away.

Conferences. Meetings. Hushed conversations. Kalinka hears them plotting through the night. It is Marguerite, after all, who poses the real danger to the French, but it is Peter, finally, who is arrested-the French have taken her for an ignorant Tonkinoise.

Peter's interrogation-no beatings this time, nothing like his treatment by the Japanese. Bright lights in his eyes, hours without sleep. Finally he confesses to great and monstrous crimes, all rehearsed so many nights with Marguerite. The French, bewildered by the scope of his confession, take him for a major spy. He is too important to be imprisoned. They decide to expel him to Russia, a homeland he's never seen.

Much emotion that final hour when Marguerite and Kalinka visit him in jail. No possibility of Marguerite leaving too-she must stay behind to continue with the fight. But Kalinka is another matter. They discuss her future while she holds her mother's hand. If anything were to happen to Marguerite, Kalinka would be orphaned and alone. Finally it is decided-she will leave with Peter. Someday, sometime, when the war is over, they will all be reunited in Hanoi. A last exchange of hugs. Kalinka and Peter board the boat. Her last memory of her mother is the sight of her standing beside her bicycle waving to them from the pier.

Thus Kalinka's story was completed up to the time of her arrival in Tangier, a jigsaw puzzle of a life in which Hamid had searched for matching edges, gradually filled in holes and gaps. Still, for him, the biggest gap was not yet filled: Why had Peter settled in Tangier, and why had he insisted that Kalinka pretend to be his wife?

He wondered why this was so important, why, having learned so much, he couldn't leave these matters alone. Am I , he asked himself, behaving like a lover or a detective? Both, he decided finally- I can't help myself; I have to know . Was it because Kalinka was getting away from him, growing, changing, beginning to contradict the personality he thought he had understood as, so laboriously, he'd unraveled her early life? He couldn't say. He knew only that solving the relationship between her and Peter had become an obsession, the problem to which his great troubling questions about all the foreigners had finally been reduced.

At 2:00 A.M. one morning the telephone rang, jarring Hamid from sleep. Eyes still closed, he grasped about for the receiver, then accidentally knocked it to the floor.

Kalinka turned on the lights. "I can hear someone talking," she said.

Hamid strained his ears and heard it too, an urgent garble of Arabic, distant and indistinct. "Yes?" he said, retrieving the receiver. "Yes? Yes?"

"Aziz, Inspector. I'm at the Surete."

"You want me to come down there too, I suppose." He sat up, adjusted his pillows. Kalinka covered up her ears and yawned.

"We need you, Hamid. We've got a fiasco down here. I wouldn't call at this hour if I weren't facing special difficulties-"

"All right, Aziz. I'll see you in a little while."

He hung up and began to dress. "There's a certain ironic tone," he explained to Kalinka, "that finds its way, occasionally, into Aziz's voice. Then I know I'm in for it. Absurd passions. A glimpse at the rot of the West." He slipped into his moccasins. "It's the best part of my job."

There was not a car on Hassan II as he drove quickly through the night, only a few souls still lingering at the cafes off Place de France. Aziz was waiting on the steps of the Surete, pacing back and forth, puffing nervously on a cigarette.

"This one's something, Hamid-prominent persons, overtones of sex. I have the principals separated now. A few minutes ago, when we put them all together, they started to fight like medina cats."

Poor Aziz , he thought, so loyal, so intelligent, but when it comes to the foreigners he still gets flustered and confused .

"Don't worry." Hamid slapped him on the back. "We'll straighten this out soon enough. We'll go to my office. I want to hear everything in sequence. We must conduct our business in an orderly way."

He stopped off at a lavatory to splash cold water on his face. He wanted, always, to appear clear-headed and set a calm example for his staff.

When, finally, they were seated in the office, Aziz began to talk. Hamid was pleased by the cogency of his delivery and by gestures he recognized as his own.

"About an hour ago our operator received a call. The night clerk at the Hotel Continental reported a disturbance in one of his rooms. Since the Continental is in the Dar Baroud sector of the medina, the operator referred the complaint to the First Arrondisement. A pair of officers responded, arrests were made, and since foreigners were involved all the parties were brought down here. This is what we have: Mohammed Seraj, better known as Pumpkin Pie; an old whore who goes under the name of Sylvia; two young prostitutes, a boy and a girl, each about sixteen years old; Mr. and Mrs. Codd."

"Ashton and Musica Codd?"

Aziz gave a triumphant grin. "The Codds claim the role of complainants, but there's a difference of opinion on that. For one thing, they were arrested nude. And our investigating officers say Codd tried to thrash them with his walking stick. Pumpkin Pie claims they hired him to convince the teenagers to perform unnatural sexual acts. He says the whole fracas began when he refused and they turned on him in rage. The old whore claims she just happened to be in the next room and came out only when she heard the noise. The teenagers say she's their mother, and that she's in the business of renting them out."

"What do the Codds say to that?"

"They're claiming they were framed. They were 'interviewing' the kids, they say, when the whore arrived suddenly with Pumpkin Pie. These two tried to blackmail them, and when they refused to pay out they were brutally stripped and robbed. Codd says he assumed our men were other members of the gang. He merely tried to defend himself with the only implement he had at hand."