William Bayer - Tangier

It's the fast, he thought, that's clouding up my mind. He'd begun to get headaches from lack of food and interrupted sleep, could hardly bear any longer the deprivation of water in the day. Even his meetings with Robin at Haifa Cafe seemed boring and irrelevant now. While his favorite informer spieled out gossip, he stared in agony across the Straits.

"— Percy Bainbridge, you know, Hamid, the failed inventor, the sycophant-well, he just won a fortune at the Casino Municipal. Amazing! And, oh dear! I nearly forgot-Inigo's broken off with Pumpkin Pie. Yes, it's finally happened. He's gotten rid of that crazy lad. Now he's secluded himself to work on an enormous canvas, a double portrait, erotic to be sure, of Tessa and David Hawkins, our incestuously involved brother-and-sister horseback riding act-"

Who were these people? Did he know them? How many years had he wasted caring about their pointless lives?

"— Anyway, let me tell you, I've great plans for little Pie. Now that he's 'wild chicken,' out of Inigo's sphere, I'm going to put him together with Herve Beaumont, who keeps telling me he wants to become a full-time queen. Pie's a little dangerous, but Herve can handle that. There's no better hustler around, I think, to teach a boy all the tricks-"

Hamid turned away. Robin's mention of Herve Beaumont brought back sad thoughts of Farid. He'd seen his brother many times since his intrusion in the rug room, but neither of them had spoken of the incident, as if it hadn't happened and Hamid hadn't seen what he had seen. It didn't matter anyway, he supposed. They were brothers and loved each other as brothers should. Farid was entitled to live his life as he liked. And yet it seemed to Hamid that in that moment in the rug room he had stood between opposing worlds which he could not put together in his mind.

Could Kalinka help him reconcile the foreigners' Tangier which he policed with the Arab city in which he lived? Could she give him a vision of Tangier in which all its facets would finally be clearly joined? She'd said he'd liberated her from hashish, and now she would free him from the Mountain. Was that possible? Was she right? Could she really have become so strong?

He had a dream. He was lost in a medina-not the medina of Tangier, for he knew his way through that, but a new and strange medina, a maze of alleyways and buildings, narrow streets that turned at odd angles, filled with people crying out in European tongues. Yes, that was what was strange-there were no Arabs in these streets. It was a medina for Europeans, which was impossible of course, a European labyrinth in which he was caught and trapped and lost. But then Kalinka appeared, slim and straight in a Vietnamese dress. She beckoned to him. He followed her. She became his guide, led him through the labyrinth, and showed him how he might escape.

Two-thirds of the way through Ramadan the foreign community of Tangier became possessed. The social madness, the effort to transform a disastrous summer into a glittering fete, reached a peak when five parties of varying elegance and size were scheduled for a single August night.

Everyone's appetite had been whetted, prior to that sweltering evening, by the presence in Tangier harbor of Henderson Perry's enormous yacht. That magnificent boat, The Houston Gusher , anchored in plain sight, seemed to advertise the festivities to come.

Those fortunate enough to be invited to Perry's "Castlemaine" would have a chance to devour his Beluga caviar and God only knew how many bottles of his fine champagne. The American Ambassador and half the Moroccan royal family were coming up from Rabat. There was even a rumor (incorrect, as it turned out) that the Shah of Iran would secretly fly in.

In the event that one were not invited to Perry's, the situation was still not bleak. Countess de Lauzon was throwing a rival affair-"an evening of fantasy," she said-at which her guests, the sons of Sodom and the daughters of Gomorrah, were encouraged to appear in outrageous dress.

Then there were the Manchesters, who'd invited their friends to "drink the dregs" on the eve of their departure for Fort Lauderdale. Willard and Katie weren't aware of the other parties when they sent their invitations out, and later, on account of pride, they couldn't change the date. It didn't matter anyway, according to Robin Scott, since their circle barely touched the higher orbits. Peter Zvegintzov, Dan Lake, the Foster Knowles', and the Clive Whittles had accepted, the Fufus were probables, and the Ashton Codds had promised to "try."

The gathering of Tangier Players club members at Jill and David Packwood's Shepherd's Pie was the lowest of the parties in social terms, but held the promise of high drama nonetheless. The Packwoods' little restaurant on the beach would be closed to tourists for the night. Once a nasty bit of TP business was concluded, there would be a beer-and-sausages party to celebrate the end of Laurence Luscombe's reign.

Finally there was a soiree at Jimmy Sohario's, "a party to unwind from parties," as it was billed. Everyone was invited: duchesses, diplomats, hustlers off the streets. The idea was to slip away from the Manchesters', the Packwoods', Henderson Perry's, or Francoise de Lauzon's just after midnight when things were cooling down, then hurry over to Jimmy's "Excalibur," where the revelries would last till dawn.

Tangier was ready, poised for all of this, when the unexpected news of Vicar Wick's suicide broke like a summer storm. A cloud of confusion hung above the Mountain. Lightning bolts of sorrow pierced British breasts.

But then, as the contents of the Vicar's diaries became known, the shock and grief began to lift. The sorrowful image of him dangling from a rafter in the nave of St. Thomas in a noose of his own contriving, gave way to a sense, generally shared, that the old boy had got what he deserved.

Word of his scandalous diaries traveled fast. His expressions of hatred, his detestation of his loyal flock, were greeted with stunned outrage. He held them all responsible, it seemed, for the evils that had descended upon the church: the anonymous notes, the pierced sheep's eye, even the hacking of the altar crucifix. People were prepared to forgive the curse of madness, to say "There but for the grace of God go I," but the Vicar's accusations against them, his hatred so monstrously misplaced, eroded any sympathy they might have felt.

Lester Brown certainly felt that way. "My God," he said, wiping the sweat from his gleaming pate, "how that awful man led me on. He had me spying on people, making lists of suspects whom he knew were innocent all the time. Kept talking about the future of St. Thomas, the hypocrite, as if he ever really gave a good goddamn."

Lester might have had good cause to feel betrayed, but there were others who, though less intimately involved, expressed great fury too. How can this be? they asked, bitter and confused. How could this man whom we honored, made curator of our faith, have stabbed us so cruelly in the back? Other, less pretty phrases were bandied about the Mountain. "A kick in the ass," said Percy Bainbridge. "A knee to the balls," said Patrick Wax. The furor, which raged like a tornado, brought many Englishmen to tears, not in memory of their late vicar, to be sure, but for what his actions told them about themselves.

The Mountain recovered after a while, making a conscious effort to dismiss the matter from its collective mind. "We're not accountable," Peter Barclay told his friends, "not accountable in any way. Besides, we must try to occupy ourselves. The parties, for instance-it'll do us good to let off steam. In the autumn there'll be plenty of time to find someone new to lead the church."

So the storm passed, nearly as quickly as it had come. Spiritually regrouped, the Europeans marched on with their lives. There was much to think about those torrid August days; Tangier was restless, and a night of five parties loomed.