When he’d read that name for the first time Falcon got to his feet and did a tour of his study with a clenched fist. By tomorrow morning he’d have the killer’s ID number and an address. He drank more whisky, poured himself another glass.
2nd June 1960, Tangier
A letter from M. telling me that M.G. IV has died, having survived two months longer than expected. She is desolate. I write her a letter of commiseration telling her to come to Morocco, leave the city, leave the scene of her grief. This is selfish. I am in need of a companion. P. and I move around each other like strangers, or rather, with a stranger in our midst. I should ask her about Tariq Chefchaouni. I should, as her husband, demand to know who she was consorting with on the beach. But I don’t. Why not? I rummage through my mind, looking for reasons and find none, other than that I seem to be frightened at the prospect. Does this seem possible of me, the veteran of Krasni Bor? But this is not physical fear. I am scared to reveal my vulnerability. I am stunned to discover that this all started last summer and I have been tormented for a full year.
3rd June 1960, Tangier
I go back to the Boulevard Pasteur and stand outside the shop, waiting for the younger man to leave. I go in and ask his father how much he wants for the bone sculpture in the window. He says it is not for sale (a technique I recognize) and we haggle. I play the game badly because I’m too concerned about T.C. returning. I pay $30, which seems like a fantastic sum, until I get the sculpture back to my studio and see that it is indeed quite a piece. There is a stunning beauty to the lines and shapes, which is offset by the macabre quality of the material used. It says something ambiguous about the quality of being human. I begin to think that the old man, rather than being crafty, has in fact done something unforgivable.
18th June 1960, Tangier
This is how I am. It is P.’s birthday. Rather than give her the usual piece of jewellery I wrap the bone sculpture. I ask her to the studio in the early evening and serve champagne on the verandah. It is still light and very warm with a gentle breeze blowing off the sea. We are hovering around a perfect moment when I give her the present. She is animated, because I normally give her a small box, rather than something which stands 40 cm high. She tears the paper off like a small girl. I watch like a wolf and see it the moment she has stripped it down to the bone. Her face, for a fraction of a second, breaks in two. Her eyes enlarge and stand off her face. She recovers. We go back to the champagne. The sky darkens. I am aware of her looking at me as if I am a strange beast that has assumed human form but been careless about leaving a hairy hoof showing. I have what I want. She has what she desires. The piece sits on her dressing table.
A letter from M. saying she has been delayed by a legal battle. It seems that the children from M.G.’s previous marriages don’t think that she deserves half his fortune.
3rd August 1960, Tangier
I find T.C.’s workshop and am told he is never there in summer. The house, I’m sure, consists of no more than two rooms with a garden behind. It is unattached to any other building so is not part of the family home. I come back at night and wait and watch. It is silent. I return the next night and slip over the wall into the lush garden, which smells of damp earth. There is a large brick tank in the middle, brimful of water. The lock at the back is very loose after the summer and the door opens easily. Inside is a straw mattress on a wooden pallet and a calabash in the corner, nothing else. I hesitate as I reach the door to the next room, as if I have some premonition that my life will be changed by crossing the threshold. The room is his studio. It is full of the same paraphernalia as my own. My torch ripples over ironwork, stone sculpture, horn carving and jewellery until it catches the edge of a painting.
I fix my beam on it and am drawn to it as if falling on my own sword. At the end of the room are three abstract nudes. Looking at them down the mote-filled flute of light is not the best way to see such works, but even in that wretched dimness their quality stands out. Two nudes reclining and one standing. I know immediately, even though they are abstracts, that the subject is P. I am eviscerated by the sight of them. They are the perfect and beautiful developments of the charcoal drawings of P. that I’d accomplished fifteen years before. Hot tears roll down my face as the thought enters my head that this should have been the rightful end of my work.
On the table there’s a sketch book which I cannot resist leafing through. The drawings are of the highest quality. They are figuratives of details. A hand, an ankle, a throat, large heavy breasts, buttocks, a waist and a belly. They are entrancing. Then I arrive at my own face, brilliantly dashed off. I see developments from that. Caricatures. Uglier and uglier until, in the bottom right-hand corner, I am a brute, a cartoon horror. My hand trembles with rage. His vision gives me righteousness. I am capable of anything now.
30th October 1960, Tangier
Summer is over. The tourists have abandoned us. I leave the house and wait for P. in the market. She goes through the Petit Soco to the taxi rank on the Grand Soco and gets into an old Peugeot. I follow in the next taxi, pressing more dirhams on the driver as I tell him which way to go. The Peugeot stops at T.C.’s workshop. She gets out and is welcomed in. I tell the taxi driver to wait for me. I climb over the garden wall. The bedroom door is open. I hear T.C.’s talk and P.’s laughter from the studio. The door is ajar. I see her naked as she steps out of her underwear and walks to a rumpled sheet spread out on the floor. She kneels with her back to T.C., whose robe is already showing the ludicrous signs of arousal. He works with pencil first. He has a way of putting his whole body into creating each line. The lines become balletic flourishes, as if he is dancing the work out of himself and on to the paper. He goes through three sheets and then asks P. to change her position. He moves behind her and gathers her hair up and pins it with a brush. He moves in front of her and pushes her shoulders back so that a ridge forms down her spine. P. sees his arousal and, with instinctive intimacy, pushes up his robe and strokes him until he is shuddering. She drops her head to him and he gasps. She brings up a hand to his buttocks and pulls him to her. She slowly bows her head as if in prayer. His hands tremble on her shoulders and he lets out the cry of a child woken suddenly in the night. She drinks him in. I leave.
I go back to my studio in the taxi and take up my brush for the first time in months. There are five blank canvases which I tack up on the wall. I prepare black paint. I take up a pencil. My mind is like steel. The thoughts rifle down the channels like bullets and within moments I have sketched out a drawing of utter obscenity, with P. amongst satyrs of appalling priapism. I paint with vigour and viciousness, but with clarity and precision so that when I take the paintings down they are nothing to the viewer but five black-and-white canvases. My revenge only takes shape with a precise configuration.
3rd December 1960, Tangier
I am not working. I only watch. My eye rests solely on the entanglement of two people. I have cooled to ice. My mind works with the clarity of a shout across a still, snow-covered field. I have established T.C.’s winter routine. He wakes up late, always after midday. He walks to a small cafe and eats breakfast and drinks tea. He smokes three or four cigarettes. In the afternoon he rarely goes back to the workshop. Sometimes he goes to his family home. He has a wife and three children, two boys and a girl, aged between five and eight. Other days he goes to the beach. He likes the bad weather. I watch him from my studio, standing in the wind and rain with his arms spread out, as if he’s welcoming the cleansing powers of the elements. At night he works. I have watched him. He is so absorbed he notices nothing. Sometimes he works naked, even in the freezing cold. Occasionally he drops, literally, to the studio floor, exhausted. He has completed a fourth nude. P. kneeling. It is phenomenal. A marvel of the mysterious simplicity of form, but with the same quality that distinguishes the previous three — the joys and dangers of the forbidden fruit.
28th December 1960, Tangier
