Pickering looked somewhat relieved. “Good, then I don’t have to go out there. I’m too old for that sort of thing anymore. You won’t need to hire an interpreter, they’ll already have several. And I can introduce you to the ambassador at the audience with the sultan this evening at the palace. Be back here at six and we’ll head for the palace. In the meantime you and the bosun can get a room at the hotel across the street. Tomorrow you can send a telegraph on the French commercial line to your admiral.”
Wake thought the building across the street was a stable. He tried not to cringe.
“Thank you, sir, for your time and explanation of the situation. Bosun Rork and I will be pleased to accompany you this evening and will stand ready to assist in all ways we can.”
***
They didn’t ride to the palace, they walked. Through a slum of huts and hovels, past the walls of the fort, which Pickering said was called the Kasbah des Oudaias. He also explained the city as they went. Salè was the slum across the river and the traditional home of pirates, thieves, and the poor. It was a lawless area even to the Sultan’s troops, and the Kasbah was there not so much to protect against foreigners as against the riffraff of Salè from crossing the river. It was also the reason there was no bridge.
The Kasbah—Wake felt like he was in some novelist’s fairytale—had been built eight hundred years earlier and was the home of not only the fortress, but also the main royal palace in Rabat. There were two others of lesser import in the town, but the sultan, whom Pickering said he got along with quite well, preferred the Kasbah. Pickering thought was it because there he was far more secure from his own people.
The three of them walked around the Kasbah with the river wall on their right side, to the Andalusian Gardens, a beautifully tended park of scented trees with red and yellow flowers everywhere, like an oasis in a city of gray and brown. From there they continued around to the Bab Oudaia—the main gate, built in 1195. On their left was the Medina, the old walled city consisting of a maze of alleyways.
Wake had marveled at Islamic architecture four months earlier in Spain, but it was new to Rork and he gasped at the grandeur of the gate’s mosaic patterns and curves, intricately tricked out in greens and blues. “I’ll be son o’ a Orangeman if it ain’t a sight more beautiful than any cathedral, sir.”
“And older. Wait until you see inside,” added Pickering.
Slit-eyed guards splendidly dressed in robes of white and green, with long curved cutlasses and pikes watched them approach. Evidently recognizing Pickering as the United States ambassador, they presented arms in the Western fashion and opened the massive paneled doors. The three Americans never even broke stride as they entered the forbidden world of Sultan Hassan. It reminded Wake uncomfortably of his entrance into the Alcázar, and he silently asked God to let this time be different—without unpleasant surprises.
***
Rork was told by a servant that he was to stay back near the gate with the other diplomats’ underlings, his rank not being sufficient for admittance to the inner sanctum. Wake told him to watch and listen for any intelligence of value, but Rork still worried about Wake heading further into the Kasbah without him.
Pickering and Wake were led through winding passages to a chamber deep in the palace, latticed windows casting a pattern of shadows as the setting sun filtered its way into the room and created a golden ambient light. The alabaster walls had torches and lamps flickering in between richly woven blue and green carpets. The marble floor was polished to the sheen of glass and the carved cedar benches gave off an intoxicating aroma that mixed with intoxicating incense wafting in clouds from smoke pots in the corners. A quartet in the shadows played haunting melodies on exotic long-stringed lutes, giving a funereal sound to the scene.
Servants and courtiers padded around silently, their brows furrowed in some unknown heavy responsibility, and here and there ominous Senegalese giants guarded doorways. Designed to overawe a visitor, Wake decided it was even more successful than the Alcázar. The contrast between the abject poverty outside and the Oriental opulence within was stark, disconcerting.
As usual, according to Pickering, his highness the sultan was late, keeping everyone waiting to enter the royal chamber. Pickering explained who was in the room, from the angry-looking Belgian ambassador to the elderly Spanish ambassador to the raven-eyed Jewish Rabbi of Morocco.
“What about the French? I thought they had quite a presence here?”
Pickering frowned. “Yes, they do have a presence here, but at his first audience a couple of months ago, the new French ambassador managed to insult the sultan with his candidness about Morocco’s relationship to France. The sultan doesn’t like him, but is polite to the ambassador because his wife is one of the missing. The Frenchman’ll be along shortly—he’s showing disdain by coming late.”
A commotion started at the entryway. “Well, speak of the devil and he shall appear,” he harrumphed. “Here’s your French ambassador now. The man seems incapable of entering a room quietly . . .”
Henri Faber marched in and Wake felt his bowels turn to jelly.
A huge golden-robed courtier arrived, intoned something imperious in Arabic, and sounded a tiny bell three times. Without a word, everyone stood and formed a line by protocol rank of diplomatic seniority, the Americans near the front, then filed through doors that were flung open by the guards, who slashed their curved swords up and out, forming an arch for the procession to walk under. Wake saw that Faber had not recognized him, joining the line behind the Americans.
As they entered the mechouar, the royal chamber, Pickering, his forehead
