they're in an attractive environment, and put them in the mood to buy.'
'Yes-'
'That's the problem with Russia, you see. Those drab state-owned stores. Rude clerks. People waiting in line. Everything out of stock. Three thousand size-twelve shoes, but they only fit your left foot. If you started thinking in business terms, you could make some real dough.' Lake bit into his lower lip. 'Yeah-a gold mine. You could have a real gold mine here.'
'I don't do so badly now,' said Peter. 'My clients seem pleased enough.'
'Of course. Of course they are. I didn't mean that. You're doing a hell of a job. But what happens when they put in this new road? Then the Mountain people won't be coming by here every day. Course you could move the shop, but you'd probably lose momentum if you did. I personally think you should stay here, brighten the place up, regulate the inventory, and make it worth a special trip.' He paused. 'Listen, I got to get going. Janet'll kill me if I'm late. Reason I came by was to invite you to dinner. We're having some Moroccans, official types, over Wednesday night. Wondered if you'd be free.'
'Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you very much.'
'Good. Wednesday then. Eight-fifteen. So long, Peter. And think about what I said.'
It had been a curious exchange, Lake realized, as he paused outside the shop, watching Peter struggle with his iron security grill. There was an awkward moment then as Peter locked the door, and they grinned at each other through the glass. Lake waved, Peter waved back, then turned off the fluorescent lights.
Lake waited until he'd disappeared into his little bedroom in the back. Was Peter intrigued, he wondered, about why the ranking American official in Tangier was taking such an interest in his shop? Impossible to know. His face was opaque. He revealed nothing, nothing at all.
Hamid Ouazzani was thinking of the summer as he stood on his balcony late that Sunday afternoon. The sun was above the Mountain, just about to set, and to the east he could see Djebel Ben Moussa shrouded in a darkening mist. Soon, he knew, mobs of tourists would descend upon Tangier, and with them all sorts of petty crimes. He could look forward to three months of hard work, new assistants in his office, foreigners haranguing him in European tongues, kif arrests, pickpocketings, fights in bars, rapes, cat burglaries, and trouble on the beach. He could count too, he knew, on one murder at least.
Kalinka was sitting on the banquette in their salon bent over her sketchbook, intent, working with her crayons. Hamid was pleased as he watched her draw. He'd been encouraging her the entire day. 'Draw your memories,' he'd said. 'Draw your mother, your childhood home.' And she'd surprised him-she'd agreed.
Perhaps, he thought, it was language that was the barrier, that made it impossible for her to answer his verbal probes. He didn't know, but now, watching her, he congratulated himself for suggesting that she draw. She was so talented, her sketches were always so fine, so beautifully crafted, executed with such delicate, patient strokes, and now it seemed that through them she might be able to tell him things which she could not or would not reveal to him in words.
He left the balcony, walked over to her side, peered down at her work.
She looked up at him and smiled. 'Just as you said, Hamid. Pictures of the past.'
She flipped through the pages, showed him what she'd done. He was fascinated, sat down beside her, looked carefully at every sketch.
The figures in them were clear and quickly drawn, all enveloped in a moody haze. There was a sketch of a petite Oriental woman ('My mother,' she said) standing beside a bicycle with a conical straw hat in one hand, her other arm raised to wave. There was a picture of a heavy-set man holding a little girl by the hand and walking with her beside a lake. There were several views of streets jammed with people, all wearing conical hats, running, escaping from a storm of slashing rain. There were pictures of stoop-shouldered men dressed in black, carrying guns, slinking among trees, and a sketch of a column of upright soldiers marching behind an officer wearing a kepi.
'With my mother in a cyclo,' she said, pointing to her sketch of a little girl beside a woman with the same conical hat upon her lap, the two of them sitting in a contraption attached to the front of a bicycle pedaled by a bare-legged man. Finally she had drawn a low-angle view through a doorway. In a room beyond, Hamid could see a person's back.
'That's Peter,' Kalinka said. 'Peter in his store serving his customers. I am behind, in the back room, looking out from the dark.'
'Go on!' he said, excited now, feeling that at last a curtain was being raised. 'Tell me stories about them. Talk, Kalinka! Talk!'
'They are only the past, Hamid. You asked me to draw them, and now I have.'
At that she began to sign the sketches, compressing the letters of her name so they formed a seal. He looked at her-she'd surprised him again. It was the smoke, he was certain, the smoke of her hashish which she'd sucked into her lungs for so many years and which now was working its way out through her fingers, her crayons. But still she was vague. He looked at the pictures again. A beginning, he thought, a breakthrough, an access to the mysteries locked inside her brain.
Late that evening he took a walk. From his apartment on Ramon y Cahal he made his way by a circuitous route (Rue d'Istamboul, Rue Leonardo Da Vinci, then Rue Mordecai Bengio through the Jewish quarter) to the steep west Casbah gate. Once inside the old fortified section, he began to wander through a labyrinth of ancient, narrow streets, alleys really, not wide enough for two people to walk abreast, with high, straight walls on either side and small, narrow barred windows overhead.
He walked aimlessly, losing himself in the maze, wandering from time to time into dim culs-de-sac. It was intentional, this becoming lost-he knew the alleys of the Casbah well, but he was deliberately trying to forget his way, lose himself, as if he were a tourist or a man gone blind. It was a game he was playing. He was practicing being a detective the way a cat practices hunting on a rug. He wanted to see if he could find his way by sound alone, listening for water flowing in the sewers beneath the streets, without looking up to search out landmarks in the night.
The echoes helped him more than the sewers did, and eventually, with less difficulty than he might have thought, he emerged by the old wall on Ben Abbou, the back wall of the Casbah, separating it from the medina below. He walked swiftly then by the Casbah mosque until he reached the giant square, emerging at the far end of it, the side away from the cliffs and sea.
There was no one about except the one-legged man who watched the cars. Hamid strode across the old stones, hearing the echoes of his footsteps as he walked, until he reached the overlook where he'd encountered Kalinka one night so many months before. Here he lit a cigarette and stared down at the beach and bay, feeling the east wind blow gently across his face. There was a yacht anchored off the mole. He could see people aboard her, could make out their silhouettes. They were Europeans, moving, dancing. He could hear faint music, something romantic, out of date.
He stood for a time staring out, thinking of Kalinka's drawings, the ones she'd made that afternoon. He'd been tremendously excited by them, but still he wondered: Who were those people? What were they doing? What were their passions, their struggles, the meaning of their guns?
He would find out. He was a policeman, a detective. He would investigate the matter as if Kalinka were a suspect in a case. He would start a dossier, write her name on the cover. He would file the drawings there, and any others she might make, and his notes on their conversations, everything she said. He would find his way through the maze of her mind just as he had moved through the labyrinth of the Casbah, feeling his way, all his senses alert. Yes, he would discover her, solve the mystery of who she was, and when he was clear with her, when all her past was finally laid out and her foreignness revealed, then he would be free to bind himself to her, make her his wife.
II
