Tangier

for you. It makes you dream. It dulls your senses. It clouds your sight. You must give it up, Kalinka-right now, right away. Take walks. Grow plants on your balcony. Draw pictures. Listen to music. But stop smoking. That's why your chest aches. That's why you feel weak, tired all the time. It's the hashish that has made you forget.'

He was surprised at the force with which he delivered his little speech-it was not like him to lecture a patient that way. He thought back upon what he knew of her life-her reputation as a femme fatale. This tiny creature had broken the spirit of the Russian, then ensnared Hamid. Achar did not believe the talk about her casting spells, but when Hamid had fallen in love with her he'd acted like a fool. What was it about her? What was the source of her power? He looked at her carefully again and for a moment, a splinter of a second, saw something that made him feel weak. It was something ancient, veiled-a whole history that showed on the smooth, blank features of her face. It was as if all the mystery of the Far East showed there, all the centuries of struggle and bloodshed, strange rites, formal rituals, something placid, hieratic, deep. It was so compelling that, for a minute, he could not tear his eyes away. But finally she grinned and broke the spell.

'Yes,' she said, 'the hashish. I will try. I promise I will try to stop.'

At twilight Achar went out to walk. It had been a busy day at the clinic, and still there were people waiting to be helped. But he needed to breathe, to get out of those narrow rooms, to feel the cool air that rolled across the valley from the sea. The taps were not yet turned on, but children were waiting near the pumps. Dradeb was a beehive, pulsing with misery and life.

Most of its houses were constructed out of discarded bricks mortared in haphazard ways. The roofs were sheet metal, kept in place by stones on top; otherwise, when the wind blew the roofs might fly away. There were large portions of Dradeb where the houses were not so good, shacks made of discarded pieces of cars and bamboo culms with only a blanket for a door. There were shanties that had been erected on top of an old Jewish cemetery- the gravestones, poking up in the middle of the rooms, served as tables or even beds. Such rot, he thought, such a rotting place. Dradeb stank of over-flowing septics. Its little lanes were filled with rubble and discarded blackened greens.

Achar thought of Fischer then, walking these alleys with Driss Bennani months before, such an improbable combination, he'd thought so many times, the young Moroccan with the old American Jew. He'd liked Fischer, missed him, was sorry now that he was dead. The man had been a builder and a dreamer. Now Driss wanted to tear things down.

Achar passed a carpentry shop, waved to the men inside. Walking up an alley by the mosque, he could hear the machine in the miller's shop grinding flour out of wheat. He walked up Rue de Persil, moving to the side to avoid a rat. It lay dead in ooze that trickled down from an outhouse. There were dogs standing in the alleyway, thin, bony mongrels with supplicating eyes. A week or so before, the police had come while men demolished shanties that encroached on private land. Then the trucks took people and their possessions to another quarter, and the uncomprehending dogs were left behind. They seemed to Achar to be getting thinner every day. Soon they must find a source of garbage, he thought, or else they will become savages or die.

Finally, at the top of the hill, he turned and looked back down. There it was, Dradeb, the slum, and his clinic, a compound of shanties too. The place needed schools, water, most of all a passion to change. Only yards away, across the river on the Mountain, one could buy Cuban cigars and English marmalade.

It was foolish, he knew, to agonize over injustice. Fischer had done that. He'd been naive. Achar knew the world was full of inequalities, always had been, always would be. But Dradeb was so unnecessary. Morocco was not poor. There were huge deposits of phosphates in the south, and tourism earned a fortune in foreign exchange. There was money, it flowed in, not to the people who needed it, but to the coffers of the King and his friends.

Let them be rich, he thought. Let them play golf and live in palaces and eat great banquets and dress in haute couture. They could have all that if only they would share. But they shared nothing, and even took from those who had so much less. They watered their golf course from the reservoir of Dradeb, so that even to drink was now a luxury in the slum.

He looked up at the Mountain, the glittering villas, hanging in terraced gardens so high above.

The Hunter

By the middle of June Hamid Ouazzani began to notice certain things that reminded him of other, less unhappy summers in Tangier. In the early evening a huge moon hung full and low above the city while the wind blew wisps of clouds slowly across its face. There was a smell of overflowing sewers in the Casbah, the screams of cats on the roofs at night, and, as he prowled the Moroccan quarters of the town, he felt an anger familiar from the past. The city was short of water. There was garbage on the beach. At noon the crowds of petitioners were thick around the Surete. Demonologists stalked the streets offering to rid homes and shops of unwanted spells.

Sometimes Hamid would stop his car at an irregularly shaped rubble-strewn lot. Then he'd get out, lean against his fender, and watch boys playing soccer in the dust. He had played himself at this place when he was young, had run for hours in tattered shorts, his stomach distended by worms. After the games he and his friends had shared their bread, then hiked to the beach to wash. He longed at times to relive those simpler days, the joy of kicking at a battered, misshapen ball. But now his life was being written in another way. He was embroiled in the unsavory affairs of men.

Already his desk was piled with dossiers, and the summer had just begun. Even with extra summer help he was having difficulty keeping up. An English girl drowned at the beach. He talked to her weeping mother on a bad connection to Liverpool. A few minutes later he interrogated a Dane arrested for cavorting naked in the fountain at Place de France. There were complicated automobile accidents involving foreigners' cars. How many times would he have to explain to German tourists that their insurance forms were meaningless when they killed a peasant's sheep?

Then there was a tempest on the Mountain over mishandled deliveries of manure. Patrick Wax was the latest in a chain of victims to find a truckload of goat pellets dumped unceremoniously on his lawn. Hamid investigated. The manure dealer claimed he'd received precise instructions on the phone. He proclaimed his innocence. Hamid believed him. They looked up at the Mountain, faced each other, and shrugged.

Later Hamid drove up the Mountain to see the damage for himself.

'Now look here, Inspector,' said Wax, pointing at the pellets, covering his nose with a perfumed scarf, 'this has got to be a deliberate thing. The pellets were dumped at the very spot where I erect my summer party tent.'

'Could have been an honest mistake,' said Hamid. 'Perhaps the manure man got his addresses mixed.'

'Impossible! The same thing happened to Countess de Lauzon. Someone's calling up and ordering the stuff, then telling the deliveryman to dump it in just the places where it hurts.'

'But who, Mr. Wax? Whom do you suspect?'

Wax looked at him, narrowed his eyes. 'Bainbridge,' he said. 'Couldn't be anyone else. He's cross with me, and also with Francoise, because neither of us will have him in our house. This whole thing smacks of Percy's style- just his sort of revenge.'

Hamid wanted to laugh, but he listened solemnly as Wax elaborated on his complaint. He took notes and, when Wax was finished, suggested the pellets be raked around to fertilize his flowers.

'Of course,' Wax exclaimed, 'that's just what I intended to do. But I wanted you to see this first. This pile of shit is the only evidence I have.'

Could it be, Hamid asked himself, driving back to town, that police in other countries trouble themselves with matters such as this? The Europeans were crazy, ordered manure dumped on each other's lawns. What did it mean? What was the pattern of their dance?

Later, back at his office, he paced around his desk. The 'Manure Affair' was a comic operetta, but there was a victim, the manure dealer, who'd acted in good faith and now would not be paid. The trouble with police work, he thought, was that it was so inexact. Cases overlapped, dragged on unresolved, everything was a mixture of half- truths and lies, the city was a web of interlocking snares. He felt frustrated, longed for clarity. Even his feelings about Kalinka were murky: love for her and troubling questions about her past were inextricably mixed.