Brian looked at me as if I’d just slapped him. “Did you kill him?”
“I don’t remember,” I said. I relaxed my grip on the Beretta and lowered my hand and the gun till they were resting on my thigh.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I don’t remember,” I said. Handing the picture back to Brian, I turned my head slightly and pulled the hair just above my temple aside, revealing the pale scalp beneath. My fingers brushed the raised edge of my scar, the neat circle of the healed wound. “Can you see it?” I asked.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brian lean forward. “What happened?”
“I was shot,” I said.
“Why?”
“That’s the big mystery, isn’t it? I woke up a year ago in a field in France with a bullet in my head and nothing else. Before that, I don’t remember.”
“Amnesia?” Brian asked, skeptically.
“I wouldn’t believe me either.”
“But you knew Pat. You remember Pat.”
It took me a moment to answer, and when I did it was with a lie. “No,” I told him. “I don’t remember your brother either.”
“What are you doing in Tangier?”
“There was a used ticket stub in my pocket for the Tangier-Algeciras ferry. I thought I might remember something, that someone might know me.”
“Why now? After a year.”
I thought about what to say, how much to trust this person. “It wasn’t safe to stay where I was.”
He shook his head, still disbelieving.
“When’s the last time anyone saw your brother?” I asked.
“The end of October, a year ago.”
“Do you know the date?”
“The twentieth. He was a regular at the Pub. They had a darts tournament that night. A bunch of people saw him there.”
“Alone?”
Brian nodded.
“Then what?”
“According to All Join Hands, he had a meeting in Marrakech on the twenty-fourth, then headed down to Ourzazate. He was supposed to check in again on his way back, but he never showed up. They called my mom and dad in the States about a week later asking if they knew where Pat was. That’s the first we knew something was wrong.”
“Where’s Ourzazate?” I asked.
“South of Marrakech, on the other side of the Atlas Mountains.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Work stuff. Evidently he was looking into starting a project with some of the date plantations down there. All Join Hands doesn’t know much more. Pat was pretty much on his own.”
“Did anyone see him in Ourzazate?”
“Not as far as I’ve been able to tell.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“And, you know how many Africans disappear into the Strait of Gibraltar each year? There’s a limit to the amount of time the police here can or want to spend on some wide-eyed American who took a wrong turn in the medina.”
“What about the consulate?”
“There’s no American consulate in Tangier, but I’ve made at least a dozen trips to the embassy in Rabat. There’s not much they can do. They figure nine times out of ten when someone disappears like this, they don’t want to be found.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t know. You see these old men in the cafés in the Petit Socco sometimes. White guys in burnooses drinking mint tea. At first I used to think maybe that’s what happened to Pat, that he read too much Paul Bowles and decided to go native. But that’s just not him. Don’t get me wrong; he wanted to do this. But he wanted to come home someday, too. Get married, have a couple of kids.”
“With the girl of his dreams,” I said.
“Yeah,” Brian agreed.
We stood there for a moment, each of us silent as the corpse at our feet.
“Where do we go from here?” Brian asked finally.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Right now, I’d say anywhere but this place.”
I took one last look at Joshi. The coverlet had failed to cloak his outstretched hand, and it lay there, pale and disembodied, still reaching for something.
“There’s something wrong with his finger,” I said.
Brian stepped toward the body and took the hand in his own. The dead man’s pinky flopped downward at an unnatural angle. “It’s broken.”
I winced, thinking of my own encounter with Joshi the night before. The barest hint of violence had been more than enough to get the little man to talk, and yet someone had hurt him. What had that person wanted? What kind of information had Joshi had to give? The same information he’d sold to Brian? My room number at the Continental?
“Let’s get out of here,” Brian said.
I nodded in agreement. “I can’t go back to the hotel.”
“You can stay at my place.”
“No,” I told him.
“Whatever you want.” He shrugged, then glanced back toward where Joshi lay, as if for emphasis. “It just seemed to me that you and I might be after a lot of the same answers.”
“It’s not safe,” I said. “You’re not safe with me.”
He turned away and started for the door. “I’ll take my chances.”
NINE
“It was Pat’s apartment,” Brian explained as we pulled up in front of a nondescript residential building not far from the tourist office. We had walked through the medina to the port entrance, then taken a petit taxi to the Ville Nouvelle.
Brian paid the driver, then unlocked the building’s front door and motioned for me to step inside.
“How long have you been here?” I asked as we started up the stairs.
“Eight months.”
“And you never thought of giving up?”
“Every day,” Brian admitted. “But when I really thought about it, thought about what it would mean to make that decision, to decide to leave…” He stopped and looked at me. “If I was the one in trouble and Pat was the one looking for me, he wouldn’t give up.”
We started upward again in silence. The apartment was on the fifth floor, at the front of the building. It was nicer than Joshi’s place, but blander, more utilitarian, all square angles and white paint. An L-shaped front hall led to a galley kitchen and a good-sized living room with a small balcony. Two partially closed doors revealed a bathroom and bedroom.
That it was the apartment of a transplant was obvious. Many of the furnishings were tastefully Moroccan, but the accessories hinted at a life left behind. A bulletin board over the computer desk in the living room was crammed with photographs: well-groomed girls in summer dresses, distinctly un-African gardens in full bloom, a picnic on a beach somewhere. An open cabinet next to the television held several dozen videotapes, the handwritten black-and-white labels marked Yankees/Red Sox or NHL East Finals. A football rested on an end table.
“Can I get you something?” Brian asked, laying his coat across the back of a chair. “Tea? Something to eat? I’ve even got good old American peanut butter.”
“No thanks,” I told him. It was well past three by now, and all I wanted was a good night’s sleep.
“There are some women’s clothes in the dresser in the bedroom,” Brian said. “Hannah’s, I’ve always assumed. And you’re welcome to anything of mine or Pat’s as well. There’s just the one bed, but it’s a big one, if you don’t mind sharing. I can always sleep out here.”
“No,” I said. “Sharing’s fine with me.”
Brian nodded toward the bedroom door. “I’ll let you change.”
Hannah’s wardrobe was that of a traveler, just a few simple pieces, modest and practical. October fifth, I thought, remembering the last date of Hannah’s stay at the El Minzah. It hadn’t taken her long to move out of the hotel and in with Pat. I set my pack down, stripped out of my grungy clothes, and pulled on an oversized T-shirt.
Brian was waiting for me just outside the door when I emerged from the bedroom. “Thank my mom,” he said, handing me a brand-new toothbrush. “She sends a care package every couple of weeks. She’s big on oral hygiene.”