He looked up at me, his eyes beginning to fill with water, but said nothing.
Hoping he wouldn’t call my bluff, I mumbled something about the police station and started forward, pushing him in front of me.
“Please,” the boy pleaded. “It was l’allemand.”
As thick as his accent was, it took me a moment to understand what he meant. L’allemand. The German.
“His name,” I prompted.
The boy shrugged.
“He found you in the Djemaa el-Fna?”
“No,” the boy said, shaking his head, frustrated by my adult ignorance. “He has a great house in the Ville Nouvelle. My mother’s sister works there.”
“Where in the Ville Nouvelle?”
The boy shrugged again. “Near the Jardin Majorelle.”
I paused a moment. “You’ll take me there,” I said.
“Please, Madame,” he entreated. “No police.”
“No police,” I told him. “I promise.”
Because the streets in much of the Old City are too narrow for vehicles of any kind, all goods are transported either by human or by donkey. When people die, their bodies are wrapped in white cloth and carried through the medina on the heads of their relatives, floating along above the fray like leaves washed from stream to river to sea.
It was this same current that swept us toward the Bab Doukkala. Once the boy and I left the empty side alleys and found one of the medina’s main arteries, we didn’t walk so much as ride, buoyed by the crush of the crowd. It was midafternoon when we emerged from behind the medina’s red walls into the twenty-first-century rush of the Ville Nouvelle. I hailed a petit taxi, and we rode the rest of the way, the boy snapping directions to the driver.
As is so often the case in Moroccan cities, where what faces the street provides little clue to the character of the homes, the windowless facades of the neighborhood we finally stopped in revealed almost nothing of what lay behind them. Only the occasional glimpse of well-tended foliage, old poinsettia bushes and towering palms, and the preponderance of well-dressed Europeans and mirror-black Mercedeses, hinted at just how far from the souqs we had come.
The taxi pulled to the curb, and the boy started to get out. “Which house is it?” I asked, holding him inside.
He pointed to a large gate. “There.”
I reached into my pocket, pulled out what cash I had with me, forty dirhams and some change, far more than what the cab would cost, and handed it to the boy. “Take him back to the medina,” I told the driver. Then I opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
THIRTEEN
Among Holocaust survivors, periods of retrograde amnesia are not uncommon. I once spoke to an old woman, another of Dr. Delpay’s patients, who had been to Bergen-Belsen as a child and was still haunted by the fact that she could remember nothing of the eighteen months she had spent there. It’s tempting to think of this as a blessing, the brain’s way of saving itself. But to her, for whom bearing witness was the greatest salvation, for whom dozens of loved ones could be known only through memory, the loss was unspeakably painful.
“We were always hungry,” she told me, pulling a chocolate bar from her pocket, proof of her compulsion. Some sixty years later she still could not leave her house without food. “My sister says we were,” she said guiltily, “but I don’t remember it.”
“Your past is not a bouchon menu,” Dr. Delpay had said when I’d first told him of my plan to go to America. “It all comes together on one big plate: quenelles, andouillette, tablier de sapeur. You can’t pick and choose.”
“Yes.” I’d nodded, but Delpay could see I didn’t believe him.
“He’ll find you, you know,” he’d insisted. “Your friend from the rooftop. He doesn’t care that you don’t want to be found.”
I’d told myself he was wrong, but even then I’d thought of the woman with her chocolate, the way her speckled hand had reached for it in her pocket.
Now, as I watched the taxi make a U-turn and head back to the Bab Doukkala, I thought of her again, and of that morning in the kitchen with Heloise, her cruel God. Yes, I told myself, there was no picking and choosing, no answers but all the answers, and the certainty that knowledge, even the worst kind, is worth the risks.
I headed across the street, trying to make like a tourist out for a stroll. The large iron-and-wood gate, the villa’s only visible entrance, was closed and, I assumed by the keypad and intercom on the outer wall, locked. A tall, thick, pisé wall, topped with jagged shards of broken glass, ran the length of the grounds. A porcelain plaque on the gate gave a street address but no name. Short of ringing the bell and asking, there seemed to be little I could do to get any more information about the house or its owner.
Ringing the bell, I thought, was a crazy idea, though not so crazy as it might at first seem. Stepping closer to the gate, I pushed the little round button below the intercom.
There were a few seconds of silence, then the speaker crackled on and a static-garbled yet polite female voice asked me to identify myself.
“It’s Chris Jones,” I said in English, choosing the most generic American name I could think of, ignoring the fact that my unseen inquisitor had spoken French. “I’m here to see Mr. Thompson.”
There was a confused pause on the other end, then, in impeccable English, “I’m sorry, Madame. Did you say Thompson?”
“Yeah, Fred Thompson.”
“There is no Mr. Thompson here,” came the reply.
“Sure there is,” I said. “We met last winter in Chamonix. He gave me this address.”
“There is no one here by that name,” the voice repeated.
“Just tell him it’s Chris,” I persisted, “from Dallas. He’ll remember.”
“I’m sorry, Madame,” the woman apologized again, her tone showing exasperation this time. “This is the Werner residence.”
“Well, where does Fred live, then?” I asked, incredulously.
“I don’t know, Madame,” she said, curtly. “Good day.” Then she clicked off, and the intercom went dead.
I lingered by the gate for a moment longer, then cut back across the street. The Werner residence, I thought. Werner. Walking the length of the wall, I shadowed the perimeter of the property. The villa was on a corner, and two sides of the enclosed grounds came right up to the street. The house’s remaining boundaries bordered the equally imposing villas on either side. Besides the main gate, a large wooden door near the rear of the property, which I assumed was a service entrance, was the only opening in the unbroken plaster wall. The whole place looked as if it had been built to withstand a siege, from prying eyes or angry rabble or both.
I did a tour of the neighboring homes, making a loop around the large block the Werner villa was situated on, sticking to the far side of the street. Each of the properties showed evidence of at least some kind of security system. A discreet army of surveillance cameras studded the walls and rooftops. The sound of barking dogs could be heard from inside one of the compounds. Here was the price of wealth, the penalty of privilege in a place of such abundant poverty.
Finishing my tour, I turned back onto the street where the taxi had let me out and stopped several yards from Werner’s main gate. There was a limit to the amount of loitering even a dumb blond playgirl could do in a neighborhood like this, and I figured any more snooping would have to be done at night.
As I took in the villa and its walls one last time, I heard the electric gate beep in warning. The latch unlocked, and the two iron doors swung slowly outward. The black prow of a Mercedes appeared, sun blazing off its chrome bumper and hood ornament. The car paused for a moment in the driveway; then the wheels turned in my direction, and the hulking sedan moved out into the street. I ducked back around the corner, flattening myself against the wall.