My stomach dropped. “She took my pack?”
“But of course not.” Ilham fished in her djellaba and withdrew her key ring. “I’m sorry, Mademoiselle, but you said nothing to me about this. I told her you would have to come yourself.”
“What did she look like?”
“A woman.” The proprietor shrugged, coming out from behind the desk, opening the door to the storage room. “Rather tall, with blond hair. You do understand, don’t you? I can’t just let anyone in here. If you had told me yourself…”
“Yes,” I said, catching a glimpse of my pack in its wire locker. “You did the right thing.” I flashed her a weak smile, my gratitude as real as it gets.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to charge you. It’s five dirhams a day for luggage storage.” She undid the lock and stepped aside.
“Of course.” I reached up, undid the pack’s top flap, and fished deep in the inside pocket. “Here,” I told Ilham, pulling out a one-hundred-euro bill, then handing it to her.
She shook her head vehemently. “But, Mademoiselle, I couldn’t possibly have change for this.”
“Please.” I pushed the bill into her hands. “Take it and keep it.”
“Got it?” Brian asked as I slid into the passenger seat of the Land Rover.
I nodded, hauling the pack in after me. “Someone was here asking about me. A woman.”
“When?”
“This morning,” I said. “She wanted my pack.”
“It doesn’t look like she got it.”
Shaking my head, I opened the pack’s top flap. “Thank God for inscrutable hotel managers.”
“Thank God,” Brian echoed.
“Here.” I withdrew the tattered ferry ticket and handed it to him. “My sole worldly possession.”
He took the scrap of paper and examined it carefully.
“There’s something on the back,” I told him. “I always thought it was a code of some sort.”
I watched him flip the ticket over and mouth the characters silently to himself.
“Or maybe a combination,” I hazarded.
“It’s not a combination,” he said. He handed the paper back to me, started the Rover’s engine, and pulled out onto the street.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Brian turned onto the Avenue Mohammed V, heading in the direction of the Ville Nouvelle. “We need to find a Koran.”
We parked on a side street behind the post office and walked the few short blocks to the All Join Hands offices. It was early afternoon and the building was still open, but the offices were nearly empty. Charlie Phillips and a pretty but overly thin young black woman with an upper-class British accent were playing darts in the common area while a scrawny American kid with bad acne played a video game at one of the many computers.
It was a strange threesome, each of them a misfit, each so obviously wounded in his or her own way, at large in the world, trying to find some comfort in exile. For why else would you leave? What else but belonging would you be looking to find in a place so far from home?
Charlie glanced back when he heard us come in. For a split second he looked less than happy to see us; then he tipped his mouth up into a wide grin.
“Bri,” he said jovially.
Brian stepped forward, and I followed. “Hey, man,” he said. “You mind if we make use of your library?”
Charlie smiled uncomfortably. Something was wrong, I thought, though it could have been just that we’d busted in on his hustle. “Sure,” he said.
Brian started for some bookshelves on the far side of the room. “Don’t let us keep you from your game.”
Charlie looked over at the woman. “She’s beating me anyway.” He chuckled nervously. “You know Fiona, don’t you?”
“Hey, Fiona.” Brian acknowledged the woman, then turned to the stacks, his finger running across the rows of worn spines. He pulled a leather-bound volume from the shelf and took a seat at one of the desks, motioning for me to join him.
Brian opened the Koran to the back cover and began paging backward. “The ticket,” he said, stopping about a third of the way through the text, setting the book flat on the desk.
I pulled the ferry ticket from my pocket and handed it to him.
He laid the paper on the page.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Mary,” he said. “The letters are from the first line of the sura called Mary. Only here you have them written backward.”
“What do they mean?”
Brian shrugged. “No one’s quite sure. Some people think they’re the initials of the original scribe. Another camp believes they have some mystical significance.”
He ran his finger down the page. “Verse twenty-one,” he said, reading the text out in Arabic.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“It’s the angel, talking to Mary about the Immaculate Conception. She wants to know how she can have a child when she’s a virgin. The angel tells her these kinds of things are easy for God. The Lord saith: It is easy for Me.”
Easy, I thought, it is easy for me. Where had I heard that before? “Abdesselom,” I said, remembering the Koran I’d found in my room there.
“What?”
“At the Hotel Continental. It was the first thing he said to me when I went to check in. It is easy for me. I thought he knew me. I could have sworn he knew me.”
NINETEEN
We left the city and headed north, retracing the route I’d taken down from Tangier, through the green heart of the country, the emerald patchwork of barley and new hay. After the austere Atlas, the landscape seemed extravagant, overrun with row upon opulent row of crops. Women in bright robes, colorful as songbirds, dotted the fields and dirt roads. Discarded Tide laundry soap packages littered the riverbanks where the day’s linens had been scrubbed, the familiar fluorescent orange-and-blue packaging scattered like petals from some strange fruiting tree.
The sun was beginning to set when we crossed the blue curve of the Oued Oum er-Rbia. Shadows stretched themselves across the stubbled plateau. Women and men headed in from the fields for a bowl of harira and a cigarette, that first glass of water to break the fast. As we drove toward the sea, the sky slowly darkened, the few high clouds stained pink to violet, the blue vault above us sliding from deep indigo toward star-speckled black.
We drove in shifts through the darkness, hugging the coast through Casablanca, Rabat, and the fortified towns along the Atlantic. It was close to two in the morning when we reached Tangier, and except for a few straggling tourists and a Senegalese whore or two, the city was a dark ghost town. Brian drove us in through the Ville Nouvelle to the southeast ramparts of the medina.
The Rover was too big to squeeze in through the old plaster gate on the Avenue d’Espagne, so we parked it on the Rue du Portugal and climbed the last three hundred meters up the steep cobbled street toward the Continental. I took my pack with me, hooking the Beretta in the back waistband of my pants. The gun sat snug against my skin, a spare clip bulging from my back pocket.
We will make of him a revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us. I repeated the second half of the twenty-first verse of the sura Mary as I followed Brian up past the Great Mosque, past Joshi’s apartment building, toward the hulk of the old hotel. And it is a thing ordained.
Mercy, I thought, and then I heard the sisters, all dead without mercy. Kyrie eleison, Lord, have mercy on us. And the Gloria: Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filus Patris: qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. I took a deep breath and let the rich stink of the bay fill my nostrils. Didn’t we all die without mercy?