“Pardon?”
“Nothing, nothing. Go on.”
“I was saying that word spread that it was the pasha who’d made the coppersmith disappear. And there’s more: rumor had it that the evidence of his crime still existed somewhere, and that one day it would appear in plain sight.” Ba Mouss hesitated a moment, then blurted out: “It was said that the truth would be revealed by a magical bird.”
Just as Ba Mouss had expected, the chief shrugged his shoulders in irritation. “A magical bird? Why not a flying elephant? You’d think we were in The Thousand and One Nights. Could you be any more gullible? It’s up to the police, not the birds, to find evidence!”
Without entering into the debate between science and superstition — a debate the chief always won by force of his arguments and outright threats — Ba Mouss concluded: “Voilà. That’s all we know of the story.”
“Thanks. You may go.”
The computer seemed to shut off, and disappeared. The chief went to close the door, then settled in comfortably at his desk; with his chin resting on his folded hands, he began to think. This business of the magical bird annoyed him to no end, but the more he tried to ignore it, the more it refused to leave him alone. He imagined a sort of giant, multicolored simurgh that soared to the heavens, then plunged back down to earth, carrying a violently writhing snake in its talons. I’m getting all worked up about a silly legend, he thought, peeved.
Then he remembered an expression that Hélène had sometimes used: oiseau jacasseur. She’d had to explain the verb — jacasser — to him: to talk very quickly, in an annoying manner.
A talking bird?
That reminded him of something. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the image. Memories of his childhood and adolescence, things he’d read or heard, appeared in a sort of halo...
After a few minutes, he opened his eyes and shook his head. Then he picked up his telephone and, after the usual greetings, asked one of the guys from the archives: “Do we have access to a list of the assets belonging, or having belonged, to the former pasha?... Yes, Moulay Mimoun... Can we get that?... It’ll take time? I have all the time in the world!” He let out a slightly bitter laugh, thinking of his status as a childless widower. “You’ll send it to me by a trustworthy messenger?”
He hung up, lit a cigarette, and randomly opened one of the files scattered on his desk.
A few days later, Hamdouch received the list he’d asked for. He ran his finger feverishly down the page and stopped at a name — the name of a riad that had belonged to the pasha.
“Bingo,” he said out loud, smiling.
At the end of the alleyway, most passersby would turn left. Rarely did anyone turn right. On the ground, black marks left by thousands of mopeds over the years indicated only one direction: left. This was the way leading to Bab Doukkala, the main road that wove through the medina.
The chief, accompanied by his deputy Hariri, turned resolutely to the right. He knew where he was going.
In front of the riad, an old watchman was seated on a stool. The watchman saw Hamdouch and Hariri approaching and stood up straight, discreetly dusted off his clothing, and seemed to come to attention.
“Assalamu alaikum!” the chief greeted.
“Alaikum as-salaam, S’si Chief,” the watchman replied anxiously.
“Are the French people here?”
“No, sidi, they went out to buy some fruit and vegetables. But you may come in if you wish.”
“It’s fine, I’ll wait until they return,” Hamdouch told him. “And don’t ever let anyone enter a house in the absence of its owners. Not even me! The law forbids it.”
Fifteen minutes later, the owners, François and Cécile, came back from the souk. The chief greeted them with a smile and gave a sort of salute by bringing two fingers to his forehead, then introduced himself and his deputy.
“The police? Nothing serious, I hope,” François said.
“No, no,” the chief assured him. “I just wanted to take a quick look around, with your permission. This has to do with an old case that has no connection to you whatsoever. It all happened long before you bought...” Hamdouch paused, then gestured vaguely at the door to the old building.
François and Cécile exchanged a look and raised their shoulders in unison. “Well then, come in,” François said. “We can’t offer you any tea, just some fruit juice.”
“No thank you.”
The four of them entered the house while the watchman stayed outside. The chief started looking around, turning his head every which way.
“Are you searching for something?” François inquired.
“Yes, I’m looking for a part of the wall covered in zellige,” Hamdouch responded. “Yellowish zellige.”
“A little patch of yellow wall,” joked Cécile.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s nothing, just a literary reference,” Cécile said. “But there is a similar wall here. The phrase is from Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time.”
“Research? That’s my department,” the chief noted approvingly. “Your Proust, did he write about Marrakech?”
“No, no... the patch of yellow wall is in Delft, in the Netherlands, it’s the birthplace of—”
Hamdouch raised his hand and interrupted Cécile: “Forget that, the Netherlands aren’t in my jurisdiction. Where’s the wall?”
They led him to one of the side rooms, with Hariri bringing up the rear. One of the walls was covered up halfway in ocher zellige. Curiously, there were no more tiles beyond this patch, and it looked as if someone had begun to cover the wall, then changed their mind without going to the trouble of removing the tile. Hamdouch studied the wall carefully, kneeling down to examine its base, then tapped it in several spots while pressing his ear to its surface. Hariri and the French couple watched him, baffled.
“You think there’s something behind it?” Cécile asked. Without waiting for a response, she turned to her husband. “You remember the Héberts? They bought an old house in Paris, in the Marais. While they were doing some renovations they discovered a fake wall, and behind it, in a case, they found a very valuable violin. A Guarneri, I think.”
“Well then, we just might hit the jackpot,” François said.
The chief stood up with difficulty. “I don’t know if you can get rich in the skeleton trade,” he muttered. “If you can, then you’re in luck: there’s a coppersmith’s skeleton behind this wall.”
Cécile swayed and fell right onto a chair.
“What do you mean?” François asked, stunned.
Hamdouch shrugged and told his deputy to go find a bricklayer and two strapping policemen — and to bring mallets, hammers, and a large plastic bag.
While François tended to Cécile, who was hyperventilating, the chief explained: “With your permission, we’re going to make a hole in this wall to extract the corpse that’s hidden behind it. But don’t worry, we’ll seal everything back up again.”
Hamdouch went out to smoke a cigarette in the shade of an orange tree.
A few days later, Hamdouch was seated in his usual chair at his usual restaurant, in front of what was left of a chicken tagine with olives. His hunger satiated, he burped quietly and then ordered a mint tea. Finally, he agreed to rehash the case for the proprietor, who’d been hovering around him all evening.
“You know that Brahim Labatt was also a plumber? He’d probably been hired to do some odd jobs around the riad, and discreet as he was, they’d completely forgotten he was there. Without meaning to, he witnessed the coppersmith’s assassination by the pasha, or rather by the pasha’s henchmen. They must’ve lured the guy there to place an order for copper trays, or something of the sort. Poor man, I hope he was already dead when they walled him in. Otherwise, what a horrible end... Anyway, Labatt got out of there without anyone noticing him, and within a few weeks he’d finished the painting. It was, in a sense, his only way of speaking out about what he’d seen.”