The Hamadcha saw to it that I danced until my feet were raw and every bone in my body so sore that when I finally fell in front of the flutes I thought I’d never get up again. But just let me hear one long sobbing tremolo blown hoarse and husky on the long bamboo chebaba, and my soul kindled, caught fire and leaped up in me to send me hopping and whirling out there again in front of the music. It was all pretty tiring, I have to admit, and I was very glad I had kept on my room at the Hotel Africanus to which I used to creep away when I could, to toss down a swift Scotch or two at the bar with Amos, who kept his back door locked in case the Brothers came calling after me. Amos was and is a real darling, you’ll see; although he has a quite different world-view than we do, naturally. Deep down in his heart somewhere, he thinks we’re just Tourists. He lectured me, gave me books to read, was helpful and kind but he always disapproved utterly of what I was doing. To study anthropology was one thing, to practice it quite another. But I was constantly calling him in to translate, so, sooner or later, he got mixed up in everything we’re doing and he’s really invaluable, you’ll see! However, don’t be fooled for a minute, Amos simply doesn’t get the message that comes from Beyond — either he thinks it’s sinful or just not practical and he honestly doesn’t feel that he needs to make any spiritual progress other than that involved in protecting himself from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Lest this sound too harsh let me add that I, at least, think Amos can be brought to see a bit of Beyond. Mya denies it. Oddly enough, Amos dearly loves me, but Mya he admires, fears and respects.
She, by this time, had begun shacking up with Pio Labesse on the Boulevard. I phoned her up there from the depths of the Socco Chico, once or twice a day, to see how she was getting on, but it was such an almost unthinkable effort to haul myself out of that hole in the Medina that I didn’t see much of her. Over the phone, Mya was a bit snippy about Amos, pretending to think I must be having an affair with him but nothing could have been further from my mind. I was all wrapped up in the Hamadcha, with whom I was advancing step by step into their labyrinth of initiation, or, so I thought. When I tried to tell Mya this, she said she was coming down to see for herself but I said No, I’d go up to her at the Mingih. When I got there, her room was still unmade but there was no sign of the cardboard box in which we’d been carrying PP’s million dollars in greenbacks. We never gave it to the hotels to take care of because the box was too big for most vaults and besides nobody looking at it ever would think it was money because we had EXPLOSIVE written on it in big red letters with a big exploding pop-art bomb for people who can’t read. It frightened the hell out of hall porters and Customs men, too. As I bent down to kiss Mya on the bed, the communicating door opened into the next suite and there was Labesse in a gold brocade Arab caftan down to the floor. In his room, I could see the box torn wide open with green bricks of hundred dollar bills spread like a mattress over the bed he’d been lying on. Somehow, before I knew it, just out of habit I guess, I’d invited them both to my party, which I hadn’t known until that minute I was giving. It was a catastrophe, of course.
Labesse had a genius for enraging Arabs which a former French governor general might have envied. The sneer, with Labesse, was a scimitar with which he whittled all Arabs down to what he considered their proper elevation, grass-high. He reserved the other side of his blade to shave Americans, all rich Americans: North, Central and South. I’ve made quite a study of Dr. Labesse: we’ve got a huge Labesse archive down in “Malamut” which I hope you’ll have a chance to consult when you get down to Cape Noon. It’s all in audio so you can have it played to you while you’re asleep, if you like: we have all the equipment. Amos, it turns out, is an electronic genius amongst other talents and he’s seen to the wiring of “Malamut” under Mya’s direction, although like most women she really hates sound unless she makes it herself. The house, as you’ll see when you see it, is meant to amplify her. Mya built it with Pio while I was away on my stumbling spiritual quest so you’ll hear the story of “Malamut” better from her lips.
Mya still thinks Labesse was a cross between Talleyrand and Machiavelli with a dash of the Borgias thrown in. It was that last dash she found irresistible. Her greatest childhood experience had been being poisoned by mushrooms out on the Canadian prairies, so when she got to college that took her into toxology and, eventually, genetic biochemistry before she married poor PP and got interested in money. As an Old Moroccan Hand, himself, the first story Labesse ever told her was about some mysterious substance which Moroccan women are said to give their husbands to make them complacent. You must have heard of it, of course; “Borbor,” it’s called. You see, when Mya and PP first moved from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Basel, it had been with the idea of studying with Professor Forbach: you know, the man who discovered the hallucinatory principle of all the new drugs.
Actually, in the end Forbach threw Mya out of his laboratory when he learned that she had launched a mutual fund scheme from Basel. You’ve heard of Fundamental Funds, haven’t you? Well that’s Mya’s baby or was in those days when Professor Forbach dismissed her because he could no longer consider her a “seriously dedicated scientist” if she insisted on making millions or hundreds of millions of dollars like that on the side. So she offered to buy him out from his pharmaceutical combine, which paid him only some annuity, but that was a mistake, waving her dollars around. Professor Forbach was furious, naturally! She called him a “kept chemist!” and swept out to the sounds of breaking glass test-tubes, slamming the door.