Tangier July 1978
Tangier
‘I’m telling you, it just vanished.’
From the corner of his eye, Sam saw Norton shake his head.
‘Are you sure you didn’t imagine the whole thing? Maybe you never even wrote a letter, just sat there daydreaming after a bit too much –’ Norton mimed smoking a joint.
‘Of course I didn’t imagine it,’ Sam snapped. ‘I wrote the damn letter. How else did I get ink on my face?’
Even so, he felt a prickle of uncertainty. It was true, he’d lost himself in the act of writing, had scrawled out a confession to an unknown person without meaning to. But he had written. Hadn’t he? ‘Anyway,’ he said, rubbing his neck. ‘I didn’t smoke much this morning.’
‘But you did afterwards?’
‘Sure. I was freaked out.’
Norton sighed. He looked more relaxed today, in chinos and a shirt and some sort of cravat, a jacket slung over his shoulder despite the temperature. The sun had set but the streets still held their late orange heat. ‘This letter,’ he said, ‘did it have anything important in it? About you?’
Yes, Sam wanted to say. But he knew what Norton meant: name, address, social security number. He shook his head.
‘Then why are you worrying?’ Norton stopped. ‘Look, it was probably nicked by someone who thought they could pull one over on you, extortion or whatnot. I’d put my money on one of the waiters.’
‘There was this old man. I thought he was watching me but …’ There was every possibility he’d imagined that too.
‘Well there you go,’ Norton said. ‘I’ll bet he was just some loony who liked the look of you. And he didn’t take that.’ Norton poked the writing case under Sam’s arm. ‘So no harm done.’
‘I guess not.’
‘Good. Let’s get a drink and forget about it.’
They set off down a narrow street that led towards the beach. Sam took the roll-up from behind his ear and lit it, before offering it over to Norton. He watched the Englishman’s face crease at the taste of the kif.
‘Too much of this stuff will make you paranoid,’ Norton said, smacking it away from his tongue.
‘You know what they say, “A pipe of kif in the evening is worth a dozen camels in the courtyard.”’
‘Who says that?’
Sam laughed at Norton’s expression, feeling his shoulders ease for the first time since the morning.
The Hold was open. Sam could tell, because the dark rectangle in the white, salt-damp wall was slightly darker than usual, and music was spilling out, the scratchy, warbly jazz the old-timers liked to play. At the threshold, Norton faltered and glanced at the peeling, hand-painted sign.
‘Hackett. Where are we?’
Sam smiled. ‘We can’t drink at the El Minzah every day, old chum,’ he said, mimicking Norton. ‘And anyway, you said you wanted to meet other ex-pats.’
‘I meant Peruvian oil barons and Russian heiresses,’ Norton muttered, ‘not ex-cons.’
‘What’s the difference?’
A shallow set of stairs led down to the bar, where it was cooler, away from the fierce heat. As Sam stood blinking, with Norton at his back and the bright streets in his eyes, he heard someone exclaim:
‘I’ll be damned. Is that Samuel Hackett?’
Squinting, he took a few steps across the uneven floor.
Slowly, the bar resolved itself from the gloom.
A padded bench ran around the edge of the cellar, low tables before it.
A record player sat at the end of the bar, next to a crate of records, where Roger, the owner, could keep a watchful eye.
Leaning next to it was a woman. She was smiling at Sam, her blue eyes startlingly bright against skin that was as tanned and creased as hide. There was a cigar in her hand, unlit.
‘We’d given you up for dead,’ she said, her lips forming a smile. ‘Some of us before others.’
‘I don’t owe you money too, do I?’
She snorted. ‘Well, I never did expect to get it back.’ Her eyes settled on Norton, lingering at the bottom of the stairs. ‘But what have you brought us?’
‘A compatriot of yours,’ Sam said, enjoying Norton’s expression. ‘This is Ellis Norton, he’s here with Interpress, fresh off the boat.’
‘How dreadful for you.’ The woman smiled at Norton with all her teeth. A great many of them were gold. ‘I’ll bet you wanted Rome.’
Norton flushed, extending a hand. ‘I’m determined to make the best of it, Mrs …?’
Sam winced and leaned over the bar to call Roger from the back room.
The woman was staring Norton down. ‘Mrs Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s Captain. Captain Elizabeth Lowe.’
‘Bet used to have a ship,’ Sam murmured over his shoulder.
Norton seemed at a loss, before clapping a hand to his jacket pocket. ‘Ah, perhaps a drink?’
‘Now, young man,’ Bet said, biting off the end of the cigar, ‘you are speaking our language.’
Roger appeared, limping and gruff as always, and got them a round of beers.
He’d grown even hairier since Sam had last seen him.
No one really knew how the Welshman had ended up in Tangier, running a hole in the wall.
There were a dozen stories about him. Someone said he’d been in a secret desert task force during the war, and couldn’t bring himself to go back to Swansea with all the blood on his hands.
Others said he’d been in the Merchant Navy, and had gone AWOL one night only to wake up in the casbah two weeks later with the keys to a bar in his pocket.
And you, Sam asked himself, draining the glass of beer, what great story can you tell? A dropout, begging from his parents? The writing case sat beside him, bringing back a memory of the letter; a first chapter of something new. Perhaps not, he thought.
The bar soon began to fill up with regulars, many of whom had been coming for so long they’d worn the grooves of their arses into the bench.
Sam knew better than to try and sit in their places.
Bet sat at her table, next to the record player, nearest to the bar.
Next to her sat Dr Halligan who taught at the American school and usually had a few college students in tow – undergrads who’d lost the sheen of home.
Giles from the British Embassy, sipping his Benedictine; Kline from – nobody knew where Kline was from.
Germany, perhaps. Or Switzerland. Anyway, he had something to do with shipping, and was perpetually murmuring to Bet about tide times and anchorage.
Wizened Derek Bluff and his glamorous wife Lina.
Sam couldn’t help but blush when she leaned in to kiss him on both cheeks, filling his nose with powder and perfume.
Roger once told him that Lina was a White Russian who had been a spy, and that Bluff was the British Service man who had unmasked her one fateful night in Gibraltar, only to fall unaccountably in love.
Sam exchanged pleasantries with them, brushing off questions about his writing, about where he had been.
He wasn’t sure why he’d stopped coming to The Hold.
He’d begun to feel as if it was a strange hinterland, a twilight zone between the denouement of a story and a coda that never came.
Everyone there had a past; a wild, dangerous, murky past, yet now they lingered, the crescendo behind them.
He felt so blank in comparison. High school, college, summer work, bumming around England and France and Spain.
In Connecticut, that made him adventurous, but here …
He glanced over at Norton, who was holding forth to Giles about his golf handicap. Sighing, he called to Roger for another couple of beers.
Over at her table, Bet was peering down at a map that Kline had spread before her, and was marking things in pencil, talking softly. When he appeared, they both looked up abruptly.
‘Here,’ he said, passing her the beer. ‘Am I interrupting?’
‘No, no.’ Kline folded the map away. ‘I am picking only Bet’s knowledge. Please.’ He vacated his seat, indicating Sam should take it.
He did, and took a sip of the lukewarm beer. In the background, one of Halligan’s students was trying to replace the jazz record with David Bowie. Sam glanced over at Bet. He’d never been able to guess her age. Anywhere from fifty-five to seventy-five. It was impossible to tell.
‘Remind me, how long have you been in Tangier, Bet?’ he asked in the end, raising his voice over the start of the Bowie record, with its trumpets and squelchy notes.
She looked at him steadily, and in the dimness of the bar, in the pungent cloud of cigar smoke, the voice from the record player seemed to be coming out of her blue eyes, singing of dead-end streets.
‘Long time,’ she said, tapping the cigar into the tray.
‘But how long?’ he pressed. ‘What year?’
She frowned at him. Information was a currency, in Tangier.
‘1951, or thereabouts,’ she said eventually.
‘After I was demobbed from the Wrens and nearly went out of my mind with boredom in Plymouth. A girlfriend got a job on a pleasure boat here, serving drinks, said I should join her.’ Bet puffed on her cigar.
‘It was the International Zone then. Anyone and everyone came here. You couldn’t move for embassies and freight companies, French, Spanish, American, Dutch, Italian, it didn’t matter.
I wanted to sail so it worked for me.’ She showed a few gold teeth.
‘All those charts and radar plotting during the war, I could’ve sailed from here to Gib with my eyes closed.
Fat lot of good it did. No one willing to hire a female pilot, in those days.
But eventually I met … a person who ran an import-export concern.
’ She slid a glance at Sam. ‘They gave me a job. Said I was the best they’d ever seen.
We worked together for years after that. ’
Sam smiled, trying not to let his disappointment show, but Bet caught it anyway. She laughed, blew out smoke. ‘Not what you wanted to hear?’
‘Yes, I did,’ he hurried. ‘It’s just, I found something the other day, from the late 1920s …’
As the bar grew more crowded, he found himself telling her about his trade with Abdelhamid, about the Hermes and the old writing case, the calendar in it and the letter he’d written, which – he was sure – had been taken at the café.
‘There was an old man,’ he said, over the sound of a few young Moroccan guys calling greetings to Roger from the stairs. ‘He was watching me in the mirror.’
Unlike Norton, Bet didn’t roll her eyes. She only frowned. ‘Old man,’ she repeated. ‘How old? What did he look like?’
‘Hard to say. Seventy, maybe? He was wearing dark glasses, big ones, and an old-fashioned hat. Western clothes, a suit, I think.’
Bet tapped her empty glass on the table. ‘Done something you shouldn’t have, Sam?’
The ease with which she asked it shocked him. Another reminder I’m not from her world, he thought.
‘No. I’ve not been doing anything. Apart from smoking kif.’
She snorted. ‘Well then. You’ll just have to wait until you see him again, won’t you?’
‘Yeah.’ A moment later, Sam dug into his pocket, pulling out the piece of leather. ‘Listen, I don’t suppose you know what—’
Before he could finish, Norton stepped up to the table. He held a sticky glass, and the scent of Benedictine, herby and boozy, hung around him.
‘Captain Lowe,’ he said, pulling up one of the stools, ‘I’ve just been hearing the most marvellous stories from Giles. He said you were a smuggler ! Is that true?’
Norton’s necktie was loosened, his face flushed.
At another time, Sam might have said that he was drunk, but just the day before he’d seen the man dispatch three double whiskies, and barely blink.
Perhaps the heat was getting to him. He glanced over at Bet.
Everyone knew the rumours about her, but there was something uncouth about saying it aloud, to her face.
He shifted in his seat, but she only laughed.
‘All ancient history.’ She put out the cigar. Without it, she seemed smaller, older. She gave Norton a little smile. ‘How about another drink, dear boy?’
‘Of course.’ He was on his feet. ‘Beer was it? Back in a tick.’
Sam watched him move towards the bar, belching out a loud ‘excuse me’ to the Moroccan guys. He looked back to find Bet’s eyes fixed on Norton.
‘Hmm,’ she murmured, before levering herself to her feet. ‘I must have a word with Giles. Bring my drink over when it arrives, Sammy, there’s a love.’ Her eyes fell on the scrap of leather that lay forgotten on the table. ‘Where d’you get that old thing?’
‘This—’ He stared at her, before grabbing it up. ‘You know what this is?’
She gave him a pitying look. ‘You young people. I will admit though, most places use paper these days.’
‘Bet, what is this?’
She was searching through her handbag for something. ‘It’s a cloakroom tag, from the Continental. I’d recognize that old tomcat design anywhere. The manager used to write me the most obscene love notes on the hotel stationery. “Elizabetta, Pirate Queen”, he called me – where are you going?’
He had grabbed the writing case and was pushing his way towards the stairs, the tag clutched in his hand, not caring whose feet he stepped on.
As he reached the doorway, Norton turned from the bar, his hands full of drinks, eyes fixed sharply on Bet.
A second later, he saw Sam and his expression changed, melting into a wide smile. ‘Hey!’ he yelled.
But Sam couldn’t think about Norton now, he couldn’t think about anything except Bet’s words: Cloakroom tag, Continental.
Thanks to the case, he had written, truly written for the first time in months.
And now, here was something else, a clue to the mystery.
It might lead to a second chapter, and that chapter might lead to a third …
This could finally be what he had been searching for through the streets of London and Paris and Barcelona, across the beaches of Málaga and the Strait of Gibraltar: a story, one that would make him want to write and write and never stop.