Crossed Bones (40 page)

He showed me the colourful pottery made at Safi, further down the coast, and exchanged greetings with the ancient, toothless merchant. As we walked away, he told me, ‘Every Saturday I came here first thing in the morning before he set up his stall and he let me unwrap the plates.’

‘You loved the pottery so much?’

He grinned. ‘No: some of them came wrapped in sheets torn out of old comic books –
bandes dessinées
– which my father wouldn’t let me have at home. He was a very strict man, my father: only the Qur’an was considered suitable reading material for a boy of six. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of the decadent adventures of Rodeo Rick or Pif or Asterix and Obelix. I used to sit at the back of the stall, lost in all these marvellous fragments of story, while my brothers chanted out their verses at home.’

On the Rue des Consuls we found the ubiquitous carpet-sellers, their Aladdin’s caves hung with fabulous lanterns and gorgeous colour. I watched one of the merchants flourishing rugs at a pair of tourists who had foolishly stopped to admire the display and were now helplessly trapped. No one had tried to sell me anything. At first I had thought this was because of the forbidding presence of Idriss, though I soon realized it had more to do with the robe and hijab I wore, enabling me to move camouflaged and untargeted through the bazaar. Feeling smug, I watched the two Europeans – she in her expensively cut dress and Prada sandals, he, slightly paunchy in chinos and blue seersucker shirt – wriggle like hooked fish under the carpet-seller’s assiduous attentions. Now another man had joined in, flinging carpets dramatically to the floor in front of them. At least a dozen carpets had thus been unfurled: how could they possibly refuse to buy after such a display? One of the carpets came down on top of the woman’s foot, and I saw her jump back and steady herself on her husband’s arm, her face turned up to him in an expression of dismay.

It was Anna.

Or rather it wasn’t. It was Anna
and
Michael, joined together like some symbiotic, two-headed creature, rearing away from attack. Michael had his arm around her, possessive and protective, although he looked just as powerless as she did to ward off the relentless sales pitch.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Then, instinctively, I caught Idriss’s arm, my fingers closing on his hard biceps. ‘Quickly, we have to go quickly!’

I turned and dragged him away, past the wrought-iron-sellers and the goatskin lamp stalls, until we were out of the medina and by the side of the ring road with traffic roaring past.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

I must have looked as if I was about to faint, for he took me by the elbow and ushered me along the road and into an open doorway, which seemed to lead to an unattended reception area for a tiny hotel. Idriss marched to a door at the back, opened it and shouted a name. Seconds later a young man in jeans and a Manchester United shirt appeared, and the pair embraced.

‘This is one of my other brothers, Sadiq,’ Idriss said, grinning. ‘And this is Julia Lovat. She needs tea, plenty of sugar: see what you can do.’

Sadiq gazed at me, awestruck, said something unintelligible to Idriss and promptly disappeared.

‘He says you have eyes like Lady Diana,’ Idriss told me, steering me around the corner to a dimly lit area of sofas and low tables.

I snorted. ‘How ridiculous. He just means they’re blue.’

He regarded me solemnly for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s your Englishness. It is very… exotic.’

Exotic: that was how I thought of him. It was disorientating to realize that the converse might be true. ‘Such shameless flattery.’ I wagged a finger at him. ‘You should be selling snake oil and whale shit alongside that old charlatan in the bazaar.’

His eyes gleamed. ‘Another string to my bow.’

Sadiq came with a tray of tea things. I watched Idriss pour out the golden liquid from a deliberately showy height, so that it crashed into the little glass like a miniature waterfall, and then drank it down without complaining about the diabetes-inducing quantity of sugar it contained.

‘Now tell me why you ran away.’ I must have looked as uncomfortable as I felt, for he paused. ‘Oh, I am an idiot. Of course – you saw Michael.’

I bent my head. ‘Yes.’

He frowned. ‘But I was keeping watch for him – I cannot believe I missed him.’

‘He was in one of the carpet-sellers’ booths.’

‘There was someone, a couple… the woman was small, dark, very chic.’

‘That was Anna. His wife.’ I watched my hands, held loosely in my lap, begin to tremble and told myself the sugar must be having its effect.

Idriss reached across the table and tilted my chin up. ‘Julia, I think you had better tell me your story – all of it. It strikes me that there is a lot more to it than the possession of an antique book.’

And so, staring fixedly at the table top, I let it all spill out. My friendship with Anna, my furtive relationship with her husband, my terrors of being discovered, my fear that he would leave me, the way it had shaped the last seven years of my life – a long catalogue of betrayal and moral cowardice. Not once did I raise my head to look him in the eye; I could not. For, suddenly, I realized that it mattered desperately what Idriss thought of me. How and when had that happened? And this first realization was immediately followed by the sickening certainty that by telling him I would ensure that henceforth he would regard me with disgust.

When at last I had finished spewing out my confession, silence fell between us like a thick glass screen. When an eternity of several seconds had elapsed, I risked a glance upwards, but he was not looking at me. His gaze, cool and distant, was fixed on the coloured glass of the window behind me, as if he wished himself out in the hot, clean sea air beyond, rather than here in the stifling gloom with a woman who had betrayed everyone of importance in her life, and in the process had lost everything, including her self-respect. What must he think of me, this man whose life was so simple and straightforward? He had so little, by the standards of the culture that had raised me; but in all the ways that mattered, he had so much.

‘I am horribly ashamed of myself,’ I said quietly into the stiff silence.

His gaze came back to me slowly. Was I imagining it, or was there cold disdain in those dark eyes now?

‘We must go,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Khaled will be waiting for us.’

He said nothing else to me for the rest of the afternoon.

The café was on the Rue de Baghdad, just behind the central railway station. Khaled turned out to be a rotund little man in his middle fifties with a smooth, unlined face and twinkling, curious eyes. He wore a white gandoura and, incongruously, a green baseball cap bearing the letters ASS across its crown. He caught my hands and shook them warmly. As my eyes strayed back to the cap he laughed delightedly.

‘You like my hat? It is my favourite,’ he said in excellent, barely accented English. ‘I wear it particularly for surprising my American students, who find it hilarious. Stands for
Association Sportive de Salé
.
C’est rigolant
,
non
?’

Idriss managed a thin smile, while I nodded, grateful for this break in the tension.

‘As I said on the telephone, Julia has a book she wants to show you for your opinion,’ Idriss started, as if wishing to complete the task as quickly as possible. He switched to Arabic, talking fast, and Khaled’s expression changed to one of shock. A paranoid part of me imagined Idriss telling him that the woman opposite him, looking so innocent in her hijab, was in fact an adulterous infidel, a creature of no morals who had by dubious means come by a treasure she did not merit; that they should relieve her of the book and send her back to the world she came from, where such behaviour was commonplace. I felt my cheeks flushing anew.

‘May I see it?’ the professor asked at last.

Idriss sat back, his expression closed and remote, and lit up a cigarette.

I reached into my handbag, extricated
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
and passed it to him. At the sight of it, Khaled’s eyes grew round and intent. He spread a paper napkin across the melamine table, as if decades of spilled coffee, sugar and ash could by osmosis insinuate their way into its covers to desecrate its contents, and laid Catherine’s book down with the reverence of a man handling a religious relic. His fingers brushed the calfskin, caressed the blind bands on the spine. Then, with infinite care, he opened it and began to read.

‘
Incroyable
.’ The four syllables came separately, the
r
rolled dramatically.

‘Is it real?’ I asked.

I had sat like a mouse for the best part of two and a half hours, avoiding Idriss’s gaze, instead drinking an unpalatably strong coffee and focusing on the professor turning the pages and tilting the book this way and that. At one point he had produced a magnifying glass, at another a small dictionary. He had tutted and hummed and taken his baseball cap off and scratched his head, revealing an unfortunate comb-over, muttered to himself in Arabic, and then in French, and said something to Idriss that he did not translate for my benefit. He had laughed and flicked back a few pages, as if searching for a reference, before reading on. Now he met my concerned look with a vast grin.

‘Real?’

‘Or is it a clever forgery, a fake?’

‘
Ma chère
Julia, it’s as real as you or I.’

By this stage, light-headed with hunger and dread, I was feeling so insubstantial as to not be very real at all. ‘Sorry, can you explain?’

‘There is, as far as I am aware, no other account in any language by a female captive from the early days of the Salé corsairs, even before their independent divan was established; and the fact that it appears to be in her own hand makes it a unique artefact. The Sidi Mohammed al-Ayyachi is a well-documented character, and in the course of my own research I have come across references to a lieutenant of his called Qasem bin Hamed bin Moussa Dib, so to see him featured here is quite fascinating.’

‘Who?’ I frowned.

‘Qasem bin Hamed bin Moussa Dib, known variously in the legends as the Djinn or the Jackal –
dib
means fox or jackal in Arabic – or the man of Andalusia. He appears to have been one of the Hornacheros, Andalusian Moors expelled from Spain by Philip III. According to the stories his family was butchered by the Inquisition, and he returned to Rabat. He supposedly learned his corsair skills under the tutelage of the infamous Dutchman Jan Jansz, otherwise known as Murad Raïs. Qasem was Admiral of the Salé Fleet, after which he was elected a raïs – a captain of the fleet – and fought as an
al-ghuzat
: a holy warrior in the war against the enemies of the Prophet. This tells us things about Qasem no one ever knew: that he was more closely allied to the notorious English pirate John Ward than to Jan Jansz, that he led the fleet to the English coast in 1625, that he was more cultured and more complex than any of the legends infer.’

‘You speak about him with far more respect than I’d have thought due to a pirate chief.’

Khaled smiled. ‘I might say the same of your Robin Hood or your Francis Drake; and certainly of your Richard the Lionheart. One culture’s hero is another culture’s villain: it all depends whose side you’re on. History is a very malleable thing, usually written by the victors.’

‘I always preferred Saladin,’ I said softly.

‘Another great
al-ghuzat
: and, unlike your Richard, merciful in victory.’

‘And all this about the embroidery: can it be true that Catherine taught the local women her skills?’

Khaled spread his hands. ‘About that I fear I am no expert.’ He leaned forward. ‘But it ends very suddenly, this journal. Do you know what happened to her, to this Catherine Tregenna?’

‘There is more to her tale.’ I showed him the photocopies Michael had left at the riad for me.

He read the sheets, then turned them over, searching for more. ‘But where is the rest? You cannot leave me in such suspense. The young man followed her here: was he successful in his ransom bid, did she return to your country with him?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

‘But we must find out! I very much want to read the account of this’ – he scanned the first page again – ‘this Robert Bolitho.’

‘A friend has the letters,’ I said uncomfortably.

‘Well, then, that’s simple enough. Excellent. I shall very much look forward to reading them. Now, in the meantime, Julia, tell me: what are you going to do with your book?’

I hesitated. ‘I’m not sure. What do you think I should do with it?’

The professor’s eyes gleamed. ‘It is a magnificent treasure containing unique insights into the history of my country. It would be a tragedy for it to disappear. I would truly love to do some further research on it, to produce a paper… maybe even a book of my own.’

He was candid at least. ‘For now,’ I said carefully, ‘you could have a photocopy. While I decide what I am going to do with it.’

He beamed at me. ‘That would be wonderful.’

We found a copy shop around the corner from the Ministry of Justice, and I went outside and sat on the pavement in the late-afternoon sun while Khaled, with the infinite care of a man used to handling old books, made a copy. Idriss came out and leaned up against the door, smoked another cigarette in an agitated fashion, glanced at me once and looked as if he were about to say something, then went back inside without a word.

At last Khaled gave me back Catherine’s book, and we shook hands. ‘Let me give you my telephone number,’ he said. ‘So that you can call me when you make your decision, yes?’

I smiled. ‘OK.’ We both took out our mobiles, and I gave Khaled my number while I turned mine on. Méditel came up on the screen after a few seconds, followed by a powerful beep.

You have seven missed calls

Oh, hell. There were also three messages: two from Michael and one – my heart thudded – from Anna. Avoiding the messages, I keyed Khaled’s number into the phone, locked the keypad and stowed it in my bag. ‘I will phone you,’ I promised the professor, and stood back as he and Idriss embraced and bade each other farewell.