Odditorium: A Novel (30 page)

Okay, okay. Just a little stage fright. Deal with it. He sat on the edge of a Naugahyde chair and lectured himself. Now was the time to flush out his system; there’d be no place for this kind of thing later on. Any sign of it and they’d shred him like a classified document. Keep moving, just keep moving. Let yourself go. Half the pressure, twice the quickness. And finally, because there was no other way out, he pulled himself as tight as the money belt and went on to his next appointment.

The purchase of the Land Rover had been prearranged with transatlantic phone calls and a money order. The salesman wanted very much to take him out for a test run, but Christo dissuaded him. He said he had to be immediately on his way to a meeting with government agronomists in Tetuán, and the lie had a tonic effect. Falling back into the old skills centered him. That’s it, just keep moving. He pulled out his Arno Bester driver’s license, signed half a dozen forms, and the salesman handed over the keys along with a complimentary map of the city.

The noon heat was insidious despite the ocean breeze, and Christo shrugged out of his jacket, removed the clip-on tie. Following the written instructions, he went down to the abrupt end of a palm-lined avenue and jogged right. Slow-moving chaos closed in, jumbled buildings and people layered like compost along the brown walls. He gripped the wheel hard. Nasty birdcage voices poured with sticky air through the Rover’s windows. The breeze was cut off here, the salt fragrance replaced by something heavy and unplaceable, though spoiled melon came close. Someone on a motorbike made a sudden U turn in front of him, and Christo trod on the brake, banged his knee on the edge of the metal dash. He considered the grisly upshot of a pedestrian under his wheels: pulled from the driver’s seat and devoured by a raging native mob.

The fright was on him again. He watched bunched faces passing, brown complexions like camouflage, eyes angling toward him. Enough turbulence out there beneath the steady, sullen surface to drown in. He’d been against a foreign venue all along, but Pierce had insisted. Fine for him, Pierce was the strategic whiz who never left headquarters. Christo was smack-dab and defenseless in this human overflow, his only weapon—language—useless here. Hold on and move through it. Keep moving.

Then in a blink, the way was empty, like an eerie curfew zone. These walls were whitewashed and topped with broken glass; doors were armored with black wrought iron. It seemed that the air had thinned, the heat lessened, but Christo did not know whether to trust even his own senses. He was so intent on monitoring himself that he nearly missed his turn.

The street had narrowed, gone rough under him, by the time he located the shop. Tomas stood in the doorway sucking on a pipe and looking like a retired fisherman surveying the sea.

Christo parked in the entryway and hopped down. “Hey, partner, J. D. Christo from the New York office.”

Teeth clenched around the pipestem in what might have been a smile, Tomas sidled over and patted Christo’s back, sides, hips—an overt frisk. “Just a reflex,” he said apologetically. His English was without accent. “New York is full of statues.”

“But there are never enough heroes to go around,” Christo replied, fulfilling the witless password requirement.

“Come on, then.” Tomas emptied his pipe on the street and, as Christo steered the Rover inside, pulled a corrugated steel door down behind them.

Not much action under the low concrete ceiling. Two wiry men in newspaper hats squatted on either side of an upended crate playing dominoes. A pie-faced boy in sandals and a canvas jumper drowsily taped over a car’s windows prior to spray painting. An equally drowsy blues sax came out of a stripped-down speaker cone balanced on the disfigured rear end of a Peugeot, accentuating the junk-sick bunker atmosphere.

Tomas bobbed his big blond head, shuffled to the beat. “Your only decent export, jazz. The mighty tree that grew from the death culture. You dig Horace Silver?”

“The most.”

Christo was thrown hopelessly off stride, having expected a razor-sharp pro, finding instead this solemn boho who poked him now, called his attention to the piano passage coming up.

“You hear the genius? It makes me think of a rain forest.”

Solid, Pops. Just as Christo focused his concentration on the skittering chords, Tomas broke away, all business.

“She is brand new, eh? With all the papers?” Without awaiting an answer, Tomas spoke to the pie-face in mongrel Berber French. Stroking the Rover’s flanks, rapping on it here and there, the boy grunted something back. “Abdel is my best man,” Tomas said paternally. “A born engineer.”

“That’s good to know.” Christo could feel himself twitching.

“You’re in some kind of hurry?” Tomas made a treadmill motion with his hands.

“Well, I didn’t come to see the sights.”

“All right. Commerce on an empty stomach, then.” Tomas pulled him around to the rear of the car.” We will cut down through here, you see? By my estimation we will need eight cubic feet of space. If necessary, we can squeeze more up here behind the firewall. Also, a few modifications so that the final weight will tally with what is on your manifest. Abdel will take care. And once the load is in, he will seal up, putty, sand, repaint and you will be ready to go.”

Christo looked suspiciously at the vapid pie face.

“Don’t worry,” Tomas said. “He is paid from my share.”

Feeling tentative, Christo examined oil stains on the floor, listened to the men slapping down their dominoes. “So when do we go to meet the man?”

Tomas had cupped one ear, absorbed in the sound track again. Christo repeated himself, an obstreperous buzz in his voice that hung in the dead air that followed.

Tomas winced. Then, shaking his head as the band picked up its chorus, he growled, “Right away then. But I suggest you calm down on the way. I don’t like strain.”

Calm down, quiet. It was good advice, except the speed had Christo ready to run through walls, his ganglia red-hot and smoking. Get any more alert and he’d crack like a candy egg. But still he needed the friction, knew he operated best that way.

By the time they reached the village, there were indentations in Christo’s thumb from the nails at the end of the rabbit’s foot he’d been squeezing reflexively. He was sweating under a heavy woolen djellabah. The long, tentlike garment made him claustrophobic, but Tomas had insisted.

“No use looking any more conspicuous than you have to. And keep the hood up, it will hide your face.”

Now, as they crossed the dirt road with sun angling over tile roofs and into their faces, he cautioned, “Keep watch on yourself and show respect for these people. Remember, we’re infidels.”

The Swede was calling all the shots; Christo accepted his own docility. He simply wasn’t prepared. It was like an inescapable dream where everything took him by surprise. He felt as helpless as a cork on rough water and more than willing to be led.

They passed under a stone arch furrowed by several hundred years of windblown sand and entered the souk. It was a scene in suspension and the only sound was the buzzing of flies. Goats nosed around in the dust, too listless to heed tethering. The more prosperous merchants had been able to put together stalls of lumber rescued from cooking fires and rubbish heaps, while the rest just sat on the ground with a few articles before them on a cloth—one woman with henna-stained palms offered a rusted flywheel, assorted nuts and bolts, a pile of tiny airline soap bars. Next to her, a crippled boy had loose cigarettes and a half-dead chicken that twitched feebly at the edge of his ragged blanket, its feet bound with reeds.

Christo felt a queer internal tremor as he realized there were no other customers.

“Don’t be fooled by what shows,” Tomas murmured as he stopped to purchase ten centimes’ worth of dried chick peas. “This one here, his real business is in virgin boys.”

Christo lurched as an olive vendor tugged his flapping sleeve. Tomas smiled thinly and said it might be wise for him to buy.

“Good will?”

“A gesture. Gestures and ceremony, these things are paramount here.”

“Back home we call it public relations.” Christo thought: A clever line, I must be doing better.

With olive juice dripping down his arm from the paper cone, Christo followed his guide into a hut that smelled like wet dog. The counter was a plank laid across two kegs, and the little girl behind it (she could not have been more than ten) had a whore’s tired, smirking face. She opened two warm Cokes without being asked, listened with meandering eyes as Tomas instructed her, then dropped the coins he gave her in a cloth sack that hung under her skirts.

Back outside, Christo tossed away his olives and collapsed against the wall, caught by the sensation of a mental fissure through which dizziness rushed in a torrent. He was marinated in sweat.

Tomas gulped Coke, wiped his mouth. “These Arabs love the sugar. That’s why most of them have brass teeth.”

Christo rocked on his heels, touched the crease in his trousers for reassurance. “What now?” he managed.

“Nothing now. We wait. The girl will take my message and after a while they will come for us. For now we just sit.”

“Sorry. I must have left my patience on the plane.”

Christo closed his eyes to the glare and tried to fold his arms and legs into a napping posture. But recent images whiplashed across his inner eye: Tomas’s dank garage, the threatening clutter of the city, aboriginal faces self-righteously blank.

“
Maktub
,” Tomas said.

“What?”

“Fate. What will be, will be.”

Yes, Christo silently commented, that’s just what I’m afraid of.

A noise like an electric shaver cut the air followed in a burst by music from the other side of the wall: dolorous yodeling embroidered by an epileptic clarinet. In the thin belt of shadow that intersected the square, boys had been playing a game with round stones; now they broke away and moved briskly in a pack.

“
Hashish
?
Monsieur pour hashish
?”

“English?
Deutsch
? Good dope for you.
Ich haben
.”

Christo rose to his feet as they pressed in, but Tomas pulled him back down. “Don’t encourage them.”

More and more came, as if a chemical signal had been released drawing them like insects to a food source, Christo felt waves of sour boy-breath on his face as they shoved and clamored, cried their incantation: “Hashish! Hashish!”

Slapping heads, an older boy thrust his way to the front. “You waste your time with these filthy childs. I take you somewhere no big noise. You sit, have tea, smoke best hashish all you want, no problem. Listen all new tapes just flown in. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones.”

“
Cessez donc
!” Tomas cocked his fist “
Cessez
.”

They recoiled momentarily, then surged forward, giggling and aping Tomas—“
Cessez
!”—in shrill, taunting voices. The first brave hands shot out to poke and tug; the first rumble of animal menace rose like heat from the ground.

Tomas stood quickly. “Let’s walk.” They drove through wild puppy furor, but were clear for only a few seconds before it reformed around them in a circular dance that combined entreaty and defiance.

It was eerie, the way they froze all at once, went mute. Christo tensed, expecting the worst, but the pack began to dismantle, boys drifting away in bashful groups of three and four. From the direction in which they carefully did not look, it was possible to detect the cause of their submission.

He was tall and elegantly slim in his Western clothes, his dark face dominated by eyes like a pair of ray-gun apertures, one sweep of them more than enough; a terrible power quickly flashed. Just from the way he set himself, it was clear he had the juice, that he would be a chieftain of the streets anywhere—Bedji or Lima or Chicago.

“Ibrahim.” Tomas approached him. “
Salaam aleikum
.”

“
Aleikum salaam
.”

They grasped wrists in a kind of Indian-wrestle greeting. Christo was introduced as an “American businessman.” Ibrahim bowed deeply, emitting a powerful fume of bay rum.

“You come yourself to meet us,” Tomas intoned. “We are most honored.”

“We in turn are honored by your visit.” Ibrahim had a rolling, staff-announcer’s baritone. “This way please, and we shall ride.”

The car was long and black, and pitted by rust and by the sharp stones that were everywhere. It had to be the only Oldsmobile in town. Ibrahim drove at cortege speed through several miles of dismal countryside, gray-green succulents and disintegrating rock. Tomas whispered urgent cultural lore.

“From now on, we are in the care of the family. They will dictate the atmosphere. They will decide how and when to complete the transaction. In Islam, the most important thing is how one provides or accepts hospitality.”

“Okay, okay,” Christo said irritably. And to himself: Good manners? Something else I don’t have.

Turning off the main road and passing through a chicken-wire gate, they pulled up at a low, oblong warehouse with a shining tin roof. Ibrahim’s curt horn beeps fetched out a fervently obsequious little man who opened doors and ushered them inside; where his nose should have been, there was a tan hole.

Everyone wore sunglasses except Ali Mustafa, the patriarch, a generous dumpling of a man in a crisp linen tunic, who soaked up deference with the careless inveteracy of a mullah. Clearly, he was running the show. Welcoming his guests to a fragrant sanctum where carpets had been laid over the floor, he bade them recline among the cushions that encircled a brass table. He snapped his fingers and a tray of sweet mint tea in glasses was brought. Christo took his cues from Tomas during the long Arabic toast. The tea was like syrup and made him sweat even more profusely inside the djellabah. The glasses were replenished and a young relative played a halting version of “My Blue Heaven” on the flageolet. Ali Mustafa beamed.

“We thank you for your long trip,” he said.

“Yeah, great to be here,” Christo said, like someone on a talk show.