The Blue Hour (25 page)

Another search engine led to me a hotel—The Select—located just three streets away from here. One star, very basic, but the photos of the spartan rooms indicated a degree of cleanliness, and it was cheap. They didn't have an online booking service, but I asked the waiter if I could borrow a phone. He offered his own, and turned down my offer of ten dirhams for its use, “As long as you are calling locally.” I assured him that I was just phoning down the street, and quickly punched in the hotel's number, which connected immediately. I explained I needed a room until four this morning.

“No problem,” the man at the front desk told me.

Five minutes later I was at the reception desk of the hotel. There was an elderly man in a shiny suit behind the counter. I paid cash and told him I needed a wake-up call at 4:00 a.m. and a taxi here promptly at 4:30.

“I'll handle it,” he said.

“And please, I am counting on you to bang on my door loudly at four.”

The room was Early Nothing. Basic drab furniture. A hard double bed with much-laundered, stiff sheets and a floral bedspread. A sink, a toilet, a tiny shower stall with a meager hose. I undressed and brushed my teeth. I rubbed some of the miracle face cream into my face. I noted that I would be having to get up again in five hours and cursed myself for not having found a bookshop in the shopping center late this afternoon and choosing something there in the English-language section.

Then my mind began to race. How would Paul react to my arrival in Ouarzazate, how would he deal with the realization that I knew all about Ben Hassan, and that we were going to have to figure out some way of getting out of Morocco undetected? Didn't I read somewhere that the border with Algeria had been closed by the Moroccan authorities since that very bloody and frightening civil war in the 1990s? Could we get into Mauritania on US passports without a visa? Would Ben Hassan have people watching for us at the port at Tangier?

But these logistical questions were overshadowed by a flashback I had of my father. I was eighteen and had just arrived at the University of Minnesota. My second day there, Dad called me from Las Vegas (of course) to tell me that the professional windfall he'd been waiting for had finally come his way.

“Here's the thing, kiddo,” he said. “Just had this big interview for a senior job in casino management out here. A VP for Human Resources at Caesar's Palace. The guy who interviewed me today told me I was head and shoulders above all candidates. So looks like me and your Mom will be singing ‘Viva Las Vegas' before too long. And as soon as my John Hancock is on that employment contract, I am organizing that big Christmas trip I've been promising you and your mom for years to Hawaii.”

“No rush, Dad. I mean, Hawaii has never been on my list of priorities.”

“Well, if you want to transfer next semester to Columbia . . .”

“Minnesota offered me the full scholarship, Dad.”

“You're being too nice here, Robin. My little girl gets admitted to an Ivy League university and has to go to State U because her deadbeat father can't afford to pay the tuition.”

“Don't think that. You're a wonderful dad.”

“I don't deserve such kindness.”

Then the line went dead. As this conversation took place in 1993, well before everyone had cell phones, I had no way of knowing the number from which he had been calling me. Nor did he call me back—though I waited by the phone in my dorm for an hour, hoping he and I might finish the conversation.

But no call ever came.

Until six the next morning. Only the person on the phone was my mother. And her voice was so hushed that she could hardly get out the words.

“Your father died last night.”

I remember the world going so quiet that all peripheral noise seemed to have been smothered.

“He had a heart attack after losing five thousand at the craps table.”

She'd heard this from the cops in Vegas. He'd been winning all night, then put all his chips on one throw of the dice. Which didn't go his way. This time he didn't weather the impact of another act of self-sabotage. This time it proved overwhelming to his psyche . . . and the cardiac incident that followed killed him. How I've assembled and reassembled this scene in my mind since then—and all based on those few tough, terse details that my angry mother supplied. How part of the overwhelming grief that followed—the sense that I was now very much alone in a difficult world—was also wracked with the incessant reproach that kept ringing in my ears for months, years afterward, a lament that, truth be told, has never faded away:
you should have been able to save him
.

Was that what was at work now? Was that what I was chasing here: a chance at redemption? Was I somehow convincing myself that—despite the desperate betrayal, despite the realization that I had been truly shammed—I still needed to rescue my husband from harm as a way of appeasing the guilt about my tragically affectionate wreck of a father, the man who gave me the only actual love I'd ever encountered until Paul Leuen walked into my life? Might I claw back a little final peace if I could do what I was too young and too unschooled in life's harsh contours to do at the time? Was that why I was sitting alone in this sad cheap hotel room, my brain on overdrive, so desperate to find Paul and bring some resolution to all this?

I can fix this. I must fix this. I will fix this.

Heaviness clouded my eyes. Then came darkness. And several hours of mental void before the loud knock on the door. I had a fast shower and was in the taxi to the airport at the agreed time of 4:30. Casablanca in the middle of the night was still the strange faceless metropolis I'd briefly passed through, in which the sense of ugly modern sprawl was omnipresent.

At the airport I picked up my boarding pass and then proceeded on to the Royal Air Maroc ticket counter, where I was told that, if I didn't fly to New York today on the scheduled flight onto which I had been rebooked, I would lose the ticket.

“But I changed it once already,” I said. “Can't I please change it again?”

“That was an exceptional change, clearly made by someone in authority,” the clerk told me. “If you can get back in touch with him before your flight departs at midday, then perhaps he can make a second exceptional change. But I cannot do anything,
madame
. My apologies.”

The flight south was on a small turboprop with just thirty seats. The sun was ascending as we took off. After twenty minutes, we passed over Marrakesh and the Atlas Mountains came into crisp silhouette. These were no mere hills but proper stern alpine peaks: craggy, with switchback roads frequently defining their vertical terrain. There were dazzling valleys. There were impossibly positioned villages clinging to mountainsides. There was even a hint of snow atop one summit.

Then, out of nowhere, the sand began. It was as if someone had flipped a topological switch, transporting us out of high rugged terrain and into a world of endless aridity. Sand that was not white, but actually bathed in a bleached red ocher. Sand that was full of strange undulations and irregularities. Sand that was duned and, in the emerging sunlight, crimson. Sand that stretched into an absolute infinity. Sand that could bury you with ruthless disinterest. Sand on a scale and a dimension that I had never glimpsed before; a realm so well known by mythic repute, yet so unseen by most of the planet's habitants. That ultimate empty quarter. The Sahara.

We were coming into land, passing buildings that had a 1930s French Foreign Legion look about them. The sand was just beyond; the encroaching reality abutting the city's frontiers. As apprehensive and tense as I was—as much as I dreaded the confrontation that was ahead of me—there was still something extraordinary about my first sighting of the Sahara. The airport also seemed 1940s desert military—hot and fly-blown. Inside the arrivals hall was an information desk, manned by a young woman in a hajib. I told her the name of the hotel I was seeking. She knew it immediately and said it was a short taxi ride from here. I also showed her the scrap of paper on which Ben Hassan had scribbled Faiza's address. She got out a map of Ouarzazate and marked the location of the hotel, then used a yellow highlighter to trace a route to Faiza's front door. It was, she said, about five minutes by foot.

“Don't pay the taxi driver more than thirty dirhams,” she said. “If he says no, tell him that you are going to report him to me—Fatima. He'll know who I am. They all do.”

Actually the cabbie accepted the offer of thirty dirhams without the usual bartering. The Oasis Hotel was just off the very wide main drag that, at eight in the morning, still seemed half awake. I took in the desert deco architecture, the languid men loitering in cafés, the blast-furnace heat. The cab had no air-conditioning. According to the gauge on the dashboard the temperature was 43 degrees Celsius—an astonishing 109 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time we reached the hotel—all of two minutes later—my lightweight clothes were sodden.

The Oasis was, at first glance, a slightly shabbier version of our hotel in Essaouira. At least the lobby was air-conditioned—and the heavyset woman behind the desk was welcoming. When I explained that I was Paul Leuen's wife, I could see her lips tighten.

“Monsieur Leuen just went out for a walk,” she said.

“Really?”

“You seem surprised.”

“It's a bit early for a walk, that's all.”

“Monsieur Leuen . . . he was out walking until three a.m., so my night man told me. And he came in very intoxicated. I am sorry to report this,
madame
.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“He was also shouting in his room late last night. The night man had to go up and tell him to be quiet. He found Monsieur Leuen in a very bad place. Drinking wine and crying. He was very apologetic when he was told he was waking the other guests.”

I shut my eyes, trying to keep my emotions in check. I was furious at Paul. I was terrified for Paul—and the crazed trajectory down which he was traveling.

“Do you have any idea where he headed to just now?” I asked.

“None at all. But Ouarzazate is not a big place. And he just left five minutes ago. Try the cafés on the avenue Muhammed V.”

“I apologize for all the trouble he's caused you.”

“I am simply happy to see you here,
madame
. If you can assure me that he will be quiet tonight, I will let you both stay here. Had you not arrived I would have shown him the door.”

I wanted to go upstairs and drop my bag and have a shower before facing the heat again. But part of me also knew that time was of the essence, that I needed to find Paul now.

“A question,
madame
,” I said. “Besides the flights to Casablanca, isn't there a direct service from Ouarzazate to Paris?”

“Every Tuesday and Thursday at five o'clock. So yes, as it is Thursday today . . .”

“Could you please find out if there are any seats on this afternoon's flight while I go look for my husband?”

“With pleasure,
madame
. If you would like to leave your bag here, I will make certain it is kept safe for you.”

“Thank you for your kindness and decency.”

“I wish you luck,
madame
.”

I wished myself that too.

Before I left I dug out Paul's passport from my bag, and slipped it into the button-down pocket on my pants.

I headed out into the back street, turning up a dusty alleyway in which a young boy—he couldn't have been more than seven—was milking a goat, the white liquid being sprayed into an empty tin can. He looked up and smiled at me, saying, “Fresh milk—just ten dirhams.”

I smiled back and moved on, dodging two elderly women on canes, their faces hidden by black niqabs. They moved slowly in the maniacal sun. How in the world were they able to cope with the hefty black Islamic garb in this inferno? One of the women held out a hand. I stopped, reached into my pocket, found a five-dirham coin, and placed it in her palm. Out of nowhere her fingers closed against mine. In a croaky whisper she uttered, “
Faites attention, madame
.”

Be careful.

What did she know that I didn't?

I turned down another spindly street before reaching the city's main drag, avenue Muhammed V. Adobe-shaded sandstone in a colonial fortress style defined the architecture. The sun was, after just two minutes outside, beginning to play games with my equilibrium. So I stopped at a small stall and bought a replacement green khaki field hat and a liter of bottled water, drinking almost half of it in one go. Then, over the next twenty minutes, I went from café to café, scanning all terraces and interiors for any sign of my husband. I approached every waiter I saw, Paul's passport in hand, showing them his photograph, asking them if they'd perhaps seen this man in the past few minutes, indicating that finding him was an urgent matter. All the waiters were polite. All said that, alas, they hadn't seen him.

One man at a café—midfifties, a little portly, but still relatively well preserved and dressed in Moroccan merchant casual (cream slacks, a gray polo shirt, Italianate loafers)—overheard me inquiring about Paul and stood up.

“Perhaps I can help you,” he said in excellent English, motioning me over to his table. He introduced himself as Mr. Rashid and offered me a coffee.

“You think you've seen this man?” I asked, holding up the passport photo.

“Indeed I have. But you first need something to drink, I think.”

“Where did you see him exactly?”

“On this street a few minutes ago.”

“Can you tell me exactly where?”

“I'd love to know your name first.”

I told him.

“Well, Robin, let me offer you a
citron pressé
and then we can get into my car—I have a very large and comfortable Mercedes—and we can start looking for him. And if we don't find him, maybe you can have lunch with me.”