The Blue Hour (35 page)

Another possibility: the goon got back to Tata, tried to work all day, was in a state of escalating panic, as he had my backpack hidden away somewhere, and then suddenly came up with an ingenious solution to his problem. He drove back out to the desert, tossed my backpack out near the corpse, returned to Tata, reported his friend missing, said he had met an American woman . . . and didn't fill in any further details. How we ended up in that spot in the Sahara . . . would that matter when compared to the smoking-gun evidence of my backpack near the corpse? It would directly link me to the events that culminated with a young man being torched alive.

“What are they saying?” I asked Jabalah. He waved away my question, keeping his attention riveted on the screen. This was worrying. So were the even more hardened looks of Maika and her husband. Aicha, meanwhile, was betraying all emotions, appearing both shocked and distressed. When she actually put her hands over Naima's ears, so she could hear nothing more of the broadcast, I sensed trouble.

The news item ended. There was an immediate heated exchange between Immeldine and Jabalah. When Aicha tried to interject something, she was shouted down both by her husband and her mother. Naima began to cry.

“Please tell me what they said,” I asked Jabalah.

Out of nowhere Immeldine barked something at me so fierce that Naima hid herself behind her mother.

Then Jabalah said to me, “You go. We bring the food to you.”

“If I could just explain . . .”

“Go!”

I wrapped my face in the niqab and crossed the few steps back into my tent. Once inside the fear turned into a crazed panic attack. I found myself pacing manically around the tiny space, all sorts of extreme scenarios playing out, including Jabalah and Immeldine deciding that they had to turn me over to the police, and the cops picking me up, and my being thrown into a squalid cell in which I would be repeatedly abused by the guards. And Inspector Moufad from Essaouira conducting an all-night interrogation designed to break me, and my signing a confession that, yes, I had killed Paul in a fit of rage on the beach and dumped his body in the Atlantic. And yes, I had agreed to go on an all-night joyride with those two monsters, and when the little shit got a bit fresh with me I lashed out and . . .

Stop this insanity, I hissed at myself. But my brain was on overload. In moments of lucidity I told myself that all the repressed mental trauma of the rape was now finally coming to the surface. But those nanoseconds of clarity were soon subsumed by full-scale sobbing. All those terrible childhood moments of our family being evicted from a series of houses and apartments came flooding back. With it the realization:
It's happening again. I am being forced out from a place of safety, a family who had given me more love and acceptanc
e and a sense of shelter than I'd ever had. Now this new family is about to reject me, turning me out into a malevolent world that will engulf me as soon as I am beyond this little oasis
.

My sobs became convulsive, so out of control that I felt as if I was about to become unhinged. I was literally crashing into corners of the tent, endangering its stability. Suddenly Maika and Aicha rushed in. Aicha had me in her arms in a moment, firmly settling me down on the cot, cradling me, whispering consoling words that had no meaning for me except that they were soothing. She held me as I buried my head in her shoulder and fell apart. Maika kept her distance as the grief came cascading forth. Perhaps she knew—given what I had been put through—that this was long overdue. Perhaps she also understood my fear of the world beyond. Whatever the reason, she let me cry myself into exhaustion. When I briefly subsided she stepped in, helped Aicha to undress me and get me into the white nightshirt I'd been sleeping in. Laying me down on the cot, she rubbed a different kind of balm (it smelled of patchouli and chamomile) across my forehead and into my temples, then massaged the same substance deep into my feet before sitting me up and making me drink an extralarge dosage of the nightly tisane.

Just before I surrendered to the night I grasped Maika and Aicha's hands and said,
“Shokran.”

I came to and was shocked to discover it was almost 11:00 a.m. When I got off the cot and changed out of the nightshirt and back into the djellaba and niqab, I noticed a certain physical stability that had been absent for so long. Then I started considering again what might happen if Jabalah turned me over to the cops and the shakiness began to reassert itself. But I managed to get dressed, wrap the niqab around my face, and make it to the toilet without succumbing to another panic attack.

When I returned I found Jabalah standing outside. “I would like to speak to you,” he said.

“Of course.” I motioned that we should go inside. He shook his head. I instantly regretted my faux pas, as there was absolutely no way he would enter a tent alone with a woman who wasn't his wife, mother, or daughter. He pointed to the tent where we ate dinner. I followed him over, removing my niqab once inside. He bent down in front of a little gas stove and illuminated it, boiling a small kettle of water, then opening a tin and throwing a large handful of mint into a pot, filling it with hot water, and waiting several minutes for it to steep. Nothing was said during the tea making. After pouring us out two glasses, he handed me one and nodded gravely as I thanked him. He motioned for me to sit down on one of the two stools. Then, in his hesitant French, he said, “I know what happened to you. I am very sorry for what happened to you. I do not want to judge you. But . . . the police are looking for you. If they find you here, they will accuse us of hiding you. This will be bad for us. So you have to leave.”

I acknowledged his decision with a nod of my head.

“I know all your money and papers were stolen.”

“I don't know what I should do next,” I told him. “I was so unwell after the attack that I hadn't really thought about how I would proceed once I left here. All I know is that I will never forget for the rest of my life what you and your family have shown me.”

He scrunched up his lips.

“The man who drives the rugs and things that the women make . . . he will be here late this afternoon. I will ask him to take him with you. He will be going to Marrakesh, but usually makes many stops along the way.”

“You have to tell him I am wanted by the police.”

“Of course I will tell him that. He is my friend. Go back to your tent now. Think how you will get money and papers—because you will need both. I will have my wife fetch you when the driver arrives. His name is Aatif.”

With a final nod he left the tent.

A few minutes later, back in the tiny space I was going to be vacating in just a few hours, I tried thinking through a solution to my rather large problem. I had no easy answers. The accountant in me reasserted herself for an hour or so, weighing up all the checks and balances available to me. They were virtually nonexistent. Say I found a phone and called Morton in the US, and told him he needed to wire money to me. Say that my disappearance had been picked up by international news services, and was also being monitored on the internet (no doubt, a small item—but a husband and a wife separately missing in a North African country, with overtones of foul play, would cause interest). Even if Morton wired the funds there I would have to show ID to collect them at a bank or some outpost of Thomas Cook, and I had no ID. Then there was the little problem of the previous night's television news bulletin. It is a strange experience, watching a missing persons report in which you are not only the individual the police are trying to track down, but also the chief suspect as well. Remembering Inspector Moufad stabbing that photograph of me, I was in no doubt that if I simply went and turned myself in I would be burying myself alive.

So wiring money from overseas was out of the question, especially as the Moroccan version of the FBI and Interpol were probably now monitoring any potential emails or wire transfers in the name of Robin Danvers. As they had broadcast my mug shot last night on Moroccan television, there was a good chance that it was going to be a regular feature on future news broadcasts until I was apprehended. Would the Moroccan police also put a Wanted poster up in post offices and banks and, indeed, places where foreigners would collect money? Were they sophisticated enough in their surveillance techniques to have flagged any emails sent or received from [email protected]? When Paul had first proposed this trip I quietly googled “Moroccan terrorism” just to reassure myself that the security situation was as good as Paul had said. Bar a terrible bombing of a Marrakesh tourist café in 2005, and certain warnings about travel in the extreme south, all the reports I read noted that the country was a highly stable one. But like every other place on which the specter of terrorism had fallen, Morocco had a very sophisticated intelligence and antiterrorism apparatus at work—which surely meant the monitoring of telecommunications and the internet. The fact that a national manhunt was under way for me . . . I was absolutely convinced that the moment I sent or received an email, the alarm bells would go off, and the geographic location from which it was read or dispatched would be flagged. Yes, I could borrow somebody's cell phone to call the States, but if I couldn't physically collect the money without photo ID, why would I risk a call? Especially if the Moroccan Sûreté and the US Embassy here had alerted the NSA and the feds to my disappearance, and they too were monitoring calls to my office, my home, my professional colleagues.

As I kept pondering the lack of options open to me, I kept twisting the two rings on my left index finger. Which is when the penny dropped. When Paul proposed to me three years ago—it was during a romantic weekend in Manhattan—he brought me to Tiffany's to choose an engagement ring and wedding band. He'd just sold a few lithographs and insisted that I choose a very beautiful single diamond ring and white gold wedding band, which cost together thirteen thousand dollars. When I worried out loud that this was far too much money to be spending on rings he made an amused comment to the very gracious, very formal saleswoman about “my wife-to-be understanding the bottom line far more than I do.” I could see the saleswoman smiling politely and taking in Paul's long gray hair and his leather jacket and black jeans, and telling him the two rings were an elegant choice, and him slapping down his credit card, and me thinking how wonderfully romantic and impetuous my man was, and how I hoped he'd have the funds to clear the credit card debt the following month.

But now . . . now I had on my left index finger the one negotiable piece of currency on me. Surely, if this driver was heading to Marrakesh, there were several serious jewelers there who would be willing to buy my rings. I wouldn't raise anything close to their original value, but I would, at the very least, come out with around thirty, forty thousand dirhams. Maybe I could then find another driver to get me up to Casablanca. I would barge in on Ben Hassan. I would wave the money in his corrupt face and get him to issue me one of his false passports. I would then find another driver to get me to Tangier and the boat to Spain. Once I was on the other side of the Mediterranean—and out of the shadow of the Moroccan Sûreté—then I could call Morton and a lawyer and see about getting the US Embassy in Madrid to issue me a new passport to get me home.

So there it was. A plan, of sorts. Getting from here to Marrakesh might not be the simplest of journeys, but I didn't want to consider any of that until I met the driver and sized him up, and found out his price. But first . . .

There was a terrible moment when Aicha and Naima paid me a midmorning visit, bringing me an early lunch of pita and couscous. Naima ran to me and threw her arms around my legs and started to sob, putting together three of the English words I'd taught her: “You no go.”

When I crouched down beside her she buried her head in my shoulder. I looked up and saw Aicha also in tears. I held Naima for several moments before loosening myself from her embrace. Keeping my arms around her, I said, “I don't want to go. I don't want to leave you. But I must go home.”

I touched my head and my heart. “You will always be here and here.”

Naima smiled sadly as she too touched her head and heart. “Here and here,” she repeated, pronouncing each word beautifully. Now I felt tears. Aicha also choked back a sob. I reached beneath my djellaba and unfastened the silver chain around my neck. Bringing it out, I showed Naima the sterling silver horseshoe that had been a gift to me from my great friend Ruth only nine months ago on a weekend visit to Brooklyn, just after Paul and I decided to try to have a child. When I announced this to Ruth, she couldn't have been more thrilled for me. She returned that evening with this gift—a small, elegant luck charm. No charm has much luck against an operation guaranteed to render pregnancy impossible. But maybe, just maybe, it brought me the good fortune to survive the ordeal in the desert and land me here.

I put the charm around Naima's neck, explaining that my best friend had given it to me, and since we were best friends—I signaled this by pointing to the two of us and then touching my heart—I wanted her to have it. Naima had the horseshoe in her little fingers, looking at it with wonderment. When her grandmother entered the tent a few moments later, holding some of my clothes in her hands, Naima ran over to her and proudly showed off her gift. Maika smiled gravely at her granddaughter. Approaching me she handed me my freshly laundered pants and underwear. She also brought a fresh djellaba and a niqab, indicating that I was to keep them as a gift . . . and through more of her gestures, also letting it be known that I might need them en route to Marrakesh. Then she did something completely uncharacteristic. Out of nowhere she embraced me. Taking me by both shoulders, she touched one of her leathery hands to my face and said,
“Allah ybarek feek wal 'ayyam al-kadima.”