The Forgiven (5 page)

“They arrived five minutes ago, Monsieur. They are in a terrible state. There is something that is terrible in the extreme. There has been an accident down on the main road.”

I knew it, Richard thought darkly.

“When the car arrived at the gate, we saw at once that they had a wounded man in the backseat. Now we have verified, Monsieur. And it is a dead man. It is terrible.”

“Go on.”

“A Moroccan, Monsieur. The English hit him on the road. It is very unclear.”

There was nothing to say. They strode across the open space with the fairy lights in the trees spelling out the word Welcome in Arabic, and Richard wondered what he would say to them. He asked Hamid quickly if he recognized the dead man.

“He’s not from here, Monsieur. Who knows who he is?”

Richard knew the Hennigers from London. He had been at school with David. They were fun people. They were droll, rich, spirited, but they argued a lot. That was tiresome. And the doctor had a booze issue. At school (one couldn’t remember much), he had been a witty, cruel little prick, but handsome and loyal. There was something crushed about him. He had always reminded Richard of the line from Plato Dr. Amos had drummed into them: “Be kind, because everyone you meet is having a hard struggle.” But was David having a hard struggle? They kept up through the years; they liked each other, and Richard was always interested to see that big, bristling, angry shape of a man barging through a doorway. He enjoyed the crassly honest insults David shot at people at dinner parties and the way he got drunk—always winking at Richard as if he were putting it on. He was a buffoon, but there are useful buffoons and entertaining ones and even buffoons who make us wonder. The moneyed English buffoon is a particular species. It is much cruder than it lets on—it’s a Viking with silverware. Richard smiled. That was Dr. Henniger in a nutshell.

“Unclear?” he said to Hamid quietly. “Why did you say it was unclear?”

“They say he was selling fossils by the road. He stepped out, and they struck him by accident. But it is night. The road there is deserted.
There has never been a fossil seller on that road at night. Or in day. That is why it is unclear, Monsieur.” He drew himself up silently for the proverb muttered inside his own mind: “Open your door to a good day and prepare yourself for a bad one.”

The Camry was parked just inside the gate, and the Hennigers had been taken to their house by the staff. The car was empty but for the body sprawled on the backseat. The servants crowded around with stricken looks, muttering quietly to themselves, three and four flashlights dancing around the spots of blood. When Richard came up, they drew back. He had a thunderous look on his face, though he was not aware of it, and he was thinking ahead with intensity and rational directness. He looked down and saw the hands of the body, chalk white now, and noticed a diagonal white scar on the side of the left hand. It was an old scar.

“Does anyone recognize him?” he barked at the boys.

They shook their heads. He grabbed a flashlight and leaned into the backseat to look at the young, slightly bearded face that could have been peacefully sleeping. It was a boy of about twenty, slender and quite tall. A handsome boy, with a tattoo on his right hand.

“He is from the south,” Hamid said at his elbow.

“Un chien sauvage,”
someone said.

They looked at his feet, with the sandals still attached to them though the bones had been broken, and at the robe torn in places and speckled with dried blood. The hands were white with dust. Blood had leaked all over the seat and the back of the front seats, too; a pool of it had formed on the car’s floor. With no idea who to call, lost in a foreign country, the Hennigers had simply taken the victim with them and brought him here. It was the logical thing to have done. And yet it was incredibly awkward. He told the boys to take the body from the car and lay it out somewhere. Perhaps the garages, where none of the guests would wander.

“Shall we clean the car, Monsieur?”

“No. We have to call the police in Taza.”

Their faces fell and there was a moment’s silence. It would take the police an hour to get there, if not more, so there was time for him to talk to the Hennigers. He took Hamid aside as the body was rolled out of the car and laid on a blanket. The hands flopped into the dust, and Richard and Hamid found themselves staring at them uncontrollably. Hamid seemed ashamed of something. He didn’t want to be involved in this remarkable disaster.

“Hamid, did you believe their story?”

“But they are your guests. How am I not to believe them?”

“But did you, in fact, believe them?”

“I think they are very scared. They told the truth.”

Hamid’s eyes turned away. There were times when discretion was not what Richard wanted from him, but the relation of employer to servant was impossible to surmount. The English were the master’s guests. They must be respected. This attitude could not be penetrated.

“Go to the house and tell Monsieur Dally. Whisper in his ear and don’t make a fuss. Tell him to meet me in the garage.”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

RICHARD WENT BACK TO THE CAR AND LOOKED IT OVER
. The massive dent on the left fender was unmistakable enough. The headlight had been shattered and the fender almost detached. So the boy had crossed the road from the left and been hit. They must have been going at a fair clip. He looked up at the moon and thought it a clear night. He walked through the gate onto the dirt road and looked down at the highway snaking around the bottom of the hill. One could see everything. One could see the formations of lignite on the mountains by the far side of the road, a distance of miles. The moon was full, and nothing escaped it. He’d be interested to hear what their story really was. He hadn’t asked Hamid, because he wanted to hear it himself from their own lips. People change their stories rapidly. He opened the phone and lingered among the high roadside weeds for a few
moments, wondering if he should explain anything to the police, and then decided not to think about it too much. Every minute of delay was incriminating.

“It is Richard Duddy here. At Ksour Azna.”

The voice at the other end was sluggish and slightly hostile, its French clogged with uncertainties.

“Good evening, Monsieur Galloway. Have you been burgled?”

They laughed. “No, Yassine, I have an unfortunate situation. You will have to come over at once. A man has been hit by a car.”

“Is it one of your guests?”

“No, we don’t know him. He might be local.”

“Is he dead?”

“He was dead when he came in.”

“Was the car belonging to a foreigner?”

“It was.”

“It is a shame.”

There was a dragging irritation in the voice.

“Monsieur Richard, keep everyone there, please. Put the body somewhere cool.”

“The kitchen?” he wanted to yell at Yassine.

“And, Monsieur Richard? Do not touch it.”

WHEN RICHARD GOT BACK TO THE GATE, HE TOLD THE BOYS
to send on a carafe of chilled water to the Hennigers’ rooms. Soon Hamid came trotting up.

“Mr. Dally, Monsieur was very upset. One of the other boys must have told him. He has gone down to the garage.”

“I must see the Hennigers first. Is the party going okay?”

“They are all drunk and happy.”

“Perhaps,” Richard wondered aloud, “I should calm the Hennigers down and get them into the dining room. There’s nothing they can do about it now.”

“The others will be getting up from the dinner soon. Coffee and smoke.”

“What we don’t want, Hamid, is a panic and a scene. They mustn’t know that there’s a body on the premises.”

“Naturally not, Monsieur!”

“Can you see to it?”

The paunchy Hamid stiffened. “Count on me.” But to himself he thought, with disengaged fatalism, “Piece by piece the camel enters the couscous.”

RICHARD WALKED THROUGH THE
KSOUR
TO THE LITTLE
whitewashed house where they had put the late arrivals. Most of the houses were still ruined, and they formed picturesque streets like those of a bombed city. Twenty were renovated and turned into guest rooms, each one subtly individual. Chalet 22—they called them “chalets”—was near the walls, with a small desert garden around it. The windows and door were wide open, and from the interior came the sound of a difficult argument, the voices forcefully lowered but hissing away vigorously. He hung back for a minute or two. Not because he wanted to hear what they were saying, but because he didn’t want to embarrass them. Then the wife began to sob.

The husband let it flow for a while, and drifted to the open door. He lit a cigarette and said nothing. Cicadas purred in the rosebushes and around the hairy boles of the palms. The party could be heard easily. David was breathing heavily, confused, indignant. He was sure it wasn’t his fault. He was certain of it, and he couldn’t talk himself out of his own innocence, not even when he was truthful.

“
I HEARD WHAT HAPPENED
,”
RICHARD SAID AS HE WALKED
out of the shadows and up to the door. Behind them, Jo lay curled on the brocaded tribal cushions of the bed. Richard closed the door behind
them and went to put his arm around her. “It’s all right,” he said. There was a smell of sweat and dust in the room, of misery and disputes, and the bags had not yet been unpacked. It was a family scene, a scene of coupledom at its worst.

He had never quite understood how men and women could get on anyway. It seemed so unlikely that deep down he didn’t believe in it. “Women,” he thought dourly, “are born recriminators.” Yet he had always liked Jo immensely. She was beautiful, spirited, a little mad, and she had that passive-aggressive, almost androgynous nobility that upper-middle-class British women often possessed, a hint of vast tenderness that could never arrive on your plate. She was a complete enigma, and he respected anyone resolute enough to be an enigma. She looked at his tuxedo with a hangdog trustingness. So people were dressed for dinner, which meant that the world was still normal. She dried her eyes. This slender, dry gay man in his perfect tuxedo seemed more authoritative than her deflated husband still covered with dust and another man’s blood.

“I think you should change, David. Both of you. I’ve heard it was an accident. There’s nothing you can do. I think you should have showers and go down to dinner. The police will be here in an hour, but they’ll want to see the body first, and it will take time. They know you’re not going anywhere. And they’ll know you’ve done nothing criminal. It’ll be sorted out. The police officer told me to reassure you.”

“Did he?” she broke out.

“He did. I know him. It’s all a formality. Perhaps Jo should shower first. You need to get out of those clothes.”

“I’d love a drink,” she said fiercely.

She went into the bathroom, and David changed in the main room. He couldn’t stop shaking. Well, Richard thought, let him shake. He was dead sure this irresponsible bastard had had a drink on the road. Should he save him or let him hang? The Moroccan police would not be forgiving about a Breathalyzer test. Richard began as testily as he could.

“I have to ask you. How did it happen? I think you should tell me before you tell the
flics
. So we can iron anything out.”

“We were bowling along looking for the sign for Azna. There was a fossils seller standing by the road, like they always do. We’d seen hundreds of them since Chefchaouen. I couldn’t see. There was a lot of sand blowing across the road. Then the guy just stepped in front of us. He wanted us to stop. We thought he would carjack us. We’d heard about the carjackings.”

“Carjackings?”

David threw up one hand. “It’s like he wanted to bluff us. Or commit suicide. It was like he didn’t understand the speed of a car.”

Richard didn’t know how to deal with an observation like that. A little dry irony?

“These are simple people, David. They don’t always understand things like the speed of a car. Some of them don’t even know what cars are. They’ve only seen them in the movies. Incredible, isn’t it? In this day and age.”

“I’m surprised they’ve seen movies.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jo said impatiently. “The fact is, we hit him.”

Richard relented, and he merely watched David loosen his collar and sweat it out. The doctor didn’t even feel the barb. “These sorts of accidents happen. The main thing is to come clean, cooperate with the police, and seem overwhelmingly contrite. Sometimes they will ask for a discreet bribe. We can do that, can’t we?”

“If it’s absolutely necessary.”

“It might be. We’ll see. The guy there now isn’t too bad. They’ll probably ask you if you knew the kid. They always ask that.”

“How the hell could we have?”

“It’s just their way of getting their suspicions out in the open. We have to go along with it.”

They were both English, so there was complicity. Us and them. The “them” was especially Muslim officials who didn’t drink. The question was, did the “them” include the dead boy lying in the garage? They
didn’t even know his name. There was no ID on him, and it was highly unusual for a Moroccan not to be carrying ID. There was nothing in his pockets at all, not even a single
dirham
note. Normally, one would laugh.

David wondered if Richard was lying. There was something that made him think so. Not massively, but slightly. Lies are excusable, but it depends on what they are, and when he searched David’s boxy, hypermasculine face, he found it half open like a box that hasn’t been properly closed. The eyes were in eclipse.

Behind them, David crept about unsurely, trying to figure a way out of this mess, and prepared to bend things a little. His face sweated and wouldn’t dry, and he rubbed his fingers frantically as if he wanted to get something off them, though he had obviously washed them thoroughly. He kicked off his expensive Oxfords in disgust and his face became petulantly enraged. Gradually he calmed down. Richard sat on the bed next to him while they listened to the woman showering in the next room. They had known each other for some time in London, but they had never seen each other elsewhere. Richard watched him gulp down the pitcher of water.