The Heat of Betrayal (21 page)

Ben Hassan maintained a light, almost jovial tone throughout this banter – as if this was all a rather amusing turn of events.

‘Why did Samira turn him away?' I asked.

‘Because he was a very bad father who hadn't bothered to show any interest in his daughter until just a few months ago.'

‘How do you know this?'

‘Samira considers me to be her surrogate father.'

He looked straight at me as he said this.

‘Where was her mother?' I asked.

‘Here in Casablanca until her daughter entered university – and they began to have all sorts of problems. Then Faiza, who was also having a variety of professional difficulties, lost her job. And lost her home, owing to manifold debts and a man in her life who was not honourable, let alone honest.'

‘Not Paul?'

‘No – Paul cut complete contact with his wife and his daughter when he left for the States some months before Samira's birth.'

‘Then why did he feel the need to reconnect if he hadn't been in contact for decades?'

‘You would have to ask Paul that.'

He raised his glass again, downing it all in one long draught. After a small but indiscreet belch, he raised his eyebrows and said:

‘Of course the fact that he discovered he was a grandfather might have had something to do with it.'

‘Samira has a child?'

‘Yes, an eighteen-month-old son named Claude. The father is a French lawyer from Marseille. Married. Highly intelligent. Highly complex. But Samira has always liked her men intelligent and complex. Which is why she was always intrigued from afar by her absentee father – and also desperately hurt that he refused all contact. But it's the strangest damn thing. Not a word to Faiza or Samira for decades. And he never once sent them anything in the way of money. He'd vanished across the Atlantic, out of sight, clearly uninterested. Then, a few months ago, he suddenly gets in touch with me, asking for news of his daughter. Not just news, but recent photographs and her email address. And he began to write to her, wanting to know everything about her life. Samira came to me, upset and confused.'

‘Why would he contact her after all this time?' I asked. ‘Why now?'

‘I told Samira she should ask that question of Paul in an email. His response was: “I have just discovered that I cannot have children with my new wife.”'

I was so thrown by this statement that my glass of wine fell to the floor.

‘He wrote that?' I whispered. ‘He
actually
wrote that?'

Ben Hassan pursed his lips, suppressing a smile.

‘Yes, he wrote that he could not have children with you . . . that you were not fertile.'

‘That is beyond a lie,' I said, starting to sob. ‘And the reason he came fleeing up here to Casablanca is because I found out that he'd had a vasectomy behind my back.'

Ben Hassan received this information with a momentary shocked stare – quickly morphed into what I had begun to discern was his default wry passivity.

‘That is quite an accusation.'

I was now digging into my backpack, searching for the clutch of documents I had brought with me.

‘It's not an accusation,' I cried. ‘It's the truth.'

I slammed the documents down on the work table in front of Ben Hassan.

‘There it is, in black and white.'

In a hurried, manic stream of words I told how the invoice for the surgery had found its way to me, and everything that had happened from that point onwards, leading to me being here now. Ben Hassan listened in silence. When I was finished he picked up a small bell near to where he sat and rang it twice. Omar was back in the room within seconds. An interchange in Arabic. Omar disappeared and returned immediately with a new glass of Kir for me. He also began to pick up the shards of glass that were scattered everywhere on the floor. When I tried to apologise for my angry clumsiness Ben Hassan held up his hand and told me to go easy on myself.

‘You have been subject to far too many shocks in the past twenty-four hours. Happily the glass in question is not Rosenthal crystal, just
un verre ordinaire
, so no damage done.'

More whispered words to Omar, who dumped the broken glass into a nearby trash can and left us alone again. As soon as the door was closed, Ben Hassan reached for the surgery invoice and held it up.

‘Here is the proverbial smoking gun – further proof that you did attack him with a bottle upon discovering the nature of his treachery.'

I snapped my eyes shut. I should never have uttered a word of this to the crafty operator seated opposite me. I finally said:

‘You need to know that I am telling you the absolute truth when it comes to Paul's head injury. And that I am desperately worried about him. I have to find him.'

Ben Hassan fell silent for a moment, sipping his wine. Then he said:

‘I hope you will take solace in the fact that your husband has worked very hard at making amends with his daughter.'

‘By which you mean . . .?'

‘He helped buy her an apartment.'

Now I really was lost.

‘He what?'

‘He helped buy Samira the apartment she lives in now – the apartment in front of which you verbally attacked her this morning.'

‘I was not verbally attacking her. I was simply—'

‘Letting it be known that you believed she was your husband's other woman. Samira called me while you were asleep, just a little aggrieved at such an accusation and the way you accosted her in public.'

‘I did not accost her.'

‘As before,
madame
, you are, I know, telling the truth.'

‘Paul couldn't have bought her an apartment.'

‘He only paid for half of it. The other half came from her French lover.'

‘How much did my husband give his daughter?'

‘One million dirhams.'

Ben Hassan watched me absorb that little detail.

‘I can't believe that,' I said.

‘Why can't you?'

‘Because that's what? . . . Eight point eight dirhams to one US dollar . . . something in the neighbourhood of one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars.'

‘You are the human abacus,
madame
.'

‘There is no way he could have borrowed that money in the States without me knowing about it.'

‘Which is why Paul borrowed the money here in Casablanca.'

‘But he has no credit rating here, no equity that he could have put up as collateral against a loan of that size.'

‘Again you have hit the bull's eye. Which is why your husband didn't turn to a bank or any other financial institution.'

The penny (actually an ocean of pennies) dropped.

‘Are you telling me he turned to a loan shark?'

‘“Loan shark” is rather pejorative, is it not? A “financial facilitator” is a far more elegant turn of phrase and not as derogatory.'

‘Do you think I care about verbal niceties right now, Monsieur Ben Hassan? He borrowed money from a loan shark, which means he's in even more trouble than I had imagined. I suppose you know the name of the gangster to whom he's now probably paying three times the sum borrowed?'

‘The man is no gangster. He's just a businessman.'

‘And his name is . . .?'

A long pause as my host drained his glass, belching loudly and pointedly. Finally he said:

‘His name is . . . Monsieur Romain Ben Hassan.'

WE MOVED ON
to a local restaurant. And by the time the first bottle of wine was empty, Ben Hassan was trying to insist that he was my new best friend.

At the start of the meal, however, he was oozing neither bonhomie nor easy camaraderie. On the contrary, he was showing me his more menacing hand.

‘When Paul heard from me that Samira might talk with him again if he helped her buy an apartment for herself and her son, his immediate response was: “Get her the money.” I told him that, if he was actually serious about borrowing one million dirhams from me, he would have to take the consequences if he did not meet his monthly payments.'

‘What sort of consequences might these be?'

‘Unpleasant ones.'

‘Surely you weren't planning to send somebody over to Buffalo to rough him up . . . or worse?'

‘Had that become necessary, of course there were ways and means – contacts, so to speak, in that corner of the world, who could have been called upon to intervene on my behalf. For a price,
naturellement.
A price which would have been tagged onto the monthly repayment.'

‘I think the actual term in loan-shark speak is “vig”. The monthly “vig” – which you have to meet or else contend with grievous bodily harm.'

‘I presume you picked that term up from some sort of crime novel,
un polar
, yes?'

‘In my business you occasionally run into a client who has made the mistake of borrowing money from a thug like you.'

Ben Hassan put his fingers together in front of his face, as if creating his very own cathedral into which he now stared. I could see his lips twitch. Was he trying to contain his anger, his disdain? Had I crossed the line of no return? If my husband had signed something quasi-legal and binding, had he fled to Ouarzazate because he simply could not pay the ‘vig', leaving me behind to clean up his financial mess as usual? Only the sum involved – one million dirhams – was a vertiginous one. I certainly didn't have that sort of cash in a bank account, let alone my back pocket.

Ben Hassan stopped looking through the lattice of his thick sausage-like fingers. Then, favouring me with a paternal smile, he said:

‘There's no need to hold onto your bag, as if I am going to snatch it away. I know you still don't trust me. But you have my word that I would not dream of harming you in any way.'

‘My husband, on the other hand . . .'

‘He will hopefully work out a way to honour our little arrangement.'

‘You know he doesn't have that kind of money.'

Ben Hassan covered my hand with his own – actually burying it under his soft mound of flesh.

‘Let us discuss such matters later on . . .'

With that he insisted on ordering dinner for us. The waiter was immediately at our table, treating Ben Hassan like some godfatherly pasha, telling him that the
patron
wanted him to have a bottle of the best cuvée on the house, and informing him that the chef had prepared a lamb tagine with preserved lemons ‘especially for Monsieur Ben Hassan and his lovely guest'.

Part of me wanted to ask my host whether they owed him money as well, and as if anticipating my question he said:

‘I made a small investment in this establishment some years ago – and the management remain exceptionally grateful for my aid at a moment when they sorely needed assistance.'

‘You are quite the businessman,
monsieur
.'

‘Such flattery,' he said. ‘But I find myself a less-than-interesting subject. Especially when seated opposite such a lovely, fascinating woman.'

He got me speaking about myself and I gave him the abbreviated version of my life, sidestepping much in the way of any telling detail about my father, my first marriage, how I fled a journalistic career for the surer waters of accounting. But Ben Hassan turned out to be a master of subtext, immediately deducing much and using it to make me feel even more uneasy. The man was ruthlessly clever when it came to taking an inference (‘Dad never could really settle down') and turning it into a psychological revelation (‘So you have always been attracted to unstable, unsound men'). I quickly cottoned on to his game. Instead of getting defensive, I started asking him about his own background, discovering that his French father had run a vineyard in the Meknes region, had married a Moroccan woman from a bourgeois Rabat family, but abandoned her and his young son when an opportunity arose for him to return to Bourgogne; how his father refused to see his son thereafter, ‘excising me from his life as if I was a nasty boil'; how Ben Hassan had studied commerce in Paris and tried repeatedly to maintain contact with his father; how ‘my attempts to enter the world of international business in Paris came a little unstuck'; how ‘I returned to Casablanca and began to make my fortune here'; how . . .

‘Did you get into some sort of trouble in France?' I asked, the exceptional food and wine emboldening me.

‘Why do you immediately assume that the discrimination I encountered in France was due to some sort of scandal?' he demanded.

‘Aren't there plenty of North Africans who have successfully integrated into French society?'

‘It is still the country of
Le Front National
. I couldn't stay there.'

‘But you must have a French passport, thanks to your French father. When were you last there?'

‘My girth has militated against my ability to travel.'

The second bottle of wine arrived. The waiter opened it and, with great ceremony, placed two fresh glasses on the table and delicately poured a fingerful for Ben Hassan. My host again made great theatre of sampling it, swirling it around the glass, sniffing in with such great force that I feared he might just inhale it, then taking a sizeable sip and rolling it around his mouth like a gargle before gulping it straight down and nodding his approval. The waiter poured out two glasses, then left. As soon as he was out of earshot I posed a question that I had been wanting to raise for several hours:

‘How serious was Paul's relationship with Faiza?'

Ben Hassan ran his finger several times around the top of his wineglass. The man loved creating a sense of drama before making a statement. Finally he spoke:

‘We were all part of a bohemian circle in Casablanca – writers, poets, visual artists. I may have studied commerce in Paris, but that was to please my mother. As I sense you know, you can never please your mother. Still, before Paris, after Paris, abstract painting was my métier. I even had a gallery here in Casablanca that sold my work. Was I considered a serious painter? Quasi-serious. But not a major artist like your husband. And Faiza – well, she was teaching in a
lycée
here and trying to write the Great Moroccan Feminist Novel, seeing herself as a sort of North African Simone de Beauvoir. Truth be told, she had little in the way of actual literary talent. But she was rather fetching all those years ago, before disappointment and cigarettes began to work their toxic magic. Paul back then was the young American bohemian of every artistic girl's dreams. Faiza comes from a good family in Rabat. Her father worked for the Moroccan Central Bank as an economist, and they were hardly rigorous Muslims. But even if you are a secular Muslim – as so many Moroccans still are – you are also the byproduct of a conservative society, especially when it comes to sex. Paul was Faiza's first lover. They were quite the handsome couple. She wanted him to whisk her off to New York, make her his wife and fund her writing while he became the famous artist.