The Drifters

  That was all. We hurried back to police headquarters to inform Inspector Ahmed, but it was he who had news for us. ‘We’ve found her,’ he said, ‘but I must warn you that she’s in dreadful shape.’

  ‘What happened?’ Cato asked.

  ‘Nothing unusual. Malnutrition, dope. She’s in our hospital.’

  He led us to the edge of town, where, on a cliff overlooking the incomparable bay of Tangier, a group of Catholic sisters still remained to run a hospital for a country which had more or less kicked out their church. The mother superior who met us was as gracious as nuns always seem to be when dealing with men of other religions, but she was not optimistic about Monica.

  ‘This girl is gravely ill,’ she warned us as we approached the ward. ‘Only one of you had better enter.’

  We looked at each other and by common agreement chose Cato to see her, but before he could enter, Inspector Ahmed produced a British passport: ‘This is the girl, I assume.’ Cato took it, opened its cover, and gave a deep sigh when he saw Monica’s slim patrician face smiling back at him.

  ‘It’s her,’ he said, and the nun led him into the room, but within a few seconds he was back, his face contorted: ‘It’s not Monica!’

  Ahmed and I brushed past the mother superior and hurried into the room, where there on a bed lay a blond girl of about twenty who looked not at all like Monica. We guessed she was a Swede, but it was apparent from her appalling condition that we were not going to be able to question her. In fact, from my brief glimpse of her slack-jawed face I wondered if she would live much longer.

  We piled into Ahmed’s car and drove hurriedly back to the Lion of Morocco, where the asthmatic innkeeper told us that there had been several Swedish girls staying with him over the past week, but he knew nothing of them. One of them could have stolen the English girl’s passport, but that was unlikely, because he ran a clean establishment, as the police would verify.

  Cato suggested doubling back to the Zoco Chico to see if we could spot the two Swedish girls who had first told us Monica had stayed at the Lion of Morocco, and we found them there, lounging in the sun outside one of the bars. ‘Are any of your gang missing?’ Ahmed asked professionally, and in a slap-happy way the two girls began to cast up their friends, but they had apparently been eating hash and could not focus on anything, so Ahmed pushed them into his car and drove them to the hospital, but when we got there, the mother superior told us, ‘She’s dead.’

  Ahmed dismissed this information as irrelevant and took us all into the morgue, where the young girl we had seen less than an hour ago lay stiffly under a sheet that left her face exposed: emaciated, debauched, dead. The girls required only a brief glimpse: ‘It’s Birgit.’

  ‘Birgit who?’

  ‘From Uppsala.’

  ‘But what’s her name?’

  ‘Birgit from Uppsala.’

  Inspector Ahmed jerked the sheet away, inspected the veins in her arms, rubbed the abused scar tissue, looked at us impassively, and replaced the sheet. ‘Heroin,’ he said.

  On our ride back to the center of town I saw that Cato was trembling, and I turned as though to comfort him, but he kept his eyes averted and shrank away from me. When we reached our hotel room he fell into a chair and held his head between his hands, staring at the floor and mumbling, ‘Oh God, let us find her … quick.’

  ‘Any ideas, Loomis?’ I asked.

  ‘One. At the Zoco Chico, I know a waiter in one of the bars. He works only at night and he’s the most corrupt human being in North Africa. Let’s get a little sleep now, because he’s our last chance.’

  It was ten o’clock that night when we trailed down the hill to the Zoco Chico, to find it brightly lit and filled with tourists. It could have been a square in ancient Baghdad, or modern Damascus, or Cairo of a hundred years ago, except that this year it was crowded with drifters from all parts of the world, most of them young students who had vaguely wanted to see Marrakech but who would never get beyond Tangier. They were not an attractive lot, for most of them were sodden-eyed, unkempt, and shuffling of gait, as if they were hopeless men in their sixties instead of hopeful people in their teens.

  Big Loomis headed directly to the principal bar, went to the inside office, and shortly returned with a waiter of indefinite age; he was probably no more than thirty-five but looked to be in his seventies, for he was totally debauched, and I was astonished that he could still hold a job. When he spoke, however, he was alert and persuasive: ‘Gentlemen, you come to me highly recommended. My friend Big Loomis can be trusted and I have good news for his associates.’ He dropped his voice, sidled up to us, and through black teeth whispered, ‘The flowers were never sweeter in Lebanon.’

  ‘What?’ Cato asked.

  ‘From Lebanon, riches beyond compare,’ he said with a sly wink.

  ‘What?’ Cato asked again.

  ‘Marijuana!’ he snapped. ‘Damned good marijuana from Beirut.’

  ‘Kasim,’ Big Loomis said, placing his arm about the waiter’s shoulders, ‘what we’re interested in tonight is what happened to the English girl, Monica Braham.’ Kasim showed no sign of recognition, but Loomis continued, ‘She’s a most important young lady. Seventeen. Daughter of Sir Charles Braham, London.’

  ‘And Vwarda,’ Kasim said, not changing his expression.

  ‘The same,’ Loomis said. ‘And we’re phoning Sir Charles tonight. He’ll be deeply concerned about the whereabouts of his daughter.’

  ‘He’ll pay for helpful information?’ Kasim asked.

  ‘I will pay,’ I interrupted.

  Kasim, relieved to find that an American with funds was accepting responsibility, said, ‘I know nothing of this girl. English girls? Look for yourself. There are hundreds. But I’ll ask.’

  ‘That’s all we could hope for,’ Loomis said reassuringly.

  We sat down at a sidewalk table, and with Kasim standing over us as if he were only a waiter, we told him all we knew, giving him the names of the two places where Monica had slept and the name of the dead Swedish girl who had been using her passport. With this information, Kasim disappeared.

  As we waited for his return, Big Loomis tried his best to divert us by saying he could calculate within a few months how long each passing foreigner had been in Tangier. Germans with quick step and keen searching eyes had come in this week. Englishmen with dragging feet and glazed expressions had been here upwards of a month. Americans shuffling along, looking furtively this way and that, uncombed and unwashed, had been here for half a year. And a few nondescript types from almost anywhere—California, Sweden, Sydney, Vancouver—were habitués who would never leave as long as they could collect money from some relative. A goodly number of this latter group, Loomis said, were remittance men from England or France, and some of them recognized the big Negro, who was himself technically a remittance man, and these sat down to inform us that things in Tangier were not so good as they had been four years ago.

  When they heard why we were there, they expressed no interest at all in the disappearance of an English girl; it happened all the time and they had found it wisest to keep clear of such messes, because if you didn’t, the damned girl was certain to wind up in your flat, with her parents accusing you of having seduced her. Cato, furious at such indifference, said, ‘Don’t be so goddamn casual,’ and the Englishman said, ‘She’s your girl?’ and when Cato nodded, he said, ‘Unquestionably she’s shacked up with someone else, and what can you do about it?’ Cato said, ‘You son-of-a-bitch, she may be dying,’ and the Englishman said, ‘Aren’t we all, really?’ Cato wanted to clout him, but Big Loomis said, ‘Cool it. We may be here for days.’ As if to support this conclusion, Kasim returned about two in the morning with sorrowful news: ‘No one knows where she is.’

  Our phone call to Sir Charles Braham in Sussex proved abortive. He was not at home … had gone off to some kind of agricultural meeting; and as I waited while the telephone girl tried unsuccessfully to track him down, I reflected that during each cr
isis in his daughter’s life he had been absent. We could expect no help from him.

  We spent the next day running down futile leads and at night we again went to the Zoco Chico, but Kasim was not on duty. Loomis asked where he was, and the proprietor said, hopelessly, ‘With Kasim, who knows?’ Fortunately we waited, for after midnight the clever fellow appeared with a big smile on his face. ‘I have found her! The police could do nothing, but I have found her.’

  We leaned forward, and he said, ‘It’s been most expensive. I had to send a boy to Chechaouèn.’ At the mention of this ancient hill town, Big Loomis whistled, for it was a considerable distance southeast of Tangier, and that an English girl would go there was inexplicable.

  Cato spoke first. ‘Can we drive there?’

  ‘I think you should,’ Kasim said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Kasim looked at Cato, then at me. ‘Maybe it’s better I speak with this gentleman,’ he suggested, leading me to the rear of the café. ‘The news is not pleasant,’ he whispered. ‘Two boys from here made her acquaintance … rented her out to seven of their friends … one after the other. Then they took her to a country place in Chechaouèn. She became very sick, so they ran away.’ He paused, then added a scrap of information which he knew summarized the case but which was too strong to share with Cato. ‘My boy told me over the phone, “They screwed her eight or nine times a day but wouldn’t give her anything to eat.” ’

  When we reported her whereabouts to Inspector Ahmed, he commandeered an official limousine, loaded the three of us in, and sped eastward toward Tétouan, the city which Spain had renamed grandiloquently Tetuán-de-las-Victorias in commemoration of some minor skirmish. It was dawn when we got there and turned south along a winding road that carried us high into the foothills of the Atlas. The day was well begun by the time we reached Chechaouèn, a very old caravan stop nestled within a rim of hills. We drove to a spot near the square and were met by local police, who set out to find Kasim’s boy. He was located at a booth in the square, and as we crossed this irregular-shaped market we could have been in any Biblical city two thousand years ago. Even the costumes of the Arabs who were opening their stalls were unchanged, their habits untouched by the modern world, for this was a city with very old religious interests, and modernism was not welcome.

  Our guide was a boy of fifteen, trained by Kasim in the intrigue of Tangier, and knowledgeable in those vices which could be turned to profit. As he led us past the market and into an ancient quarter of the town, one that for centuries had been forbidden to infidels, he selected me as the probable leader of the group and confided, ‘Your daughter is very sick. Maybe we should get a doctor.’

  I started to say that I was not her father, but decided not to complicate things. ‘Fetch a doctor, if one is available,’ I said, and he took us on a short detour to the home of a young medic who had been trained in Casablanca and was now posted to Chechaouèn for public service. He spoke excellent French and asked which of us was ill. When the boy explained that my daughter had fallen upon bad days, he nodded gravely and told me, ‘We saw a good deal of this in Casablanca. Swedish girls mostly.’

  The boy took us down some extremely narrow alleys, and I said to the doctor, ‘Things haven’t changed much here in two thousand years, have they?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘This is the backland of Morocco. And things won’t change for another two thousand years.’ We stopped at the door of a small mud-walled house that must have been at least two hundred years old, and I experienced a sense of tragic drama when I thought that it was to such a hovel that Monica had come. I was about to enter when the doctor said, ‘I’d better go first,’ and he allowed the boy to lead him inside.

  As we waited apprehensively, I could see that Cato was tense to the breaking point. To Inspector Ahmed, of course, Monica was merely another European girl to be traced; if he did find her today, tomorrow he would be looking for someone else.

  Now the doctor came out, very grave, saying, ‘One of you had better join me.’ I stepped forward, but Cato in his red fez elbowed his way ahead of me and disappeared through the small door. In a moment we heard a terrible cry—a shriek of mortal anguish. Ahmed darted into the house, but before I could follow, Cato appeared in the dark hallway, bearing in his arms the dead body of Monica.

  She was a ghost, her arms and legs hanging like withered twigs, her black hair a tangle about her once-beautiful face. Her left arm showed the hideous and familiar sore which I supposed had finally caused her death.

  The doctor shook his head in professional disgust. ‘That abscess could easily have been cured.’ He looked at Cato and me and said, ‘Didn’t any of you notice her face? Her color? That’s what killed her. Serum hepatitis. For weeks it must have been incubating in her body and was able to break out with terrible force because of her malnutrition.’

  ‘She died?’ Inspector Ahmed asked professionally. ‘She wasn’t killed?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘Then we face no legal problem,’ Ahmed said, evincing no further interest in the case.

  ‘How did she catch hepatitis?’ I asked.

  ‘Infected hypodermic. Lots of young people kill themselves that way.’ The doctor turned to face us: ‘Any of you use her needle six weeks ago … seven weeks?’

  Cato, still holding the dead girl, shook his head numbly.

  The doctor spit in the dust and said, ‘The tragedy is that if any of you had made one sensible move, she could so easily have been saved.’

  When it came time for us to drive back to Tangier, the question arose as to what we should do with Monica’s body, and Inspector Ahmed suggested, ‘We’ll put her in the trunk,’ but when that dark receptacle was opened, Cato rebelled. ‘No! She rides with us.’ Ahmed shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It’s going to be damned uncomfortable.’

  Cato pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around Monica, and we climbed into the car, placing her body across our knees, her head resting against Cato’s chest.

  As we picked up speed along the road that would take us into Tangier, I affected not to notice that Cato, drawn deep within his corner, his arms about Monica’s shoulders, was weeping silently. Occasional convulsions of his sagging shoulders betrayed his passion, and I thought of how bitter his experiences with love had been: Vilma kicked to death, meaninglessly, on the streets of Philadelphia; Monica dead of a dirty hypodermic needle in Morocco, when even the most routine attention would have prevented it. As I maintained surveillance of him I felt that he represented his generation, courageous in building new modes of behavior, defenseless when overtaken by the ancient tragedies that no man escapes.

  In my compassion I reached out to touch him, but he reacted as if I had struck him. ‘Keep your hands off me!’ he cried. ‘I want no sympathy from white men,’ and I told him, ‘I didn’t offer it as a white man.’ From the front, Big Loomis growled, ‘Cool it back there.’

  Cato half-turned to look at me, his red fez cocked to one side, his dark eyes brimmed with tears. He wanted to say something conciliatory, of that I am sure. He wanted to return my gesture, for his hand left Monica’s shoulder and started to reach for mine, but at this moment his grief overcame him and he collapsed in shaking sobs which he no longer tried to hide. In this manner, sharing the burden of the dead girl we had loved, we returned to Tangier.

  As we drove up to the police station, I spotted the yellow pop-top. Gretchen and Joe ran out to greet us, and before they could see what Cato and I were holding, Gretchen asked eagerly, ‘Did you find her?’

  ‘We did,’ Loomis said.

  ‘Britt! They’ve found her,’ Gretchen cried as Holt and Britta came up.

  They saw Cato and me, grim and silent, and then, looking down, saw the motionless form on our laps.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Gretchen cried. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Cato said.

  Gretchen put her hand to her lips and watched, stunned, as we climbed out of the car, leaving the body stretched
across the seat. Cato and I had brought Monica home; we could do no more, and so we stood aside.

  Inspector Ahmed and another policeman came back and routinely started to unload the body, but as they did so, the shirt pulled away from Monica’s head and disclosed it to all who were watching.

  ‘Jesus!’ Joe cried at the awful sight.

  Quickly Inspector Ahmed replaced the shirt. But Britta, walking stolidly to where Ahmed held the dead girl by the shoulders, carefully drew it back and gazed down at her friend. She was hideous, terrifying, staring at us, her mouth ajar, her tongue protruding. This was not death; it was an indecent mockery.

  ‘Cover her,’ Holt said, but Britta put an arm around Monica’s head. Tenderly she closed the eyelids and straightened the wild strands of hair. She bent to kiss the sunken cheeks, then turned to us, crying, and said, ‘We gave her so little help.’ Holt started to say that nothing would have helped Monica, but Britta placed her hand over his mouth, and Ahmed and his man carried the dead girl to the plain wooden box that awaited her.

  Morocco was used up.

  We sat at our sidewalk table in Zoco Chico and found the parade of young drifters frightening and ugly. Each stringy-haired girl reminded us of what had happened to Monica.

  No one proposed going back to Marrakech, and to remain in Tangier was unthinkable. Nor was there any need of us. The authorities showed no inclination to track down, let alone prosecute, the young Moroccans who had taken Monica to Chechaouèn, because she had accompanied them willingly. As for their maltreatment of her, it would be impossible to prove that they had collected money from the friends they had called in to use her, and Inspector Ahmed shrewdly guessed that her father, Sir Charles, would not be eager to fly to Tangier to press charges that could only reflect on him. He told us, ‘Last year we had twenty-nine girls die. Much like your friend. From all parts of the world. And in only two or three cases did the parents wish us to delay the burial so they could come. The case is closed.’