Let it come down Page 20

  «He’s really rather sweet,» she said to herself, thinking not of Wilcox, but of Dyar. Soon she rose, walked into the house and rang for Mario. «Get me the Hotel de la Playa on the telephone,» she said.

  Wilcox had gone to the Atlantide, undressed, and got into bed. There, in spite of his anxiety about the Ashcombe-Danvers sterling transfer, he had fallen into a deep slumber, exhausted finally by the wakeful night behind him. He awoke at twenty-five minutes past one (just as Dyar was entering Ramlal’s shop), saw the time, and in a fury called downstairs to see what had happened. When anything went wrong, it was usually the fault of one of the employees at the desk.

  «Have I had any calls?» he demanded. The young man did not know; he had just come on at one o’clock.

  «Well, look in my box!» shouted Wilcox. The young man was rattled. He began to read him the messages for the person in the room on the floor beneath. «Oh, good Jesus Christ Almighty!» Wilcox yelled, and he dressed and went down to the desk to see for himself. His box was empty. There was nothing he could do, so he gave the youth at the desk a tongue-lashing and went into the bar to sit gloomily over a whiskey and grunt briefly now and then in answer to the barman’s sporadic chatter, thinking how possible it was for Dyar to have come, announced himself at the desk, and been told that Mr. Wilcox was out.

  XVI

  Perspiring a little after his rapid climb up from the port, Dyar stepped from the street’s yellow glare into the darkness of the shop. Young Ramlal was reading a newspaper; he sat dangling his legs from a high table which was the only piece of furniture in the tiny room. When he glanced up, no expression of recognition appeared on the features of his smooth face, but he jumped down and said: «Good morning. I expected you to come earlier».

  «Well, I came by twice, but you were closed».

  «Ah, too early. Will you have a cigarette?»

  «Thanks».

  Tossing his lighter onto the table, the Indian continued: «I have been waiting for you. You see, I could not leave the package here, and I did not want to carry it with me when I go to eat lunch. If you had not come I’d have waited. So you see I am glad to see you». He smiled.

  «Oh,» said Dyar. «I’m sorry to have kept you waiting».

  «Not at all, not at all». Ramlal, happy to have extracted an apology, took a key from his trousers pocket and opened a drawer in the table. From this he lifted a large cardboard box marked Consul. Twenty Tins of Fifty. A Blend of the Finest Matured Virginian Grown Tobaccos. «I would not advise counting it here,» he said. «But here it is». He opened the box and Dyar saw the stacks of thin white paper. Then swiftly he closed it, as if more than this rapid exposure to air and light risked spoiling its delicate contents. Keeping one thin dark hand protectingly spread over the carton, Ramlal went on: «They were counted of course by my father in Gibraltar, and by me again last night. Therefore I assure you there are one thousand eight hundred five-pound notes in the box. If you wish to make a count now, it is quite all right. But» — He waved expressively at the throng passing in the street a few feet away, and smiled. «One never knows, you know».

  «Oh, hell. That doesn’t matter». Dyar tried to look friendly. «I’ll take your word for it. If there’s any mistake we know where to find you, I guess».

  The other, looking faintly offended as he heard the last sentence, turned away and brought out a large sheet of shiny blue and white wrapping paper with the words «Galeries Lafayette» printed across it at regular intervals. With professional dexterity he made a smart package and tied it up with a length of immaculate white string.

  «There we are,» he said, stepping back and bowing slightly. «And when you write Mr. Ashcombe-Danvers please don’t neglect to give him my father’s greetings and my respects».

  Dyar thanked him and went out into the street holding his parcel tightly. Half done, anyway, he thought. By the time he had eaten something the Crédit Foncier would be open. He strolled up through the Zoco de Fuera to the Italian restaurant where he had eaten the previous night. The bundles of big soiled white notes had not looked like money at all; the color of money was green, and real bills were small and convenient. It was no new sensation for him to have in his hands a large sum of banknotes which did not belong to him, so that the idea of his responsibility did not cause him undue nervousness. At the restaurant he laid the package on the floor near his feet and glanced down at it occasionally during the meal. Today of all days, he thought, he would have liked to be free, to rent a little convertible, perhaps, and drive out into the country with Hadija, or even better, to hop on a train and just keep going down into Africa, to the end of the line. (And from there? Africa was a big place and would offer its own suggestions.) He would even have settled for another pilgrimage to the beach, and this time he would have gone into the water and had a little exercise. Instead of which the best part of the afternoon would be occupied by the visits to the Crédit Foncier and the Hotel Atlantide, and Wilcox would find fault and yell at him, once he knew the money was safe in the bank. He decided to tell him he had gone by Ramlal’s and found it closed three times, instead of twice.

  A few minutes after two he got up, took his parcel, and paid the check to the stout patronne who stood behind the bar by the door. As he stepped into the brilliant sunlight he pitied himself a little for his obligations on such an afternoon. When he got to the Crédit Foncier the doors were open, and he went into the shabby gloom of its public room. Behind the iron grillework of the wickets the accountants were visible, seated on high stools at their chaotic desks. He started up the chipped marble staircase; an Arab in uniform called him back. «Mr. Benzekri,» he said. The Arab let him continue, but looked after him suspiciously.

  The buff walls of the little office were disfigured by rusty stains that spread monstrously from the ceiling to the floor. Mr. Benzekri sat in a huge black chair, looking even sadder than when they had met at the Café España. He nodded his head very slowly up and down as he unwrapped the box, as if he were saying: «Ah, yes. More of this dirty paper to count and take care of». But when he saw the carefully tied bundles inside, he looked up at Dyar sharply.

  «Five-pound notes? We cannot accept these».

  «What?» The loudness of his own voice surprised Dyar. «Can’t accept them?» He saw himself embarking on an endless series of trips between an irascible Wilcox and a smiling Ramlal. However, Mr. Benzekri was very calm.

  «Five-pound notes are illegal here, as you know». Dyar was about to interrupt, to protest his ignorance, but Mr. Benzekri, already wrapping the blue and white paper around the box, went on: «Chocron will change this for you. He will give you pesetas, and we will buy them for pounds. Mr. Ashcombe-Danvers of course wants pounds for his accounts. He will lose twice on the exchange, but I am sorry. These notes are illegal in Tangier».

  Dyar was still confused. «But what makes you think this man» — he hesitated.

  «Chocron?»

  «— What makes you think he’s going to buy illegal tender?»

  A faint, brief smile touched Mr. Benzekri’s melancholy lips. «He will take it,» he said quietly. And he sat back, staring ahead of him as if Dyar had already gone out. But then, as Dyar gathered up the neatly tied parcel once again, he said: «Wait,» bent forward and scribbled some words on a pad, tearing off the sheet and handing it to him. «Give this to Chocron. Come back before four. We close at four. The address is at the top of the paper». «A lot of good that’s going to do me,» Dyar thought. He thanked Mr. Benzekri and went downstairs, out into the Zoco Chico where the striped awning over the terrasse of the Café Central was being let down to shield the customers from the hot afternoon sun. There he approached a native policeman who stood grandly in the center of the plaza and inquired of him how to get to the Calle Sinagoga. It was nearby: up the main street and to the left, by what he could gather from the man’s gestures. All hope of getting to the beach was gone. The next sunny day like this might come in another two weeks; there was no telling. Silently he cursed Ra
mlal, Wilcox, Ashcombe-Danvers.

  Chocron’s office was at the top of a flight of stairs, in a cluttered little room that jutted out over the narrow street below, and the gray-bearded Chocron, who looked distinguished in the long black tunic and skullcap worn by the older Jews of the community, beamed when he read Benzekri’s note. His English, however, was virtually non-existent. «Show,» he said, pointing to the box, which Dyar opened. «Sit,» suggested Chocron, and he removed the packets from the box and began to count the bills rapidly, moistening his finger on the tip of his tongue from time to time. «This one and Benzekri are probably crooks,» Dyar thought uneasily. Still, the value of the pound in pesetas was posted on blackboards every few feet along the street; the rate could not go too far astray. Or perhaps it could, if the pounds were illegal. Even if the notes themselves had been valid, their very presence here was due to an infringement of the law; there was no possibility of recourse to any authority, whatever rates Chocron and Benzekri took it into their heads to charge. Below in the street the long cries of a candy-vendor passing slowly by sounded like religious chanting. Mr. Chocron’s expert fingers continued to manipulate the corners of the notes. Occasionally he held one up to the light that came through the window and squinted at it. When he had finished with a bundle he tied it up again meticulously, never looking toward Dyar. Finally he placed all the bundles back in the box and taking the slip of paper Mr. Benzekri had sent him, turned it over and wrote on the other side: 138 pesetas. He pushed the paper toward Dyar and stared at him. This was a little higher than the street quotation, which varied between 133 and 136 to the pound. Still suspicious, making grimaces and gestures, Dyar said: «What do you do with money like this?» It seemed that Chocron understood more English than he spoke. «Palestina,» he answered laconically, pointing out the window. Dyar began to multiply 138 by 9,000, just to amuse himself. Then he wrote the figures 142, and passed the paper back to the other, to see what the reaction would be. Chocron became voluble in Spanish, and it was easy to see that he had no intention of going that high. Somewhere along the flow of words Dyar heard the name of Benzekri; that, and the idea that one hundred forty two was too many pesetas to pay for a pound, was all he grasped of the monologue. However, he was warming to the game. If he sat quietly, he thought, Chocron would raise his offer. It took a while. Chocron pulled a notebook out of a drawer and began to do a series of involved arithmetical exercises. At one point he produced a small silver case and inhaled a bit of snuff through each nostril. Deliberately he put it away and continued his work. Dyar tapped his right toe against the red tile floor in a march rhythm, waiting. You could change the price of anything here, Wilcox had insisted, if you knew how, and the prime virtues in the affair were patience and an appearance of indifference. (He remembered Wilcox’s anecdote of the country Arab in the post office who had tried for five minutes to get a seventy-five-céntimo stamp for sixty céntimos and finally had turned away insulted when the clerk refused to bargain with him.) In this case the indifference was more than feigned; he had no interest in saving Ashcombe-Danvers a few thousand pesetas. It was a game, nothing more. He tried to imagine how he would feel at the moment if the money were his own. Probably he would not have had the courage to attempt bargaining at all. There was a difference between playing with money that was not real and money that was. But at this point nothing was real. The little room crowded with old furniture, the bearded man in black opposite him, making figures mechanically in the notebook, the golden light of the waning afternoon, the intimate street sounds outside the window, — all these things were suffused with an inexplicable quality of tentativeness which robbed them of the familiar feeling of reassurance contained in the idea of reality. Above all he was aware of the absurdity of his own situation. There was no doubt now in his mind that the call from the American Legation had to do with a proposed questioning on the matter of Mme. Jouvenon. If he disregarded both the call and the dinner engagement, by tomorrow they would be pulling on him from both sides.

  With each day as it passed Dyar had been feeling a little further from the world; it was inevitable that at some point he should make a voluntary effort to put himself back in the middle of it again. To be able to believe fully in the reality of the circumstances in which a man finds himself, he must feel that they bear some relation, however distant, to other situations he has known. If he cannot find this connection, he is cut off from the outside. But since his inner sense of orientation depends for its accuracy on the proper functioning, at least in his eyes, of the outside world, he will make any readjustment consciously or otherwise, to restore the sense of balance. He is an instrument that strives to adapt itself to the new exterior; he must get those unfamiliar contours more or less into focus once again. And now the outside was very far away — so far that the leg of Chocron’s desk could have been something seen through a telescope from an observatory. He had the feeling that if he made a terrible effort he could bring about a change: either the leg of the desk would disappear, or, if it stayed, he would be able to understand what its presence meant. He held his breath. Through the dizziness that resulted he heard Chocron’s voice saying something that made no sense. «Cientocuarenta. Mire». He was holding up a piece of paper for him to look at. With the sense of lifting a tremendous weight, Dyar raised his eyes and saw figures written on it, conscious at the same time that inside himself a vast and irresistible upheaval was taking place. «Huh?» he said. Chocron had written «140».

  «All right».

  «One minute,» said Chocron; he rose, took the box of money, and went into another room, closing the door behind him.

  Dyar did not move. He stared out the window at the wall of the building opposite. The quake was quieting down; the principal strata had shifted positions, and their new places seemed more comfortable. It was as if something which had been in his line of vision had now been removed, something that had been an obstacle to discovering how to change the external scene. But he distrusted this whole series of private experiences that had forced themselves upon him since he had come here. He was used to long stretches of intolerable boredom punctuated by small crises of disgust; these violent disturbances inside himself seemed no part of his life. They were much more a part of this senseless place he was in. Still, if that were the way the place was going to affect him, he had better get used to the effects and learn how to deal with them.

  When Chocron returned he carried the box with him, but this time the bills in it were smaller, brownish-green, violet, and there were fewer of them. He set the box on the desk and still standing, wrote in his notebook for Dyar to see: 1260 @ l000p. «Count,» he said.

  It took him a long time, even though most of the bills were new and crisp.

  Well, this is fine, he thought, when he had finished. Twenty-five thousand two hundred bucks or thereabouts and no one to stop you. You just walk out. He looked up at Chocron’s face, curiously, for a second. No one but Wilcox. It was true. And Wilcox alone — not Wilcox with the police. By God, what a situation, he thought. It’s almost worth playing, just for the hell of it.

  He did not pay much attention to Chocron’s handshake and to the steep stairs that led down into the street. Walking along slowly, being jostled by water carriers and elderly Jewish women in fringed shawls, he kept his eyes on the pavement, not thinking. But he felt the glossy paper around the box, and knew that Chocron had wrapped it carefully, that it was once again a parcel from the Galeries Lafayette. He went beneath a high arch where Arabs hawked bananas and thick glassware; to the left he recognized Thami’s café.

  When he looked inside the door the radio was not playing. It was dark in the café, and he had the impression that the place was practically empty.

  «Quiere algo?» said the qaouaji.

  «No, no». The air was aromatic with kif smoke. A hand grasped his arm, squeezed it gently. He turned.

  «Hello,» said Thami.

  «Hi!» It was almost like seeing an old friend; he did not know why, except that he
had been alone all during a day that had seemed endless. «I didn’t think you’d be here».

  «I told you I’m always here».

  «What d’you have a home for?»

  Thami made a face and spat. «To sleep when I have no other place».

  «And a wife? What d’you have a wife for?»

  «Same thing. Sit down. Take a glass of good tea».

  «I can’t. I have to go». He looked at his watch: it was quarter of four. «I have to go fast». The walk down to the Crédit Fonder was only a three-minute one, but he wanted to be sure and get there before they shut that iron grille.

  «Are you going up or down?»

  «To the Zoco Chico».

  «I’ll walk with you».

  «Okay». He did not want Thami along, but there was no way out of it, and anyway, he thought they might have a drink afterward.

  As they walked, Thami looked disparagingly down at his own trousers, which were very much out of press and smeared with grease.

  «My old clothes,» he remarked, pointing. «Very old. For working on my boat».

  «Oh, you bought that boat?»

  «Of course I bought it. I told you I was going to». He grinned. «Now I have it. Mister Thami Beidaoui, propietario of one old boat. One very old boat, but it goes fast».