Tangier: A Novel Read online

  TANGIER

  a novel

  Stephen Holgate

  Blank Slate Press

  Saint Louis, MO 63116

  Copyright © 2017 Stephen Holgate

  All rights reserved.

  Blank Slate Press is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC

  www.amphoraepublishing.com

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical or contemporary accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.

  For information, contact:

  Blank Slate Press

  4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116

  www.amphoraepublishing.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Cover art: IStock

  Set in Adobe Caslon Pro and Avenir Next Ultra Light

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939473

  ISBN: 978-1943075287

  To Felicia, for her faith

  Contents

  PART I: FALL 1995

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  PART II: SUMMER 1940

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  PART III: FALL 1995

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  PART IV: SUMMER 1940

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  PART V: FALL 1995

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  PART VI: FALL 1940

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  PART VII: FALL 1995

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Envoi

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  TANGIER

  PART I

  FALL 1995

  ONE

  Then the ship broke through the fog, and he could see Tangier on the horizon, its ancient medina glowing white in the autumn sun. Unknown scents, speaking of deserts and distant mountains, stirred on the currents of the warm air.

  “Morocco. Africa,” Chaffee whispered to himself, the words hard and exotic on his tongue. Land of the Arabs, edge of the Sahara. I should have come earlier, he told himself, when I was young. But, I didn’t know—couldn’t have known—one day I would have no choice.

  Chaffee ran his fingers through his wisps of graying hair and sagged against a stanchion like the old man he would be in a few years.

  He stood at the rail and felt the exhaustion of the last twenty-six hours pulling at him like a drug—the flight from Washington, the bus into Madrid, the cold, rattling train ride down to the ferry at Algeciras. Washington. If the papers got hold of this they’d play it on the front page: Disgraced Official Flees Oversees After Resignation.

  “Screw ’em,” Chaffee muttered. A young boy looked up at the man talking to himself. Chaffee scowled at him and the boy skittered off.

  The babble of foreign tongues ground at his nerves—Spanish, French, a little English, but mostly something else altogether foreign that he knew must be Arabic.

  He peered across the water at the whitewashed walls of the old quarter, the buildings crowded onto the bluffs like a jumble of discarded jewel boxes. To the east, a line of office buildings and apartment houses straggled out along the low hills.

  The questions rose in his mind once more: My father’s home? My father’s grave?

  Leaning over the rail, Chaffee looked back toward the wall of fog from which they had emerged. Everything—Spain, the Rock of Gibraltar, Europe—everything comforting and familiar was lost to sight. He drew a deep breath and turned again to face Tangier, growing larger on the horizon, where it had always been, waiting for him.

  “Business or pleasure?”

  Groggy with exhaustion and dislocation, Chaffee looked blankly at the uniformed man on the other side of the counter.

  “Monsieur, you are here for business or pleasure. What visa?”

  “I . . . It’s a personal visit.”

  He knew not to ask what visa category applied to seeking the dead.

  The man stamped his passport without looking up and Chaffee emerged from the customs house, shouldering his way through the gantlet of young men milling along the curb, all of them too thin, too desperate, speaking in a bedlam of tongues. And there, before him, was the city, where it had always been, waiting for him.

  “Guide?”

  “Taxi?”

  “Senor, quiere . . . ”

  “Un hotel, monsieur?”

  “Kif, mein herr? You vant to smoke some kif?”

  He remembered a friend telling him, “The real Casablanca is nothing like the movie. But Tangier is. You can get into a lot of trouble very quickly in Tangier.”

  He collapsed into the back seat of the first taxi in line, the springs groaning under him. The car had no seatbelts, and Chaffee careened from side to side as the driver dodged from lane to lane in the slow, heavy traffic with the trance-like concentration of kid playing a video game. He was about to tell the man to stop and let him walk when he pulled up to a dingy three-story building on a narrow street. Its wooden door held an unpolished brass plaque: “Hotel les Ambassadeurs.”

  “My God, is this it?”

  The driver squinted at Chaffee in the mirror like a croupier wondering if the loser of a foolish bet would make a scene. “Hotel les Ambassadeurs,” he said in heavily accented English. “Like you say.”

  When the travel agent back in Georgetown recommended the place, Chaffee had pictured a large modern hotel faced with sheets of glass and graced with a fountain in front of a wide drive. Men in fezzes would bow and open the door for him as he arrived. But the agent probably read the newspapers and assumed Chaffee couldn’t afford that kind of place anymore.

  He handed the driver a five dollar bill. When the man smiled for the first time since they’d left the port, he knew he’d overpaid.

  An old man in a fez walked by. Chaffee opened the door for himself.

  A short, dapper Moroccan in a brown suit stood behind the front desk. “Monsieur?”

  For most of his childhood Chaffee had spoken French with his mother—her native language—until one day when he was fourteen she said, “It’s time to stop this,” and abruptly switched to English, disincorporating without explanation the isolated French village inhabited solely by the two of them. Since then he’d always expected that, when needed, his French would come back to him like water flowing from a rediscovered spring. Instead, he could barely manage to find his words in English. “Chaffee. A reservation. I have a reservation.”

  “Chay-fee.” The dapper man consulted a large book in front of him, flipping its pages back and forth before slapping it closed and shaking his head. “No, monsieur, I have no reservation for a Monsieur Chaffee.”

  “But my travel agent—”

  “Yes?”

  Chaffee tried to summon some
thing of his old bull persona, the gruff manner that had once turned his aides’ knees to jelly. “My reservation was for a week.” But the note of righteous displeasure he meant to hit had, in his weariness, slipped out as the squeak of a querulous old man.

  The man behind the desk raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “Are you still going on about that?” but said, “It is not a problem.”

  And apparently it wasn’t. The small room on the top floor lacked air-conditioning, a television, and a bathtub, but the bed was comfortable and a pleasant breeze came in through the open window, which offered a view of the port and the Straits of Gibraltar.

  Despite years of advice not to sleep before evening if he was to recover from jet lag, Chaffee lay down and shut his eyes. Just for a moment.

  A telephone ringing. That’s how it had begun. He’d been sleeping and the telephone rang. Even after picking up the receiver he hadn’t understood at first why she was calling.

  “But that’s what I’m telling you.” Impatience gravelled her voice, “Your father’s not dead.”

  “How could he not be dead, Mother? He’s always been dead.”

  Her scornful voice hissed in his ear. “For you, of course. For me, no.” Despite fifty-five years in the United States, her French accent had never surrendered to its environment.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Mother? You’ve done what?”

  “I’ve received a letter from your father.”

  “What? Be serious. You can’t expect me to believe that—”

  “Calm down, Christopher.”

  “Mother, you can’t have received a letter from a dead man.”

  “Calme toi, Christopher. Je suis sure.”

  “Sure of what, for chrissake?”

  “Are you listening at all, Christopher? I told you. He sent it during the war. Your father. He sent it in 1940.”

  Had she gone mad? Chaffee swore he could hear a thin sweat beading up on his brow.

  “Nineteen forty,” he repeated. Fifty-five years ago. The year he was born.

  He managed to collect himself, refused to give his mother the satisfaction of knowing she’d astonished him. “All right, he sent a letter from prison before he died. Why do you have to call me at . . . What time is it anyway?”

  “He didn’t send it from prison.”

  “You said he was in prison. Locked up in Vichy during the war, and they all died there.”

  “I never said they all died. I said he died. That’s all I was told. Now I think he didn’t die.”

  “Why in the world do you think—”

  “Je le sente. I feel it. J’ai la lettre. Sans aucun doute. Et—”

  “Speak English, dammit. When did you start speaking French again? Don’t do that to me.” She went quiet and he muttered into the silence. “How could a letter take fifty-some years to—?”

  “How do I know? The embassy sent it. They found it weeks ago they said. Then they found me.”

  “But your name is Chaffee, not Laurent anymore. How could they have—?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is the embassy—”

  “Which embassy?”

  “Theirs.”

  “Which ‘theirs?’”

  “Mine—back then. His. The French Embassy. . . . Say something, Christopher.”

  “Don’t let any of this get into the papers.”

  “The papers? Why should they care about you anymore?”

  “I’m just saying . . . ”

  “Bouf! You’re still angry about—”

  “Damn right I’m angry. Those bastards at The Washington Post . . . ”

  “Christopher, they’re not the ones who should have—”

  “I’d already paid the agency back. I’d still have my job if those sonsabitches at the Post hadn’t decided they wanted to nail someone in the administration. Decided to make a big deal about a couple thousand dollars in travel expenses. I mean, I’m the director of a federal agency—”

  “Not any more, Christopher.”

  He muttered unintelligibly, gripped again by the anger of destroying his career over something so banal, writing a three instead of a one in the thousands column of his travel voucher. All right, doing it several times. Over a number of years. Always citing non-existent receipts he claimed to have lost. He’d led his agency well, for years. He deserved a break he told himself. When he thought of what he could have made in the private sector . . .

  “I’m just saying it didn’t have to be a big deal. No one was telling me I had to resign. Then it got into the papers. And that’s when you find out who your enemies are.”

  “Yes, Christopher, did you read the latest edition?”

  “No. I don’t even look at the goddamned thing anymore. What did it say?”

  “It says there might be a . . . what is the word?”

  “How should I know what the word is? You’re the one—”

  “Indict. Is that a word? It said they might indict you. Christopher, are you there?”

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  “What? I’m only telling you what’s in the—”

  “Drop it. Just drop it, Mother.”

  “All right.” He could see her making that Gallic shrug. “But this letter from your father.”

  “Letter?” Caught in his own obsessions, it took Chaffee a moment to come back. “Yeah, the letter. It doesn’t make any sense. If he’s been somewhere else all this time, why wouldn’t he have contacted us? Why would he still be in . . . Where did you say it came from?”

  “Morocco. Tangier. I don’t know why anything. But I feel it strongly, I know he’s not dead.”

  Chaffee sighed. “And I suppose you want me to go there and look for him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So, why don’t you go?”

  “The trip would kill me.”

  Chaffee started to say something irretrievable, but stopped himself. “Look, Julie’s still working. She can’t get away long enough to—”

  “You can.”

  “Sure. Why not? I’m unemployed now.” A river of silence flowed through the telephone. “So you expect me to drop whatever I’m doing and just—”

  “Do you have a choice?”

  “Sure. I can say no.”

  “No. You can’t, Christopher.”

  He slammed the phone down but it wouldn’t stop ringing. In fact, it had been ringing even while they spoke.

  Finally, Chaffee understood and woke up, groped for the receiver.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Monsieur Chaffee? This is the front desk. You asked for a wake-up call.”

  Chaffee had no memory of making any such request. “What time is it?”

  “It is three o’clock, Monsieur Chaffee.”

  He’d been asleep for two and a half hours.

  “Yes. All right. Merci.” He slumped on the edge of the bed and caught the stink rising from his clothes. He opened his suitcase and pulled out a fresh shirt, nearly as rumpled as the one he wore. From its folds a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. The photocopy of his father’s picture.

  His father. Since boyhood the words had carried a sanctified gravity. While other kids had dads, he had a photo. This photo. It stood on the buffet in his mother’s dining room behind an unlighted candle, like an abandoned shrine. A formal portrait, very much of its time, of a man in his late twenties dressed in a dark pin-striped suit, strong, thin face, skin porcelain smooth. A handkerchief, folded just so, peeked out from his breast pocket. His faint complacent smile reflected the hauteur appropriate to a young man recently appointed to the Foreign Ministry.

  How many times during his boyhood had visitors remarked on Chaffee’s strong resemblance to the handsome man in the photo? They invariably added that he would one day live up to his father’s myriad virtues, his intelligence, grace, and his bravery in the face of tyranny that led to his imprisonment and martyrdom. Yet the tone of their v
oices spoke more of skepticism than certainty and their praise left him feeling somehow diminished.

  When he had asked his mother about him, she had little to say. She spoke of his idealism, his love of country, his hatred of its enemies, of Hitler and the Nazis, until it wore on his nerves. A saint’s virtues. Noble. Bloodless.

  When no one was home, Chaffee would gaze at the photo, vowing that one day he would buy himself a suit like the one in the photo, would look just as handsome, just as untouchable. As for his father’s virtues, they were what had led him to prison without ever meeting his son, and he wanted nothing to do with them. He would be no one’s martyr.

  As a boy, Chaffee had tried to imagine playing ball with his father, eating dinner with him, riding in a car, having a dad like the other guys. Instead, he could only picture him like this, in the dark suit with the handkerchief poking from his pocket. It was funny, he thought, the peculiar nostalgia one can have for moments that should have happened, but never did.

  Chaffee stood in the middle of his hotel room and put the photo in his pocket next to the copy of the letter from his father. Another copy. He had wanted to bring the original letter, but when he went to see his mother the day before he departed she had refused to give it to him.

  “It might have some clues in it,” he had argued, “Something in the type of paper or the ink or something.”

  “Clues,” she scoffed. “You’re not Sherlock Holmes, Christopher.”

  “I won’t lose it.”

  “Of course you won’t,” she replied, meaning that he couldn’t lose what he didn’t have. Grudgingly, she had agreed to let him make a photocopy.

  Letter and photo in hand, Chaffee descended the stairs into the lobby, stepped out into the sunlit street and headed toward the French consulate.

  TWO

  The assistant French consul, a kid of perhaps twenty-five, propped his elbows on his desk and turned his hands palms up. “I ask for your pardon, but could you please attempt to make more clear what it is you want me to do for you, Monsieur Chaffee?”

  The baroque imprecision of the kid’s English grated on Chaffee, who had at first tried to conduct the conversation in French. At the sound of the American’s accent though, the young diplomat—what was his name? Janvier?—had shaken his head like a spaniel getting the water out of his ears and switched to English.