Abdulla Latif frowned and then said he thought he did. Seymour said that in matters of this sort it was as well to go by recommendation and his acquaintance — a Monsieur Bossu, was it? — had spoken highly of Abdulla’s services. Abdulla bowed and said that he recalled his client perfectly. He had been able to be of use to him on several occasions.
‘Twenty per cent!’ said Mustapha, as they walked away. ‘Twenty per cent!’
Seymour thought he was registering the enormity of the charge. But he wasn’t.
‘See, that’s what those big blokes can get away with. Someone like our friend can go in and they’re all over him. “It’s just twenty per cent for you, sir.” Whereas it’s bloody forty per cent for someone like you or me, Idris!’
‘What was that about a bodyguard?’ asked Idris. ‘Your friend’s not planning a trip down south, is he? Because if he is, we could fix him up.’
‘No, no. There isn’t any friend. It was just a trick to get the information out of him.’
‘Pity!’ said Idris.
‘The journey’s already been made,’ said Seymour. ‘By Bossu.’
And then ‘Just a minute!’ he said. ‘Do you do this sort of thing? Sometimes?’
‘If the money’s right, yes. Why not?’
‘Down south?’
‘Well, probably not far. We’re city people, really.’
‘You didn’t, by any chance, go down with someone to Azrou and Immauzer?’
‘No, no. Miles away.’
‘Too hot!’
‘Bloody camels!’
‘Not our sort of thing.’
‘We have been down occasionally, of course. But that would have been on a run.’
‘And in a truck. I mean, camels!’
‘Okay, not you, then. But you know people who do that sort of thing? Act as a bodyguard?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Mustapha casually.
‘Listen, do you know anyone who’s made a trip down to those places? Azrou and Immauzer? And Tafilalet?’
‘Don’t think so. Could ask around, I suppose.’
‘Would you? It would have been several months ago. I’ve got the dates here. A Frenchman. Carrying money. Quite a lot. Probably would have paid well.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ said Idris.
‘It was bad,’ said Chantale, cast down. ‘It was bad.’
And it was bound to get back to her mother.
Seymour was amused. Here was this woman, who seemed so supremely competent, informed, it appeared, on just about everything. On good terms with all and sundry, able to fix practically anything — and alarmed, like a schoolgirl, that her mother might hear of her transgressions!
‘Your mother?’
‘It was in the quarter,’ said Chantale gloomily. ‘You don’t know our quarter. And you don’t know my mother. Everything in the quarter gets back to her sooner or later.’
‘And that matters?’
‘It does. Apart from everything else it is an offence against the caida. You know about the caida? No? Well, you ought to, because it runs through and affects everything you do in Morocco. It is — well, I suppose the French word for it is etiquette. But it is more than that. It is a sort of web which touches everything. It enters into all a Moroccan does… into the way you conduct yourself to others. Not just politeness but tact, sensitivity, respect. And I’m pretty certain that my mother’s not going to feel I showed a lot of that towards Madame Poiret.’
‘She asked for it!’
‘No, no, that’s a Western thing to say. It’s too brusque, harsh. It sounds aggressive. And that’s part of the problem for Westerners. Whenever they speak, it sounds wrong. It sounds like that. We Westerners-’ She caught herself and laughed. ‘We. Me! In our clumsy way we are always offending against the caida. And when we do, the Moroccan shrinks back. He withdraws. And so the West never quite meets the East. They never quite come into contact. The Moroccans are terribly polite to them but somehow there is no engagement. You have to be sensitive to the requirements of the caida or else you can never really quite speak to a Moroccan.
‘And, of course, if you are a Moroccan, it’s worse. My mother will be shocked and hurt at what I’ve done. She will say that I’ve put her to shame — that everyone will say she’s not brought me up properly. She will think I’ve let her down.’
‘Oh, come on! My impression was that everyone in the crowd agreed with you.’
But Chantale was not convinced.
‘She will feel that even if Madame Poiret was in the wrong, I still ought not to have struck her. She will think it lowering on my part. A lapse of standards. You have to behave properly even to people who don’t behave properly to you. It’s a question of — well, I suppose it’s like noblesse oblige. If you’re part of the caida, you’re like noblesse. That’s the way I ought to think and behave and if I don’t, she will feel she has failed.’
‘But, look-’
Chantale shook her head.
‘You don’t know what it means to my mother. She has struggled to bring me up. And most of the time on her own. And part of that is being true to the way a well-bred Moroccan should behave. The Moroccan bit is important. She doesn’t want me to lose touch with — well, the Moroccan side of me. And now look what I’ve done!’
She looked at him tragically with her large, tear-stained eyes and Seymour found his knees turning to jelly.
‘Put it down to the French side of you!’ he said, in an attempt to lighten things.
She shook her head again.
‘She wouldn’t like that either. She also wants me to be true to my father. And to that side, the French side, as well. She has rather an idealized picture of that, too. He always had such beautiful manners. I mean, to everyone, high or low, the meanest beggar. He always treated them with respect. You could feel it when he spoke to anyone. It was a bit like the caida. Or that’s how she would understand it. So she would feel I’ve let her down on that, too.’
He could see that it was very important to her and that an attempt to jolly her would be wrong.
‘You’re caught between both sides, I see that,’ he said. ‘And perhaps between unrealistic expectations on both sides?’
She shook her head fiercely.
‘No!’ she said. ‘Don’t say that! She is right. I must be true to both sides of me. The best of both sides. That was what my father would have wanted. My mother knows that. And she has tried to bring me up to be like that. Only, sometimes — sometimes it’s not easy.’
‘I think you’re terrific,’ said Seymour. ‘And I think it’s a terrific ideal. And I’m not surprised if you can’t always live up to it.’
He heard a door close somewhere nearby in the house behind the counter and wondered if someone was coming.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘why don’t I take you out to dinner? Or would that be another Western breach of caida?’
She sat back, as if slightly shocked.
Then she smiled.
‘No decent Moroccan girl would allow herself to be seen out at night alone with a man. Even in a restaurant. However-’ she pretended to consider — ‘a French one would, I suppose. Think of me, for the purposes of this evening, as French. I will ask my mother to cover the desk.’
She suggested a place near the Kasbah and a little later they were making their way through some of the streets he’d passed through earlier. Then they had struck him as seedy. Now, however, the darkness concealed the grime and dilapidation and the moonlight picked out things he’d not previously noticed; carved doorways, ornamental arches, delicate columns.
They went through one of the arches into a small patio with a fountain and trees. One of the trees must have been an orange tree for they suddenly walked into a heavy waft of orange blossom. A spiral staircase wound up out of the patio and they found themselves on an upper balcony on which men were sitting on leather cushions around low tables.
They chose a table at one end of the balcony, from which they could look down on to the patio. The evening was heavily warm but the fountain freshened the air. A waiter brought small bowls of olives and nuts and little plates of salted cakes.
Chantale hesitated.