I let the last of the pretty little camels cross my path, and glanced towards the souk immediately across from me. I saw Brodmann. He was unmistakable in a crumpled linen suit and stained panama. To cool himself he carried a small child’s raffia fan in his hand, of the kind the Berber women sell to tourists. When he realised I had seen him he shaded his face and looked away immediately, stepping to the darkness of a spice-seller’s awning. I did not know whether to confront him or ignore him. I tried to think what damage he could do me in Marrakech and decided he must wield no power here. But I was still nervous. I called a cab immediately, telling the driver to whip the horses to a trot. I was in a hurry.
From that moment on I took serious note of Mr Mix’s warnings. The next day, when I went out to my factory, largely to get rid of any evidence of my liaison, I found that a car had been delivered. It was, in fact, the Pasha’s damaged Rolls Royce. A small gesture of peace, perhaps? Or had Mr Mix found a way to get me my engine? The engine, I saw immediately, was completely untouched and could easily be modified for El Nahla, my Bee. (Since the disaster, I had changed the names in the catalogue to those of insects. You can imagine my surprise when I arrived in England to hear them announce they had suddenly invented a Mosquito! I keep my own counsel these days. The truth of my achievement is known to myself and to God and that is all that matters.) With no help on that first day I was able to free the engine from its housing and by the second day I had it in a cradle poised over the yellow and black body of my Bee. By the third day I insisted that Miss von Bek give up more time and help me ease the engine into the modified housing while I demonstrated my ingenious belt-drive to turn the propeller, delivering more than enough power for the delicate little plane which I still considered our best Schneider chance. Miss von Bek warned me that by spending as much time as she was on the engine, she was endangering herself and others. ‘If I am the others,’ I said, ‘do not worry about me. We now have our means of escape! If necessary we shall leave by the same way we arrived in Morocco. What happened to the balloon, by the way?’
He had told her he had put it away for safety. She now believed he kept some kind of trophy museum. She was unusually agitated, even after our love-making, where earlier she frequently became icy and distant. Now when she spoke of El Glaoui’s pleasures her eyes no longer filled with unguessable lusts but with tears. ‘He is a Bluebeard, of sorts,’ she said. ‘Murder is merely one of his more radical instruments of policy. We should not have accepted his hospitality, Max.’
I was too much of a gentleman to remark how readily she had accepted all he had to offer, almost from the moment we left our basket. She had communicated some of her terror to me and I was sympathetic. Hers was not like my fear of Brodmann, awful as that was. Hers was more like my fear of the Egyptian God, hopeless and wretched, allowed to choose only between a lifetime of utter humiliation or painful death. And so, from my position of relative freedom, I was able to comfort her. I did not have to decide between her and Mr Mix. My natural chivalry put me at the service of the woman.
Somehow we still found time for our sexual liaison but I performed now from habit, not from lust.
Sexuality for her had become almost her entire channel of escape; it was a kind of madness in her. She was like one of those people in the ‘difficult’ ward at the New Bethlehem who perform the same few functions over and over again, perhaps locked into some moment when they felt free or safe or alive. Their catharsis, when it comes, is always hideously violent. And, for all that, I could not break the ties of love and fascination with which she had entranced me. I felt that our destinies would be forever entwined.
It had become her compulsion, even as we worked on (he engine, to tell me El Glaoui’s secrets, though I had no further interest in them. Every aspect of Eastern sexual diversion was more than familiar to me and to be told of the different pleasures claimed from circumcised and uncircumcised girls, from neutered boys and so on, was distasteful to me. The Pasha preferred his women uncircumcised in the main, she said, which is why there were so many Europeans in his harem. It was no wonder, I said, that these potentates liked to keep their concubines from public view. The amount of maiming and beating involved gave me the impression that any member of the harem at any one time resembled a boxer after a particularly dirty match. Another reason to retain the veil, I suppose.
He was taking a delight, she said, in revealing more and more to her as she became increasingly ensnared but decreasingly interested in him. She remained, he told her, a guest; her involvement must always be voluntary. That was his special pleasure, she believed. ‘But he has already demonstrated the fate of those who upset him,’ she said. ‘He has never been the same since he saw my Italian passport.’ There had been some sort of execution, I gathered, in one of the cells at Tafouelt and she had been a privileged witness.
I had a clear idea of her position. It would be inhuman to take Mrs Cornelius’s view. What possible motive could Miss von Bek have for blackening the Pasha? I am not the only one to have been told such tales. In France there is a whole literature of it. Mrs Cornelius passed me on a book by a woman who was El Hadj T’hami’s mistress and who worked for the French Secret Service. She was not the only adventuress - or adventurer - attracted to the Pasha’s strange court, to the lure of subtle intrigue, dangerous gossip and thrilling revelations. Of the children hanging in irons, she said nothing.
After 1956 the Glaoui family became professional people and businessmen and adapted almost with relief to the life of the average middle-class Westerner. We have a habit of forgiving tyrants their crimes while alive and forgetting them entirely once they are dead. Do we have so little respect for human suffering? Are we all no more than cattle grazing in some leisurely progress to the slaughterhouse? It was the same in the camps. I could have gone that way, but I applied myself pragmatically to my problem. I made the most of what was available to me. I refused to become a Musselman. I am an engineer. I am a citizen of the 20th century. It is not right that I should be brought low by brutes. I carry within me the great spiritual tradition of Rome and Byzantium. The musselman has neither ambition nor understanding. He rejects all analysis. I am a scientist. I examine and I originate. I take control of my destiny. God helps those that help themselves. This was the Anglo-Saxons’ secret pact with their creator - not to waste His time. If His help were not immediately forthcoming they got on with the job themselves. Sometimes they had enough energy left over to offer God a hand whenever He seemed to be flagging. The Anglo-Saxon is the miracle-worker of the great Christian alliance. The Slav is its soul.
Rosie von Bek, in spite of all anxieties, continued to romanticise me, to make a melodrama of our liaisons. This, too, terrified me. ‘You are truly a Hawk,’ she would say to me as I lay gasping on the piled quilts. ‘You are like one of Si Hammou’s hunting birds. There is a strong case for your being hooded and traced for the rest of your life. You are no longer suited for freedom. You were neither bred nor trained for it. Whoever freed you made a serious mistake. But, of course, it was the Revolution, I suppose. You’d probably be renting out bicycles on the Odessa sea-front now and more or less content, if it hadn’t been for the Bolsheviks.’