When I had finished I left the paper unsigned. ‘It will be signed when my servant and I are released with my luggage and my films,’ I told him. ‘At the station.’
Hadj Idder was beaming with relief and bore the happy air of one who has seen a dear friend reach a sensible decision and save himself from danger.
The vizier had taken his gold and his signed portrait away and I was beginning to suspect a further trick when ten minutes later a somewhat nervous guard in a grubby djellabah entered bearing a large hessian sack which obviously contained the film cans. After he dumped the sack down and turned the big crude keys to unlock our leg-irons, he lit a cigarette. Then he glared at us, as if we were to blame for his predicament, and slouched off, cursing us for dirty infidels. Though the door of the cell had been left open, this was not particularly unusual. There was no way out of the prison without permission and the jailers’ charges were so well disciplined that few dared crawl a further inch towards the door, let alone enter the common corridor.
An hour later, Hadj Idder reappeared. He had brought us heavy djellabahs to put on over our remaining rags. He then gave stern orders to the same guard whose expression changed rapidly from chagrin to terror to reconciliation. Then, with sullen resentment, the Arab led us up the steps before pausing at the door into the warren of passages which had brought us here. In French, Hadj Idder called from below. ‘When my master returns he will be angry. He is obliged to punish those who tamper with his women. Therefore you would be wise, both of you, to remove yourselves from Morocco as soon as possible.’
‘We have no car,’ I said. ‘And the plane is gone. We were supposed to have train tickets, but - ‘
‘How you leave is of no interest to me.’ He spoke casually.
‘Will you not also be punished for helping us?’ I asked the plump negro. ‘Perhaps you had better come too?’
Hadj Idder was amiably reassuring. He indicated our less than knowing guide. ‘What the Glaoui discovers and what he does not care to discover are his concern. But you need not fear for me. Some dog shall have to be punished so that my master’s honour can be satisfied. The dog will be beaten and executed and that will be the end of the matter. Assuming, of course, that you are by then on your way to another country.’ He gave a sharp order to the guard, who gloomily flung the sack onto his back.
Jacob Mix wanted to know if some of the film he himself had shot could be returned to him. Hadj Idder heard this request with appreciative amusement. ‘I hope you enjoy your freedom as much as I have enjoyed your comradeship,’ he said to Mr Mix in what was probably intended for a compliment, but he did not reply to the request.
I had found distasteful Hadj Idder’s hint that Miss von Bek had also been involved with Mr Mix. No doubt he meant me to look on my friend with suspicion, to poison my mind against him. It was impossible to imagine even the wild Rosie von Bek contemplating an affaire with an ordinary American darkie! I was about to confront Hadj Idder on this when the vizier stepped backwards into the shadows and was gone. The muttering Arab, who had been ordained to the rôle of scapegoat in Hadj Idder’s elegant plot, led us at such a snail’s pace through the maze and took so long to reach the end that I began to suspect a further trap, or that he would abandon us to some fresh threat. But at last we were in the dark, listening streets of the mellah, outside the house of the wretched Jew whom Brodmann had betrayed. The guard left the sack at our feet and backed away. Mr Mix hefted the sack and grinned. ‘Here’s The Masked Buckaroo, Max. He’s all yours.’ But when I failed to lift both the sack and the bag, he took pity on me, though his attitude remained cool, and he picked up the bag, striding ahead while I followed with the sack. I remained nervous. I could still not fully determine El Glaoui’s motives for releasing us. But Brodmann would surely be furious when he discovered my escape and would try to involve the French and Spanish authorities. We were still therefore in considerable danger. As we paused in the narrow space between one street wall and another, the archway ahead of us suddenly blazed with light and we heard the sound of an engine turning over. The Arab had already dropped well behind us. Cautiously we advanced up to the archway and the broader road beyond. A modern Buick sat in the shadows with its motor running, a pale, frowning Berber face staring from the cab. ‘Taxi ordered by Monsieur Josef,’ said the driver a little impatiently. ‘To go to the railway depot.’
‘That’s us,’ said Mr Mix and he opened the door for me to enter the comfortable interior and sit there with my bag on my knees desperately wishing that I could void my bowels, which had now been transmuted into water. Mr Mix put the sack of films on the floor as he settled back in the seat. ‘The only problem we have now is that we don’t have Fromental’s tickets and have no way of buying them. It’s not like an ordinary railroad office here. You have to do everything through the military.’
The car had left the mellah and pushed into the busier streets of the city. It crawled along the far edge of the Djema al Fna’a. Even now, as I fled for my life, I felt drawn to the Congress of the Dead, so ironically named. Here was every kind of life being lived at its most intense. Yet we are also the dead. We are also the ghosts of the unborn. We are our own betrayed children. Every evening at sunset these people poured into the square to perform a scene Griffith himself could not have bettered, to present a thousand cameos, a thousand little morality plays, for the benefit of an audience responding with all the spontaneity that once greeted those much-disputed performances first proclaimed across the boards of The Swan and The Globe; an audience frank and tolerant as all good-hearted peasants the world over.
The car pushed through the press of beggars, tumblers, oracles and story-tellers, through snake-charmers holding their dying, disenvenomed cobras high above their heads, through musicians with flute, tambourine and lute. Occasionally the Buick was forced to stop altogether as the bodies refused to part. Against the glass appeared the grinning faces of little boys, while behind them I observed the nosy disapproval of old men, the envious contempt of youths, the intense curiosity of the veiled women, and I had the impulse to cry out to them, to speak of the world I could have given them. Then, for a moment, I wondered if my world was indeed any better than the one they knew. Perhaps it was not right to bring the twentieth century to the fourteenth. Would it not be best to leave them in peace?
But can expansive Carthage ever leave Europe in peace? She sends Turkish and Tunisian guest-workers through the whole of Northern Europe. Now Ali Baba and Sinbad are heroes as familiar in Stockholm as Lohengrin and Tannhäuser once were. But has the musselman in his turn adopted our chivalric epics? Do Lancelot and Parsival thrill the blood of little boys in Baghdad and Bengazi? An honest answer tells the whole story. Carthage forbids anything save her own legend. She is paramount. Carthage conquers inch by inch. Half the slogans on the Ladbroke Grove walls are in unreadable languages. The wall is all that is left to the unheard, the unenfranchised, the silenced of this world. Why has the spray-can replaced the ballot-paper? Perhaps because people are informed by a natural will to evil and chaos, but I think it more likely that they are moved by the knowledge that nowhere in the halls of power is their opinion represented. I do not blame them for losing faith in their constitutions. I do blame them, however, for turning their backs on God.