Yet, as Captain Quelch was fond of quoting from Wheldrake, One sweet moment is worth the suffering of the century. I have no regrets. Soon I shall be dead and I shall die knowing I have done all I could to pass on the wisdom of my experience, to show the world something of what went wrong since 1900. And if they do not wish to listen, I cannot feel guilty. The Holocaust, if you care to call it that, was not my fault, after all, any more than it was Adolf Hitler’s! I think we would do better to ask ourselves ‘Who was betraying whom in those days?’ Then perhaps we might see who continues to betray us and all we dream of. We are the people of the New Testament, not of the Book. El-kitab huwa sa’ab ‘ala ‘l’walad essaghir. Das ist meyn hertz. Rosi! Ayn chalutz, ich bin. Ayn gonif, never! Teqdir tefham el-Kitab da? El-’udr aqbah min ed-denb.
‘The excuse is more shameful than the offence,’ Captain Quelch frequently declared. Which was one reason, he said, he did not make excuses for himself. ‘If I step outside the law, well it’s for my own profit and I take a high risk. But I can’t honestly say, old boy, that I feel I’m doing anything wrong. And most people agree with me, certainly my customers.’
At Mrs Cornelius’s insistence the three of us were in the lobby of the French Line Hotel, about the only civilised place in the city, to meet Major Fromental’s Chief of Police, a soft-faced little man in an unnaturally smart white uniform and a képi which was drawn down almost to his thick, black eyebrows. He introduced himself as Captain Hourel and spoke in smooth, rather affected Parisian tones, assuring us that the slave trade had been completely wiped out under the French. He admitted the local moonshine might have KO’d Mr Mix. It was even possible he had been wounded in a quarrel. ‘But that we shall soon know, gentlemen.’ With the air of a man called from more important business he escorted us from the hotel to his waiting Daimler. The native chauffeur was driving curious youths away with an old-fashioned camel crop, clearly kept for this purpose alone.
In the large, closed limousine we steered through a chaos of trucks and beasts of burden into the old town. Surrounded by the awnings of shops and stalls, busy with donkeys, women and boys, with squatting oldsters, wobbling handcarts, impossible burdens, squalid bargains, Bab Marrakech Square sold the discarded junk of three continents. Tin cans, broken toys, yellowed magazines were offered by ill-fed urchins who threw back the frayed pieces of oil-cloth or old linoleum with which they protected their pathetic wares from the elements and sang their virtues in shrill voices while elsewhere a variety of grubby entertainers performed their frequently puzzling and sometimes grotesque tricks like toddlers in a school yard.
All the news in Casablanca was to be heard here, said Captain Hourel. He sent his Berber sergeant to investigate.
There was nothing to do but take a table outside the cafe and watch the snake-charmers and tumblers go through their rather limited paces while Captain Quelch quietly thanked God for the invention of the printed book and the moving picture. Even these performers had a bedraggled hopeless mood not designed to improve the spirits of their audience. Captain Hourel drove away a group of boys who approached us pointing at their bottoms and their open mouths. ‘They are hungry and they have dysentery,’ Captain Quelch observed with an amiable wave to the departing troupe, whose only response was to scowl and spit. On the far side of the square, under sodden awnings, in heavy woollen djellabahs which even from here stank like wet sheep, men of all ages sat sipping mint tea and discussed the gossip of the day or whatever international news affected the fate of this wretched monument to unchecked commercial greed. ‘It is where the detritus of Africa, Europe and the Middle East finally discovers it can flow no further and it silts up here in a great heap. The population grows greater every week, it’s hard to believe that this was not much more than a village whose people were massacring Frenchmen in this very square less than twenty years ago. After that, of course, Paris had to take control of the damned country. And they’re thanking us now.’
‘All but a few ingrates.’ Presumably Captain Quelch referred to Abd el-Krim.
The sergeant returned with the news that a tall negro had been seen with a party of nomad tinkers buying provisions in the souk only a short distance from the west side of the Bab Marrakech itself. He had visited the shop but the owner had been able to tell him very little. He thought the tinkers had a camp out near the new airfield. ‘Well, let’s get off to the bloody airfield!’ demanded Quelch as if determined to suffer every possible discomfort and inconvenience on this, in his view, pointless quest. ‘Fiat justitia, ruat caelum!, etc.’ And so there was nothing for it but to drive out through the sleeting rain on the freshly-laid wide black road, past a succession of modern concrete and steel factories, to a broad, glittering strip on a horizon as flat as Kansas with one very small white control- and customs-station and a spanking new single-engined mail-carrier, a Villiers biplane of the latest type, bearing the blazons of both France and her Postal Service, on the far side of the field. Near some ruined dirt-walled farm-buildings, cleared in the progress of modernisation, we came upon the tinkers’ abandoned camp. They had left the usual collection of litter and dung, but there was no sign of Mr Mix ever being with them. ‘We shall have to get a Berber tracker,’ Captain Hourel decided. ‘If those people have your friend or have harmed him, don’t worry - we shall soon know.’ But it was clear to me, at least, that he thought the expedition had been a waste of time. He kicked suspiciously at a black and red paper sugar-sack bearing the cheerful features of a French provincial pierrot, and revealed the half-burned corpse of a day-old child. ‘A girl.’ He shook his head. ‘But we’ll have to get after them for that.’
He sighed and spoke in Arabic to his sergeant. The man saluted and took his rifle to stand guard. We drove back to Casablanca in moody silence. ‘We are overworked,’ said Captain Hourel out of the blue. ‘Ever since Lyautey went.’
Captain Hourel assured us that he would send a telegram to the Hope Dempsey just as soon as he knew what had become of Mr Mix. We had to be content with this. We returned to the ship to tell Mrs Cornelius that the entire Casablanca garrison had been put to work to locate our friend and the tinkers who might have captured him. We had also informed the American consul. Privately I wondered if Jacob Mix were fulfilling some strange ambition to journey to the heart of the Dark Continent in search of something he might recognise as his homeland. I could certainly understand this yearning for a place to call home. Scarcely an hour of my own life goes by when I do not remember Kiev and those happy years before War and Revolution robbed me of my past, my mother and my sister.
So furious was Mrs Cornelius at this unexpected but hardly tragic event - I, too, held Mr Mix in considerable affection, but did not fear for a man so evidently resourceful - that she turned almost scarlet and all but accused us both of having sold the negro for Arab silver. ‘ ‘E never said nuffink abart leavin’,’ she said. ‘I’d ‘a sensed it. I’ve orlways bin able ter sense fings like that.’