Ilse was lying under the covers on the edge of the bed, the mound of her body slim and small in the soft lamplight.
Beecher collected an ashtray, matches and cigarettes, and placed them on the bedside table. He stretched out on top of the covers, and sighed with weary contentment as his body sank down into the gentle mattress. For a moment he considered the effort involved in lighting a cigarette. He would have to get up on his elbow, shake one from the pack, light it. That wasn’t all. He would have to place the ashtray so that he could stretch his arm out in the darkness and knock the ash off safely.
It seemed like too much trouble.
“Are you going to sleep now?” Ilse asked him, barely whispering the words.
“Yes,” he said.
A little later he heard her crying. He turned his head and blinked his eyes to bring her features into focus. Tears moved down her cheeks, glistening like quicksilver in the darkness.
She wanted to be comforted, he knew. Made to feel happy and secure with her femaleness attested to and celebrated. But it was like the cigarette. It was just too much trouble. It was a selfish decision, he realized, but sometimes gentleness was a privilege of the strong. Don Willie had probably been gentle to her, he thought. In whatever ways he could. The idea rankled him. He turned his back on her soft sobs and punched the pillow up under his head. But despite his bone-deep weariness, it seemed a long time before he fell asleep.
19
Sergeant O’Doul and the redhead were waiting for them in the cool dawn at the Café Rouge et Noir. Both were obviously impressed by Ilse’s shyness and when the car swept away from Agadir, with the soldiers in front and Beecher and Ilse in back, Sergeant O’Doul struck the informed and protective tone of an announcer on a sight-seeing bus.
“Don’t waste your time on this real estate,” he said, catching Ilse’s eye in the rear-vision mirror. “It could be under water for all the good it is. But wait till you see the souk in Marrakech. There’s something for you.”
The redhead was quivering with a miserable hang-over, the peak of his cap pulled down against the sun, and his dark bushy mustaches hanging limply about his pale lips. But the sergeant, true to the canons of his rank, was charged with energy, eyes bright and alert, cheeks shaved and ruddy, and a cigarette piping a constant flow of nicotine into his tough and compact body.
He handled the car with arrogant competence, fingertips resting lightly on the wheel, the speedometer needle brushing seventy.
They rushed through a ripe red countryside so rich with color that it seemed to be blazing back at the sun. The road curbed smoothly between flat fields of wheat, orange groves, and hill farms with terraced slopes swirling away from them in hypnotic symmetry. Berber women worked the fields, unveiled, weathered and strong, faces tattooed in tribal markings, symbolic arrangements of blue dots marking their chins or foreheads. The Berber villages were clusters of mud-walled huts, fenced by stands of dusty paddle cactus. In the pastures small children tended herds of goats and cows. The girls wore their hair clubbed with bright ribbons, and their faces were dark and hard as gypsies. A constant parade of camels lurched on the horizon, tottering yearlings and old males with hides mangy and worn as shabby carpeting; some were teamed with donkeys, others walked dusty paths around ancient water wheels. And everywhere the sun fell and burned on the stark, blood-red earth.
“Nothingville,” Sergeant O’Doul said. “Give these gooks an American john and they’d probably wash potatoes in it.”
The redhead pressed his temples gingerly. “But they got a nice peaceful slant on life. What are we rushing for, tell me that?”
“You dope, we’re going to Casablanca.”
Marrakech rose against the sky, an expanse of palm trees circled by the snow-tipped peaks of the Atlas mountains. As they approached they saw the red-clay buildings climbing with jasmine and bougainvillaea, and the clean wide boulevards lined with orange trees and date palms. At the circular intersection, fountains shot sprays of crystal water into the dry, transparent air.
Sergeant O’Doul insisted they stop to see the markets, and Beecher tried to accept the delay philosophically. They left the car and started on foot for the souk, pushing their way through beggars whining at their knees and peddlers hawking camel bells, brass jugs, hashish pipes, and bolts of brilliantly dyed fabric.
Beecher felt conspicuous and uneasy; O’Doul’s braying and critical opinion of everything in sight resounded hideously in the narrow streets. For the most part they were ignored by the Arabs, but occasionally Beecher saw an eye flash at them over a veil, or a shopkeeper looking up to regard them with a speculative frown.
In the souk it was better. The sergeant’s flamboyance was muted, if not overcome, by the noise and color of the market stalls, the breathless crush of the crowds. Beecher wished that his nerves would relax, and that he could enjoy this shrieking wonderland. The streets were cleanly swept, and the air was fresh with the smell of leather and sandalwood, sweet with the tang of mint tea. Ilse’s reserve had diminished; she was staring with excitement at the spice stalls with their sacks of paprika and cumin, and the colors spilling from open drawers of saffron and coffee beans, dried peppers and powdered rose leaves. In tiny open cubicles sewing machines droned like bees, and tailors manipulated basting threads with hands and feet, using their bare toes as cunningly as fingers. The sunlight gleamed on polished brass, and lay in melting tones on pale yellow leather.
Beecher had only one scare, but it set his heart pounding; a policeman in a black uniform and white helmet trailed them for several blocks, occasionally tugging at his little beard and glancing at a notebook in his hand. He was a young man, with a look of industry and perseverance in his eager eyes and straight back, but he seemed puzzled by the American soldiers, or wary of them; Beecher hoped fervently that their uniforms represented the terrors of officialdom to him and raised pictures in his mind of deep pitfalls in tangled jungles of red tape — those traps for the overzealous which had been created by the sticky presence of sanctioned foreign troops on Moroccan soil.
But he could think of nothing to disarm his obvious suspicion, or increase his equally obvious timidity, until finally, acting on nervous inspiration, he asked O’Doul to let him try on his garrison cap. He proposed sentiment as an excuse. “I haven’t put one on since I left the Air Force. I’d like to see how it feels.”
O’Doul was enthusiastic. “We’ll have you re-enlisting, you keep up this Auld Lang Syne bit.” He clapped the peaked cap on Beecher’s head, adjusted it to a smart angle, then clicked his heels and winged a salute at him. “Gook squad, ready for inspection, sir!”
Beecher risked a quick look from the corner of his eye. The policeman had stopped at an intersection a dozen yards away and was watching him with a solemn frown. He shrugged and scratched his chin when Beecher returned the sergeant’s salute, then sighed and strolled away, with only the faintest of frowns lingering on his dark, serious features.
They returned to the car through the streets of the dyers, where long wet skeins of wool in red and green and blue and yellow dripped from overhead poles like fantastic Spanish moss. They drank mint tea and ate pinchitas in a dark restaurant, and it was the middle of the afternoon when they rolled out of Marrakech.
It was dark when they got to Casablanca, and O’Doul parked near the center of the city, a block from the Hotel Mansour. He cursed the crowds, the traffic, and policemen swinging their white batons.