The rabies scare blew over in a week. The saliva tests proved negative, and the animals were returned to loving homes. But though the alarm proved false, the bitterness did not subside. People swore they'd get even no matter how long it took.
There was no logic, he knew, to these European feuds, yet the city seemed riddled with them-hatreds and vendettas that possessed the foreigners, a form of sustenance by which they renewed themselves and by which, he sometimes felt, they'd be devoured.
When he described the dog-and-servant feud to Kalinka, she shook her head and laughed.
"I know you think it's funny," he said, "but it took three days to straighten out."
"Oh, Hamid, I'm sorry," she said. "It's just so ridiculous-that you have to spend your time on such silly things."
"Yes, it is ridiculous. I know. All my work. All of it."
"Oh, Hamid-" She edged closer to him, took hold of his hand. "Poor Hamid, so much trouble you have, so many troubling affairs."
"What can I do? I'm supposed to police these people."
"Can you transfer to another section, get away from them for a while?"
He shrugged. It had taken him years to get where he was. He'd always wanted to be chief of the foreign section. Now he had the job, and all the misery of it too.
"Listen," she said, "please don't be angry with me, Hamid. You've helped me so much, freeing me from hashish, talking with me, helping me so I could face the world and discover who I am. Well, maybe now I can help you a little too. Because you're a prisoner, Hamid-a prisoner of the Mountain. There're so many more important things than the things that happen there. Injustice, cruelty-I see it so clearly now, and you must free yourself so you can deal with them."
Injustice, cruelty. She was speaking of Dradeb, of course, and in the same words used so often by Achar. Had the surgeon put her up to this? Were he and Bennani using her to get him to help them in Dradeb? He dismissed the notion as absurd, but it set him to thinking about his life.
He had thought that if he could understand Zvegintzov and Kalinka, get to the bottom of their past, then the mystery of all the foreigners would be revealed, and the motives for all their curious actions would become clear to him at last. It hadn't happened. He was still confused, and now Kalinka was implying that he had a narrow vision of the world. A prisoner of the Mountain-was she right about that? He wondered. Could she by some intuitive route have come in a few weeks to a comprehensive grasp of the city while he'd become lost in a sideshow, the foreign colony, so many years? This notion-that for years he'd been missing Tangier's essential point-was too terrible to face.
It's the fast, he thought, that's clouding up my mind. He'd begun to get headaches from lack of food and interrupted sleep, could hardly bear any longer the deprivation of water in the day. Even his meetings with Robin at Haifa Cafe seemed boring and irrelevant now. While his favorite informer spieled out gossip, he stared in agony across the Straits.
"— Percy Bainbridge, you know, Hamid, the failed inventor, the sycophant-well, he just won a fortune at the Casino Municipal. Amazing! And, oh dear! I nearly forgot-Inigo's broken off with Pumpkin Pie. Yes, it's finally happened. He's gotten rid of that crazy lad. Now he's secluded himself to work on an enormous canvas, a double portrait, erotic to be sure, of Tessa and David Hawkins, our incestuously involved brother-and-sister horseback riding act-"
Who were these people? Did he know them? How many years had he wasted caring about their pointless lives?
"— Anyway, let me tell you, I've great plans for little Pie. Now that he's 'wild chicken,' out of Inigo's sphere, I'm going to put him together with Herve Beaumont, who keeps telling me he wants to become a full-time queen. Pie's a little dangerous, but Herve can handle that. There's no better hustler around, I think, to teach a boy all the tricks-"
Hamid turned away. Robin's mention of Herve Beaumont brought back sad thoughts of Farid. He'd seen his brother many times since his intrusion in the rug room, but neither of them had spoken of the incident, as if it hadn't happened and Hamid hadn't seen what he had seen. It didn't matter anyway, he supposed. They were brothers and loved each other as brothers should. Farid was entitled to live his life as he liked. And yet it seemed to Hamid that in that moment in the rug room he had stood between opposing worlds which he could not put together in his mind.
Could Kalinka help him reconcile the foreigners' Tangier which he policed with the Arab city in which he lived? Could she give him a vision of Tangier in which all its facets would finally be clearly joined? She'd said he'd liberated her from hashish, and now she would free him from the Mountain. Was that possible? Was she right? Could she really have become so strong?
He had a dream. He was lost in a medina-not the medina of Tangier, for he knew his way through that, but a new and strange medina, a maze of alleyways and buildings, narrow streets that turned at odd angles, filled with people crying out in European tongues. Yes, that was what was strange-there were no Arabs in these streets. It was a medina for Europeans, which was impossible of course, a European labyrinth in which he was caught and trapped and lost. But then Kalinka appeared, slim and straight in a Vietnamese dress. She beckoned to him. He followed her. She became his guide, led him through the labyrinth, and showed him how he might escape.
A Night of Five Parties
Two-thirds of the way through Ramadan the foreign community of Tangier became possessed. The social madness, the effort to transform a disastrous summer into a glittering fete, reached a peak when five parties of varying elegance and size were scheduled for a single August night.
Everyone's appetite had been whetted, prior to that sweltering evening, by the presence in Tangier harbor of Henderson Perry's enormous yacht. That magnificent boat, The Houston Gusher, anchored in plain sight, seemed to advertise the festivities to come.
Those fortunate enough to be invited to Perry's "Castlemaine" would have a chance to devour his Beluga caviar and God only knew how many bottles of his fine champagne. The American Ambassador and half the Moroccan royal family were coming up from Rabat. There was even a rumor (incorrect, as it turned out) that the Shah of Iran would secretly fly in.
In the event that one were not invited to Perry's, the situation was still not bleak. Countess de Lauzon was throwing a rival affair-"an evening of fantasy," she said-at which her guests, the sons of Sodom and the daughters of Gomorrah, were encouraged to appear in outrageous dress.
Then there were the Manchesters, who'd invited their friends to "drink the dregs" on the eve of their departure for Fort Lauderdale. Willard and Katie weren't aware of the other parties when they sent their invitations out, and later, on account of pride, they couldn't change the date. It didn't matter anyway, according to Robin Scott, since their circle barely touched the higher orbits. Peter Zvegintzov, Dan Lake, the Foster Knowles', and the Clive Whittles had accepted, the Fufus were probables, and the Ashton Codds had promised to "try."
The gathering of Tangier Players club members at Jill and David Packwood's Shepherd's Pie was the lowest of the parties in social terms, but held the promise of high drama nonetheless. The Packwoods' little restaurant on the beach would be closed to tourists for the night. Once a nasty bit of TP business was concluded, there would be a beer-and-sausages party to celebrate the end of Laurence Luscombe's reign.