"It was."
"It's not. I know we said he was at peace and everything, but Jesus, I don't think of him that way. I don't at all. Everything I see is different."
"I know."
"I lost grandparents before, and an uncle, but with them I actually pictured rest for them. I think of them dead and I picture them lying down. In the grass, in long grass, deep green. Infinitely comfortable. But Jack -"
"I know."
"Jack I picture frozen under ice. He's still awake, and he's frozen there, under the ice. Somewhere else, fucking shocked under the ice, and he's there alone. He's always alone and that's the hardest thing about it. That's the fucking part that makes me murderous. That's why I want that trucker's head, because he's alone under the glass or ice or whatever. He's waiting."
"Listen. Just – I don't want that picture in my head, Will."
"It's not just that we won't do the valley, all that shit," I said, "it's that there's nothing like that anymore. It's just not possible, anything like that anymore. I mean, none of this was supposed to happen in the first place."
"None – none meaning what?"
"You think I want to be here? I don't want to be here. This fucking place is wrong, Hand."
"Where? Here? Marrakesh? How?"
"It's all wrong. You know it's wrong. Everyone knows it's wrong. This fucking place! It's all wrong. We're all here and we're pretending it's not wrong because we're too fucking polite."
We were at the car. Hand had dragged me off the ground and now he rested his palms on the roof, and his chin on the backs of his hands, atop one another.
"I'll drive," he said.
"No, that's okay," I said.
"I want to. Just tell me for real that you want none of this money when we're done."
"None."
"Because I believe that you'd do it. If that's what you're proving – that you'd do it – then I believe you."
"Not the point."
"Fine."
"I'll drive," I said.
"No," Hand said. "I have another idea first."
In a few seconds Hand was in a cab. There was a long line of cabs waiting for straggling tourists, and Hand had gotten into one. I followed him in.
Hand directed the driver around the cul-de-sac and back to our car. The ride took about eleven seconds. We stopped.
"Here?" the cabbie said.
"Yes."
"Yes? Here?"
"Yes."
The cabbie laughed. We gave him an American fifty.
As my face dried and cooled and my breath evened, we did this three more times. He got in another cab immediately and had him drive us around the cul-de-sac and gave him $80 in dirham. It was great. Once we went around the square, once the length of three cars. Each time we paid them extravagantly, each time they took it knowing we knew what we were doing. The cabbies, in contrast to the merchant, knew what was what, knew that none of it really meant anything, or meant everything but in a way we wouldn't ever really understand. Each drove off grinning. Comrades!
The bike boys rode by again.
"Faggots," they said.
We agreed to go to the mountains. We took one more cab, about a block this time, to our car, and headed in the direction we'd last seen the mountains. Where were the mountains? They weren't visible from the city anymore; I drove us in the direction we thought them to be, past the buildings and the tall red walls separating the street from the compounds and castles and soon we were in a rural area, but we were lost.
It was midnight and we were lost in the wide flat land around the city. The air was cooling and the night was quiet. We drove back to the city, and soon found a cabbie, sitting on his yellow Mercedes hood in an alleyway, at a café's outdoor checkered table, next to a group of men playing dominos.
We proposed paying him to lead us, he in his car and we in ours, to the mountains. He was skeptical. Hand grabbed a wad of bills from his thigh pocket and waved it near his ear. Idiot. The man raised a finger to us, asking us to wait, as he walked back to his table, where he conferred with the three men, all heavy-set and moustachioed. They looked, over to us, all at once and then one at a time, then stared down at their hands, as the man continued.
"What are they talking about?" I asked.
"Directions maybe," Hand said, sitting on our hood.
The men went on, their discussions more heated now, staccato bursts of whispers hissed. One man pointed to another, who pointed angrily back at him. The first went through a doorway behind them, an eye on us, and emerged a minute later with a different jacket on. He walked down a side alley, without looking back, while our cabbie approached us, nodded, and got in his car and we in ours. I looked at Hand and he at me, and we both understood that something seemed not right.
Marrakesh is full of tiny alleys no wider than an elephant's ass, and through those we drove, I drove, much too quickly. The walls were no more than six inches from the car. Our rims scraped twice against curbs, planters. It was like driving through the halls of an apartment building. Dozens of times I doubted we'd fit through this or that entranceway, that we'd get stuck like a truck in a tunnel too tight. We guessed and hoped and prayed for deliverance through the labyrinth, narrow and crumbling. Our car whined around the tightest of turns and squeezed through impossible corridors.
Residents stared from windows and doorways – did they? were those faces or? – and those on the street stepped out of our way. We didn't see any other cars, this fact making our passage easier but more unsettling. Were we supposed to be here at all? We were the only two vehicles active in this part of the city, at this time of night.
Through the alleys we sped and then under an arch and suddenly we bled into a large square, high-walled but open. It was a hundred yards left and right, and there – holy shit – was a soccer game going on and we were driving through the middle of it, fifteen young men yelling, thin and high-socked, right in front of us, after midnight. We were in the game. Our car was driving through their midfield, straight through, our car following his.
"Did you see that?" Hand asked.
I did.
"We just drove through a fucking soccer game."
"At one in the morning."
"You are Ronin."
"I am Ronin."
Through a maze of high red walled avenues, precisely as through a maze, and – hell, this went on for half an hour, all this, the alleys, the narrow black stone streets with the men pushing carts, the men sitting on stoops, our two cars buzzing by, no more than two feet from their toes. It was exhilarating though I expected at any moment to be stopped and the car taken and both of us throttled or examined or both -
And now there was a car behind us.
"You see that?" I asked.
"The guy behind us? Shit. Yes."
"Why would there be a car behind us?"
"No idea."
"How many guys inside? Don't look."
"Two."
"Who is it? Don't look."
Hand turned.
"One looks like the guy from the café."
"Which guy?"
"The guy with the jacket. The one who went in and -"
"Okay. Fuck!"
"This is bad."
– You fucking imbecile, Hand.
– I know. I know.
"They're definitely following us," he said.
They were. We were following one car and being followed by another. There were two men in the car behind us, and they were allowing about twelve feet between them and us. The car in front took half a dozen turns, and we took them with him, and the car behind followed. There was no mistake, no coincidence.
"Still there," Hand said.
"I know!"
"They're in it together," said Hand.
"Who?"
"All of them. They're taking us somewhere. To a dead end. We won't be able to back up."
"Shut the fuck up."
My stomach felt grabbed and compressed. I had a fleeting stupid sense of relief that our French resister hadn't decided to join us. Because the future now seemed set: at some point, in a narrow alley, the car in front of us would stop and the car behind would close in and we'd be trapped and killed and disappeared.