CHAPTER 50

Marrakech, Summer 1977 [Then]

Several years before she died Malika told Moz a fairy tale. It was the summer she turned nine and Malika told it without once looking at Moz, her eyes fixed on a distant line of clouds.

Moz told the story to Jake and Celia as they all drove north in the VW campervan, the earth beyond their windows turning from red to yellow and finally to brown as they travelled the two hundred kilometres that took them to Casablanca and three seats on an Air Maroc caravelle to Tangiers, where a ferry to Alicante waited for them.

It was a flat road and mostly straight, dotted occasionally with spindly cedar, larch and imported eucalyptus and it cut through the Middle Atlas, a mountain range so scrawny and underfed by the time the mountains met the Marrakech-Casablanca road that it barely merited the name.

The fields along either side of the road were hedged with prickly pear and occasionally stone, the plots broken into smaller and smaller fragments as farms passed from fathers to sons and parcels of land were divided time and again.

At this point Jake still intended to buy a house in Spain, although he changed his mind shortly after docking at Alicante when three gun-toting, green-cloaked members of the Guarda Civile, having ordered everyone out of the car he'd just bought, emptied Jake's luggage onto the road, dismantled the seats and ripped the spare tyre from its wheel.

A body search followed for each of them.

That was when Celia announced she was going back to Cheyne Walk as soon as possible and Jake decided he might try Amsterdam instead. They had a short and bitter argument about who had responsibility for Moz.

Jake lost.

Moz told them Malika's story when the VW was an hour outside Marrakech and Jake and Celia were still talking to each other. He told it because he hated them and because he knew they would not understand. The story began on the sixteenth day of Jumaada al Thamy in the year 1375 AH, which Jake and Celia knew as 1956.

On that day, Monday 30 January, in a square near Bab Doukkala, three Arab stallholders poured petrol through the broken window of a racing-green Studebaker, the 1954 model. They were watched by a heavily veiled woman chewing on a dried fig and a small boy who hopped from leg to leg with excitement.

Waving the boy and his grandmother away from the car, the eldest of the three men pulled a brass lighter from his jellaba pocket and lit a petrol-soaked rag he'd already tied to a stone, tossing the stone high in the air, so the rag flamed like a comet on its way down.

So huge was the explosion that the small boy tipped backwards and suddenly found himself sitting in the dirt. For a second his bottom lip quivered and then he began to clap.

At the other end of Derb Ali, in what had once been stables, a young Berber shouldered open a locked door. He did this as quietly as he could. Something of a rarity for Driss Mahmud, a man who liked to make his presence felt.

Sultan Mohammed V had returned from French-imposed exile to declare himself King. On the morning in question, at 11.30, his old enemy Thami al Glaoui, eagle of Telouet, the black panther and mountain gazelle, the last great lord of the Atlas and Pasha of Marrakech, had died, having made profession of his faith.

He was seventy-eight years of age, feared and revered in equal measure. A hero to many and a traitor to more. And with his final breath withered not only the Glaoui's life, but the protection his reputation gave to those who had served him.

"Hide me." Driss Mahmud's voice was jagged with fear, although one had to know the man to realize this.

"Where?"

He could hear contempt in Maria's question, which was the first time she'd ever dared reveal such an emotion to his face. Her mother had been an esclave in the Glaoui kasbah as had her grandmother before that. The girl's father was unknown, a man who'd given his unclaimed daughter little to remember him by but pale skin and green eyes.

This room had been Driss Mahmud's present to Maria. Not really his to give but that seldom mattered to the servants of Si Thami al Glaoui. All Driss had done was order a café to give up its storeroom and the girl had been living there ever since.

She was fat with child, her breasts sore against the thin cotton of a cheap dress. Her head was bare, her hair untied and her forehead sweaty. Darkness was approaching but it brought only a shift in the sounds of the city. It was a bad night to be found with a servant of the old Pasha.

"Hide me here," said the man. "Say you've got a customer."

Maria slapped him then.

And when she finally picked herself off the dirt floor, wiping blood from her lips, it was to walk past him to the storeroom door. "I don't do that anymore," she said, pulling aside the curtain.

A single step brought Driss close, so close Maria could feel his breath on the nape of her neck and a sharpness against her skin. Everyone knew that Driss Mahmud carried a knife and on a night like this he might well be carrying his gun.

Except there had never been another night like this.

"In here," Maria shouted, and would have shouted again but for the sudden hand over her mouth to ensure silence.

"I should kill you," Driss said.

You should have killed me months back... The thought came and went, more wish than thought. Maria wasn't good at considering her own emotions. Most of the time the girl found it hard to believe that what she felt might matter.

Once, in the time of the big war, a fat foreigner had sat in a rattan chair on the terrace of the Pasha's kasbah and said something that made the Pasha roar with laughter. They'd both been looking at a small girl scooping ice into a bowl when he spoke.

"You." The Pasha's voice was low, surprisingly soft. And Maria realized she'd never dared listen to his voice before. "What's your name?"

She gave her mother's village, her grandfather's name and his job as one of the Pasha's herdsmen. Maria wasn't sure how else to answer. All of this the Pasha related to the foreigner in the stranger's language.

"So," said the foreigner, "call her Mimi." Or so one of the dancing girls reported afterwards.

The Pasha stared at him.

"Her hands," explained the fat man. "They're frozen."

"What was it you asked?" said the Pasha. "How much do I pay them?" He turned to the girl. "How much do you get paid?" he said.

Maria looked at him, her eyes wide.

The fat man in the rattan chair dragged on his cigar, blew out a cloud of smoke and turned to the Pasha. Whatever he said about her silence made the Pasha frown.

"You." He nodded to the girl. "Why do you work for me?"

She had no answer to that either.

When the Pasha glanced at Maria again it was to wave her away. So Malika's mother picked up her bucket, which was actually silver and made in Paris, covered it with a white linen napkin as she'd been taught and crept from the terrace.

The next time anyone noticed her it was to offer her to a German industrialist. She was twelve.

A month later Driss was told to deliver her to a brothel in the Medina. It was unlikely the Pasha even knew or cared that she was gone. Between the kasbah and the brothel, Driss stopped once to push her into a bricked-up archway, raise her dress and turn her to face the wall.

Now he stood behind her again. In the room which he'd found for her. And though his life was in danger and the Medina full of men after people like him, Driss Mahmud paused for long enough to force one hand inside Maria's dress and grip a swollen breast, twisting hard.

"You won't forget me," he said.

And as fear and a full bladder emptied themselves down Maria's bare leg, Driss went, knife out in front of him, running at a half crouch like some wounded animal.