A soft scraping sound…crepe soles brushing across the threshold…a silhouette appeared in the doorway. A glint of light reflected off blue steel in the hand hanging down by his side….
The Medina, Tangier, Morocco
Scattered bushes overran the rocky ground where thickets of aloes and prickly pear cactus broke out between the simple grave plots marked by a low whitewashed concrete border ending in a gravestone. Here and there, through the fading smoke of a small, improvised campfire, a soiled white rag suspended from a stick denoted the humble resting place of a minor saint. No Christian was permitted to approach the stately dome rising in the background – the tomb and sanctuary of Sidi Ben Arraquia, a saint of extended celebrity.
A solitary cricket sang in the distance, adding his lament to the din of Tamazight rising from the knot of Berber women bargaining, hawking their mint – their aubergines, onions, cabbages, and chickpeas – in the souk down the hill. But as the veil of dusk began to fall over Tangier, the International Zone, an infidel waited in the vanishing shadow of that tomb amid the weeds and thistles of the cemetery in the Mendoubia Gardens:
I waited. Watched the approaching figure in Maghrebi robes weaving up the path, halting momentarily, lurching forward, moving in the direction of the tomb, tripping, then stumbling into an open grave. Victim of the wine that his religion forbade. But everything in Tangier is made available to our residents. For a price. By the Berber goddess, Tinjis. Consort of Hercules and our namesake who warned audacious travelers to – non plus ultra – “go no further”into the realm of the Unknown beyond the Strait of Gibraltar.
The inebriate, now out of sight, no longer diverted my attention from the path as I fondled the warrant disc – Geheime Staatspolizei Dienstmarke – in my pocket. The thin, oval piece of metal given to me by the man I waited for. The disc that opened all doors in la Ville de Tanger, if not always so willingly.
Now, I could just make him out: The Panama hat was barely visible in the dusk, and those signature round sunglasses – the ones he wore in all weather and at any time of day or night – became recognizable as he approached.
“La noche es dorada,” Liebknecht said.
“Muy buenas noches, mi jefe,” I replied deferentially. He took a fat manila envelope out of the inside pocket of his white linen coat and handed it to me. I peeked inside at the new counterfeit pound notes forged by skilled Jewish engravers. In which camp was that? Auschwitz? Or maybe Sachsenhausen. It was indeed a golden evening.
The side door to the small Catholic church on the border of the Medina was left open. The confessional booth was locked, but the sexton had been paid well for a key. A brown Franciscan cassock with a hooded cowl was carefully folded on a chair next to the latticed opening.
I pulled the robe over my head. A wooden crucifix hung by a leather thong looped over an ear of the chair. Placed the cross around my neck. The slit under the arm hole of the cassock was just wide enough to slip my hand inside when I tried it.
Now the knotted cincture could be wrapped around my waist and run through the loop. With the cowl draped over my head, I made my way reverently, silently, through the church and back into the street.
Caracol was busy hitching up the donkey to a cart when I came into the dank interior of the stable in the deserted alley down from the Zocco Chico, the small market in the Medina – the old walled Berber city within a city.
Caracol turned around, started to say, “Perdóname Padre, porque he pecado…” “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned…”
I cut him off in the middle of the taunt: “No me jodas…tenemos negocio.” “Don’t fuck with me…we have work to do.”
Caracol guided the donkey out into the alley, got on the cart, and helped me up beside him.
“Vaya al Puerto Viejo. Estamos buscando al barco Inmaculada.” The sound of my voice echoed, hung in the passageway…then cart wheels over cobblestones drowned it out.
A small blue running light burned on the mast of the fishing boat, Inmaculada, as the cart pulled alongside a man with a sailor’s hat stacking wooden crates on the dock. The crates were stenciled with black letters: BAYER, and under that, Sulfonamide. Other red letters had been stenciled across the upper right-hand corner of the crates: U.S.A.
A priest – even a false priest in stolen vestments – and a Spanish peasant on a donkey cart were of little interest to the few incautious pedestrians walking long after sunset that night in the abandoned streets of Tangier. It was late and Caracol was hungry. But he didn’t only think about the ache in his stomach.
“¿Cómo van las cosas, Capitán?” Caracol asked the man on the dock.
“Regular…tranquilo,” the captain answered as he looked up at me and crossed himself. I got down from the cart and told Caracol to start loading the crates of antibiotics.
“¿Quinientos, verdad?” I asked the fishing-boat captain rhetorically and got a perplexed nod as an answer when I reached under my cassock to remove the bundle of fifty ten-pound notes. The crisp bills filled the hand of the smuggler, one by one, as I counted them out.
The blue light faded away out by the breakwater as Caracol finished covering the crates with an old chenille bedspread. All that remained was the faint lopsided chug of a diesel engine in the distance.
A priest – even a false priest in stolen vestments – and a Spanish peasant on a donkey cart were of little interest to the few incautious pedestrians walking long after sunset that night in the abandoned streets of Tangier. It was late and Caracol was hungry. But he didn’t only think about the ache in his stomach.
He thought about the fresh British pounds that he would immediately change on the black market for pesetas, about his wife hanging the laundry on the roof of their casita in the Medina, about a plump filet of hake on a bed of thinly sliced potatoes kept warm in the oven, about his sleeping boy, about the cold white wine that was waiting for him at home in the icebox.
I lit a candle and waited with the donkeys while Caracol finished stacking the crates next to the bags of rice from California, the dried beans from Texas, and the sacks of flour from Duluth that were stored in the improvised warehouse at the back of the stable
A soft scraping sound…crepe soles brushing across the threshold…a silhouette appeared in the doorway. A glint of light reflected off blue steel in the hand hanging down by his side.
“We were not aware that you were running your own international aid agency, Padre,” the man said as he took a step into the half-light of the stable with his Colt .45 automatic leveled at my gut. He was an athletic-looking man with a military bearing, the man who’d met with the American naval attaché today, a man concerned about smuggling stolen American war supplies from the Port of Casablanca into Tangier.
Light exploded from two blasts a hair’s-breadth apart after I knocked over the candle. The shots bled into each other, saturated the air of the stable with an ear-splitting reverberation that projected out into the hollow shaft of the alley. No one listened.
It wasn’t exactly a crash when the donkey slipped and skidded down to the floor, more like a shuddering thud. Now another sound was audible in the darkened stable…something convulsing, quivering over by the door. I lowered my right arm. The smell of burned wool wafted up from the charred hole in the cuff on the sleeve of my cassock.
“Tenemos más trabajo esta noche,” I told Caracol as he looked down at the man on the floor.
“¿Tirarlo en el puerto?” “Dump it in the harbor?”
I waited…one heartbeat: “Sí…”
* * *
A graduate of UC Berkeley (MA in Painting), Kurt McGill is a writer, poet, and visual artist. He has been published in Akashic Books, The Bangalore Review, and Vanguard Press. His public artwork (NYC) is included in the Museum of Modern Art Archives. Longtime resident of Tribeca, Kurt splits his time now between Montevideo, Uruguay, and Florida. Facebook/BlackLotusDreams.
(Top image: Ryhor Cisiecki – Facebook/cisiecki AT gmail.com)
Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon 