Love Is Dangerous Page 7

  She sat still on the leather cushion, feeling curiously bereft, strangely lonely.

  Could this really be happening, she asked herself.

  And then knew that she was being carried along like a tidal wave by Bing Ward’s exuberance, vitality and strong personality. There was something irresistible about him, she thought and yet at the same time there was something that frightened her too. It was that something which had shown in his face when he had killed that man and she could never forget it.

  ‘I am afraid of him,’ she thought and felt herself shiver.

  She wondered now, if she had the choice over again when he had offered to engage her, whether she would say no. It had seemed then an exciting adventure and now she was not so sure.

  There was something sinister about everything they did, the feeling that they were being watched and pursued, the feeling that she was unwittingly taking part in a drama that affected the whole country.

  Then she thought of her father working year after year for little money and no thanks to stabilise the country and to throw out the worst elements in it. He had loved Morocco. “The Garden of Eden”, he had called it more than once and she knew that whatever happened she could not let him down.

  Would he approve of what she was doing? She had a feeling that in this battle he would have been on Bing’s side and that he would have wanted her not to be a coward.

  And yet she knew that she was a coward.

  Yesterday her life had been full of her secretarial work, administering the petty needs of Mrs. Schuster and now she was involved in danger and death, in intrigue, in a war between people who counted each other’s lives as cheap and had only one objective and that was to win.

  Then she remembered the little boy and thought that he and she had something in common. They were both pawns in a big game they could not understand.

  She heard a sudden acceleration of the noise outside. The shouts, the chatter and the voices had made a background for their conversation that had seemed almost like strange music. Now there were cheers and instinctively, without thinking, she went to the window.

  It was impossible to see through the small dirty panes and, not realising that she was being stupid, she opened one side and peered out. Someone was coming down the narrow street on horseback and being cheered as he came.

  He was a big man wearing a white burnous and riding a magnificent black horse. He had a white turban on his head and the long end of it encircled his throat.

  He was a middle-aged man, but there was something strong and impressive about him, something that quite obviously appealed to the people who cheered and waved to him as he passed by.

  He raised his gloved hand in salute and she saw that following him were two other men, servants or companions, wearing Arab dress and keeping closely behind his horse as if they protected him.

  The shouts grew louder and were almost deafening as he passed beneath the window where Melina stood watching. And then, as if something attracted him, he glanced up as he rode by and their eyes met.

  She felt a little shiver go through her.

  He might look magnificent astride his horse but there was, too, something sinister about him, she thought, something forceful which seemed to strike at her almost as if he shouted at her as he passed.

  It was only a momentary impression and then he had gone by raising his hand to the cheering crowd and she was not certain if she had not imagined it all. She stood there watching him go and then suddenly she felt her wrist grasped by a hard hand and someone dragged her away from the window and slammed it to.

  “You little fool! Why are you showing yourself?” Bing demanded.

  His tone was offensive and Melina’s chin went up defiantly.

  “Are you so stupid that you don’t understand that we do not want to draw attention to ourselves?” Bing snapped.

  The expression on his face made Melina realise what was at stake.

  “I-I’m sorry,” she faltered. “I did – not think it – would matter. I heard the noise and – and I wanted to see what was happening.”

  “And you saw,” he said. “I hope you were suitably impressed.”

  “Who was he?” Melina asked, knowing the answer before he had told her.

  “Moulay Ibrahim,” he answered.

  “Oh, Bing, I’m sorry!” she cried. “I had no idea – that he might be passing. I just wondered what the noise was about. It’s – it’s all so exciting for me.”

  “Did he see you?” Bing asked sharply.

  She would have thought it a strange question if she had not already realised that he had an extraordinary intuition in picking up the unexpected. She wanted to lie but she knew that she dare not.

  “He looked up,” she said.

  “He did!” Bing exclaimed grimly.

  He saw the expression on her face and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “This is a shop. There’s no reason why you, as a tourist, should not be looking out of it. And if you were a tourist you would naturally be intrigued by the noise and excitement and want to know what it was all about.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Melina said again. “I’ll try to be more sensible and not to do things that might be dangerous.”

  Intent on what they had been saying to each other she had not taken in Bing’s appearance until he stepped a little nearer to the light.

  Then she saw that his hair had been cut in a different fashion and now it was much darker, not sensationally so, but the fairness had gone and he was a kind of mid-brown, an indescribable shade which nobody would notice and on which no one would make any comment.

  “Do you like it?” Bing asked with a smile.

  “It changes you,” Melina remarked.

  “That is what we hoped it would do,” Bing replied. “But it’s wet and I cannot touch it or put my cap on. However, we cannot wait here any longer. Come along, and be ready to tell Rasmin when we get downstairs that his goods are charming.”

  They negotiated the narrow rickety stairs – there was a light on them now, which made it easier – and slipped back into the shop from behind the hanging carpet.

  Once there, Bing began to talk in a loud voice, flourishing a notecase filled with dollar bills. He had not had those before, Melina thought, and wondered who would reimburse Rasmin for all this expense.

  “Will you send a porter to meet me at the car?” Bing said as they reached the door. “And don’t let him be late. I shall not be more than twenty minutes and I don’t want to hang about in this crowd.”

  “It shall be as the gentleman desires,” Rasmin responded in the humble ingratiating voice of the shopkeeper.

  “You have got some mighty fine things here,” Bing went on. “I’ll tell my friends back home to look you up when they come to Morocco.”

  “A thousand thanks, sir. You are indeed gracious,” Rasmin smiled.

  Melina held out her hand.

  “Thank you for letting us see all your lovely things,” she said. “I only wish we could buy more of them.”

  Rasmin just touched her hand and then put his hand to his forehead and his heart.

  They left him and pushed their way up the crowded street to the café.

  Here they sat and Bing ordered a strange dish which, he told everyone within hearing, had been recommended by a friend of his in New York and which, despite looking rather unpleasant, tasted delicious when it finally appeared. Then there was fruit, goat’s milk cheese on freshly baked bread and mint tea, which was not nearly as pleasant as that which had been served by Rasmin.

  Finally, after nearly three-quarters of an hour, Bing paid the bill with a lot of by-play as to not understanding exactly what money was required and how much to leave as a tip.

  Then they retraced their steps towards the car.

  A boy was standing beside it with half-a-dozen packages badly wrapped up in coloured paper. Bing unlocked the door, took the parcels from the boy and chucked them on to the back seat. He gave
him half a dollar and took it back again, then changed it for some French francs.

  He tipped the small child who had looked after the car and then they turned right and continued through the brightly lit streets towards another gate of the town.

  “Where are we going?” Melina asked as finally they drove through a high pointed gate and out into the darkness.

  “To a hotel,” Bing answered. “My passport will be behind us on the back seat. Lean back and get it, will you?”

  She did as she was told, unwrapping the piece of paper to reveal the mid-blue plasticised cover,

  Bing brought hers out of his pocket.

  “There’s just a small amendment on yours,” he said.

  Melina opened it. She saw the words ‘married woman’ had been added and the name of ‘Cutter’.

  “Don’t worry,” Bing told her. “The additions are written in an ink that only lasts for forty-eight hours. Tomorrow you may have lost your husband one way or another.”

  “You think of everything,” Melina said half sarcastically.

  “Don’t boast,” Bing begged. “It’s unlucky.”

  His words made her remember once again the danger of this seemingly mad adventure. One could never escape from it. It was there, all around them in the darkness, even in the car.

  Then in a very small voice she asked a question that had been troubling her ever since they had set out from Tangier but to which, until now, she had been too nervous to give expression to,

  “When we arrive at the hotel,” she said, her voice slightly tremulous, “and we – we say we are married, do we – I mean can we still ask for – two single rooms?”

  Chapter 5

  There was a gentle knock on the door and Melina, who was only half asleep, was instantly wide awake.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  In answer the door at the far end of the bedroom opened softly and she could see Bing’s shoulders silhouetted against the light of the room beyond.

  “It’s eight-thirty,” he began apologetically, “and I think if we are going to order breakfast I had better bring these things back.”

  “Of course,” she agreed. “Wait one moment.”

  He turned away and she slipped out of bed into her dressing gown, which was lying over a chair. Then she drew back the curtains from the window and the sunshine came flooding in, enveloping her in its golden rays that dazzled her eyes and made her lift up her face towards it like a flower towards the light.

  Then her eyes cleared and she saw a vision of high palm trees, climbing bougainvillaea, crimson and pink geraniums and white lilies and beyond, the sand-coloured walls of the native City of Fez.

  The hotel that Bing had taken her to was just outside the walls, high up on a hill and, he told her, it had once been a Palace belonging to a former Sultan.

  The proprietors had done little to spoil the atmosphere. The rooms were furnished in Moorish fashion. There were coloured tiles on the walls, there were Moorish carvings, hangings which might have come straight from a story of the Arabian Nights and all the main rooms opened onto a terrace on which there was a large and tinkling fountain surrounded by palm trees and flowers.

  The night before, when they had arrived, the fountain had been lit with coloured lights and Melina had thought it beautiful. But this morning, in the sunshine, she thought that it held an enchantment beyond comparison with anything she had seen before.

  She stood there staring until a noise in the room behind her made her turn round. Bing was struggling through the communicating doorway with sheets, blankets and pillows and now he put them down on the empty bed that stood beside Melina’s.

  “I’ll make it,” Melina said, turning towards him.

  “Thank you,” he answered. “Making beds is something I have always hated doing ever since I was in my preparatory school and matron said that I was the worst bedmaker in the whole dormitory. I’ve had a complex about it ever since!”

  He turned back into the small sitting room where he had spent the night and Melina, knowing the narrowness of the couch he had made his bed into, felt somewhat guilty as she tucked in the blankets and then disarranged them again to look as if someone had just got out of bed.

  “You’re up early,” she commented.

  “We have a great deal to do today,” he replied, coming back into the doorway to watch her finish the bed.

  It was then that she remembered that she was wearing only a nightgown and dressing gown and that she had not arranged her hair or powdered her nose since she had risen.

  “Oh, goodness!” she said in sudden confusion. “Don’t look at me. I’ve forgotten, in the excitement of seeing the view outside the window, what I must look like.”

  “You look very fresh and young,” he said in a tone of voice that somehow did not make it a compliment.

  “You make me feel like a beatnik,” Melina answered scoldingly.

  She crossed the room to the dressing table and was relieved to see that her hair, because it curled naturally round her forehead and over her small head, did not look unattractive. She ran a comb through it and powdered the tip of her nose.

  “And now,” she asked, “What are the plans for today?”

  She saw with almost a feeling of chagrin that he was not listening to her nor, indeed, looking at her. He was staring past her through the open window towards the roofs of the City below them.

  It was funny to remember, now, she thought, how apprehensive she had been of staying with him in a hotel.

  He had made it very easy, demanding a suite as soon as they arrived and paying no attention when the receptionist told him that owing to the influx of tourists and the fact that there was a big dance in the neighbourhood the following night, there was no chance of their being accommodated with anything of the sort.

  “I like a sitting room to myself,” Bing had asserted in the nasal accent that somehow seemed to make him sound richer and more important than if he had spoken naturally.

  “Even if I am on holiday I have business to do and my wife doesn’t like my papers cluttered all over the place in her bedroom. Find the Manager.”

  The Manager appeared and Bing reeled off a list of influential Americans whom, he said, had recommended him to this particular hotel. Finally, someone had been moved from the room they now occupied and the Manager’s private office, which happened to be next door to it, was put at their disposal.

  “You cannot sleep in there,” Melina had said half in a whisper, when finally they were alone in the bedroom together.

  “It’s a jolly sight better than most of the places I have to sleep in,” Bing said with a smile. “And I’m quite used to the floor, it doesn’t worry me. I can sleep on anything.”

  Fortunately, however, there was a small couch in one corner on which Melina suspected the Manager took his siesta. It was hard and not very comfortable, but Bing pooh-poohed the idea of moving the mattress from the bedroom onto it and, taking only the sheets and the blankets, assured her that he would be all right.

  They had locked the door as soon as they came into the room and Bing had already warned Melina against talking about anything that mattered except in a very low whisper.

  “To say the walls have ears is literally true when you are in any Eastern or Middle Eastern country,” he explained. “The natives know everything. Nothing is too small to escape their notice, nothing is too insignificant to be remembered and relayed on to someone else.”

  “I remember my father used to say the same thing,” Melina said. “It frightens me at the moment.”

  “With reason,” Bing answered in all seriousness.

  Long after he had closed the door between them and for all she knew was sleeping soundly, Melina had lain awake thinking over the events of the day and feeling herself bewildered, fascinated and, at the same time, scared by everything that had occurred in such quick succession.

  How could she have imagined, when she had woken up that morning, that she would lose her job, a nice
, safe, secure one, she had thought, and find herself re-engaged and taking part in an incredible crazy adventure with implications which even now she found hard to believe.

  There were so many questions, she thought, that she had wanted to ask Bing, and yet somehow there was something about him that made it difficult to encroach on his reserve or those things that he was quite determined to keep secret.

  Melina had always been sensitive towards other people’s feelings and now she knew that it was impossible to probe too deeply or to try and force his confidence. He was a strange man, she had thought a dozen times during the long drive to Fez, and she thought it again now as she watched him looking out of the window and having, for the moment, apparently forgotten her presence.

  “Bing, is anything the matter?”

  She asked the question almost apprehensively and then with a little start he turned towards her and a smile flickered over his face.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I was planning something. Get dressed. I’ll order breakfast in our sitting room. They will expect us to do so as I made such a fuss about having it.”

  He walked out of the room, closing the communicating door behind him.

  Melina hurried to have her bath and put on one of her prettiest cotton dresses, which she had remembered to ask the maid to press the night before. She arranged her hair, powdered her face and put on a little lipstick. It was already beginning to grow hotter and she knew that in the heat the less make-up she used the better she would look.

  She had hurried, but it was nearly nine o’clock before she opened the door and went into the sitting room. The waiter, wearing the traditional long white cotton robe, a spotless, cleverly turned turban, and with bare feet, was bringing in the breakfast – long glasses of fruit juice, eggs with tiny curls of crisp bacon, fresh rolls and butter which looked delicious, but which Melina already knew tasted slightly rancid.

  “I am just hoping, honey, that the coffee is drinkable,” Bing said as she came into the room. “I haven’t had a decent cup since we left New York.”

  “You must learn not to fuss so much about your coffee,” Melina said, thinking as she did so that they sounded exactly like a comfortably married couple who had grown used to each other’s likes and dislikes.