Love Is Dangerous Page 8

  The waiter left them alone and Melina raised her eyebrows.

  “Eggs!” she said. “Isn’t it too hot for eggs?”

  “You may not get any lunch,” Bing warned her.

  She smiled at that and ate her eggs with enjoyment, finding, as she had expected, that the butter was nasty and the jam, made from tiny strawberries found at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, was delicious. The oranges, which had obviously been picked locally, were small and sweet.

  They ate in silence for some minutes and then Bing said,

  “I have decided the best thing we can do today is to go and reconnoitre round the house where the party is to be held tonight.”

  “I was expecting you would say that,” Melina answered. “I should like to see where Moulay Ibrahim lives.”

  “It isn’t the sort of place where he ought to be living or where he would feel most at home,” Bing replied. “He was born in the desert. His father was a small Sheik who, owing to his ambitions, rose to be a senior one. He made a great deal of money cattle dealing and also, I am convinced, by slave trading and the smuggling of drugs.”

  Bing made a gesture of disgust.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “the old Sheik became so rich that he grew bored with the company of his tribesmen and of his innumerable wives. He went on a trip to Paris taking his eldest son with him. His extravagances there, the parties he gave, his excesses, his vices and his general behaviour are still talked about and have become almost a legend.”

  “It must have been fun in a way,” Melina laughed.

  “Dope peddling is a dirty business,” Bing answered, “but it pays. The Sheik renewed his efforts when he returned home. He also required extra cash for his son’s education because he left him behind in Paris. Unfortunately the boy was far too imbued with his father’s mentality to learn much that was any good to him. Nevertheless, after a few years he came back to take over the chieftainship from his father who was sinking into premature old age, due mostly to the effects of drink and disease.”

  Bing paused to drink his coffee.

  “Moulay Ibrahim had no intention of ruling as his father had ruled,” he continued as Melina did not speak. “He had far greater ambitions and he started to enlarge his tribe in every way he could, to make his possessions larger and even more impressive than those owned by his father, and to do what had never been done by his ancestors before, to cultivate the friendship of the Europeans.”

  Melina had put her elbows on the table and was listening intently. She was seeing, as Bing talked, the commanding figure astride the black horse, his dark flashing eyes that looked up into hers.

  “Moulay Ibrahim did not only crave money, he wanted power,” Bing went on. “And he found that one of the first ways to get himself known was to entertain. He built an enormous villa on the foundations of an old Palace, which I hope we shall see tonight, outside Fez. He built another in Casablanca and also purchased property in Marrakesh.”

  Bing’s voice altered and became cynical.

  “It is never difficult to get people to accept invitations to a superbly organised party,” he said. “The French citizens of every town which Moulay Ibrahim patronised were only too willing to dance to the orchestras he had flown from France and enjoy the expensive cabarets, which were even sometimes brought from as far as New York.”

  “I don’t blame them for going,” Melina said quickly.

  “Neither did anybody else,” Bing said. “But it was not generosity that made him play host. It was something quite different.”

  “What was it?” Melina asked, then sat up suddenly, surprised by the expression on Bing’s face.

  She could see that he was listening, tense and still, with his ears strained. She listened, too, but could hear nothing.

  Then soundlessly he rose to his feet, walked to the door and jerked it open. The waiter was standing outside very near to the door. If he was surprised he did not show it.

  “What do you want?” Bing asked sharply.

  “If the gentleman has finished with the breakfast, I will take away the tray,” the waiter said submissively.

  “Yes, we have finished,” Bing replied abruptly.

  Melina rose to her feet so as to allow the waiter access to the table.

  “Get your things,” Bing said. “We have a lot of sight-seeing to do. The sooner we start the better. Don’t forget the guide book.”

  “No, I won’t,” Melina replied.

  She was aware, as she went to her bedroom, that her heart was beating a little quicker. Had the waiter been listening to what they were saying? And if he had, did it matter? Bing had been speaking in a very low voice and yet even a low voice might have carried as far as the door.

  They had been speaking in English, but who was to know whether the waiter could understand English or not?

  There was no reason why they should not talk about Moulay Ibrahim, and yet, at the same time, it was unlikely that an American would have known so much about him.

  As she put a clean handkerchief into her bag, she began to feel frightened again. She and Bing were so vulnerable. Two English people alone fighting against inconceivable odds and without the slightest knowledge as to who and where their enemy might be or what he would look like should they find him.

  ‘The child! Remember the child!’ she told herself fiercely.

  That was what mattered. It was no use getting frightened, no use getting panicky. It was the child who mattered and it seemed that very soon they might be at the end of their quest.

  Her bag was ready and she picked up her sunshade. She had brought only two hats abroad with her, but she had not been foolish enough to underestimate the sun or to imagine, as so many Europeans do, that her hair would be enough protection. She slipped the hook of the sunshade over her arm and remembered that Bing had said, ‘bring the guide book’.

  She did not have one, but she had in her case a paperback novel that she had been reading. She thought she had better carry that and make herself look as much like the usual tourist as possible.

  Bing was waiting for her in the sitting room.

  They went downstairs, which were of the cool stone of the old Moorish Palace, but were highly polished so that Melina held tightly onto the banisters for fear she should slip.

  There was a crowd round the reception desk talking about rooms and excursions and Melina waited while Bing bought two highly coloured postcards of the hotel.

  “We must not forget to send these home,” he said and, demanding loudly two stamps for the United States of America, he then stuck them on the postcards.

  “Put these in your bag,” he told Melina, “and we’ll write them when we’re in the Sultan’s Palace. They’ll give the folks back home a real thrill.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Melina said, longing to laugh but realising that all this was too serious to be really funny.

  Having established his American identity, Bing then walked with Melina through the hotel and out into the courtyard.

  Their car was parked where they had left it the night before, in a row with a number of other cars. But now, where the courtyard had seemed quiet and deserted in the darkness, it was alive with people, movement and colour.

  The hotel servants were busy bringing out the luggage for a bus load of tourists who were leaving for their next beauty spot, with the usual number of twittering excited ladies carrying guide books and souvenirs, accompanied by tired rather bored husbands, who would much rather have spent their holidays at home working in the garden.

  Melina was not really interested in the tourists, but looked beyond them to where, through an arched courtyard, she could see a number of natives peering in at them, apparently trying to excite their attention.

  “What do those people want?” she asked Bing.

  He glanced towards them as he helped her into the car.

  “Oh, they are guides,” he said. “At least, the ones in the black and white striped cotton nightshirts are. The others are beggars,
fortune tellers, snake charmers and Heaven knows what else. They are not allowed in the hotel courtyard, thank goodness, but we have to run the gauntlet to get through them. Shut your window and leave it to me.”

  It was really quite an ordeal, Melina thought, as Bing, driving the car very slowly, refused three or four guides in succession, a man who wanted to sell him a raffia hat, another with leather bookmarkers and a third with children’s windmills. Pushing behind them, shouting, waving, screaming their wares, were a large number of other natives and several women with tiny babies who held out their hands and begged for money.

  “I feel we ought to give them something,” Melina said with a sigh as at last the car was free of the encroaching crowd and they moved away swiftly, blowing up a cloud of dust over those who petitioned them.

  “If you give once you have to give again,” Bing said. “The word goes round. They know at a glance if you’re a sucker, then they never leave you alone. They are professionals. You cannot shake off a professional whatever you say to him.”

  Melina laughed.

  “It’s all so exactly as I thought it would be. The beggars, the people selling their goods, the dust, the palm trees – oh, everything! I think I should be the happiest person in the whole world if it wasn’t that we have to find that child.”

  “And quickly!” Bing added quietly.

  “Suppose we do find him tonight,” Melina asked. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Bing answered. “It’s impossible to make plans. One can only pray that something will turn up at the last moment and that somehow, by some extraordinary and unexpected miracle, one can achieve the impossible.”

  There was something in his tone that made her look at him quickly.

  “You don’t think we are going to find him, do you?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Bing sighed wearily.

  She felt he did not wish to talk about it anymore and contented herself in watching the road ahead.

  They were climbing steadily and now the country was green with trees and the cultivated slopes of the hills and on the road were white bullocks being led along by a very small child on a donkey, laden with what seemed an almost incredible load of straw and green bushes but which seemed to trot beneath them jauntily and unconcernedly,

  “Is this the way to Moulay Ibrahim’s house?” Melina enquired.

  “It’s not the direct way to it,” Bing answered. “I want, if possible, to get a little above it. I cannot remember quite how high up the hill it is.”

  After a mile or so he turned off the main road on to what was little more than a cart track winding between great boulders, which looked as if they had been thrown there by some giant and stunted trees with thick trunks and strange, flat, wide branches.

  On they climbed until finally Bing stopped the car under a tree and climbed out. He opened the door for Melina and then produced two cameras from the back seat.

  “One for you and one for me,” he said. “We have to do the thing properly.”

  “Where did these come from?” Melina said.

  “Rasmin provided them with our other purchases,” he said. “They are jolly expensive ones, too, so we must not forget to return them.”

  “Who is Rasmin? You must tell me about him,” Melina insisted. “And you haven’t finished your story about Moulay Ibrahim.”

  “It was very foolish to speak as I did,” Bing said.

  “Do you really think the waiter overheard?”

  “I don’t know,” Bing answered. “But one thing is quite certain, he was trying to. It may have been just routine as all the native servants spy for somebody. If it isn’t for the Government or those who are against the Government or for the police or for the hotel proprietors, it’s for the shopkeepers who want to know how much money the tourists have and if it’s worth their while sending a free gift or something that will attract them to their shops.”

  He sighed.

  “No native boy can resist the excitement, the intrigue, of knowing a little bit more than his friends know, of having some titbit of information to impart that somebody else wants.”

  “I can see it’s a kind of game,” Melina observed.

  “It is, unfortunately, something that they as a nation are very good at and we, as reserved inhibited British are very bad at,” he answered.

  He took Melina by the arm and started to lead her up a steep incline through the trees to what was obviously the summit of a little hill. Her feet slipped in the sand and it filled her sandals, making it hard for her to walk but, finally, with Bing’s help, she reached the top.

  Then she gave a little gasp.

  The view was magnificent. It seemed to stretch out on the right to a shimmering heat-laden horizon where the land merged into the sky. A little to the left of them was the City of Fez with its great high walls, its spires and minarets, its palm trees and beyond it the white modern buildings of the French quarter.

  Just below them, brilliant in the sunshine, glittering, shining almost as if it was a glorious jewel, lay the villa they had come to seek.

  It was surrounded by a wall, although at first Melina’s eyes were only for the glimpses she could see of shining fountains, of dark cypress trees, of great splodges of colour, so vivid, so breathtaking in their loveliness that she felt as if she looked at a picture painted by a Master Impressionist who had used every colour on his palette.

  The villa itself was enormous. She could see the long wide rooms with their low parapets, she could see the windows, iridescent in the sunshine, which opened onto the gardens. There were dozens and dozens of them and yet the whole scene was so perfectly proportioned that one felt that it might have been built by some Grecian architect rather than that it belonged to this century.

  There was a swimming pool, blue as the Mediterranean as it reflected the sky above it. And then, as if her eyes were satiated with so much luxury and beauty, she looked a little closer to what she saw was preoccupying Bing – the wall round the villa,

  The ancient people who had built the City of Fez had built it to keep their enemies out. Moulay Ibrahim had done the same thing. The wall was not so high, but it was equally unclimbable. Of local stone, it surrounded the whole villa save for the entrance at the far end where two great iron gates were guarded by sentries.

  Although the wall was not abnormally high, it was ornamented all along the top with great spikes set at strange angles, which would have impaled anyone mad enough to attempt to scale it.

  Suddenly the beauty and the colour in front of her seemed somehow sinister.

  “It’s – it’s a prison,” Melina whispered almost beneath her breath.

  “Moulay Ibrahim’s father, who built the wall round the old Palace, was reputed to have two hundred wives,” Bing answered. “In Fez I was told that they were so lovely that every young man grew up in the native City with the ambition to see at least one of them. The old Sheik made quite certain that there was no chance of their doing that!”

  “If the child is there,” Melina said, “what chance do we have of getting him out?”

  “That was just what I was wondering myself,” Bing said.

  He threw himself down on the ground and drew from under his shirt a pair of binoculars. They were not very large ones, but Melina felt a memory vaguely stirring in her mind of someone who had talked to her about a German firm who had invented binoculars which were so powerful that miles away one could see a fly on the wall.

  “Keep a look round to see that no one is watching us, there’s a good girl,” Bing asked her.

  She wanted to resent his tone because it was so casual and yet authoritative, but with a mental shake of her shoulders she told herself to remember that he was her employer. If he gave her an order he had every right to do so. But somehow, in that moment, she resented his ceasing to be the charming companion and becoming suddenly aloof and nearly a commanding officer.

  Then she knew that this was a Bing she had not seen before – a
Bing at work, concentrating to the exclusion of all else, a man dedicated to the task that was at hand.

  He kept his head down as low as he dared and the binoculars were almost against the ground. It was a wise precaution, Melina thought. Anyone approaching him, except from the front, would imagine he was resting and would have no idea of his real occupation until they were right up to him.

  She looked round as he had told her to do. There was nothing in sight except some long-eared goats nibbling at the dry grass and a hawk high overhead, poised and quivering against the sky. She could see that Bing was searching every inch of the villa, window by window, door by door.

  At last her curiosity could be contained no longer.

  “Can you see anything?” she asked,

  “No,” he said, “nothing.”

  He rose and moved into the shadow of some trees. There was a clump of stones and he crouched behind it, having first looked around to see that he was not observed and lifted the glasses once more to his eyes.

  Melina had followed him and now, as she watched him inspecting the windows once again, she gave a little gasp.

  “There’s a man – a man in the garden,” she whispered.

  Bing swung his glasses to the left.

  There had only been one man when Melina spoke, but now there was another. They were both of them wearing white trousers and open-necked shirts. They looked in the distance as if they were Europeans, Melina thought, but it was impossible to judge.

  Only Bing would know through his powerful glasses.

  “Can you see them clearly?” she asked. “Who are they?”

  Without a word he handed her the glasses and steadying herself against the rocks she put them to her eyes. They were so strong that she almost gasped when she had them first focused on the men.

  It was almost as if she was beside them, talking to them, they were so vivid.

  One man was standing looking down at the swimming pool. He was dark and she had the impression that he might be a Moroccan, but she was not sure. The other was undoubtedly fair-skinned and yet it was difficult to imagine what nationality he might be.