Flashback (7 page)

“Ms. Boyle,” he said warmly when he had reached my table. Tucking his tray under his arm, he leaned in closer, beaming, shaking his head in evident disbelief. “I almost didn't recognize you.”

Boyle, I thought, Ms. Boyle. I looked up at the man's delicate, caramel-colored face, searching in vain for something familiar.

“Nadim,” he said, motioning to himself.

I smiled. “Yes, of course, Nadim.”

He stood there for a moment, an awkward silence passing between us, then made a slight stiff bow. “Your drink,” he said, turning. “I will be right back.”

I watched him walk to the bar. He said something to the bartender, and they both glanced back at me and nodded; then the bartender pulled a clear bottle from the shelf behind him. I had been here, I thought, shifting my gaze to the piano player and the dark bank of windows beyond him, the panes reflecting the bar's dim faces. I had been here, and yet I could not remember. The waiter came back carrying a martini glass and laid a small linen bar napkin on the table in front of me.

“When was I here last?” I asked.

Nadim set the glass on the napkin, then straightened up. “It has been a while,” he said, scowling, trying to remember. “A year. Maybe longer. You stayed with us.”

I looked down at the drink. A single delicate sliver of lemon rested at the bottom of the glass. “Was I alone?”

“Yes.”

“And I was here before that?”

The waiter drew back now, puzzled. “Of course. Ms. Boyle, is everything all right?”

“Alone?”

“Why no, with Mr. Haverman.”

I took a sip of the martini. It was vodka, cold and citrusy, studded with tiny shards of ice. “A friend?” I asked.

“Of course, Madame.”

“What does he do, this Mr. Haverman?”

“Do?” Nadim asked, perplexed.

“For a job.”

“He's an American,” the waiter said, as if being an American were a profession in itself. “Like you. A nice man.”

“And what does he look like?”

Nadim shuffled his feet nervously. “Young, like yourself.”

“Brown hair? Blond?”

“Brown,” Nadim said, growing more and more wary of this game by the second.

A customer several tables away signaled for service, and the waiter gratefully excused himself. I put the drink down and reached up and grasped his wrist. “What else, Nadim?” I asked, desperate to keep him there. “What else do you know?”

The waiter looked down, fear flashing across his face. “You are a patron of the hotel, Ms. Boyle,” he said, trying to compose himself. “And a lovely lady. You drink vodka martinis with a twist. This is all I know.”

“And Mr. Haverman?”

“A friend,” he said, repeating his previous answer, “a customer like yourself. This is all I know.”

Nadim had made no attempt to remove his wrist from my grip; now his arm was beginning to tremble. The man at the other table waved again, and I loosed my grasp. “I'm sorry,” I told him as he hurried away, obviously embarrassed by what had just happened.

I finished my drink, ordered another, and watched the crowd revolve. Toward the end of the evening the American film crew from the Continental showed up. They were loud and underdressed, as Americans almost always are, throwing dollars around and ordering overpriced Scotch.

It didn't seem possible that this had been my life, and suddenly I didn't want it to be. I wanted my old clothes back, and if not the convent, some place like it, a small plain room and a little garden on a hill, a bell ringing the hours.

The piano player tapped out the first few lines of “As Time Goes By,” and a smattering of applause rose from the tables. Giving up on Brian, I downed the last of my drink, stood, and made my way out of the bar. It was late enough that the rest of the hotel was nearly deserted. Out in the courtyard the only sound was the splash and gurgle of a fountain, and a woman's quiet laughter that drifted down from an open window somewhere above. The stars were out, a carpet of faraway sun catchers. The black shape of a bat cruised silently overhead.

I climbed up into the empty lobby and headed for the front desk, where a young woman in a blue suit was bent over a computer keyboard. She looked up when she saw me coming and straightened, fixing some unseen crease in her jacket. I watched her face for some expression of recognition but saw none.

“May I help you?” she asked.

I nodded, thinking of the form I'd filled out when I'd checked in at the Continental. Surely a hotel as nice as the El Minzah would require just as much information from its clients, if not more. If I had been a guest here, there might be some record in the computer.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked, stepping forward, propping my elbows on the marble counter.

“Six months,” the woman said. She was meticulously made up, her lips stained the same dark red as the drapes in the piano bar. Her name tag read
Ashia
.

I smiled. “I stayed here about a year ago,” I explained. “I'm trying to pin down the dates. I just can't seem to remember. Do you keep a record of your guests on file?”

Ashia nodded. She looked at me expectantly and when I didn't answer, cleared her throat. “Your name, Madame?”

“Boyle,” I said.

“
B-o-y-l-e?
” she asked, already typing the name into her computer.

“Yes,” I said, hoping it was the right answer.

She hit
ENTER
and squinted down at the screen, her brow furrowing as she manipulated her mouse. “Hannah?” she asked without looking up.

“Sorry?”

“Your first name, Madame.”

“Oh. Yes.” I nodded. “Hannah.”

“Here it is. Fall of last year. You spent eight days with us. September twenty-eighth to October fifth.” She glanced up and smiled, appreciative of her own efficiency, then tapped at the keyboard again and frowned.

“Is there a registration form you have guests fill out?” I asked, pushing my luck and not caring. “You know, address, passport number, credit card?”

She nodded, half preoccupied by whatever she saw on the monitor. “Normally, yes, but I can't seem to find the information here.” I watched her click her mouse again, her dark eyes roving the screen. “Look at that,” she murmured to herself, then to me. “It looks like you left something with us, in the safe.”

She looked up at me, suddenly skeptical, and I felt the skin along my arms flush with goose bumps.

“Oh, yes,” I said easily, feigning irritation and surprise at my own thoughtlessness. “I had almost forgotten. How stupid of me. It's just something I picked up in the medina. I can't believe you've held on to it all this time.”

“Of course,” the clerk said, offended that I would question the hotel's reliability.

I took a step back from the counter and casually adjusted a stray lock of hair. Just a forgotten trinket, I told myself, trying to quell the desperate surge in my heart. “Could you get it for me?”

The woman nodded. “If I could just see your passport, Madame.”

“Yes.” I smiled. “Of course.” I set my pack down and reached into the front pocket, brushing aside Marie's passport, pulling a one-hundred-euro note from my savings. I thought for a second, contemplating the plush lobby, the woman's blue suit. No, I didn't want to get this wrong. Reluctantly, I pulled out a second note.

“Will this do?” I asked, straightening up, sliding the two bills across the counter.

The woman hesitated a moment, and I felt my heart still. Then she put her hand out and carefully considered the sum before her.

“Yes, Ms. Boyle,” she said, finally. “This will do.”

*   *   *

Hannah Boyle. I said the name to myself, running my tongue along each syllable, hoping to feel the familiar pattern in the sounds, the words worn to fit like the ledge just below the altar at the convent's chapel, the stone cupped from all the knees it had received. All those months with the sisters I had imagined some kind of epiphany, a flash of self-recognition. I would stumble on something, I thought, a place, a name, and the past would spring open like a rusty gate newly oiled.

And yet, there in the lobby of the El Minzah, nothing had changed. The Tangier Hannah had moved in was still a mystery, the woman herself only a gaunt shadow, someone with a taste for vodka martinis, someone a waiter might remember fondly, even after a year. As I watched the desk clerk emerge from the door she'd disappeared through earlier, I remembered something Dr. Delpay had once told me. We all struggle to know ourselves, he had said, our whole lives.

The woman had a small black case in her hands, a little smaller than a shoebox. She came out from behind the desk, crossed to where I was sitting, and set the case on the low table in front of me. It was fastened by a lock, a metal circle with a narrow slit for a key.

“Thank you,” I told her.

She nodded, her duty discharged, and turned away.

I sat for a moment, staring down at the relic, remembering how I'd acted with Joshi, more uncertain than ever of just how much I wanted to know. Just a trinket, I reminded myself, and perhaps it was nothing more than a forgotten bauble, a dead end.

There was laughter out on the patio. A group I'd seen earlier at the piano bar stumbled into the lobby and out the front door. The desk clerk raised her head as they passed, then looked back down, deeply engaged in some task. I needed privacy, I thought, glancing around the room, my eyes lighting on a row of wooden phone booths in the back of the lobby and beyond them an alcove marked
WC
. Taking the box with me, I stood and made my way to the ladies' room.

Ducking into one of the stalls, I sat down on the toilet and set the box on my knees. I fished two bobby pins from my pack, bent them slightly, slipped them into the lock, one on top of the other, and jiggled them gently. Yes, I knew how to do this. When I heard the latch click softly free, I set my thumbs on the box's lid and eased it open.

This was not a trinket, I thought, as the top fell back on its hinges and my heart stopped momentarily. Sitting on the very top of the box's contents, wrapped in a thin velvet cloth, was a bulky L-shaped object. There was no mistaking what the cloth covered, and when I finally unwrapped it I was not surprised to see the burnished black body of a handgun staring up at me. I picked it up and read the writing etched into the barrel:
PIETRO BERETTA, GARDONE V.T.—MADE IN ITALY
. And below, in smaller letters:
MOD
. 84
F
—
CAL
. 9
SHORT
.

There was a clip in the barrel. I released it, and it fell into my lap, fresh and full, the ten bullets it was meant to hold still neatly packed. I put my hand around the stock, and my hand knew the feel and weight of it. My palm knew the gun's contours, the pattern of ridges and the circular stamp of the maker, just as it had come to know the smooth texture of perfectly kneaded bread dough.

Setting the gun aside, I turned my attention back to the case. Beneath the cloth was a thick stack of dull green American dollars, the top bill a hundred. I picked up the stack and flipped through it. My best guess said there were at least five thousand dollars in all. A nice nest egg, enough for several rainy days, I thought, setting the bills in my lap, turning my attention to what lay under them.

At the bottom of the case were some half dozen passports, seven, to be exact, once I'd counted them. The covers and countries of origin varied. Among the seven were two American, one Canadian, one French, one British, one Swiss, and one Australian passport. I opened each little book and paged through the contents, studying the names and birth dates, studying the glossy face that graced each document. Here was Sylvie Allain, a brunette, with close-cropped hair and a pale face. Here was Michelle Harding, her face tanned, her hair bleached by the Australian sun. Here was Meegan McCallister, a redhead, born on an April day in Toronto. Here was Leila Brightman, a severe-looking Brit. But the one passport I'd expected to find was not in the bunch. Among the faces, shocking in their familiarness, the features my own, the noses and mouths and slightly asymmetrical eyes, was no Hannah Boyle.

Each passport was imprinted with a variety of visas and exit and entry stamps. Whoever these women were, they were a well-traveled bunch. The smudged stamps showed trips to everywhere from Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland to Argentina, South Africa, and a number of former Soviet Bloc countries. Not pleasure trips, I assumed, unless the beaches of the Black Sea were your idea of a tropical vacation. It was a disparate set of destinations, with little to tie them together other than the fact that of the dozens of trips each woman had taken, none, according to the dates on the imprints, had been made within the last five years. Not a single one.

The bathroom door opened, and I heard heels on the polished floor. Leaning forward, I peered through the crack where the door met the stall and watched the newcomer make her way to the sinks. Familiar, I thought, and then I realized that beneath the makeup and simple black sheath was the fanny-packed woman from the Continental's lobby. She set her purse on the marble counter and leaned in toward the mirror, surveying her face.

Hesitating a moment, I stuffed everything back into the case and closed the lid. Then I stood, reached back, flushed the toilet, slid the case into my pack, and let myself out of the stall. I glanced up at the woman when I emerged. She'd taken a lipstick from her bag, and the red tip was poised against her mouth. Her eyes were intent on her task, focused on the double arch of her upper lip, but as I turned for the door I saw them move slightly, taking note of me as I went.

*   *   *

As my taxi headed past the Jewish cemetery and the walls of the Old City toward the Continental, I tried in vain to fit the pieces of the newly formed puzzle together. The case rested heavily in my lap, its implications weighing even heavier on my mind. I had come to Tangier for answers, but what I'd found was an ever-growing snarl of questions.