A Dead Man in Tangier Read Online Free PDF Page B

bitch!'
    ‘Come, now, Juliette. Be generous. She shares your loss.
    ’ ‘She wants to share the money. He’s not left her anything, has he? That apartment –’
    ‘It does belong to her, Juliette. It is registered in her name.'
    ‘But it belongs to me! It was bought with Bossu’s money. My money!'
    ‘But it’s in her name, Juliette. That’s the problem.'
    ‘Well, you’ll just have to do something about it. Get it off her. You’re looking after my interests, Constant. My interests. Not hers. Unless – Oh, Constant! You’re not betraying me with that bitch, are you? Oh, Constant! How could you!’
    ‘I assure you, I assure you –’
    ‘Monsieur Seymour, you are not going to stand by and see a poor woman robbed?'
    She turned towards him her beautiful tear-stained face.
    ‘Assuredly not, Madame!’ said Seymour fervently, carried away, for the moment.
    ‘Juliette –’ began Renaud wretchedly.
    ‘You cannot imagine, Monsieur,’ she said, looking up at Seymour with blue, tragic eyes, ‘what it is for a woman to lose her husband in such a way. Murdered! Killed by those fanatics!'
    ‘I’m sorry?'
    ‘ Les n`egres . The blacks. They hate us, you know. And they hated him. Even though he had lived in the country for all that time. Thirty years! He gave his life to this damned country. And see how they repay him!’
    ‘But, Juliette, we do not know –’
    ‘Of course we do! Who else could it have been? A spear, in the bushes? From behind? That is how they fight. And how they kill!'
    Renaud, discomfited, did not, after all, stay behind and he and Seymour drove into Tangier together. As they reached the bottom of the slope and slowed down to turn into Tangier, Seymour felt the carriage tip suddenly at the rear and guessed that they had been joined.

Chapter Three
    The city, when they got there, was oddly still. The streets were empty. The peanut sellers, sticky-sweet sellers and dirty postcard sellers with whom they had previously been crowded had all vanished. The beggars, who had been at least as numerous, had retired into the shade. The shops were not exactly closed – their fronts remained open to the world – but no one was in them. It was, he suddenly realized, the hour of siesta.
    Renaud shook hands and departed and Seymour, with nothing to do until five o’clock, when he was seeing Macfarlane, went back to his hotel.
    That, too, was deserted. He had half hoped to see the receptionist again and was slightly disappointed when he didn’t. She was still probably doubling up as a journalist at the Tent.
    The coolness of the hotel, though, was welcome after the heat outside and he climbed up the marble stairs to his room and lay on the bed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep – he never could during the day – but he felt a need to sort out the jumble of impressions which had crowded in on him in the short forty-eight hours that he had been in Tangier: the variety of peoples – Arab, Berber, French, Jewish, Negroes (from the Sudan? or West Africa?); the exotic, besieging smells of spices and sand and fresh leather and sandalwood – even the bales of cloth in the tailor’s shop had smelt differently from the way they would have done in England; the different perfumes of the women, light, intoxicating in the case of the Frenchwomen, heavy, sensuous in the case of the Moroccans; the bright colours of the long gowns, pink and salmon and hectic green and blue, alongside the blackness of the veiled women, the sounds, the braying of donkeys, the thin wailing of flutes, the distant beating of drums, the babble and chatter of the streets.
    Above all, the words. Seymour had an unusually acute ear for language and now he was quite dazed. All morning he had been speaking French. That was all right, he spoke it well; but the suddenness and totality of his immersion in it was rather disorienting.
    And then the odd mixture of French and Arabic! The shopkeepers, the people you heard talking as they passed you