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trying to force my rusty Spanish to sound relaxed.
    He laid the passport on the little counter and slid it toward me. “No problem, mi hermana, ” he said, shaking his head. “Just a mix-up.”
    A mix-up. I smiled and took the passport. “Thank you.”
    He smiled back. “ Bon voyage .”
    Steadying my legs, I forced myself to move forward. There were two swinging doors just beyond the immigration booths, and on the other side of the doors, a long glass walkway that led out to the ferry’s gangplank. I made my way with the other passengers, my stomach slowly calming, my pulse easing down toward normal. Halfway there, I told myself, conscious of the fact that I still had to get past the Moroccan officials.
    We boarded the boat on the deserted lower car deck, then climbed up to the passenger deck. It was raining still, the dark bay dotted with gleaming whitecaps. Out the salt-rimed windows I could see the rocky flanks of Gibraltar and the geometric lines of the Algeciras waterfront. I found a free chair and settled in for the ride.
    I opened Marie’s passport to the photo page and read down through the typed information: name, place and date of birth, identity number. No, there was nothing about a profession, nothing to give away the fact that Marie was a nun. Yet the man had known. No problem, mi hermana, I had heard him say. No problem, my sister. Somehow, he had known.

FIVE
    Nothing can prepare you for Tangier. Nothing can ready you for the crush of men, the hands grabbing for your bags, the taxi drivers fistfighting for your fare, the poverty and hopelessness of the place. The city assaults you with the stench of desperation: the sweat of illegals from Senegal or the Ivory Coast waiting listlessly in cheap cafés for a night crossing to Spain, the wool-and-saffron reek of the black-market money changers outside the medina, the gunmetal tang of the soldiers in the Grand Socco. Everywhere, the pervasive stink of colonialism gone to rot.
    It was just before sundown when we docked in Tangier. I’d gotten a visa on the boat, a rubber stamp from a young Moroccan official who hadn’t even bothered to look at my passport photo. He’d added my transit slip to a growing heap of identical scraps of white paper, some littering the ground at his feet, then waved me on my way.
    The passenger deck was thick with too much humanity in too small a space, damp clothes and diapers and fried food. I was grateful when news of our imminent arrival crackled over the intercom, and we could make our way down to the car deck to wait to offload. Someone opened the chain-link cage that served as a baggage hold, and the crowd rushed recklessly forward, scrambling over the open top of the cage, fighting their way to backpacks and battered suitcases.
    After a few minutes the gangway door swung open. The gangplank was lowered into place, and one by one we funneled onto the African continent, passports once again out. I had a brief moment of anxiety before I handed mine over, but there was no reason to worry. With the hundreds of bodies pressed behind me, there was time for little more than a cursory glance and a nod.
    When I emerged from the terminal onto the long crumbling pier, I was immediately surrounded by some dozen local men, some in long hooded burnooses and pointy-toed babouches, others wearing Calvin Klein knockoffs and dark sunglasses, all clamoring to be of service in one way or another. I shook my head and kept walking, hands tight on the straps of my rucksack, moving forward with the crowd.
    Through all the shouting and confusion, the dullest ache of recognition was beginning to form in my mind. Some part of my consciousness knew this place, the shape of the port, the rhythm of the language. I looked ahead toward the distant end of the pier, and somehow I knew there was a large gate there, and a square. Northwest of the square, where the land sloped upward, lay the labyrinth of the medina. I