Lulu in Marrakech Read Online Free PDF Page B

status, no gun; I didn’t need a gun. I have to admit I’m drawn to guns and have been since learning to shoot at the Stanford University summer camp I went to as a child. My parents were upset because we came home with National Rifle Association certificates at the end. They considered the NRA an institution of the devil. Here a gun would have to be hidden with particular care, so I wouldn’t ask for one.
    In time, if necessary, someone could bring me a “firearm” (as Taft called them), but this was not considered a dangerous or “wet” mission unless I somehow stumbled into narcotics or nukes. We don’t usually concern ourselves with drugs, though.
    S ome of my equipment filled me with a special sense of unreality. Why would I, “Lulu,” an untroubled Californian tourist, have a microdot reader? Why were the names of people I could just call on the phone encrypted? I knew why, of course. There were particularly ruthless elements in North Africa, there were corpses in doorways, throats slit, ears removed, whose errors might only have been letting it be known they had talked to one of my colleagues or had done a little business with them. I knew all this but never could help an innate feeling that the frankness I have always been criticized for was the better course. Secrecy was against the grain, but I also have heard that to go against the grain is to grow.
    I couldn’t resist checking my e‐mail, in part to see how good the reception was and whether I’d need to dial up, but there seemed to be a strong signal. I’ve mentioned that I reported to this especially irritating man named Taft, who seemed to know nothing about the Balkans, and now nothing about North Africa. In part, I was to communicate with him by e‐mail, in a transparent way. He was called Sheila (“Dear Sheila”) with a simple AOL address and a fairly impenetrable set of code words by which I could alert him to look for an encrypted message online and vice versa.
    He had already told me that in Marrakech I would meet another agent; that agent in turn would know our people in Casablanca and Rabat. That agent, I was told, would find me. Now, Sheila wrote, “Watch your purse in the souk. Is it called the Casbah? I know several people who were pickpocketed.” That is to say, watch your back, there is danger, there is something afoot. With my heart excited by Ian, the message from Sheila acted on me like the chilling admonitions of my mother, recalling me to duty and common sense.

7
Emilia: How if fair and foolish?
Iago: She never yet was foolish that was fair.
—William Shakespeare, Othello, act 2, scene 1
    A t two I went down to lunch, disappointed that there were other people staying, but was quickly brought out of that mood by the prospective comedy of house parties, with their tiptoeing, significant looks, and creaky doors. Maybe it was propitious that there were others here; maybe in the long run, love would thrive on stolen moments, and maybe the other people would help me find my way into Moroccan intrigue. Though I didn’t quite see how. The other guests were a gangly British laureate poet named Crumley, a man in his fifties; his younger, pregnant wife, Posy, a sturdy girl with the English ankles, or maybe incipient swelling problems related to the pregnancy; another English woman named Nancy Rutgers, a soignée blonde in her late thirties or early forties who worked at Sotheby’s in London, expert on clocks and carpets; and her boyfriend, an American bookseller or antique dealer—one or the other—David someone.
    “They’re only staying a few days,” Ian whispered, nodding toward Nancy and David, brushing the top of my head with his lips as he bent over me. Aloud, he said, “You’ve come on a Wednesday, Lulu, so you get the full shock of Marrakech life this very night—tonight’s my turn to host the Shakespeare club. You’ll have to take a part.” He explained that members of the English ‐ language community read