The Heat of Betrayal Read Online Free PDF Page A

this summer in Essaouira?’ he asked.
    My initial thought was that we’d already put $500 down on a cottage near Popham Beach in Maine. Reading my mind Paul said:
    â€˜We can still do the two weeks in Popham. I’ve booked us to leave Morocco a few days before we’re due in Maine.’
    â€˜You’ve actually bought us two tickets for Morocco?’
    â€˜I wanted to surprise you.’
    â€˜Oh, you certainly did that. But you could have at least asked me if I was free.’
    â€˜If I had asked, you would have found an excuse to say no.’
    He was, alas, right about that one.
    â€˜Did you even consider the fact that I have a business, and clients? And how are we going to afford this trip to Morocco?’
    â€˜Jasper sold four more lithographs last week.’
    â€˜You never told me this.’
    â€˜The nature of a surprise is to keep things secret.’
    I was already intrigued. Outside of my time in Montreal and a trip once to Vancouver (hardly a real overseas destination), I had no experience of the world beyond American frontiers. Here was my husband offering to whisk me off to North Africa. But my alleged financial caution was, I knew, underscored by fear. The fear of foreignness. Of being dropped into a Muslim country that – for all of Paul’s talk about its modernity – was, according to anything I’d ever read, still locked in the North African past.
    â€˜We can easily live for a month in Essaouira for two thousand dollars,’ he said.
    â€˜It’s too long to take off.’
    â€˜Promise your staff a nice bonus if they hold the fort for six weeks.’
    â€˜And what are my clients going to say about this?’
    â€˜Who consults an accountant between mid-July and Labor Day?’
    He did have a point. It was my slowest season. But six weeks away? It seemed like such a huge block of time . . . even though I also knew that, in the great scheme of things, it was nothing, and that, yes, Morton (my bookkeeper) and Kathy (my secretary) could manage to run everything very well without me. One of the hardest lessons for anyone with control-freak tendencies to absorb is that the world actually carries on very well without them.
    â€˜I’m going to have to think this over.’
    â€˜No,’ Paul said, taking my hand. ‘You’re going to say yes now. Because you know this will be an amazing experience which will take you out of your comfort zone and show you a world you’ve only imagined. And it will give me the opportunity to work on a new portfolio which Jasper assured me he can sell for at least fifteen thousand dollars. So there’s a big financial incentive. Most of all, it will be very good for us. We could truly use some time out of here, time to ourselves, and away from all that day-to-day stuff.’
    Morocco. My husband was taking us to Morocco. To Essaouira. How could I not overlook my qualms and give in to the idea of a North African idyll in a walled medieval city facing the Atlantic? The stuff of fantasy. And aren’t all fantasies rooted in one great hope: that of landing, even temporarily, in a better place than we find ourselves now?
    So I said yes.
    The immigration line inched forward, slowly, inexorably. Almost an hour had passed since we’d landed and only now were we at the front. The man from Mauritania was being rigorously questioned by the cop in the booth, the discussion getting heated, voices raised; the policeman picked up his phone to call someone, two other plain-clothes officers (guns bulging under their suit jackets) showed up and led the now angry and frightened man into a side interrogation room. Glancing away from this little drama towards my husband I could see that he was regarding these proceedings with dread.
    â€˜You think they’ll let me in?’ he whispered.
    â€˜Why wouldn’t they?’
    â€˜No reason, no reason.’ But he sounded uneasy. At that precise moment the