Lord of the Desert

“The produce is just beautiful,” she exclaimed. “My goodness, this is even prettier than in our supermarkets back home, but it isn’t refrigerated.”

He chuckled. “Yes, and on this market day, much of it gets sold to city dwellers.”

He acquainted her with the various spices and the displays of olives before the guide led them back into the city.

“Are you thirsty?” Philippe asked her.

“I could drink a gallon of water all by myself,” she panted, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a tissue from her pocket.

He grinned. “So could I.”

He and the guide led her to a small café where he ordered bottled water for her and mint tea for himself. He offered her some tea, but she declined, nervous about trying anything that didn’t come out of a bottle.

“You must try the mint tea before you leave Morocco,” he told her. “It is famous here.”

“I will. Right now cold water sounds better.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

He handed her chilled bottled water and took his mint tea to a small group of tables under a spreading tree near the walls of the old city. Their guide remained behind to speak to a shop owner he knew. “The café owns this small space,” Philippe told her, “and patrons pay at the counter and eat here.”

“This is very nice,” she said, looking around her at comfortably dressed people wandering about. “There are lots of tourists here.”

“Yes. The city is the site of an arts festival which is going on even now. The shops in the old walled city are brimming over, and Asilah has put on its brightest face for the festival. It draws people from around Europe and Africa and from all over the world.”

“You said the revolutionary’s palace was here?” she asked.

He nodded. He sipped his mint tea, finished it, and excused himself to return the china cup and saucer to the stand. She was curious about that, because most of the tourists had disposable containers like hers. Following Philippe with her eyes, she saw the extreme courtesy with which the shop owner treated him. While she was observing that, she noticed something else—foreign men in sunglasses and dark suits standing nearby. They’d parked behind them when they arrived. She wondered why they were here. Whimsically she wondered if they were shadowing some important foreign dignitary who was in disguise. When she got home, she’d have to ask her brother about foreign security. Then she remembered that she was going to Qawi, not home. It made her nervous and a little sad.

Philippe came back and studied her from his great height. “You’re worried,” he said abruptly.

“Sorry.” She pinned a smile to her face as she got to her feet, clutching her half-finished bottle of water. “I was thinking about my new job, if I get it.”

“And worrying,” he persisted.

She grimaced. “I don’t like using a plane ticket in someone else’s name and pretending I’m her, even if he does eventually hire me anyway.”

He smiled. “I think you have very little to worry about in that respect. As for the plane ticket, the concierge will change it for you, into the right name, and Mustapha or Bojo there—” he indicated their tall driver and guide still lingering at the shop counter “—will even take you to the airport and wait with you.”

“They will?”

He grinned at her shocked expression. “Isn’t this done in your country?”

“No, it isn’t,” she said flatly.

“To each his own,” he said tolerantly. “You will find life a little different in this part of the world.”

“I already have,” she said. She laughed gently. “I don’t know that it’s good for me to be pampered like this. I’m just a very ordinary paralegal.”

One eye narrowed. “I think, Gretchen Brannon, that you are not very ordinary at all.”

“You don’t know much about women from Texas.”

“A gap in my education which I hope to correct in the next few days,” he said gallantly. With a twinkle in his black eyes, he added in the classic line from an old Charles Boyer movie, “Will you come with me to the kasbah?”

She laughed helplessly. “I really do watch too many movies. I only thought there was one kasbah until the cabdriver at the airport told me what they were.”

“Charles Boyer and Humphrey Bogart films,” he mused. “They portray a very different Morocco.”

“Yes. Those days are long dead.”

“The old ways, perhaps. Not the intrigue,” he informed her. He put a hand under her elbow to guide her through the gates of the old city and into the maze of narrow streets and small shops. He leaned down to her ear. “Do you see the man in the beige suit wearing sunglasses? No, don’t turn your head!”

She had a flash of vision out of the corner of her eye. “Yes.”

“Now, do you notice the gentlemen in dark suits and sunglasses nearby?”

“I saw them earlier…!”

“Bodyguards.”

“Really?” She sounded breathless with excitement. “Whose are they? Do they belong to the man in the beige suit?”

He pursed his lips amusedly. “Who knows? Perhaps he works for one of the Saudi princes who have estates outside Tangier.”

“The one the guide pointed out, with the heliport and armed guards at the gate?”

“That one. They go sightseeing from time to time. Yesterday I saw the ex-president of Spain in town.”

“So did we! I’ve never met a head of state, former or not.”

He kept his eyes carefully on the path ahead and didn’t reply.

“Those bodyguards, I guess they have guns?”

“Nine millimeter Uzis and they know how to use them.”

She gasped. “Good Lord. I hope nobody attacks him.”

“Nobody knows him,” he said lazily. “Heads of state from the Middle Eastern countries wander around here all the time and are never noticed. They blend in.”

“If you notice the Sheikh of Qawi, how about pointing him out to me?” she asked facetiously. “Maybe I can throw myself on his mercy before I arrive in his capital city like an unclaimed parcel.”

He put on his own sunglasses and grinned. “I can promise you, his own subjects wouldn’t know him in a European suit.”

“Is he…perverse?” she asked bluntly, worried in spite of Maggie’s assurances.

He stopped dead and looked down at her. His eyes, behind the dark lenses, were concealed. “What?” he asked icily.