The Casbah Killers полностью

I followed the narrow street, pushing my way through hordes of people, turned right at the end and came to the small house set back in a small garden. The doorway was open and I stepped inside. It was cool and darkened with drawn blinds shutting out the sun. I stood still for a moment and was about to call out when from inside a draped archway, a woman stepped forth.

She was tall, wearing a jeweled bra and ballooned turkish trousers with ornate babouches. Loose, hanging black hair gave her high cheek-boned face a somewhat wild appearance. She had a prominent nose and wide mouth. Huge, bronzed earrings and a jewel in the center of her forehead added to her bizarre appearance. The jeweled bra strained to keep in huge, pendulous breasts.

Bizarre and wild as she appeared, there was an air of unvarnished, animal sensuality to the woman as she regarded me, hands on hips, with the quizzical stare of a woman for whom there are no more surprises.

“Salaam,” I said. “Yussif ben Kashan sent me to see you.”

A brilliant grin suddenly erupted and she showed a set of flashing, white teeth. Nodding for me to follow, she slipped through the curtained archway. I went on in and found myself surrounded instantly by a bevy of excited, chattering little girls.

I guessed they ranged from 11 to 14 years of age and they were completely naked, clustering around me, pushing and thrusting their nubile bodies forward. Their bodies were slender, light to dark brown and really very beautiful in their fresh, flowering loveliness, and I was reminded that the ancient Greeks thought a woman was at her most beautiful when she was 12 to 14, boyish and yet feminine, not immature and not mature.

I felt their hands on my body, running up and down my arms and legs, feeling the hardness of my muscled frame, and their chattering grew louder and more appreciative. Their pubescent, nymph-like beauty was enhanced by the unmistakable sensuality of their motions. One leaned back against a small table and spread her legs to apparently show me how close to virginal she was.

Fatasha was an erotic mother hen, grinning proudly.

“You like, aye?” she said. “They all yours. You have good time here at Fatasha’s. You find these girls make you go very high.”

“Hold it, hold it,” I said. “I only came to ask you some questions.”

“You ask questions?” She frowned, a dark cloud seemingly enveloping her face.

I thrust a dollar bill at her.

“Here, for your time,” I said. “I look for the man Karminian. I was told he might be here at your house.”

The money helped to assuage her hurt feelings at my turning down her choice offerings.

“Karminian is not here,” she said a little gruffly.

“When did you last see him?”

“A week, maybe few days more,” she answered. That helped to nail it down a little. He was around and alive as recently as a week ago.

I pressed again. “Did he tell you where he might be going?” I asked. “Did he tell any of your girls he was going away?”

Fatasha spoke sharply to the girls and they shook their heads. Once they realized I wasn’t a customer they had sat down on a large bed and were busy talking, playing cards, and one even had a doll for which she was fashioning clothes, just as young girls anywhere would be doing. Only they were stark naked and serenely unconscious of it.

“Karminian not here,” Fatasha said again, dismissing me with the phrase.

I nodded to her, slipped through the draped archway and went back into the heat of the streets. My next stop was the Chez Caliph and outside the medina, though the streets of Casablanca were busy with late afternoon traffic, they seemed almost empty to me.

I found the place on the Boulevard Zerktouni, just as Aggie had said, and the bartender was not at all reluctant to talk about Karminian. What he said, though, made my eyebrows go up, discreetly, of course.

“Sure, he came in all the time around five o’clock for a glass of sherry,” the man said. He was a European who spoke English well. “Karminian was a loner, very quiet. He’d sit in a corner and just watch people. I only saw him with a woman once or twice, a gorgeous, black-haired dame, tall, real class.”

That sure as hell wasn’t Aggie Foster, I thought to myself. And Karminian a “loner?” That didn’t fit either.

It was getting late and evening was already closing in. Without a good description of what the man looked like it was useless for me to try touring the jazz spots. I decided to go back to his apartment and wait there until it was time for Aggie to be finished, then visit her for a better description of the man.

I stopped in at a restaurant, the Rissani, and had a delicious meal of chicken cooked in olives and lemons and stuffed with almonds, raisins, semolina, honey and rice.