Free The Blue Hour by Douglas Kennedy Page A

exploring the souk’s early byways, my loose-fitting T-shirt and linen pants were sodden. So too were the T-shirt and shorts that Paul had pulled on when our laundry was delivered to our room just after eleven (he held firm to the “no djellaba outside” rule). By that time we’d had a large breakfast on our terrace. Then we set up his outdoor studio—Paul getting me to help him move the desk from the outer room to a corner of the balcony where it was shaded by an overhanging roof, but where he had a direct view of the Essaouira rooftops. He excused himself for a moment, returning ten minutes later with a brightly striped parasol he said he’d bought at a local shop. Positioning its plastic stand to ensure that his desk was fully shielded, he began to ready himself for work. A sketch pad was opened. Eight pencils were laid out with great formality on the varnished wood surface of the desk. Pulling his khaki safari hat on, he sat down, peered out at the rooftops in the immediate distance, and then began his intricate architectural rendering. I stood inside, watching him for a good ten minutes, marveling at the precision and intensity of his vision, the amazing sense of line that he maintained, the way he seemed oblivious to everything but the work at hand, the ferocious discipline that rose up within him as he drew. All I could feel was a strange rush of love for this very talented, off-kilter man.
    Then I set up my own little workspace: my laptop, a very nice Moleskine journal I bought before my departure, and an old Sheaffer fountain pen that had belonged to my dad. It was red, with the sort of chrome appointments that recalled the fins on a vintage Chevy. Dad always kept it filled with red ink. His choice of color was a source of dry amusement to my mother. “Your whole damn life is about the accumulation of red ink,” she told him on more than one occasion. But Dad once explained to me the reason he loved that color was the richness of its imprint: “It really does look like you’ve been writing in blood.”
    But before I was able to make my first crimson entry in my notebook, the phone by the bed jumped into life. I answered it to hear the guy at the front desk telling me, “Your French professor is downstairs.”
    M. Picard clearly worked fast, as I’d only asked him to find me a teacher the previous afternoon.
    Before going downstairs to meet him or her, Paul told me, “Whoever is going to be giving you the lessons will need the work. Don’t agree to more than one hundred dirhams an hour.”
    â€œBut that’s only fifteen dollars.”
    â€œIt’s great money here, trust me.”
    When I entered the lobby, I saw a demure young woman waiting by the reception desk. Though wearing a hijab—a head scarf that allows the face to be shown—she was nonetheless dressed in blue jeans and a floral blouse that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1960s commune. A touch of retro-hippie chic. You could tell immediately that this was a young woman who was very much caught between disparate worlds.
    When she accepted my outstretched hand, the softness of her grip and the dampness of her palm hinted that she was anxious about this meeting. I tried to put her at her ease, motioning to two dusty armchairs in a corner of the lobby where we could talk undisturbed and asking the man behind the desk to bring us two mint teas.
    She was intensely shy and seemed keen to please. Her name was Soraya. A Berber from the extreme south of the country, deep within the Sahara, Soraya was just twenty-nine and a teacher at a local school. Through gentle probing I discovered that she’d studied at the university in Marrakesh and had even done a year in France. When she couldn’t get her visa extended she had to return home. Languages were her passion. In addition to her native Arabic and French she had mastered English and was working on Spanish now.
    â€œBut