Rick's Cafe by Kathy Kriger

Author:Kathy Kriger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2012-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

By this time, the officers, quite subdued, suggested that maybe their superior could intervene. We went into his office, my face streaked with tears and completely distraught. He seemed quite inured to hysterics of this sort. No doubt he would have been reasonable only if I’d pulled out wads of dirhams and flashed them before his eyes. Useless.

Back in the first office, I gathered the magazines and newspaper clippings that I’d so proudly shown earlier. The brigade chief meekly asked me to read the procès-verbal and sign it. It stated, among other affronts, that I acknowledged having broken the law by not opening my restaurant the previous June.

I refused.

They asked me to turn over my license.

“No,” I said as I walked out the door, still crying. “As far as I’m concerned my license has not been canceled.”

I walked fast, not looking back, went down the stairs, and got nervous only when I had to stop at the reception desk to retrieve my I.D. card. Fortunately I wasn’t detained.

Outside, I called the lawyer assisting me with the capital risk contracts.

“I was just going to call and invite you to lunch with another associate in the firm,” he said. “I’ll do some internal consultation, and we’ll have a game plan hatched by the time we meet.”

Over crab salad at Taverne du Dauphin, my lawyer told me that a senior member of the firm would write a letter to “someone” in Rabat. My job was to give them that afternoon a recap of the process from when I’d received my license, through my first meeting with the police, and to the meeting I’d just had.

In the memo written quickly after lunch, I thought it would bolster my case if I mentioned the National Tourism Convention coming up in Casablanca. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I held a press conference during the event to reveal the traps that authorities set for investors? I hand-delivered copies of the memo to the law firm and to the Regional Investment Center.

A few weeks later, at the beginning of February, a staff member from the Police Commissariat came to the site with a written summons to appear the next morning. He laughed when I said that it must be good news.

“When you do good things, you notify people in writing,” I said, “and, when you’re trying to do bad things, you use the telephone.”

The next morning, the brigade chief was all smiles. “Good news. Your license is not canceled on instructions of the big boss in Rabat!”

He was doing the bidding of the man who controlled his professional destiny, and I was happy that this charade had ended. The same sympathetic man was typing up the transcript of this meeting, and after the others left the room I asked him what had caused the attempt to cancel my license. “You were all so nice to me before. Has your section turned on me?”

“No, that’s not it at all,” he said. “We do like your project and understand that the previous wali was trying to change things.

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