Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [84]
He's still explaining this as the van we're in pulls through a set of wooden gates, past a sentry in a tall hat, standing to attention, and glides to a rest between two ornamental pools filled with floating red rose petals, the centerpiece of a courtyard leading to a magnificent, secluded, five-star villa.
“As I said,” Willy grins wickedly, “if you hate it…”
Yeah, right.
Inside the main hallway, an Arabian Nights column-and-pool motif lends an air of understated mystique to one sunny room after another, each decorated tastefully with antiques and laced with an enduring stillness that somehow makes its sophistication effortless, the way good taste should be. To the rear of the main hall, a set of glass doors leads to a patio, and from there to a stunning landscaped garden bordering an exquisite diamond-shaped pool of still water, not because the pump broke and it's stagnant, which has been my experience with pools in the past, but because someone engineered it that way, to mirror the house's image back at itself, in case the old girl should need reminding from time to time how beautiful she is.
Built by a wealthy Moroccan family as their private home, it was recently turned into what is arguably Marrakech's finest out-of-the-way hotel, and stands in quite epic contrast to everything else I've seen in this struggling country so far.
“We have many big celebrity clients come to stay with us,” the owner's son explains proudly. “When they do, they take over the whole house.”
Dressed in a sharp suit, with rakish long brown hair down to his collar and an aristocratic French accent, he carries himself with an air of easy wealth, and none of that appallingly obnoxious swagger sported by the nouveau riche back in Hollywood.
Wait, did he say celebrities?
“Such as who?”
“Oh, well, P. Diddy flew three hundred and fifty of his friends out for a party …”
Impressive.
“… and Will Smith brought his family here for a vacation last year.”
Really?
And now we're here. It doesn't get any better than that.
Even as we're wiring our jaws back together, a gaggle of porters runs to grab our bags and take them to our suites—not rooms, note, but whole suites, one each—on the far side of the back lawn; a series of terraced bungalows as luxuriously decadent in their way as the rest of the villa, and filled with enough antiques and other classic touches to facilitate the fantasy that you too are connected enough or loaded enough to be invited to a celebrity's Moroccan hideaway, where the Cristal is flowing, Jada Pinkett Smith is sunning herself on the patio, Diddy's rapping freestyle in the cabana, and a couple of his homeys are in the suite next door getting their groove on with some bitches—or whatever the current degrading slang for “broads” is.
However, we're not celebrities, and we're certainly not loaded. This is only basic cable. Slightly worried, I ask Tasha, “Can we really afford to stay here?”
She bites her bottom lip. “Willy told me he's done a deal. He says he got this for the same price as the other place.”
“But how? How is that possible?”
It's a mystery. As is almost everything Willy has a hand in. I know the guy is our fixer, and fixers are meant to fix things, but something about his expression, the permanent sneer, the leeriness in his eyes, his nudge-wink street-kid mannerisms, tells me that his whole life is probably lived under the table. Exactly why would this ultraluxurious hotel, which clearly has larger, wealthier fish it could be frying, allow a group like us, who obviously don't fit its target clientele, to stay here? Best guess is that maybe business is slow right now, and cable TV money is better than no money at all. But I don't think so. Something else is going on. Willy has sweetened the deal in some way; I can feel it. And deals have consequences. Whatever he's up to, his little maneuver may be fine now, but it's bound to backfire on us sooner or later. Bet you anything.
Once again, the issue of flights, and why we don't have better