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By Letters

Farm junk No:3 Everybody Comes to Rick's

The shed has yet more secrets to explore. The Fergie tractor tyres, the oil drums full of 1960's oil and the worn horseshoes were just the start. There are piles of rusty bolts, some keys for abandoned doors and even a wing belonging to a long dead carrier pigeon.

Bogart with his white raincoat and wide-brimmed fedora probably knows what is in the sack labelled "Grain" though.

Grains are of course small, hard, dry seeds harvested for human or animal food. Agronomists generally call the plants producing such seeds 'grain crops'. In Spanish they are called Grano. The Poles say ziarno. The Swedes say sädeskorn and in Romanian it's gr?unte bob which is of course in sharp contrast to the Turkish bu?day.

In early December 1941, American expat' Rick Blaine was the proprietor of an upmarket nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca. "Rick's Café Américain" attracted a varied clientele: Vichy French, Italian, and German officials; refugees desperate to reach the still neutral United States and of course those who prey on them. Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, it is later revealed he ran guns to Ethiopia and fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. A hero perhaps or simply a war profiteer?

In a Casablanca screenshot of several people in Rick's Café Américain, the man on the far left is wearing a Del Monte suit and has a woman standing next to him wearing a hat and a dress. A man at the centre is looking at the man on the left. A man on the far right is wearing a suit and looking at the other people. They are in fact all looking at each other. Many of them wear hats.
Petty crook Ugarte (Peter Lorre) shows up and offers Rick some "letters of transit" obtained by him after murdering two German couriers.

"No thanks" says Bogart. "I'm having a sandwich."

"But the papers allow the bearer to travel freely around German-controlled Europe and to neutral Portugal, and are thus almost priceless to the refugees stranded in Casablanca." Says Ugarte.
Ugarte plans to sell them at the club later that night. Before he can however, he is arrested by the local Vichy French police under the command of Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), an unabashedly corrupt official. Ugarte dies in custody without revealing that he had entrusted the letters to Rick.

Ugarte's head is in this sack seemingly.

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