‘You mean there were Arabs on the flight?’
‘Right. And all the cabin crew were poofs.’
When they approached the outskirts of town, Nat wound down the window. It was early evening, the food stands were firing up, and the scent of harissa and charcoal drifted on the air. She loved Marrakech. The heat caressed her skin, the carnival of smells relaxed her, and the cheerful swirl of noise was sweet relief from the portentous grey hush of Grosvenor’s London office. The taxi slowed to walking pace where the current of cars, motorbikes, scooters, bicyclists and people driving goats or riding donkeys had formed a complicated eddy and subsided into a general impasse that was being worked out by way of an elaborate concatenation of honks, shouts, shrieks, curses and cries. Several wonky towers of plastic crates rose from the back of the truck next to them, and through its slatted sides Nat could make out the figures of two men smoking and playing cards. Further down the road she saw a girl of seven or so in a yellow dress and pink flip flops with a three-foot-long branch of dates dangling above her head, and a boy leading a donkey with a flagon of water in one pannier and a TV in the other.
‘We’re stuck,’ said Nikolai.
‘Arrêtez ici un petit moment, je vous en prie,’ Nat told the driver.
The taxi pulled over and was quickly surrounded by boys eager for whatever business this foreign lady might bring. Nat looked the nearest boy in the eye and gave her order, along with a ten-dirham note. The chosen one elbowed his way back through the crowd. She gave another twenty to the oldest-looking boy and gestured to the rest. ‘À partager, compris?’
‘Oui, merci!’
The boy returned with water, barbecued chicken and aubergine fritters wrapped in a paper towel.
‘You eat that kind of dirty food, you are asking to get sick in the stomach,’ Nikolai informed her.
‘Don’t be silly, I have it every time I come to Marrakech. Here, I got this for you.’
‘No way.’ He paused. ‘How come you give money to those kids, huh? Makes them think they can beg all their lives,’ he said self-righteously, as if he had hit upon the root cause of all indolence north of the Sahara.
‘It’s what you do here, Niko. It’s what makes it OK for you to be rich and them to be poor. You’d better get used to it.’
Nat’s hotel, the Riad des Ombres, was in the old town, five minutes’ walk from the main square of Marrakech, the Djemaa el Fna. She had reserved a room for Nikolai on the quiet, cool side of the building, but all her brother noticed was that the TV was too small. They went down to the pool in one of the two courtyards, and the swim washed away his rebellious mood.
‘I’ve been learning French,’ he told her. ‘Bonjour mon soeur, comment vous allez vous?’
‘Ma soeur. And for your sister, you use tu.’
‘For my little sister,’ said Nikolai, ‘I use one hand to keep her away from the edge and the other to drown her.’
He placed a meaty palm on top of her head and did so. Nat screamed obligingly. It was mean of her to criticise. Learning languages was Nikolai’s hobby. He said that Russian was no good for business, unless you liked doing business with drunks. Therefore, he must learn English, German, and now French. It wasn’t obvious to Nat how his linguistic accomplishments would assist him, since his business style was to sit in silence with his arms folded, occasionally shaking his head and grimacing.
She said she’d take him to a French restaurant so he could practise. After sufficient steak, chips and beer to allow him to feel as a Ukrainian man should after his evening meal, Nikolai became convivial to the point where a gullible observer might have thought him cosmopolitan.
‘What’s he like, this Zender?’ he asked.
Nat hesitated. ‘He’s clever, charming, forty-something, I guess. He’s only interested in money, so I feel like I know where I stand with him. The most obvious thing is that he’s fat.’
‘Fat?’ said Nikolai. Most of his male friends were fat, or well covered as they liked to say. It testified to their affluence and virility.
‘Not like you. He’s huge, must be nearly two metres tall and easily a hundred and thirty kilos. Greedy, too. He hangs out at a café called Zizou’s which he says has the best pastry chef in the world. In the evening he goes to the Casino des Capricornes and finds rich people to play poker with.’
‘A pig,’ said Nikolai.
‘A very powerful pig. He knows everyone, taxi drivers, businessmen, city officials and politicians, the chief of police. The whole of Marrakech wants to do him a favour, and for anyone who doesn’t he probably has the number of a hired killer in his cellphone.’
‘So when do we see him?’
‘Not for a few days. . . Nikolai, I have to make a trip. To LA – I fly out first thing tomorrow, back Thursday.’
Nikolai’s face took on an expression intended to inform his sister that she was taking a liberty. ‘You’re leaving me in fucking Morocco,’ he said testily. ‘Great.’
‘You can stay here and relax, get a feel for the place.’
‘I don’t want a feel for the place.’ He paused. ‘Anton and Mikhail are coming out – be good to have them around.’
‘Must they?’
‘Be a holiday for them, right?’
In Nat’s eyes, Mikhail – a former state-sponsored weightlifter who never quite made it into the Olympic squad of his native Bulgaria – seemed to have been designed expressly to stand stock still and go red in the face. An impressive sight, but all wrong for Marrakech. Anton was a cut-price gigolo who fancied himself a great deal more than anything about him warranted.
‘Don’t cause any trouble, Nikolai, I don’t want to get back from LA to find the three of you slurping mutton fat in the local jail.’
She took him back to the Riad and kissed him goodnight, then went to bed herself and slept contentedly, as she nearly always did. Next morning, she ate a large breakfast and met up with her friend Jamila, the wife of the owner of the Riad des Ombres, who had offered to drive her to the airport. The two women had spent many happy hours in each other’s company: Nat regaled Jamila with tales of London high society, which in truth she knew nothing at all about, while Jamila repaid her with vivid portrayals of the scurrilous lives led by the great and the good of Marrakech. It was an altogether comforting relationship.
Nat chatted with Jamila until they reached the highway, then called Zender and told him she’d been summoned to London.
‘Grosvenor have checked their revenue projections and realised their mistake, I surmise,’ he said. ‘You will be re-instated as soon as they have worked out a way of doing so without further humiliating themselves.’
After listening to more in this vein she told him he was cutting out and hung up.
‘I’ll never know what you see in that greedy maloof,’ said Jamila. ‘And you, beautiful enough for a prince!’
‘In fact, he does make me feel like royalty. I don’t believe he has ever missed an opportunity to pay me a compliment.’
‘My advice is this, Natalya: you must take him by some tender part – I leave the choice to you – and squeeze as hard as you like. It will remind him who is boss.’
‘Now I know why your husband is so red in the face,’ said Nat, and the two women laughed without restraint at the thought of their wincing bedfellows.
They reached the airport just before ten. Nat checked in and went through to the departure lounge, then put in her call to Grosvenor. She’d been delaying as long as possible because she hoped to get away with speaking to Sir Peter Beddoes, who disliked early starts.
‘Hi Nat,’ said the chairman’s PA. ‘Clive wants to speak to you. Shall I put you through?’
Nat reluctantly agreed. It was too soon in the game to be evasive.
‘I managed to meet with Zender,’ she told him. ‘He said getting the IPD400 back was impossible. That could be a negotiating position – I’m not sure yet. The five per cent sweetener won’t be enough, anyway.’
‘It seems more than generous. Has
he told you who has it now?’
‘Obviously not. He just said he’d have a word with his client – and only because it was me who asked.’
‘It would help to have a name, Natalya. Please work on that.’
‘I’m a sales director, Clive, not a secret agent.’
‘Keep your ear to the ground – Marrakech is always full of chatter.’
‘Actually, it’s not. What have you found out your end?’
‘If we turn up anything relevant to your line of enquiry, I’ll let you know. Do we have a time-frame for Zender’s approach to his client?’
‘He said he’d call on Thursday.’
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘Yes, Clive, it is.’
She hung up, thinking it had been smart of her to get riled. All right, not exactly smart, since she hadn’t intended to. . . But if she suddenly became docile towards him, Clive Silk would get suspicious – not a good thing, given that she was sneaking off to LA for four days behind Grosvenor’s back.
Chapter Four
James was moaning. Moaning again. Or still moaning. His mind slopped around like a seagull in an oil slick. His limbs were clods of meat.
He realised why he’d woken. He was going to be sick. He pitched his head to one side and held it there as the bitter juice swamped his nostrils.
When it was over, he gurgled gently, trying not to draw the filth into his lungs. He swallowed and it felt like he had a garden hose jammed down his throat. This wasn’t the first time he’d vomited, but he couldn’t remember the others.
It came to him that he could open his eyes. Soon. Soon, he would have to open his eyes.
His room was made of breeze blocks outlined with irregular squidges of mortar. Small and square, with one corner walled off. Concrete floor. He was lying on his side on a thin foam mattress covered in canvas, still trembling from the shock of coming to. To his left was a door made of orange-stained pine. Whoever had installed the light switch hadn’t straightened it up before screwing it to the wall.
He tried to raise his head and sheets of light flared and crackled behind his eyes. It felt like someone had pounded a Champagne cork into the canal of his left ear. The outside of the ear was raging hot, probably infected by the puddle of congealing vomit in which it lay.
Opposite his mattress was a small window covered with a square of yellow cotton. Iron bars on the outside of the window cast stripes of shadow which bent and rippled as the cotton billowed in and out. It was soothing to watch – as if the room were breathing. Wafts of hot air circled him like empty thoughts, like ideas you couldn’t catch hold of.
Eventually he persuaded one of his arms to bend at the elbow and lever itself up where he could see it. There were puncture marks, brown and yellow bruising. A drip had been inserted into the back of his hand.
James contemplated the billowing yellow curtain for a further, indeterminate length of time, then decided he ought to move. He stretched out his legs and his torso and allowed his head to roll back. He waited, eyes shut, for the jangling inside his skull to slacken. His ear popped and creaked. He thought of water for the first time since coming round. He would not last long without water – maybe just a few hours. A wave of self-pity clutched at his throat.
The walled-off corner. . . He could perhaps make it to the edge and look round. He began to wrestle himself off the mattress. Some cruel alchemical transformation had made sludge of the air and given the concrete floor the contours of a ploughed field. He allowed himself to roll onto it and tried not to cry out.
Later, he hauled himself up onto hands and knees. His head swung between his arms. The feel of his kneecaps scraping across the concrete kept him going. It was a long way, and he lay down and rested many times.
Near the corner, he stretched out on his front until he could see round. No door, just a narrow room with a squat toilet, a sunken plastic tray with rests for the feet either side of the drain, covered with a film of reddish dust. A fat blue plastic hose emerged via a butterfly tap from the base of the wall beyond. James craned his neck round and his eyes followed the hose. It ended six feet up in a shower head attached with a twist of wire to a hook screwed into the wall.
He dragged himself over and turned the tap. With a polite cough, the water flowed, brown and tepid. He found the place on the floor where the stream landed and set his head beneath it. The water spattered over his face and slipped away down the toilet. He put his fingers to his head and found a band of swollen tissue the thickness of a banana stretching from his left temple round to the back of his skull. A sap’s doing.
He crawled out of the shower room and lay on the floor. The effort drained him and he felt sick again. He realised he could smell food – a plate of cornbread and dates on the floor by his mattress. The bread was speckled with black dots and it took him a moment to see they were ants. He watched them marching under the door, like a length of pulsing black wire. There was a droning noise in the background – a generator. He heard a dog barking, then a yelp.
He lay still until he felt strong enough to move, then heaved himself back to the mattress. As well as the mess his own body had made, the canvas was stained with a blotch of plum brown fading at the edges and overlaid with a swirl of greenish yellow. It looked like someone had bled to death from a gut wound. However, it was dry. Probably happened years ago. He lay down and slept.
His bruised head and infected ear woke him every time he moved, but there was not much difference between asleep and awake. The generator bawled and babbled in the background. The drug-induced stupefaction would not loosen its grip. In a moment of clarity he remembered that he’d been trained for this before one of his SAS ops: CAC, the course was called, Conduct After Capture. Make your captors believe that you do not pose any threat, he remembered. That shouldn’t be difficult. His brain fogged up again and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was a hand on his shoulder.
‘Dr Palatine?’
A woman’s voice.
‘How are you feeling? I am a doctor. I will examine you.’
He flicked his eyes open and saw the woman’s outstretched hand.
‘I. . . I. . . What will you do with me?’
‘I must look at the contusion.’
James raised his hand to his temple, as if discovering the injury for the first time. The doctor was European, with a sallow complexion and a small, square face framed by short-cropped light brown hair. She spoke English as if it was hurting her nose. James really wanted to ask, Are you the evil doctor who doped me up? Instead he stared at her stupidly.
She produced a torch and looked into his eyes, then spotted his burning ear – tsk tsk! – and inspected that too. She promised him painkillers, antibiotics and a clean mattress.
‘I can’t sleep,’ he said miserably.
‘Sure. Some diazepam also. Please, you must eat this food.’
He moved his jaw up and down as if trying to speak and reached after her in mute supplication as she moved away. There were two guards in the doorway, watching intently yet with a great show of being bored by this fuss over a sore head. The one in charge was in his late forties, with a broad, curved back and an angular face that was dark from the sun and heavy with stubble. The other was a large, slope-shouldered man, barely into his twenties, with small eyes and a sparse collection of wiry black hairs sprouting from his chin. Some kind of skin disease had left pale blotches across his cheeks. Both wore threadbare army fatigues of a faded khaki, belted at the waist. Behind them was an enclosed yard, across which James could see a row of four doors identical to his below an oblong of blue sky. A flock of scrawny sparrows tumbled in the dust.
When the doctor had gone, James sat up, lowered his feet onto the floor, and discovered that he could stand. And walk, after the fashion of an infant, or a very old man. He flipped the switch by the door and the light bulb in the ceiling came on, trembling in time with the throb from the generator. He looked at the ant-infested bread and dates, but didn’t f
eel capable of eating. He went over to the window and, cautiously, keeping to one side of the opening, lifted the yellow curtain and looked out.
Twenty yards in front of him was an arc of coiled razor wire, shafts of sunlight shearing off the barbs. Beyond it, a high mesh fence stretched for several hundred yards before curving round to the left and dipping out of sight. Beyond the fence, an undulating desert landscape pockmarked with wizened scrub. There was a guardpost just visible to his right: a shack with boards nailed to the corner posts and a corrugated iron roof. A square of canvas had been fastened to the roof to form an awning, under which three guards sat in white plastic patio chairs. Unlike his guards, they wore blue overalls. Their weapons were propped up against the shack – automatic rifles, two M16s, the other James couldn’t identify at this distance.
Then he saw the dogs, four of them, inside the razor wire, large, rangy creatures with long jaws, well cared for, fit and alert. They were sniffing over something out by the wire, but one of them must have seen the curtain move or smelled him because it raised its head and stared, then cantered across the dirt towards his window, head lowered, hackles raised. Something like a cross between a Ridgeback and a greyhound: a fine-looking animal, if you didn’t intend crossing its patch some time soon. The other dogs followed and they stood twenty yards from his window. He let the curtain fall. That set them off, and their heavy, metronomic barking jarred the clear morning air.
He tottered over to the shower room and wrestled himself free of his clothes, then sat under the fitful trickle of water. He used his T-shirt and some water to clean his ear, then washed his jeans and boxer shorts and hung them from the blue plastic pipe to dry.
He sat naked below the yellow cotton curtain, irregular puffs of air cool on his wet shoulders. His brain seemed to be functioning again – or at least, it was cranking away in some dogged semblance of acuity. You should not have entered the house in Oran, it told him. You knew there was someone behind you. How far had he come since then? A journey complicated enough to justify knocking him out with a liquid cosh so powerful it had nearly killed him.
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 7