All the recipes chosen were classically Tunisian: which was to say that they were really from Andalusia, carried to North Africa when the defeated Moors finally retreated from Spain in the fifteenth century. Except that Andalusian cookery had originated in North Africa in the first place, having been taken to Spain several centuries earlier by the armies of Islam. Its complexity of flavour a response by Islamic cooks to the new ingredients they suddenly found surrounding them.
Lady Nafisa had decreed the cuisine be Megrib to remind everyone of Ashraf’s heritage. And every dish relentlessly reinforced the fact. Even the fried brieks, small paper-thin pastries stuffed with vegetables, eggs or chicken, were a Tunisian staple. Raf’s aunt was making sure Hamzah appreciated exactly what he was getting. A genuine Berber princeling, a real bey.
If Hamzah hadn’t decided to talk up his own end of the bargain, then disaster wouldn’t have struck; but he did and so it began, with a compliment from the girl’s father.
“She’s a good kid,” Hamzah said firmly.
“Dad.”
“She doesn’t make a fuss. Doesn’t cry over stupid things.” He paused. “Actually, she doesn’t cry at all. Gets wound up occasionally, like girls do. Usually over animals or children. Stuff that can’t be changed…”
Zara snorted.
“You don’t agree?” Raf asked. “That things can’t be changed?” He only meant to make conversation but it was obvious from Madame Rahina’s sudden silence that she didn’t think he’d like Zara’s answer.
“What’s to agree?” said Zara. Her slate-grey eyes came up to meet his and for the first time that afternoon she didn’t blink or look away. “And what does it matter if I believe things can be changed or not? In Iskandryia, daughters don’t have opinions… Or rights.”
“Zara.” Her father sounded more concerned than angry.
“No rights?” Raf’s voice was gentle. “Why not?”
“Tradition,” said Zara bitterly. She stood up from the table. “You see Dad’s case over there?” The briefcase was Calvin Klein, black crocodile skin. “That contains ten per cent of my dowry. You get a further fifty per cent when we marry, minus whatever your aunt’s already had for expenses. The remainder you don’t get for twelve months.”
From the surprise on Raf’s face it was obvious he hadn’t known money was involved at all.
“Twelve months…?”
“Apparently that’s meant to stop you beating me.” Zara stepped away from the bench. “Well, for the first year, at least…” She turned to her father. “I’m sorry. I need to get some air.”
“Go after her,” Raf’s aunt hissed as Raf stood watching Zara go.
“And say what?”
“Anything you like.” Lady Nafisa was almost shaking with fury. “All girls get nervous before their wedding. Make something up. Tell her whatever she wants to hear.”
Raf nodded, “Okay,” he said. So he did.
As soon as Raf saw Monday morning’s newsfeeds, he tried to ring Zara. But she wouldn’t take his calls. Raf knew she was at Villa Hamzah because the butler who answered made no pretence of her being anywhere else. The girl just didn’t want to talk to him.
He kept calling and by that evening the butler could recognize Raf’s voice without him having to give his name. But she still wasn’t taking his calls.
“No luck,” said Raf and tapped his watch strap, breaking the connection. He was in the qaa, his back to a wall. And it was obvious from the anger twisting Lady Nafisa’s face that she’d dearly have loved to have him lifted bodily, carried to the edge and tossed to the flagstones below. Hani had been slapped and sent to the haremlek for nothing more than being there when Lady Nafisa finally and completely lost her temper. So far, Lady Nafisa had tried ordering and begging, now she was trying moral blackmail.
“You’ve ruined her. You know that, don’t you?” Fury and three arguments had worn Nafisa’s voice to an ugly rasp. The first had begun as Madame Rahina stormed out, dragging Zara behind her. The second took place the following day, when Raf angrily told his aunt there were no circumstances under which he would marry the girl. And finally there had been today’s, the third and worst.
Raf skimmed the evening paper she’d just handed him. The compulsory box-out on page two featured General Koenig Pasha’s new crackdown on smuggling, with separate pix showing the young Khedive, the General and sunrise over Western Harbour. General Koenig Pasha’s was the biggest picture by far. The rest of the paper was filled with what interested Lady Nafisa.
“Oil heiress jilted…” The story wasn’t going to go away. That morning’s Zaghloulist tabloid had been more upfront, less pleasant. Dumped dumpy read the kindest comment. Above it an unflattering and outdated grab showed Zara in a voluminous swimming costume, aged about fifteen, all expanding chest and puppy fat. The fact she no longer looked anything like that was nowhere mentioned.
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Lady Nafisa asked furiously.
Raf sighed. Her question was entirely rhetorical. He’d tried several times to explain himself but Lady Nafisa wouldn’t even let him reach the end of a sentence.
“She’s disgraced,” said his aunt. “Unmarriable. You think anyone in El Iskandryia wants your cast-offs?”
“She’s hardly a cast-off,” Raf said angrily. “Besides, her father’s worth millions.”
“Billions,” Lady Nafisa corrected him without even thinking about it. “That’s not the point. No one who matters will marry her now.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to marry someone who matters…” Raf said between gritted teeth. He put as much scorn into the words as possible. “Maybe she doesn’t want to get married at all.”
“That’s not how life works,” said Lady Nafisa. “You know nothing about it.”
“No.” Raf tossed the paper onto the marble floor. “You’re right, I don’t. But I don’t like what I’ve seen so far.”
“And I suppose you prefer prison?”
“To this?” said Raf. “Yes, I do.”
That wasn’t entirely accurate. There were brief moments when Raf looked out along the heat-hazed sweep of the Corniche and El Iskandryia felt bizarrely like home. But liking or not liking Isk wasn’t Raf’s big problem. His problem was Hu San and Wild Boy. They would be looking for him and when those two went looking, they found… All Raf had going for him was they didn’t yet know where he was or who he’d become. Which meant Raf needed to keep on being Ashraf al-Mansur the way he needed to keep breathing. And, unfortunately, it looked like the two states were inextricably linked.
Disappear into the night?
That was a definite possibility. Isk was full of foreigners running bars, brothels and dubious businesses, doing the work pure-born Iski regarded as beneath them. The only flaw there was that Lady Nafisa would undoubtedly call the police. It didn’t matter what version of the truth she told them. She was someone who mattered: they’d find him.
Killing her or staying close were his safest options, maybe his only options. Either way, he kept ahead.
“Ashraf?” The question was a whisper.
He spun, fast. “How the fuck did you…”
Wide-eyed, Hani held up her hands so he could examine the grease smeared across her palms, then lifted her arms to show the oil smeared down the front of her flannel pyjamas. “It’s a bit slippery,” she said seriously. “It gets easier when you’ve done it a few times.”
Like using the glass sword in Dragon’s Bane III or writing your own level for Imperial Assassin. Hani didn’t really distinguish between what she did on screen in her nursery and what she did in life, it was all real. Sort of…
Raf said nothing. Telling the child that climbing wires was dangerous wasn’t his job and besides, judging by the stubborn glee in her eyes it would have been pointless anyway. The danger was precisely why she did it.
“You off to feed Ali-Din?” he asked eventually.
Hani looked at him with a new respect. “That too,” she admitted.
“But I also came to see you.”
“Well, here I am,” said Raf.
“They work like speaking tubes,” Hani said, pointing towards the lifts. “Stand at the top and you can hear everything…” She paused to consider what she’d just said. “That’s why we should whisper…”
“I’m whispering,” mouthed Raf and Hani giggled.
“Stupid.”
“Yep,” Raf glanced round the silent qaa. “You’re probably right.”
“Why were you in prison?”
To answer or not to answer. “For killing someone.”
Hani looked appalled, shock swallowing her small face as she struggled for something to say. And then she relaxed slightly. “They must have done something very bad.”
“No,” said Raf. “They just talked too much.”
“And you killed them?”
Raf shook his head. “At least, I don’t think so. But I got the blame.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, it isn’t.” Raf smiled. He could remember when he too used to believe in “fair”, right up to the day he’d been driven, aged five, through the gates of a Swiss boarding school. And he’d kept wanting to believe. Making excuses for the arbitrary beatings, cold baths, sly hands, the randomness of lesser punishments… He was seven the first time he ran away. The last time was the day before his eleventh birthday, but that was from a different school. Out of five attempts, three were briefly successful.
In the end, his brain had to admit what his gut already knew: there was no justice, no fairness, only rules. Those who used, twisted or kept to the rules got by, those that didn’t were marked down as enemies of order. It was a very thorough training. “Emotional institutionalization” was how Dr Millbank described it.
And in his own fashion Raf had been keeping to rules ever since. What was his taking the fall for Micky O’Brian but playing to the rules of the world in which he found himself?
“Aunt Nafisa said you were a spy,” Hani said, tugging his sleeve. “Spies kill people. It’s their job.”
“Assassins kill people,” said Raf. “Spies collect secrets.” But Hani wasn’t listening. She was already working out another justification in her head.
“If it was your job that would make everything all right.”
CHAPTER 14
6th July
Lady Jalila rolled sideways off the couch and wrapped her gown tightly round herself. Her stomach was cramping and she wore the tension in her neck and shoulders like a heavy body cast. It hadn’t been an easy final half-hour.
“You know where…”
She nodded abruptly at the slim Greek woman and walked hurriedly from the consulting room to the lavatory next door, squatting just ahead of a spasm that emptied her bowels in a long squirt of almost clear water. That final ritual was as much a relief as it was undignified. Lady Jalila could put up with the anal speculum and lying on her side with her knees pulled up and buttocks exposed as gravity forced water into her colon and out again, emptying her lower gut of faecal matter. She could even stand those five minutes of intolerable pressure towards the end, when a warm herbal infusion replaced cool water and Madame Sosostris locked a crocodile clip round the tube to keep the infusion inside.
It was the uncontrollable gripe in her gut immediately afterwards that upset her. Those few seconds between the couch and the lavatory pan when she feared she might disgrace herself.
As for the rest of it, Lady Jalila made a point of never considering how she looked when she was on that couch or what the Greek woman thought of her endless visits. The beneficial effects of cleansing were too valuable to give up. And though she knew her husband the Minister didn’t really approve for a number of reasons, none of which included the substantial cost of her frequent visits—she could handle him. Literally, if that was what it took.
Better.
Sighing, Lady Jalila squatted again, double-checking that her gut really was empty. It was. As empty as her abdomen was flat and her stomach just slightly, attractively curved. Even her hips looked thinner now that her colon was no longer a sausage stuffed full of poisonous waste.
If only all life’s complications could be flushed out that easily.
Wrapping the paper gown tight about her, Lady Jalila returned to the consulting room of the relentlessly old-fashioned third-floor clinic set between Nokrashi and Rue Tatvig, in a not-at-all-salubrious area of El Anfushi.
She’d been the first to discover Madame Sosostris, back when the herbalist was pulled in for questioning. In those days Lady Jalila had been just plain Jalila, a uniformed recruit in the morales. Recognizing someone useful, she’d amended the arrest sheet from performing abortion to practising unlicensed female circumcision and kicked Sosostris free with a warning. Two months later, she’d gone looking for the woman with a search warrant in one hand and a business proposal in the other.
Now everyone Lady Jalila knew came to the clinic—even Coroner Mila, the new City Magistrate for Women, who usually regarded matters faecal as being beyond mention, like sex.
Lady Jalila smiled sourly. Everybody fucked. The coroner-magistrate just withheld her approval because Lady Jalila didn’t bother to hide the fact.
“All done, then?” asked the Greek woman, looking up. Tall, hipless and small-breasted to the point of clinical androgyny, Madame Sosostris had the body most of her clients secretly craved, whether or not they realized it. Her very shape gave them a target at which to aim. A reason to keep coming.
“Then I’ll let you dress…”
Madame Sosostris always waited for the client to return before leaving them to change back into their clothes. Of course, Lady Jalila was more than just a client. She’d quickly become Madame Sosostris’s dear friend and ally, an invaluable patron for a woman practising therapies not entirely approved of by Islamic mullahs. Her husband was Mushin Bey, Iskandryia’s Minister for Police, respected deputy of General Koenig Pasha himself.
Madame Sosostris left the room at an elegant glide.
Next Tuesday, decided Lady Jalila climbing into a white CK thong that no longer felt tight round the hips. That was when she’d visit next. She shuffled her full breasts into a sports bra and looked round for a mirror, forgetting there wasn’t one. Though it didn’t matter: she’d still be thin enough to check her shape in the glass when she got home for lunch, after she’d dropped in to check on Nafisa.
All in all, a good morning’s work. Her white jacket now clung in the right places without bulging in the wrong ones and the matching silk skirt hugged her hips without wrinkling. Lady Jalila wore white because white went with her swept-up blonde hair and her husband liked clothes that emphasized the difference in their age. Thirty-one might be old enough for all of her friends to have large families but to the sixty-five-year-old Minister of Police it seemed positively childish. But then, Mushin Bey still thought of her as the seventeen-year-old she’d been when she first joined the women’s police force. All blonde hair, blue eyes and innocence.
Lady Jalila pushed her feet into a pair of Manolos, then picked up the Dior bag that contained her credit cards and smiled.
Long may it remain so.
Lady Jalila let herself into her cousin’s madersa, frowning at the door Khartoum had left unguarded. Nafisa always had been slack with her house boy.
The glassed-over knot garden was hot as a steam bath, bringing Lady Jalila out in an instant flush. She knew her cousin claimed not to be able to afford air-conditioning except in her own little office. But what was the point of owning a famous garden if it was uninhabitable for most of the summer?
“Nas?” Lady Jalila used her pet name for Nafisa.
Nothing.
Passing the liwan with its cooling marble slab now dusty and dry, she stepped out into the open courtyard and stopped to breathe deeply. Early July in El Iskandryia was often humid and hot, but nothing like as cruel as that covered garden.
“Nas?”
The silence was complete. Made deeper by the absenc
e of running water in the courtyard in front of her.
Lady Jalila started to climb the qaa steps, hearing her heels ring on the stone slabs. Cousin Nafisa didn’t approve of Lady Jalila’s kitten heels: they made scars in the marble. At the top of the stairs, she hesitated. To her left was the large tiled expanse of the qaa proper. While straight ahead was the cubicle of Lady Nafisa’s office, cool and air-conditioned, created by filling space between arches with sheets of smoked glass.
That was where Lady Jalila went first…
“I don’t care who he’s with. Tell him I’m at the al-Mansur madersa and I need to talk to him now.” For once Lady Jalila didn’t have to raise her voice. The urgency in her tone was obvious even to his idiot PA and, seconds later, her husband’s worried face flashed up on her tiny silver Nokia. As ever, he looked just like a small startled rat.
“What’s…”
“Wait,” said Lady Jalila suddenly, snapping off the camera option on her mobile. Something silver and sickening had just caught her eye. Let him read about it or look at the crime-scene photographs later if he must. Nafisa dead with her blouse ripped open—there were some things she didn’t think her husband needed to see.
“Nafisa’s been murdered,” said Lady Jalila.
“Nafisa?” His horror was absolute, obvious. There were several things the Minister immediately wanted to say. But he said none of them, contenting himself with a simple “I’m so sorry.” He glanced beyond the edge of her screen to a group of people she couldn’t see and waved his hand, dismissing them. A muted question filtered into her earbead and she heard her husband’s grunt of irritation. “Tomorrow,” he said crossly. “It can wait.” And then she had his full attention again.
“How did she die?”
“She was stabbed…with her pen.”
Lady Jalila heard him punch buttons on his desk. “Don’t touch anything.” That was the policeman in him speaking. “I’ll get my best man onto it now.”
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