Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  That was when the nasrani shat himself.

  Hamzah sighed. “Okay,” he said heavily. “Let’s try it a different way.” He took a fresh Partegas from his pocket and paused as both doormen bounced forward with lighters. Waving them away, Hamzah bit off one end and spat it over the edge. Only then did he nod to the one nearest.

  “Last chance,” Hamzah told the journalist. “My name is Hamzah Effendi. I own the company that owns this club. I also own an oil field, the Midas processing plant and a shipping line. All this you can get from any trade directory… So tell me, who sent you and what do they really want to know?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Sudan

  Sergeant Ka turned towards the truth and raised a fist above his head in formal salute:

  I will ascend to heaven

  I will raise my throne above the stars

  I will sit on the mount of assembly…

  Before the silver talisman he wore around his neck became an amulet, it was briefly a bride piece in a dusty city with empty streets and a broken-down bazaar. South of the city lived the Dinka, cattle people, who once roamed the cracked earth between here and the upland forest, where fever trees glow and scrub lies lifeless, until rains come and the underbrush explodes.

  Originally, the talisman was recognizable as a Maria Theresa dollar, but the touch of a thousand hands had worn it flat. The coin, however, was never Austrian. It was minted in Stambul, a hundred years after the empress died, at a time when silver dollars were a common currency in the Sahara, Arabia and the Sudan.

  Having been taken south as payment for slaves, the coin become a bride price before coming north again, around the neck of a child who stabbed the grandson of the Dinka who originally received it in marriage.

  She used a blade because that day’s bullet ration was gone… Later, she swapped the talisman for a bone crucifix taken from a nun; but that was months later, long after the little war started in Abu Simbel. Mostly Ka avoided thinking about the little war and how he became a soldier.

  And sometimes he forgot.

  Before Ka was a soldier, he was a camel boy, which was an easy job and one he liked. Foreigners came by gleaming barge to the great temple and he and boys like him led them by camel up the thorny slope from the river’s edge to the foot of the cliffs, where great carvings had stood undisturbed for well over three thousand years.

  Back then, Ka wore tattered shorts and no top or shoes, because that way the tips were better. Once he’d worn a Pepsi T-shirt and a pair of Nikes that a pink-skinned girl had left behind and hardly any of the foreigners chose him. They rode with the barefooted boys.

  He’d have learnt his lesson from this, even without the beating he got from his uncle. Next day, Ka went back to no shirt or shoes. He also began to listen to the guides when they were too busy to notice.

  Soon he knew all the best stories about the great king and his wife. He could explain why the four big statues all wore the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, while inside the cliffs, in the darkness of the inner chamber, the king wore only the white crown of Upper Egypt or the red crown of Lower Egypt, depending on whether he was in the northern or southern part of the temple.

  And he learnt what interested the foreigners, those people who wasted water as if it was endless. Who washed under flowing showers, shat in unused water and giggled as they tipped full bottles over their heads and let clean water drain away into the dust.

  He told them of kings marrying their daughters, brothers sleeping with sisters, mothers with sons. It kept the magic sacred, kept the river flowing and renewed the dark silt that lined the banks and fed the kingdom, but he didn’t explain that. The reasons were never as important to the nasrani as the actions themselves.

  When Ka told of battles where the king’s army collected testicles to help his scribes count the number of captured, the men would look sick and the bareheaded women either quizzical or appalled. And Ka would smile and look happy when they tipped him, pretending to be surprised. As if he’d spend his whole morning telling them tales just because he loved foreigners.

  No one loved the foreigners, not really. Except, maybe, the government because they brought in francs, marks and American dollars. The poor, the felaheen, would rather the foreigners didn’t wander unasked into mosques, still wearing their shoes, that they didn’t choke the desert roads with coaches that threw dust into the faces of those walking and, most of all, that they didn’t need endless hotels along the river, because now the areas richest in silt were closed to those who used to sharecrop them and landlords got their money from the tourists instead.

  In one month, at the start of the little war, the army beat to death forty-eight people because they came from a distant village where the headman’s son had gunned down five foreign tourists. Forty-eight for five. That was the exchange rate.

  The son, Samir, whose name meant one whose conversation in the evening is lively, but who was never heard to say more than two words together, lived away from his father’s village in a brick house on a rocky islet somewhere unimportant between Aswan and Wadi el-Sebua. He was a strange man, educated first at a local school and then at el-Azhar College in Al Qahirah. He left el-Azhar to work for the Société de Géographie d’Egypte, only to leave that in turn a few months later.

  After his reappearance near the village, Samir adopted a family of ungainly chicken-sized birds. There was nothing very special about the birds other than the fact that they lived in a reed bed and were entirely purple, except for their stiltlike legs, which were pink. They weren’t even rare.

  Before he died under torture, Samir was questioned by a major from the Al Qahirah military police. The local police were happy to do the job themselves but had been ordered to leave the job to an expert. One reason, some suggested, for their lack of action after the dead Samir’s cousins ambushed the major’s car, shot dead his eighteen-year-old driver and cut off the major’s hands, then beat him to death.

  By then, the disc of Samir’s questioning was on its way to regional HQ at Aswan for transcription and analysis. It made no sense at all.

  Splashing water, that came first. The clank of something, probably an empty bucket hitting a concrete floor. A slap. Another slap.

  “I’m asking you again. When did you join the Sword of God?”

  “Never. I’m not a member.”

  “Then why kill foreign tourists?”

  The sound of a ragged sigh. Part pain, part exasperation.

  “They shot the gallinule…”

  “The tourists?”

  “No, the contractors. They cut down the acacia, grubbed up the tamarisk and shot my…”

  A thud, leather on flesh.

  “NO, WAIT.” The voice is foreign, the accent atrocious. Whoever is wielding the whip, they do what they’re told. Silence follows.

  “You want me to believe you shot five tourists because contractors killed a few wading birds?”

  “The river doesn’t need another hotel and it doesn’t need more tourists. Besides, the birds were there first.”

  “So you are Sword of God.”

  “No, I’m an ornithologist…”

  That was the start of the little war, which lasted a month. The big war came afterwards and went on for much longer, but Sergeant Ka never quite worked out who the government were fighting. No one important, obviously. And most of the fighting wasn’t in Egypt anyway, it was in Sudan.

  The little war, which was what his uncle called it, didn’t seem so little once the tourists stopped coming to Abu Simbel and the soldiers arrived. Inside of forty-eight hours the whole of Ka’s village had been rounded up and marched into the desert. Only a handful of adults survived the first week’s march. Most died of heat or succumbed to the cold at night. Very few made it into the second week to reach the holding pen at El Khaschab.

  Ka’s uncle was one of those. With his wife, parents and own son already dead in another place, the man no longer believed in God, only this lack of belief was so shocki
ng that all Ka’s uncle registered was an emptiness as his midday prayers escaped between parched lips and ascended to a silent heaven.

  Above him the same cruel sun that turned half-fertile earth to dust and killed the crops in the year Ka was born blistered his skin. A swarm of freshly hatched flies draped his shoulders like a heavy mantle but he hardly noticed them. Just as he failed to notice the watching boy or the white-plumed vultures that hopped and shuffled through the dirt, a handbreath away.

  They are excluded by a single question. Should he shoot himself or should he shoot his nephew. With only one bullet remaining, it was impossible to do both…

  CHAPTER 7

  1st August

  Zara got arrested for indecency on the 28th July. The first Hamzah knew of it was a day later, from a local paper. Front page, single column.

  Rebel Daughter Restrained.

  Since Hamzah relied on bribes, blackmail and his fearsome reputation to ensure such things never happened, never mind got reported, he was obviously furious: particularly since the shot used in Iskandryia Today showed his daughter crop-haired and naked under a tight coat.

  It would be fair to say that he was also troubled. The police were paid handsomely to leave anything that might connect to Zara or her friends well alone.

  So far as Hamzah was concerned, leaving alone meant not arresting his daughter at some illegal/political dance club. And if the Club de Hashishan really was hers, and the police were probably right about that, then that was even more reason for letting things be.

  Unfortunately, the offending picture of Zara turned up again, slightly larger in Iskandryia on Sunday… This was the paper that his daughter had just tossed in the bin, before stamping out of his marble-and-red sandstone office…

  “Well,” said Olga Kaminsky, “you deserved that.” Hamzah saw her smile as she removed Zara’s cup from his desk and wipe away icing sugar with one easy sweep of a linen napkin.

  Stating the obvious to Hamzah was living dangerously, but he paid Olga to tell him the truth and so Olga did. Besides, he was too shocked to fire her. Which he did about once a month, only to say nothing when she turned up the following day, as if their fight had never taken place.

  Another PA might have convinced herself that this was because he prized her opinion, that the unusual leeway he gave her had nothing to do with those half dozen occasions each year when he took her to bed, but he knew Olga lied neither to him nor to herself. All the same, their relationship wasn’t based on anything as simple as sex.

  It was her lack of avarice that first captured his imagination. Other mistresses had taken the diamond chains he offered, the Cartier watches, the inevitable mink. Olga took nothing but her salary and returned every gift, opened but unused. She seemed to want nothing from him but his company and, occasionally, his presence in her bed. And it was her bed, a single one with metal frame, because she’d refused his offer of a flat as well.

  “Olga, where did I go wrong?” Hamzah’s grin was rueful but admiring. There couldn’t be another daughter in Iskandryia who’d stamp unannounced into her father’s HQ, spin on the spot and slip off her jacket to show her naked back, lash marks and all, when asked why she refused to come home.

  But then, daughter and mother had never been close. And it hadn’t helped that Rahina’s only advice to Zara before her abortive engagement to Ashraf Bey was, “Never undress in front of your husband.”

  If Hamzah could have stopped the whippings, he would have done so years back; but mothers dealt with daughters and fathers with sons. And his boast that he’d never lifted his hand to Zara lost out to the fact he’d never actually raised his voice to protect her either. Tradition strangled him, Hamzah knew that. Under the silk shirt and Gucci suit he was still a felaheen at heart.

  Zara, however, was not a felaheen daughter. Proper schools, two years in New York and a career at the Bibliotheka Iskandryia had seen to that. She was brave, beautiful and smitten with Ashraf Bey, although Hamzah was prepared to bet almost anything she hadn’t let Raf know that.

  He understood what drove his daughter. What was even weirder, he actually admired her while knowing full well it was meant to be the other way round.

  “Olga, I’ve got a problem…”

  Her laugh was instinctive. “You’ve got lots of—” Then she stopped. “You mean you’ve got a problem I don’t know about?” Olga paused in the doorway, then quietly came back to where Hamzah sat. She didn’t perch on the edge of his desk or casually grab a chair and straddle it. She waited for Hamzah to nod towards a leather sofa. And when she sat it was elegantly, with her stockinged legs crossed at the ankle.

  Hamzah wondered what Olga saw when she looked at him. A filthy capitalist? A self-deluded gangster? A parvenu so desperate for baubles he bought his own title? Or a father unable to safeguard a daughter who refused all protection?

  “Okay,” said Olga briskly. “Problems I do know about… Your daughter’s been busted by the morales for running an illegal club. She’s in love with some spoilt little princeling who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. There are rumours of a strike at the refinery. And, despite a full and frank talk, someone’s still asking around about your childhood, according to Kamil…”

  “Avatar,” Hamzah corrected, without even thinking about it. “He calls himself DJ Avatar.”

  “Whatever. He could still become a problem…”

  “No,” said Hamzah. “Ashraf Bey’s a problem. Avatar just wishes he was.”

  “You believe the bey’s for real?”

  “I know he is,” Hamzah said heavily. “And he’s a trained killer, government issue… A bit damaged round the edges but still under guarantee.” The big man laughed. “Well, that was how he described himself.”

  “And you actually wanted this man to marry your daughter?”

  “I want,” Hamzah corrected her. “More than want, I need this man to marry Zara.”

  “I see,” said Olga. “Can I ask why?”

  Hamzah shook his head. There were, in his experience, immutable laws about how fathers felt regarding the suitors who sent flowers and elegant cards to their daughters. The first feeling of hatred gave way to one of regret. Third, and finally, came loss as the daughter became a woman. So was it written.

  Laws, equally immutable, governed the behaviour, if not the actual feelings, of those courted. Whoever came calling, daughters pretended to despise them. Presents were returned unopened, letters sent back unread. Mashrabiya shutters were slammed tight against each and every serenade. No touch was sought or permitted.

  Yet Hamzah knew beyond doubt that his own daughter had spent a night with this man. And while he should have been furious, he was merely worried and oddly sad. It was hard to know if his tenderness for Zara and her willingness to turn to him was a sign of success or proof of failure.

  And beyond these things he barely ever thought about, like his own feelings, was a real threat to his wealth, his happiness and to his own and Zara’s lives. Because when Iskandryian newsfeeds began running stories they shouldn’t and the police stopped contacting him at the first sign of trouble then the threat was real.

  Someone somewhere reckoned they could change the balance of power.

  “Look,” said Hamzah, relenting slightly. “At its most basic, I need Ashraf to marry Zara to give her protection… Protection I may not be able to provide for much longer. And if she doesn’t marry the bey, I have to find someone else. The big problem is that I may not have time.”

  Behind her heavy spectacles, Olga’s blue eyes were large. She understood exactly what he was saying. If Hamzah could no longer protect his daughter, then he couldn’t protect her either. If he couldn’t protect her, then what hope had he of protecting the refinery, Hamzah Enterprises or any other of the myriad shells within shells making up the story that justified the last thirty years of his life…

  “Have you upset the General?”

  “No.” Hamzah shook his head. He and Koenig Pasha had a better understan
ding than most people realized. All the General required of Hamzah was that he recognize who was in charge of El Iskandryia, which wasn’t the young Khedive and wasn’t him. In return, the General kept Interpol at bay, played Washington’s investigators off against those from Moscow, and shamelessly ignored or flattered Paris.

  “Tell me,” said Hamzah, “is there such a thing as a normal childhood?”

  “No,” Olga replied immediately.

  “Then, even allowing for the fact no one has a normal childhood,” said Hamzah, “mine was different.”

  Standing up from his desk, he walked to a window, leant out and watched a sweeper in the playground of St. Mark’s College. The fact that Hamzah’s marble-and-red sandstone office was built next door to the college was not an accident.

  He’d worked the kitchens at St. Mark’s, long ago, when he first arrived in the city. The name Hamzah came from a faded board listing every pupil killed in the war of 1914–15. The Quitrimala that became his surname was borrowed from the gilded spine of a book in the library.

  He wasn’t meant to leave the kitchens but no one saw a young boy in a jellaba with a split broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other. To the pupils and masters of St. Mark’s, Hamzah was so invisible that he might as well have been made from glass.

  No one would ever look through Zara.

  “Follow her,” Hamzah demanded.

  “Me?” Olga sounded surprised.

  The thickset man briefly considered that option. There were advantages but the disadvantages were greater. “No,” he said, “get someone from security. Have them report back every five minutes.”

  At noon Hamzah received a report that Zara had been admitted to the General’s house and had seen not the General but the young Khedive himself. Two hours later she was shopping for children’s clothes accompanied by a small girl, described as anxious and scrawny. The child had just demanded a haircut, one enough like Zara’s own for them to be taken for sisters.