Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  She smiled. “Nothing.”

  Nothing will come of nothing, that was a line from a play she was in, back when she went to college in New York… A city of high-rise boxes where the girls around her fucked anything with a pulse and a penis and quality control seemed to be a contradiction in terms. But something always did come from nothing. The universe, for a start. Time itself. All that other shit Raf talked about that one night on the boat, stuff she didn’t understand and guessed he didn’t either, not really…

  Zara sighed and went back to working on her plan.

  The bell was made from beaten silver and had an ivory handle. Its clapper was a narrow twist of iron that ended with a small ball of soft metal the size of a pea. For as long as Zara could remember, the bell had been used by her mother to summon the nearest maid. Her father thought the bell unnecessary, he just shouted.

  “Come on.” Zara rang the bell until the first maid appeared, then kept going until she had every member of staff mustered in the hall. There were seven in total. Five housemaids, a French chef and a Sudanese gardener. A surprisingly small number for a house the size of Villa Hamzah.

  “I want coffee,” she told the chef. “A large pot.”

  “Of course, Miss Zara.” The little man nodded. “I’ll have Maryam bring it to the back drawing room.”

  “No,” said Zara. “You’re missing the point. I want a lot of coffee.”

  The chef blinked. “How much?” he asked, his voice neutral.

  “Jugs of the stuff. Enough for two hundred people. And semit…” Zara named the soft sesame-covered pretzels sold everywhere in the city. “Can we do that?”

  “Of course I can.”

  Zara smiled. The Parisian would be baking all afternoon, mixing dough and waiting anxiously for his yeast to rise. “Make the coffee first,” she suggested. “I’ll take it outside myself.”

  That got their attention.

  “Ridiculous,” said the chef. “It’ll be far too heavy. Maryam and Lisa can carry it.”

  “All right,” said Zara. “We also need as many umbrellas as you can find… Start with my mother’s dressing room,” she suggested, remembering a line of them hanging in a row along the back of a cupboard.

  “Oh…and Alex.” She left out her usual comrade, not wanting to embarrass the big Russian in front of the others. “Order me a marquee. Something vast, but without sides… We don’t want to overdo it.”

  CHAPTER 37

  23rd October

  The air was warm, the afternoon sun a haze of ultraviolet through cloud. The heavy rain didn’t bother him. Not like back in Seattle.

  “Ashraf Bey…”

  Raf kept going, while behind him Hakim took it upon himself to punch the photographer to the ground. Providing the world with another picture.

  The new governor’s face already fronted Time, Paris Match and Newsweek. Cheeks hollow, eyes hard behind dark glasses, hair swept back. It was a face that Raf didn’t recognize, even when he stared hard in the mirror.

  As to why a mere handful of journalists clustered around the mansion in Shallalat Gardens… That was easy to answer. The rest were camped out on the lawns at Villa Hamzah, from where talking heads currently reported seriously on nothing very much.

  Zara’s offer of coffee and semit had been a flash of brilliance, but ordering a marquee and then staying outside to watch while a hundred journalists struggled with poles and wet ropes was beyond genius. And as they struggled, Zara had watched, not offering to help or saying anything, just standing on the lawn of Villa Hamzah, while photographers captured her guarded amusement at the chaos.

  When the marquee was finally up and the journalists were out of the rain, Zara had walked into the middle of their group, without a bodyguard, without having to ask anyone to move out of her way. And then she stopped, watching them as they watched her. Meeting their lenses and the bursts of flash without blinking or looking away…

  “Where to, Boss?”

  Raf came awake in the back of his Bentley.

  “Villa Hamzah.” Same as it ever was.

  Then Zara had spun in a slow circle, meeting their eyes, one person at a time. At least that’s what they thought; but really she’d been looking for a single logo among dozens.

  Raf knew that now without doubt.

  The journalists might have thought Zara was there to talk to them, only they were wrong. She’d stopped turning, stopped smiling the moment she saw someone from a local newsfeed. After that, her words had been for Raf alone.

  “I am waiting to hear back from the governor. I’m sorry, but until then there is nothing more I can say…”

  So now the governor was on his way, through a city that flickered by like the backdrop to some film he vaguely remembered preferring the first time round. The statue of Mehmet V, which once seemed so impressive, now looked tatty and grandiose, more parks than ever looked empty, windows to shops were unlit or shuttered tight with steel grilles: the rococo mansions of the Corniche that once seemed so magnificent behind their wrought-iron gates now looked defeated, held prisoner by their own defences.

  We define ourselves by our own limitations. The fox had said that to him once, in Seattle, shortly before it pointed out that on this basis Raf should be very defined indeed.

  But am I? Raf wanted to ask, only the voice in his head refused to answer and the voice in his heart that Khartoum talked about was missing, absent without leave. So maybe he was just the sum of his parts, few though those were. A face that looked like someone else, a fake identity and a job he hadn’t asked for…

  “Ahmed, do you know who you are?”

  The bigger of his two gun-toting bodyguards turned his head, while the driver and Hakim kept staring straight on: watching the Corniche unravel through the car’s ancient windscreen. “Do I what, Boss?”

  “You know who you are?”

  Ahmed nodded.

  “You ever think you might be somebody else…?”

  Raf saw the answer written in the other man’s puzzled frown. “Doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “Just forget it.”

  There was silence in the Bentley after that as the driver concentrated on the road and Hakim and Ahmed eyeballed the sidewalk and beach respectively, their fingers never leaving the triggers of their H&K5s.

  “Your Excellency…” It was the driver. “Five and counting.”

  Koenig Pasha was the one who’d originally demanded five minutes advance warning of when he was due to arrive. And there was a hierarchy of address too. Apparently Ahmed and Hakim got to call him Boss, while the driver was required to be more formal. It was a city of rules, from opaque to transparent. Every city was.

  Opening his eyes, Raf sat up and watched the coast become familiar. That café, a swimming hut on stilts, then the beach where…a galaxy of stars had skimmed across bare shoulders to be swallowed into darkness between perfect breasts. The hunger brought on by the memory corroded what was left of his pride.

  He was no use to Zara as he was, that much Raf understood. No use to anyone; not even himself. Certainly not to the city or to Hani, which was what he mostly cared about these days.

  And that meant it was time to change.

  “We’re here, Boss.”

  They were too, passing through heavy wrought-iron gates that had been yanked open and pushed back. Lawns that had been immaculate the last time Raf saw them were crude scars of dark earth, trampled to mud by the same journalists who now rushed the huge Bentley. Already photographers were scuffling for the best shot as a ’copter overhead suddenly dropped height, its specially adapted gun pod swinging a long lens in Raf’s direction.

  “Take it down,” Raf ordered.

  Ahmed looked doubtful but wound down his side window and started to unsling his machine gun all at the same time. Instantly the camera crews moved closer, unleashing a firestorm of flashguns and shouted questions.

  “Not like that,” Raf said as he slapped down the gun. “Get on the wire and ground that piece of shit.” />
  “Sure thing,” said Ahmed, tapping his throat mike. “What do I tell them, Boss?”

  “Tell them that, as of now, airspace over El Iskandryia is a no-fly zone. No overflights, nothing. Tell the pilot if he’s not landed in one minute we’ll blast him out of the sky. Final warning.”

  “No overflights… What about the airport?”

  “Close it.”

  The flash and arc lights didn’t bother Raf, he just recalibrated his vision and kept walking towards the blank-eyed cameras. Reptiles was what the General called Ishies, that and other things. Watching them watch him reminded Raf of his mother’s early films; not the cuddly shit she shot for money, the tooth-and-claw stuff that made her name. He couldn’t remember their titles now, but all those films had blood in them. Red blood on white snow. Zhivago shots, she called them, she was big on those.

  “Governor…” A thin woman thrust a microphone in his direction and a dozen shouted questions cancelled each other out, leaving only babble.

  Raf waited. And when one photographer came in too close, Raf just stared until the man took a step backward.

  “Ashraf Bey…”

  “Excellency…”

  The shouts kept coming until everyone finally realized that Raf still hadn’t said a word. And then came silence. It stretched out, distorted by the crowd’s expectation and broken only by the rhythmic thud of a grounded Sikorsky chopping to a halt on the Corniche behind him. He milked the silence, because that was exactly what the General would have done: and at the point their expectation was about to curdle into anger, Raf pointed at random to three people near the front, snapping out the order…

  “One, two, three… Okay, your name, your station, then the question.”

  As it turned out, number one was a good choice. She was American, on staff, not a freelancer, and represented C3N, biggest of the news channels. Or so Raf gathered from the gabble with which Helen Giles introduced herself.

  “Excellence… Will you agree to hand over Hamad Quitrimala?” She managed to trip over both Raf’s honorific and Hamzah’s name.

  “So that he can be tried in America and jailed?”

  She nodded.

  “Why would I do that?” Raf asked, his voice clear but cool.

  “But PaxForce…”

  “Are you saying we don’t have courts in El Iskandryia?”

  That got another babble of questions, which ended the moment Raf chopped at the air for silence. He was beginning to enjoy this, Raf realized with something approaching shock.

  “Well?”

  The woman’s worry lines deepened.

  “If Hamzah is to be tried,” said Raf, “he’ll be tried here in Iskandryia. And if the evidence goes against him, he will be found guilty…and shot.”

  Raf walked through their shocked silence, while behind him Ahmed and Hakim ported their H&K5s and glared at anyone who got too close. As they approached the villa’s heavy front door it swung back and Raf found himself staring at the girl he should have married.

  Flashguns firestormed.

  “Excellency.” Zara stepped back to let him pass through into the hall.

  “Zara…”

  “Yes, Your Excellency?” She stood ramrod straight, chin up. Only the rawness that rimmed her grey eyes spoke of privately spilt tears. And one look into their cold depths was enough to tell him that the tears had been dried by hatred.

  “Feeding them was a good idea.”

  She said nothing in reply. Just waited, unmoving, for Raf to announce why he was there. Except that they both knew he was there because she’d said she wanted to talk to him—and now it seemed she didn’t.

  “I’ll go,” said Raf and turned for the door, Hakim and Ahmed falling into position behind him. It was strange how quickly one could become used to having a shadow.

  “Do you really intend to…?”

  “Intend to what?” Raf asked, one hand on the door handle. He knew exactly what Zara was asking but he made her ask it all the same.

  “Execute him…”

  Not if I can help it, but somehow that didn’t seem the appropriate thing to say.

  “If they extradite him,” said Raf, “you’ll never get your father back. You know that, don’t you?”

  “At least they won’t kill him…”

  “No,” Raf said, “they’ll just lock him up until he dies. Surround him with guards twenty-four/seven. Dismantle Hamzah Enterprises and break up the Midas Refinery to pay for court costs and reparations. You think that’s what he wants? Your father knew this was coming…”

  “I’d worked that out,” said Zara, tears starting up in her eyes. “That’s why he wanted you to marry me.”

  Raf nodded.

  “The Khedive,” her voice was a whisper, “that meal.”

  “He was trying to protect you in the only way he knew how,” said Raf, his smile rueful. “He even tried sending you back to America, he told me you refused…”

  Her shoulders beneath his fingers were bony and she wore a scent he didn’t recognize and undoubtedly wouldn’t have been able to afford, had he wanted to buy her some more. And up close, with her arms tight round his neck and her face buried wetly in his shoulder, Raf could tell that Zara wasn’t wearing a bra. It was a shit time to notice something like that, but where Zara was concerned he always seemed to notice things like that at the wrong time. Like right then was a really lousy time to realize that he loved her.

  Raf pushed Zara away, very slowly, until they stood a handbreadth apart, facing each other, their eyes locked. There was something she wanted to say.

  “Anything you want,” said Zara. “I’ll give you anything you want, if you can save him.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Sudan

  “Safety off,” said the gun.

  Lying beside Lieutenant Ka, the ghost of Bec’s little sister said nothing. She’d taken to appearing at odd moments when Sarah wasn’t around, but now Sarah was gone and so Bec’s sister was smiling but silent. In fact, the whole world was silent except for a couple of green parakeets that squawked from a telegraph wire overhead, pretty much right above where he’d set up the thermoflage netting.

  Of course, Ka knew what Bec’s sister wanted to say. What she’d been saying every night in his dreams, before she did what she once did, stood up from a long-dead fire and shuffled out beyond the big camp’s pickets to find a thornbush. Only it wasn’t her bowels she needed to empty but her head, which she did by sucking on a revolver.

  They weren’t going to reach the source of the river. Nobody was going to turn off the Nile. The war and the river would keep flowing: the river wherever geography took it, the war wherever it wanted to go.

  “Distance?”

  “Five klicks and closing…”

  Status and range. That was about all the H&K/cw could ever manage. And Ka really didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered. Ka had a feeling he might have got cross about that before. He was finding it increasingly hard to remember.

  The Nile was out of sight, across rock and thorn. Last time he’d seen it, the river had still been grand even though Ka was now south of Omdurman City, where the Bahr el-Abiad and Bahr el-Azrak joined to become the life-giver everybody knew.

  Somewhere still further south, the river split again but either Ka hadn’t reached that point or he was past it.

  The Colonel could have told him, only Ka wouldn’t ask. The last time he’d wanted an answer was half an hour before, when something dark had moved in the tall rushes of the riverbank. A simple question had elicited a long lecture on the habitat of the marabou stork.

  Elaborate canals had once fed the area’s rich cotton fields but the narrow canals were mostly cracked open or filled with dirt, their bottoms broken and dry.

  Ahead of him, when he’d first arrived, had been mud-brick ruins and beyond those foothills, backdropped by faded and cloud-covered mountains. Now the foothills were at his back and the enemy ahead.

  The ruined houses behind Ka were al
l that remained of a town to which a handful of nineteenth-century Mamelukes had retreated, to live under the protection of Mek Nimr, Leopard King of Shendi, after their defeat by the Albanian warlord Khedive Mohammed.

  But Mohammed Ali sent his son Ismail south to subdue Nubia. And in October 1822 Ismail demanded as tribute from Mek Nimr thirty thousand Maria Theresa dollars, six thousand slaves and food for his army, all to be delivered within two days.

  And when Mek Nimr protested that the Sudan already faced famine, Ismail struck him in the face. The Leopard King’s reply came that evening during banquet, when his followers set fire to Ismail’s house, incinerating the prince, who died in the flames rather than be cut down like his fleeing bodyguard.

  Word of this reached the Defterdar, Ismail’s brother-in-law. First the Defterdar burned Metemma and Damer, then every village along the Nile from Sennar to Berber. Finally he reached Shendi, where his troops threw down the walls and raped and impaled its inhabitants… But he failed to capture Mek Nimr or his family.

  Fifty thousand died.

  Next the Defterdar chased Mek Nimr south along the Blue River, torturing everyone he suspected of helping the fleeing king. Men were castrated, the breasts of the women were sliced away and every wound was sealed with molten pitch… Ka’s uncle had always insisted that things were better in the old days. But to Ka, from what the Colonel said, it just sounded like more of the same.

  Ka needed to eat, only that wasn’t possible. The food was gone and so was most of his water. Actually, it was all the water, if he didn’t count a half litre sloshing round in Sarah’s old flask, the one with the cap jammed solid. He’d tried wrenching off the top and, when that failed, had tried punching a hole in the flask with his knife, but the mesh was too hard or he was too weak, one of the two, it didn’t matter much which.

  “Weapons check…”

  Whatever. Ka did a count in his head…twenty-one grenades, two Heckler&Koch OI/cw, an HK21e machine gun heavy enough to require a tripod, five assorted sidearms plus a dozen boxes of bullets, some of which might actually fit, plus a fat slab of ganja and a Seraphim 4 × 4, minus gas. Unfortunately, since there was only one of him, most of his riches were wasted.