Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Unfortunately, Kashif Pasha wasn’t.

  Although the casino was in New York and His Excellency came from Ifriqiya, the roulette wheel at which he played originated in Paris. This ensured it had only one nonpaying number rather than the zero and double zero found on US tables. It was French because Kashif Pasha placed bets so high he could dictate the choice of wheel, thus limiting the edge allowed to the house. But for all this Kashif Pasha was still losing. (A situation drearily familiar to his aged mother, the Lady Maryam, his father and his bankers.)

  “Excellency…”

  Looking up, Kashif Pasha was in time to see an apologetic croupier lean forward and rake ten scarlet chips from the grid. So busy had he been listening to the dying clatter of the ivory ball that he’d forgotten to check on which number it landed. To Kashif’s ear that unmistakable, addictive clicking was pitched somewhere between an old man’s death rattle and the tapping of an infestation of wood beetle.

  Both of which reminded him of home.

  “You there.” Kashif Pasha tried to snap his fingers and winced, making do with a quick wave of his injured hand. The effect was identical. A young black woman in a short deerskin skirt hurried forward, a box of cigars open on her silver tray. Her legs were bare, her breasts laced into a tan waistcoat that otherwise gaped down the front. A badge shaped like a feather announced her as Michelle.

  “Sir…” The waitress waited for the well-dressed foreigner to select a Monte Cristo and take the matches she offered. Something Kashif Pasha did without appearing to notice the bitten nails of his own hands, which spoke of long nights and too little sleep.

  Embossed on the matchbox was a tomahawk. The casino’s designer had no idea if Mohawk Indians actually fought with hand axes or, indeed, if any Native Americans had ever used such weapons, but tomahawk sounded like Mohawk and 30 West 54th Street was Mohawk land.

  Before it became such, the land on which Casino 30/54 sat belonged to Clack Associates, owners of a small hotel much loved by rich European tourists. Augustus Clack III sold the hotel for an undisclosed sum to the billionaire financier, Benjamin Agadir, who promptly swapped it with the Mohawks for seven glass necklaces and a blanket. Since federal regulations specifically allowed casinos to be opened on reservations or any Indian land held in trust, this neatly circumvented the state law that banned the establishment of casinos in New York City.

  “Faites vos jeux,” announced the croupier, as if inviting a whole table of high rollers to place their bets rather than just the one.

  Kashif Pasha ignored the man.

  Striking a match, the eldest son and current heir to the Emir of Tunis lifted the match to the tip of his cigar and sucked. His mother disapproved of smoking, gambling, whores and alcohol but since cigars were not expressly mentioned in the Holy Quran, she sometimes kept her peace. Besides, Kashif Pasha was in New York City and she was not.

  Quite what Lady Maryam would have made of the striking murals in the gentlemen’s lavatory it was best not to imagine. Kashif Pasha’s favourite by far featured Pocahontas undergoing what Americans called double entry. For what were undoubtedly good cultural reasons, her lovers both sported tails, the back legs of goats, and small horns.

  At home there were no paintings in Lady Maryam’s wing of the Bardo and no statues. Even his great-grandfather’s famous Neue Sachlichkeit collection of oils had been banished, saved only by the Emir’s flat refusal to have them destroyed.

  Representative art was abhorrent to his mother for usurping the rights of God. But then this was a woman who found even calligraphy suspect. Which, undoubtedly went some way to explaining why she’d burned the present his father sent her at Kashif’s birth. (An Osmanli miniature from the sixteenth century showing the Prophet’s wet nurse Hamina breast-feeding.) And this, in turn, maybe helped explain why Emir Moncef had refused to see his wife since.

  Kashif Pasha smiled darkly, his favourite expression, and pushed five ivory chips onto the number thirteen.

  “Rien ne va plus,” announced the croupier, as if he hadn’t been waiting. No more bets were to be made. There was a ritual to go through, even though the room was almost empty and the roulette table reserved for Kashif Pasha. The wheel spun one way and the ivory ball was sent tumbling another and when a number other than thirteen came up, Kashif Pasha just shrugged, carelessly he hoped.

  Over the course of the next hour the rampart of counters in front of him became a single turret, then little more than ruined foundations and finally almost disappeared, leaving Kashif Pasha with only six ivory chips.

  The casino would keep the table open for him while Kashif Pasha ordered more counters, that much was given. High rollers like His Excellency got what they wanted. Their own suites, complimentary meals, limousines to and from the airport. Even use of the casino’s own plane if necessary. And what he wanted now was a break.

  “Okay,” said Kashif Pasha. “I’ll be back here at…” He glanced at his Rolex and added two hours to the time it was. “At seven,” he said. “Have the table reset. New wheel, new ball, new grid, new stack of counters.” Which was what his croupier seemed to call those hundred-thousand-dollar red chips.

  Sliding his six remaining counters across the table, His Excellency smiled. “For you,” he said and watched the croupier blink. It was a good tip, more so since Kashif Pasha was sometimes known not to tip at all. The croupier would give half to the house, but that still left more than he earned in six months.

  “Thank you, Excellency,” said the man, moving aside to make room for a crop-haired woman who’d been watching the game from a discreet distance.

  “Your Highness.” This was a title Kashif Pasha didn’t warrant but Georgian van Broglie used it anyway. So far she’d acted as facilitator on every visit Kashif Pasha made to Casino 30/54 and he had yet to complain about the social upgrade. “Shall I have the kitchen organize some supper?”

  She took his silence as assent.

  “Chicken breast,” she suggested, “on focaccia, with honey and mustard sauce. A litre of Evian and maybe some more ginger ale?” She nodded to a line of small and empty bottles of Canada Dry, the plastic screw-top kind.

  Kashif Pasha’s usual order. A glorified chicken sandwich washed down with three plastic flasks of champagne. Quite why a forty-four-year-old North African playboy would want to drink Veuve Clicquot from an empty Canada Dry bottle Georgian van Broglie didn’t know, but then she’d never met Lady Maryam.

  “Does Your Highness require anything else?”

  She saw the man glance across the room to the deerskinned waitress who’d brought him his cigar. “No possible,” she muttered apologetically. “House rules. I’d love to make an exception but…”

  Kashif Pasha sighed. “Send up something similar,” he said crossly. “After you’ve found me the house doctor.” He checked his knuckles, which were looking more lopsided than ever. “And get room service to bring me a bucket of ice.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Wednesday 2nd February

  “Nicolai…” Emir Moncef’s call was for his bodyguard. A small and intense Uzbek whose name was probably something completely different. The Uzbek and a Tajik called Alex took turns to protect the Emir. They were a recent birthday present from the Soviet ambassador. One Moncef had not known how to refuse.

  He called again, just in case either guard was within hearing, then turned his attention back to the snake. Death was always going to come. That it chose to manifest as a slithering viper was unexpected but not impossible. Although, if the elderly Emir had been forced to bet (a vice he deplored), he’d have selected a fat-tailed scorpion as being more likely.

  Scorpions got carried into camp on the flatbeds of trucks or in date baskets. Once, if he remembered correctly, a fat-tail had hitched a lift in the cuffs of an NCO’s dress trousers. The man had succumbed within hours and the Emir had banned cuffs on all uniforms from then on.

  He would die as he had lived his last forty years, in the simplicity of Ifriqiya’s southern de
sert. A place where privation reduced leaves to water-protecting spikes and insects hid within thickly waxed bodies to conserve what little water they contained; where beetles survived on one meal in two years, if the habitat so demanded, and glass wort displayed a near-suicidal tolerance for salt.

  Tossing back his a’aban, a heavy cloak still worn by Berber men of a certain age, Emir Moncef raised a silver-topped stick. Ready to defend himself.

  “Get behind me…” His order was aimed at a boy in camouflage who still gripped a Nintendo game pad with frozen fingers.

  The Emir’s younger son shook his head.

  “Murad.”

  That the Emir used his real name scared the boy almost as much as the viper now crawling its way across a carpet. Mostly his father called him SP, which stood for small pasha, a name he’d been given by his mother before she was killed. His mother had been one of the Emir’s guard, an American convert from Los Angeles.

  Her Jeep had gone off the side of a cliff. An accident.

  “Do as I say.”

  Looking from his father to the horned viper, the twelve-year-old again shook his head. Snakes were rare in the camp, dangerous or otherwise, because intricate webs of woven copper wire lay buried beneath the perimeter. The webs created an electric field that upset snakes, scorpions and spiders. That was what Eugenie de la Croix said anyway. And it was her job to know these things.

  “Don’t be afraid. Just back away.”

  Afraid? Several options presented themselves to Murad and none involved fear or retreat. His duty was to defend his father, His Highness Moncef al-Mansur, better known as the Emir of Tunis and ruler of Ifriqiya (father of his people, loved by all). This Murad knew from reading it each morning in the cheap, Arab-language red tops the Emir insisted on having delivered by helicopter.

  Kashif Pasha punches American paparazzi…

  Today’s Es Sabah lay on a leather and oak table, one so ancient its iron nails had gone dark as the wood and quite as shiny. Under the paper rested a photograph album almost as old. No one was allowed to look inside. Which was why Murad had never been able to ask why it contained postcard after postcard of bare-breasted women ranging from girls his own age to those as old as his mother would have been.

  Berber said some, others Taurag. Most were simply described as Mauresque, sometimes Belle Mauresque, occasionally Jeune Femme Arabe… Once as Tuenisch-orientalische Typen. Almost all stared flat-eyed at the camera. As if trying to withdraw from a world where colonial officers scribbled “c’est très intéressant” across the back, stuck a five-centime stamp over the breast of a twelve-year-old and posted it to a cousin in Marseilles.

  “Murad.”

  Outside, speakers blared male habtl madjatch, a rai track even older than his father, whose favourite song it was. The rhythms and repetitions, drum and weird whistle as familiar to the boy as any adhan, the call to prayer, though Murad would never admit as much and even thinking so worried him.

  So be it. His choice was made. As God wills.

  Murad added inshá allá without even noticing. The way his mother used to say bless you every time he sneezed.

  He was twelve, after all. Old enough for what came next.

  Fires had been lit for the midday meal and someone nearby was roasting goat over branches ripped from a thornbush, both wood and goat having been brought in by truck. There was no kindling this far south. He would miss the meal and the camp and his father…

  Their previous camp had been better, more to do and less sand. The goat-hair tents were carried on camels only when photographers were around. The rest of the time a ponytailed Texan called Pigpen bundled the tents into trucks and broke them down and set them up wherever the Emir wanted.

  Few outsiders understood why the Emir allowed a nasrani such freedom. Those who did had seen the speed at which the Texan could break down a camp when the old man wanted it done really fast.

  “Pull yourself together…” The Emir was cross now.

  “I’m not frightened,” Murad shot back with all the indignation he could muster. “I’m planning.” His father was always telling him to think ahead.

  Dropping his Nintendo, Murad reached for a silver coffee jug and flipped back its lid. The jug was inlaid with copper and bronze. Even its ivory handle was hot. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Emir shake his head but it was too late, Murad had already hurled coffee into the face of the horned viper.

  Most of it missed.

  “Guards.”

  Ignoring the old man’s demand and the sudden hammering of fear in his own ears, Murad threw the silver pot after the coffee, just managing to hit the viper’s tail. So much for his first plan.

  On a sidewall of the tent hung the sword his great-grandfather took from a dying colonel after a skirmish outside Neffatia, the year the French were driven from Tunisia, as Ifriqiya was then called.

  The boy was lunging for this when Emir Moncef stepped forward, grabbed Murad by the shoulder and threw him towards the entrance with more force than the old man knew he possessed. He understood when a viper was about to attack, even if his youngest son didn’t.

  “Alex, Nicolai…”

  Part of the Emir still hoped that fate might allow him to step back from danger; because courage was one thing and stupidity another and to grow old in this world one needed to be able to tell the difference. But the viper was ready to strike. Something the old man realized, he suspected, even before the reptilian, pea-sized brain that was his death’s whole being.

  Moncef al-Mansur looked death in the eyes, heard its hiss and felt time slow as the viper froze on the edge of movement.

  The Emir was too old and too exhausted by his argument with Murad to be able to avoid a strike completely, so he made do with twisting matador style in the hope that the bite might be less than total. In this alone he was lucky. One fang buried itself deep into his calf, the other tore the cloth of a robe that time and washing had reduced to the consistency of rotten sack.

  “Papa…”

  The last thing Emir Moncef heard before he fell to the floor and found himself face-to-face with the carpet was his son begin to scream. A noise loud enough to drown out the music of Cheb Khaled and the running feet of his absent guards. The last of which, had the Emir been able to hear it, would merely have confirmed his opinion that panic and fury had no place in a well-run camp.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wednesday 2nd February

  Kashif al-Mansur liked snow and always had done. Mostly he liked it in cities such as New York, where flakes fluttered down between canyons to bury the sidewalks and cars. Everything turning white and picture-postcard.

  At home when snow fell, which was not often, white sprinkled the mountains of the High Tell and oak valleys towards the northern coast, dusting the red roofs of farmhouses built and later deserted by French settlers. He’d been impressed by that as a child, until he discovered what winter really looked like.

  The snow Kashif Pasha really liked, however, fell on carefully selected ski resorts. St. Mortiz in Switzerland, Geilo in Norway, America’s own Aspen. Playgrounds that featured mountain lodges, black runs, and a large, interchangeable and ever-fluid collection of people who wanted to be his friend.

  Thickset industrialists with salt-and-pepper hair, fake tans and astute eyes readily offered him use of their chalets, snowcats, and daughters. Not to mention unsecured loans and bribes disguised as business opportunities.

  His father might be a pariah but Kashif Pasha was a different proposition, loved by those who hated every value for which Emir Moncef stood. And Kashif worked hard on his reputation. His loans were always repaid and he was politeness itself to the Western girls who, drunk or drugged, fell against him in the ritzy bars as if champagne or charlie had taken away their balance.

  From time to time, there would be a flash that lit the darkness of some bar and another photograph would appear, apparently showing him snuggled up with the daughter of a German industrialist or American banker.


  The inevitable result of this was a letter from his mother. Handwritten, sealed with wax and sent through diplomatic channels. Lady Maryam’s lament was always the same. At her age and in her state of health, how could he… The woman, needless to say, had the nerves of a trained killer and the physical constitution of a battle-hardened commando. Only her age was against her.

  Kashif Pasha’s replies were as ritual as his mother’s complaints. The whey-faced teenager in the photograph was the daughter/niece/lover of some man he barely knew and had certainly never shared his bed. It was doubtful if Lady Maryam believed this, but then she knew far less about her son than she imagined.

  His preferences had been formed early, one Saturday in early January while his mother was away, sometime between the calls to prayer at dawn and noon. That was when he’d first noticed Sophia, a barefoot Sudanese maid maybe two years older than he. He wasn’t even aware of having seen her before until she came into his room to sweep up and found him still half-asleep in a bateau lit.

  Her hurried apology got lost beneath his demand that she open his curtains, which were both long and heavy. Kashif had just been moved into a new suite of rooms, one fitted out in the English style, so that he would not disgrace himself by exhibiting unfamiliarity on arrival at his new school outside London, a city chosen largely because his father had wanted Paris.

  “Open them all,” Kashif’s twelve-year-old self had demanded. “That’s an order.”

  With reluctance, the girl (whose name Kashif was only to ask a week later) left the safety of her doorway and yanked back the nearest curtain, though it was embarrassment not anger that made her movements so abrupt.

  “And the next window and the one after that.”

  Sophia went along the wall as instructed, pulling back curtains originally sewn by the venerable Paris textile house of Nobilis Fontan, until Kashif had an uninterrupted view of a courtyard outside. One so large that a regiment could have assembled there.