Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Excellency…” Sophia’s curtsy was made clumsy by her dash for the door.

  “All the curtains,” Kashif demanded, nodding to the only window that mattered, a small one set high in the wall over his head. To get there Sophia would have to step onto his bateau lit and reach up. Kashif watched her face darken as she realized it. She had keloid scars on her cheeks, the way Berber women in the south had tattoos beneath their eyes. Scars, a face far finer than his, and huge, doubtful eyes.

  “That window too please.” Kashif was suddenly polite. As for the first time he understood that she might refuse. If that happened, Kashif wasn’t sure he knew what to do.

  “Excellency.” Sophia gave something that was half nod and half shrug, accepting the inevitable. Three steps took her to the bed and then, as Kashif watched from the corner of his eye she stepped up onto his mattress, revealing a dark flash of calf. For a moment she fought for her balance, then did what he’d only half believed she might, stepped clean over him and reached up, her fingers tugging the curtain.

  He expected her to step down immediately and run from the room but she remained where she was, staring up as if at some vision. And although she wore no pants there was little for Kashif to see. A dark gash for her sex, a curve of bare buttock, more shadow than flesh. Heavy legs. An ankle showing some kind of insect bite.

  He was still considering this when Sophia stepped down and gestured towards the bigger windows behind her. All of them revealing the same miracle. For the first time in Kashif’s life and, for all he knew, the first time in history, fat flakes of snow had begun to fall on the city of Tunis.

  Kashif Pasha smiled.

  “Here you go.” He slipped a red chip into the hand of the girl who’d earlier brought him a cigar and dropped another two into the waiting fingers of the croupier. Tipping so much to Michelle was an extravagance and, from the hastily controlled expression on the face of his facilitor, Georgian van Broglie, not quite how 30/54 liked its patrons to behave.

  Kashif Pasha’s smile grew broader. Next time the cigar girl would come to his suite of her own accord, never realizing she’d been bought, in advance, for far less than he would have paid.

  “And this belongs to you…”

  Georgian van Broglie prepared to bristle at the indignity of being tipped, something she’d stopped needing the moment she got put on a cut of the house percentage. And found herself instead holding a business card. The card was just that, a rectangle of thick paper made from wood pulp, its china-clay surface embossed with a small logo. Below the logo, which managed to combine a torque wreath with an old-fashioned propeller was the address of a private airport, one of Long Island’s finest.

  “Anytime you’re bored, feel free to call that number. One of my pilots will take you, plus family or friends, anywhere you want and bring you back again, when you want. Caracas, Bombay, Hong Kong…”

  Her stunned expression was worth the gesture. Besides, Kashif gave good odds she’d never take up his offer. That card would remain in her wallet and get shown to friends, both social and business, while his jet would remain on the ground, fuel unused. So far no one had ever taken him up on a flight. Something about the very extravagance of his gesture prevented them.

  Georgian van Broglie was still stuttering her thanks when someone knocked at the door. “Excellency, I’m sorry…”

  Outside, in the panelled expanse of lobby stood an officer from the NYPD and beside him, looking flustered, the casino’s head of security, all cropped hair and diamond earstud. Accompanying them was a small man with the smell of a lawyer.

  “Kashif al-Mansur?”

  No sooner had the uniformed officer spoken than the small man put up a hand. “Not in here,” he said firmly and glanced at the head of security as if expecting the man to toss the officer onto the street. “This casino is on tribal land. You know the rules.”

  “What’s the problem?” Kashif’s voice was calm, with an easy familiarity that didn’t reach his eyes.

  “There’s been a complaint…”

  “Outside,” insisted the small man, managing to look apologetic and determined at the same time. The officer got the determination, Kashif got the apology.

  “A photographer alleges…”

  Before the small lawyer had even relaunched his protest Kashif Pasha was holding up a white booklet. He put it half an inch from the officer’s face. “Do you know what this is?”

  The man shook his head. They both knew that was a lie.

  “It’s a carte blanche,” said Kashif Pasha, flicking to the first page. The photograph showed a man younger by four years, a little less worn, his cheeks less full; the beard was the same though. “Total diplomatic immunity,” Kashif explained, though this was unnecessary. The words were written in several languages across the top of each page. “You have a problem, take it up with the embassy.”

  “The embassy is in Washington.”

  “So take a plane. Or even better don’t bother. I’m leaving New York in about…” Kashif Pasha checked his Rolex, which looked silver but was actually platinum. “Thirty minutes. Everything I need to do here I’ve done.” Rubbing his fist absentmindedly, Kashif rechecked the time and smiled past the officer at the snow falling onto 54th Street beyond.

  CHAPTER 5

  Saturday 5th February

  Once in a time when animals still talked and djinn walked the earth quite openly, the Sultan of Bokhara sent for a mullah living in a distant village. His message was simple.

  “Come at once. I need advice.” For the Sultan expected the arrival of an Indian ambassador and the Mullah was…

  A rumble in her tummy made Hani suck her teeth in sudden irritation. Now someone was bound to offer her food.

  “Hungry?” Ashraf Bey’s question came from across the qaa, a reception room that occupied almost all of the first floor of the al-Mansur madersa: the mansion His Excellency shared with his young niece, his Portuguese cook, a Sufi porter and the woman Iskandryian gossip still assumed was his mistress, wrongly as it happened.

  In summer the qaa was open to the elements along one side but now was winter and the arches overlooking the central courtyard were closed off with specially cut sheets of glass. A small fountain played in the middle of the qaa floor, carved, five hundred years before, from a single block of horsehair marble.

  Silver balloons floated from this because today was Hani’s tenth birthday. Although Khartoum, who was friends with the cook but tended to disagree with her on almost everything as a matter of principle, insisted it was Hani’s eleventh. Largely, Hani suspected, because Donna insisted it wasn’t.

  And as no one could actually find a birth certificate for the child and Hani had been born elsewhere, the question remained open. Lady Nafisa might have been able to provide an answer but Hani’s aunt was dead. Something else for Hani to feel guilty about.

  “Hungry?” Raf repeated.

  “No,” said Hani. “Not really.”

  The mullah’s reply to the Sultan was equally simple. “I am unable to attend, O King, as I rely for life upon the sweet air of Qasr al Arifin and have no way to bring this with me in storage jars.”

  Hani paused, her small fingers hovering in midair. A matrix of fine wires across the back of her hands ended in finger thimbles. Every time her hands flicked across the invisible keys of her imaginary keyboard, words got added to a processing package installed on her laptop one floor up in the haremlek… Very clever but not madly practical because Hani relied on seeing a screen to write.

  All the same, it was kind of Hamzah Effendi to send her a present. Hamzah Effendi was Zara’s father and Zara was the girl her Uncle Ashraf should have married, the one everyone thought…

  If only.

  Hani kicked her heels against the legs of a silver chair and sighed. Another four paragraphs and she’d let herself go down to the kitchen to make coffee.

  At first the Sultan was perplexed by this answer. And then, after consideration of the mullah’s open disr
espect, he determined to remonstrate with the man when they next met, famous sage or not. At about this time the visit from the Indian ambassador was cancelled and so the Sultan needed no advice from anyone after all.

  Many months later, as fig leaves began dropping and the stars grew cold the Sultan sat down to supper and no sooner had he picked up his goblet than an assassin leapt upon him. Immediately, Mullah Bahaudin, having entered the dining room at this exact moment, jumped upon the assassin and wrestled him to the ground.

  “O Mullah,” said the Sultan, “It seems I am indebted to you in spite of your earlier rudeness.”

  Mullah Bahaudin smiled. “O Sultan,” he said sweetly. “The courtesy of those who know is to be available when actually needed, not sit waiting for emissaries who will never arrive…”

  Hani flicked her fingers over a nonexistent trackball to shut down her laptop and pulled off her gloves. She would write the rest of Bahaudin’s story, particularly the bit where the Mullah met a miracle worker who could walk on water—but to get things right she really did need a screen.

  “Okay,” Hani said, slipping down from her chair. “I’m off to make some coffee.” She left her comment hang in the air, a fact that seemed to escape both Uncle Ashraf and Zara. “Anyone like some?” Hani asked loudly.

  “Donna can make it,” Raf replied.

  It was the wrong answer.

  “Just look at this,” said Donna, waving one heavy hand at her television, as she insisted on describing the kitchen newsfeed.

  “Disgraceful. You could get twice the zest out of that.”

  On screen a plump boy in a chef’s hat was discarding half a lemon.

  “Now he’s adding cream,” Donna said, with a disgusted shake of her head. “Cream.” The old woman loved watching the German channels for their sheer outrage.

  When Hani said nothing Donna switched her attention from the recipe for Schwetche Kuchen to Hani’s face and jerked her head upwards, through the ceiling. “Still arguing?”

  The child nodded.

  “About you?”

  Hani looked at her. “What do you think?” Everyone in the house knew what Hani thought. She refused to go to school in New York and she didn’t want a tutor at home. Hani was beginning to wish she’d never taken those tests.

  “Zara just wants to get rid of me,” Hani said. “They both do.”

  “That’s not…” Donna sighed. “Sit down,” she said in a voice that allowed for no argument.

  Frying last season’s almonds in a drizzle of olive oil and grating rock salt over the top, Donna tipped the result onto a single sheet of kitchen paper, which she screwed into a ball to remove most of the oil. “Eat,” she told Hani, when the tapas was ready.

  Hani did what she was told, sipping at a glass of red wine Donna had placed beside the plate of almonds.

  “Now you listen to me,” said Donna. “It’s your birthday. You mustn’t be upset on your birthday because it makes for bad luck. And this isn’t really about you…”

  “Yes it is.”

  “No,” Donna said firmly. “It’s not…” She sighed and took her own gulp of Hani’s wine. “It’s about something else. Something grown-up. You know what I’d like to do with those two?”

  “What?” asked Hani, suddenly interested.

  “Ahh,” the elderly Portuguese woman shrugged in irritation. “No matter. You’re too young to know about these things…”

  Although if Donna’s solution was anything like that of the madersa’s porter, then Hani had a pretty good idea already. Khartoum’s suggestion involved bricking Uncle Ashraf and Zara into a room with a bed and not letting them out until they made sheets.

  Hani wasn’t sure where the bricks or sheets came into it, but she got the general point.

  “You want more birthday cake?”

  “Not really.” Hani shook her head. “I came to get coffee.”

  “Caffeine darkens the skin,” said Donna crossly. Her own face was as brown as the inside membrane of a walnut and almost as crumpled.

  “It’s for His Excellency.”

  The Portuguese woman looked doubtful.

  “Papers.” Hani announced before she was even through the marble arch into the qaa. Zara and Uncle Ashraf would have had to be deaf not to hear Hani coming, she’d stamped so hard on her way up.

  On Hani’s tray were a collection of afternoon papers, three tiny mugs of mud-thick coffee, and the plate of baklava Donna had insisted she take. Most of the papers blamed Thiergarten for the attack on Emir Moncef. Only one chose Washington over Berlin. And that one was more concerned with the miracle of the Emir’s survival.

  “The Enquirer,” she told her uncle, dropping it onto his table and using it as a mat for his coffee.

  Pope To Make Boy Saint?

  The Emir of Tunis had been saved from death by a child’s power of prayer; the Enquirer was quite categoric about that. An unnamed source close to Emir Moncef had confirmed how, in the absence of serum, the Emir’s youngest son had prayed over the unconscious body of his father, refusing to leave Moncef’s bedside until the Emir finally awoke.

  Missing from the story was the obvious fact that Pope Leo VII was unlikely to beatify, never mind canonize, a minor Islamic princeling (even assuming the mufti in Stambul was willing). Also missing was the fact that, far from being a hero, Murad Pasha had found himself in deep disgrace. In fact the beating he received for not obeying an order from the Emir left the boy unable to sit for three days.

  Raf skim-read the story, shifted his cup to reach the end, and tossed the lies to the floor, narrowly missing Ifritah, Hani’s grey cat.

  “Uncle Ashraf!”

  “It was an accident,” Raf said firmly, and went back to work.

  A fine-tooth comb, plus instructions on the correct way to lift potential evidence from pubic hair.

  A Miranda card, one side listing Inalienable Rights, the other Rules of Plain View.

  Two dozen unused postmortem fingerprint cards, both left and right.

  Vacuum-packed latex gloves, eight pairs.

  A booklet in Spanish on Vucetich’s system of fingerprint classification, stamped LAPD not to be removed.

  A foldout chart of poisons, arranged by the time in which they begin to react. Starting with ammonia, reaction time zero, and ending with stibine, three days to three weeks…

  One single sheet of 80gsm A4 paper of the kind used in police stations across North Africa. On it the translation of an Ottoman wedding certificate typed on a manual typewriter, which suggested a fear of leaving electronic footprints. The names had been filled in but the dates left blank.

  Polaroids, two, of a young man standing by a Jeep.

  A jewellery roll made from chamois leather that turned out to contain three scalpels and a collection of surgical steel blades.

  A small .22 derringer, two-shot, with an over/under configuration and mother-of-pearl grips, badly scratched. A handful of postcards…

  Set out in front of Raf on an oval dining table, amid the debris of breakfast and the coffee Hani had just brought were fragments from two lives now gone. The Polaroids, both faded, had arrived in that morning’s post; everything else belonged to Felix Abrinsky, Chief of Detectives in El Iskandryia and briefly a friend.

  It was a long time since Raf had been this upset and the feeling was unfamiliar. What he felt as a tightness in the back of his throat he took to be side effects from dust thrown up by workmen in a garden beyond the courtyard outside.

  Me having a good time, read a card. Flipping it over, Raf paused, eyes sweeping between two women in their early twenties, both bare-breasted and joined by a silver chain between nipple rings.

  One had a bottle of beer clasped against her button-flied groin in crude imitation of an erect penis and both looked as tired and hot as the old man in the tutu behind them, the one bending bare-arsed over an open grill.

  “How very American.”

  Raf looked up to find Zara standing by his shoulder. Hollow-eyed, full-
breasted and infinitely fragile since the night a month back she’d come unasked to his room and been sent away. She was younger by three or four years than the women in the photograph and wore significantly more clothes.

  “Trudi and Barbara,” Raf said, in answer to a question not asked.

  “Friends of yours?” There was enough of an edge to Zara’s question to make Hani look up, though all the child did was sigh and return to her chess computer. So far she’d won seventeen games straight. She reckoned Uncle Ashraf could be persuaded to let her buy a smarter model if she managed to get the total up to fifty.

  “Felix’s daughter and her partner… That one’s Trudi,” Raf added, indicating the taller woman.

  It had fallen to Raf to write to Trudi with news of her father’s death. A job Raf took in an attempt to assuage his own guilt. No one had suggested prosecuting Raf over the shooting of Felix because by then he’d already been offered the fat man’s job. And arresting El Iskandryia’s new Chief of Detectives was widely recognized as being a bad career move.

  Of course, that was over too. Raf had lasted about two months as Chief, rather longer than he intended. The gun and the badge had gone back; the only thing Raf kept was the fat man’s silver Cadillac and that still sat in a parking lot under the police HQ at Champollion.

  “She looks that good?”

  Raf blinked, realized he was still staring at Felix’s daughter and put the card down, face to the table, one item among many. “I was thinking,” he said simply. “About what happened.”

  Zara opened her mouth, then changed her mind. She was running out of fingers to count the number of times she’d screwed up in the last six months by opening her mouth before thinking. And bizarre as it seemed, probably her worst mistake was not marrying the man she was so busy insulting.

  Zara had no objection to arranged marriages. She just hadn’t enjoyed being a piece in her mother’s game of social advancement. Other recent screwups involved finding herself seminaked in a local paper and appearing in court, supposedly defending her father.

  Which one of the rest was actually the worst was a toss-up between… Well, that changed. If forced to choose, she’d say her current number one, her all-time recent fuckup was moving in with Raf, though that wasn’t how she’d put it to her father. It was the al-Mansur madersa she was moving into, at Hani’s suggestion. Raf was just coincidental.