“Ditch that gun.”
“What gun?”
“Heckler & Koch, fifty-two-shot magazine. Laser targeting. Night sights…”
The one with blood on its stock.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” said the fox. “Something like that.”
Jinking round a fat man wearing white robes that marked him out as from the Trucial States, Raf sprinted for the black Zil from which the man had just alighted, only to have it pull away in a squeal of tyres, back door flapping.
The driver behind took one look at the gun in Raf’s hand and reversed hard, straight into a taxi. Headlights shattered, fenders tore and then it too was gone, followed by the cab trailing diesel fumes and fear.
When Raf next bothered to look he was running down a slip road with a shunting yard to his right and overlooked on his left by redbrick tenements. Dark windows, mostly shuttered. A car without wheels raised on cinder blocks. It could have the wrong side of the tracks anywhere. Although the air smelled different to that of El Iskandryia. Fresher somehow, owing less of its taste to the sea. Fewer cars. Not so heavy on the hydrocarbons.
“This way…”
Raf ignored the voice. Only to freeze when a hand grabbed his sleeve and swung him round, pushing him towards a metal fence.
“Through here,” insisted the voice. It wore an old uniform with a peaked cap and fat leather belt, black tie and pale blue shirt. The belt was new and the uniform slate grey, with silver-piped epaulettes on a narrow jacket and a cheap metal monogram adorning each lapel, letters intertwined so tightly that it took Raf a second to make out SBCF.
“Société Beyical des Chemins de Fer,” said the fox.
Raf shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Come on,” hissed the small man, still gripping Raf by the sleeve. “Do you want them to catch you?”
“Who?”
“Kashif Pasha’s sécurité, of course… He’s taking control,” added the man as he bustled Raf through a mesh door in an inner fence and simultaneously pulled a key from his pocket to lock it behind them. “Everyone knows his father is dying.”
Raf frozed.
“You must know,” said the man. “A week ago in Tozeur the Emir was bitten by a poisonous snake. They’re keeping the seriousness a secret.”
Raf knew all about them and they… Most of his childhood had been spent in their hospitals and special schools. Suits, smoked-glass windows, pretty little mobile phones. And endless lies, half of them his.
“I thought the Emir was unharmed?”
“That’s what they want you to believe.”
“What proof do you have?” Raf demanded, regretting it immediately.
“What proof…?” Key still in the lock the man halted then started to scrape the key in the opposite direction, infinitely slowly. This time round the man was worrying about his own escape route. Raf’s tone had been wrong. Not just his question but the position from which that question was asked… One that posited a right to make such demands and an expectation that these would be met; assumptions totally at odds with Raf’s ragged jellaba and homemade sandals.
Of course the small man didn’t think of it like that, he just felt tricked, his closing down into sullen imbecility the defence of the weak against someone who might represent those who were strong.
Raf took a deep breath. “Forgive me,” he said and shrugged, then shrugged again and switched into Arabic. “My French is not good. Only what I learnt as houseboy at a hotel when I was young. I was just asking if the illness of the Emir was true…”
Between being a houseboy at a hotel and an itinerant labourer lay a whole life’s worth of wrong choice that the old railway worker was much too polite to investigate. So he smiled instead and shrugged in his turn. “That explains your accent,” he said. “It’s very elegant. And yes, it’s true about the Emir.”
He hustled a silent Raf towards a shed that stood dark and near derelict at the foot of an abandoned signal box, pushing his new friend inside.
“Wear this,” he ordered as he ripped an orange boiler suit from a locker. “And carry that.” The bag he offered was long and made from oiled canvas. On both ends the SBCF logo could just be seen inside a faded circle. “It’s for the gun,” he said with a sigh when Raf just stared at the thing.
“Sorry.” Raf ripped the magazine from the HK, wiped it with a rag taken from the floor, then did the same for the weapon, dropping both into the bag before zipping it shut. The rag he returned to the floor.
“Who are you?” he asked the man.
“Someone whose eyes are open,” the man replied and grinned, exposing a row of crooked teeth. “You can call me Sajjad. I work the Gare de Tunis. How about you?”
“Me?” Raf glanced round the tiny hut and spotted a two-ring Belling in the corner, plates thick with grease. A stack of take-out trays next to it said the old-fashioned cooker didn’t get much use. “I’m a chef,” said Raf. “One who’s looking for a job. Name’s Ashraf. My mother was Berber.”
Which wasn’t exactly true. It was his father who’d been Berber according to everyone from Eugenie de la Croix and the Khedive to Raf’s Aunt Nafisa, but she was dead and most of what she’d told Raf had turned out to be lies anyway.
“And your father?”
“I never knew my father,” Raf said and was shocked to realize that he probably never would. And even more shocked by how much he minded.
Sajjad shrugged. “These things,” he said as he clicked on a kettle and reached for a tin, “they happen.” Such unhappy beginnings went altogether better with the torn jellaba than did Raf’s earlier question, abrupt and barked as it had been.
“Lose the jellaba in a locker,” said Sajjad a minute or two later, pouring water onto coffee grounds. “We’ll find you another,” he added when Raf looked doubtful.
Any residual doubt Sajjad had about Raf got forgotten the moment he saw the scar tissue mapped onto the young man’s back. A veritable landscape of pain, with ridges of scarring that fed between a star-shaped city on Raf’s shoulder to ribbon developments of raised tissue around his ribs and abdomen.
To Raf the only thing remarkable about it all was how little of the pain he’d actually felt, mostly that had been the fox’s job.
Sajjad whistled.
“They did this to you?”
“They certainly did,” said Raf.
CHAPTER 18
Friday 18th February
The lift in the al-Mansur madersa was an old-fashioned Otis that worked on counterweights, great slabs of lead that rose between two greased poles as the Otis descended and went down when the lift rose. Apparently the lift was now so ancient it was valuable.
For the bulk of her short life Hani would no more have dared visit the men’s floor than she’d expect a man to visit the haremlek, where her own room was situated. Uncle Ashraf’s arrival from America had changed all that. Along with other things such as eating breakfast in the kitchen, to the intense disapproval of Aunt Nafisa’s elderly Portuguese cook.
Uncle Ashraf’s cook now, she supposed.
Donna was afraid of Hani’s uncle. That much was obvious from the way she always tapped her forehead, tummy and one breast after another every morning when Uncle Ashraf first came into the kitchen. For herself, Hani relied for safety on a silver hand of Fatima worn under her vest on a length of black cotton. Not that Hani believed her uncle possessed the evil eye.
His power was baraka, the sanctity that clung to those who walked the difficult path. Hani had discussed with Khartoum her idea that baraka might have required her uncle to vanish and the fact the old Sudanese porter hadn’t dismissed her idea out of hand was beginning to convince Hani that she was right.
Easing open the brass grille, Hani slipped into the Otis and pushed herself into a corner; all of which was unnecessary because Hani had only just seen Zara cross the darkened courtyard below the qaa and disappear under a marble arch that led to the covered garden. Gone to see how far her father’s workmen had
got, probably…
Hani checked her watch. Four hours since lunch. Well, if the tray of pastries Donna had left discreetly outside Hani’s door passed for lunch. And two hours before their visitor was due to arrive.
His Highness Mohammed Tewfik Pasha, Khedive of El Iskandryia and ruler of all Egypt… One time puppy prince to Koenig Pasha’s mastiff. Hani reeled off her cousin’s titles, adding a few choice ones of her own.
These days of course the General was fighting US attempts to extradite him for kidnapping a psychotic battle computer that answered to the name of Colonel Abad. Since Washington simultaneously insisted that Abad was merely a machine, Hani was puzzled as to how General Koenig Pasha could be charged with kidnapping, particularly in an American court; always assuming Washington managed to extradite him, which was unlikely because the General was many things (including her godfather), but what he wasn’t was without friends.
The day before the day before yesterday, which was a Tuesday. (Hani checked that fact in her head and discovered she’d got it right.) The day before, etc. an invitation had arrived for her uncle and in his absence Hani had felt obliged to open it, watched unfortunately by Donna who’d also heard the knock at the door onto Rue Sherif. And Donna had been less than happy when, having skim-read the Khedive’s note, Hani promptly vanished up to her room to feed it through a pink plastic scanner.
Having saved the file, Hani typed an answer on her uncle’s behalf, folded it neatly and took it down to the kitchen for Donna to post. The reply, brief to the point of rudeness, regretted that Ashraf Bey was unable to attend the Khedive as invited and suggested that instead the Khedive might visit the al-Mansur madersa at 7:00 P.M. on Friday 18th Jumaada al-awal, AH 1472…
“Stay there,” Hani told her cat and lost Ifritah’s reply in a crunch of lift wheels. Until Zara took Hani shopping at Marshall & Snellgrove, Hani had assumed that all lifts were like this one; but then, until eight months back when Uncle Ashraf first arrived, Hani hadn’t been outside the madersa, ever… So what did she know?
Hani shrugged.
She had work to do.
Two facts were insufficient. Hani had stopped calling them clues, because they revealed so little. Her uncle was gone. A workman’s jellaba was missing. Not clues, Hani told herself crossly, isolated facts… A situation she was about to change by finding others.
The room her uncle used was dark, silent and damp so Hani folded back his shutters to let in air and with it sodium haze from the surrounding city. Directly below was the courtyard, its fountain silent, and beyond the courtyard a flat-roofed store used by Hamzah’s builders. In the old days the open-sided store had been a room for entertaining visitors not quite grand enough to be invited up to the qaa… Now it was full of sacks of cement, endless sheets of glass sorted into piles and machines for sandblasting metal.
On the far side of the store began the garden. Only most of its roof was gone, each glass pane carefully removed so that the supporting framework of Victorian girders could be stripped back to metal, treated against rust and repainted. In the middle of the garden, staring blindly into a muddy pit that would become a carp pond stood Zara, unaware of being watched. Unaware, it seemed to Hani, of anything very much since Uncle Ashraf’s disappearance.
In one corner of her uncle’s room was a bateau lit, sheets folded down neatly. A silver chair, made from walnut overlaid with beaten metal, stood next to it. Apart from that there was only a double-fronted wardrobe against one wall, doors inset with matching oval mirrors that reflected Hani back to herself, a silhouette watching a silhouette, and a bow-fronted walnut chest against another wall. A tatty rug occupied the floor in between.
Having confirmed that there were no loose tiles beneath the rug, Hani debated her next move and decided on the wardrobe. In a shoe box underneath it she found a revolver and picked this up by the handle, only then remembering to consult the notebook she’d borrowed, her tiny Maglite playing over the fat man’s spidery writing. It took Hani longer than she liked to find the right page.
Never touch evidence with bare hands…
Well, that was a good start.
Doing something clever like hook her torch through the revolver’s trigger guard was out because Hani needed that to see what she was doing. And while it was true there were wire clothes hangers, any one of which would have done, dozens of the things on an otherwise empty rack in the wardrobe, just looking at those stung the back of Hani’s legs. So instead Hani transferred her grip from handle to trigger guard and brought the barrel up to her nose. It stank of old fireworks.
Other than this the wardrobe was bare. Nothing on top or in either drawer beneath.
Search systematically, said the notebook.
For all its dusty elegance and probable value, Raf’s chest of drawers was equally devoid of clues, lined with crinkled white paper and filled mostly with dust and dead spiders. Just to be thorough Hani yanked out one drawer after another to check that no one had taped anything important to the back.
She knew for a fact Donna had tidied no clues away because the old woman was far too terrified of her uncle to enter his room. It was Khartoum who cleaned this floor and Khartoum had been nowhere near the main house for…
Now that was interesting.
Hani thought about it and grinned.
Once she was done here, she’d wander over to the porter’s room next to the back entrance of the madersa and have a serious talk with Khartoum, assuming she still had time. The arrival of her cousin the Khedive obviously took precedence.
Make notes, the book said somewhere. So Hani wrote bedroom in pencil on a blank page towards the end and put a tick next to it. On the line below she wrote bathroom.
Her uncle’s cast-iron bath was full of dust, its enamel yellow with age. One of the claws at the tap end showed black metal where an old accident had chipped the surface away. Maybe his shower cubicle would hold more clues.
Make that any clues, Hani thought to herself.
Coal tar soap. A dry flannel. Camomile shampoo. The shampoo was half-full and the flannel as stiff as peeled skin. It was the soap that was interesting. Tiny splinters of hair porcupined its surface. Not washed-out strands as one might expect but clippings. Dropping to a crouch, Hani ran one finger across the bottom of the shower tray and came up with a whole crisscross of clues.
He’d cut his hair then. No, Hani crossed that out and pencilled in cropped instead. Uncle Ashraf had cropped his hair. And that meant he was in disguise. Something she should have known from the missing jellaba. Disguise meant Uncle Ashraf was on a mission. Hani nodded to herself, heading for the lift. There was work to do. Khartoum would have to wait.
“His Highness the Khedive…” A lifetime of cigars gave the old Sufi’s words gravitas to go with their edge.
The slim boy in the dark suit nodded to Khartoum, then glared around the almost deserted qaa. Etiquette demanded he be met at the door to the al-Mansur madersa but the only person to be found at the entrance on Boulevard Sherif had been polishing its door knocker.
And it didn’t help Tewfik Pasha’s self-esteem that Khartoum still had his cleaning cloth dangling from one hand like a dead hare. In fact, thinking about it, Tewfik Pasha decided he should have insisted on bringing his bodyguards with him rather than leaving them on the sidewalk by the Bentley.
“Your Highness.”
Very slowly Zara put down her needlepoint and climbed to her feet. She was working on a circle of canvas stretched over a large hoop, onto which she’d sketched a map of the world. Zara hoped the Khedive appreciated her artistry. Particularly the fact she’d chosen to edge his domains in the exact blue used to outline Prussia.
“This is a pleasure,” said Zara, her tone indicating that it was anything but…
If Tewfik Pasha noticed the cheap silver band on Zara’s finger he didn’t let it show. Wedding rings were gold and what Zara wore signified, as it was intended to signify, that whatever she had it wasn’t a marriage.
Actually i
t wasn’t anything at all. A quick grope on a boat and two nights heavy petting at the gubernatorial palace while Raf stood in as Governor and her father was on trial.
“Are you all right?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“No reason…” The faltering in the Khedive’s voice revealed him for what he was. An anxious seventeen-year-old standing in front of a girl both older and out of his reach.
“Well, I’m here,” Tewfik Pasha said.
“So you are,” said Zara.
Glancing round anxiously, the Khedive almost flinched when he met Khartoum’s sardonic gaze. “Perhaps Your Highness would like coffee?” The old Sufi’s voice was slightly gentler than before.
“Coffee…?” Tewfik Pasha wanted to be peremptory. To have grown men falter at his gaze and women wait on his slightest word—or was it the other way round? Whichever, the General could manage both without even noticing. While the most Tewfik could manage was to hold a room for a few tense minutes, provided one of his audience didn’t answer to the name of Zara Quitramala.
“That would be good,” he told Khartoum. “And perhaps some cookies…?”
“At the very least Ashraf Bey should have been here as well,” said Tewfik Pasha as he put down his tiny brass cup to suck mudlike coffee grounds from between his teeth. He sounded peeved and not at all princely. Somehow the thought of Zara with Ashraf Bey always had that effect on him.
“Yes,” said Zara. “Then the three of us could have had a cozy chat.”
Hani snorted. She couldn’t help herself. And having given away her position, she jumped down from the top of the lift, which was an excellent place for seeing everything without being seen, and landed in an untidy jumble of arms and legs.
The Otis had been unused for the last half an hour; which was twice as long as Zara had been sitting in the qaa wondering exactly why His Highness the Khedive of El Iskandryia might suddenly decide to pay an impromptu visit. Now she knew.
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