Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Rosemary,” Per said, crumbling leaves under her nose. “And this one’s fresh thyme.”

  Sally had watched the snake-hipped Swede build a fire from brushwood, doing everything the way Sally felt it should be done. First he dug a small pit and ringed it with stones collected from the outcrop under which they camped. Raked a wide area around the pit with his fingers as a second move, brushing aside anything that might flare like tinder. And filled the pit with twigs, arranged by thickness as his third move. Spaghetti-thin in the middle, pencil-fat around that and fatter still around the outside and over the top.

  The flame came from an old lighter; so old she hadn’t seen that kind before.

  “Just petrol,” said Per, noticing her interest. “Works even in a high wind.” He did something vaguely obscene with the chrome circle at the top of the lighter and Sally realized he was jacking it up and down like a metal foreskin. “Belonged to my grandfather,” he said proudly.

  “And you still use it?”

  “Why not?” said Per. “It still works.”

  Sally smiled. He was an odd mix. A carnivorous technopagan who thought modern war inherently immoral but happily believed killing to be a hardwired human reaction, if only on a personal level. As for global politics, genetics and the other stuff that really interested Sally, they hadn’t even begun to go there. The only thing that really fired Per was history and old ruins.

  “What are you thinking?” His voice studiedly casual, borderline curious. Something about her obviously fascinated him and Sally had yet to work out what. Leaving aside the obvious.

  “That you’re a good fuck…”

  Per grinned. “And you’re a good judge of these things?”

  “You’re not?”

  Still grinning the boy put his lighter to the kindling and they both watched flame catch. An immediate helix of twisted vision ruptured the air between them. There was no smoke to disturb the summer sky, only a spiral of heat haze. Sally was impressed by that.

  They could have got off at Gabes but Sally wanted a bank and knew, because she’d already checked, that Coutts & Co. (Tunis) kept a branch where Avenue de Carthage intersected with Avenue de Paris.

  So she made Per look after her luggage in a café across the road while she sauntered into one of those grey-stoned colonial mansions with sash windows, bay trees at the door and industrial-strength air-conditioning and banged her chequebook on the counter, which was Italian horsehair marble, obviously enough.

  The florid young man who glanced up looked first at Sally’s tatty chequebook and only then at the blond foreigner and Sally was glad it was that way round. The five minutes she’d spent cleaning up in the thin trickle of water extracted from an ablutions hose in the café loo had done little but smear dust across her sunburned face. Dirt still grimed her arms and Sally’s hair was a mess under her scarf. Although Sally had to admit that tying back her hair helped make her look local.

  “Madame?”

  “Mademoiselle,” Sally corrected without thinking. Mademoiselle it was and mademoiselle was the way it was going to stay. She’d seen the price her mother had to pay for security and that was just too high.

  “I’d like to check my account.”

  Sally pushed her book to Kaysar Aziz and watched him flick back its cover and discreetly check the laser-stamped photograph embossed on the inside. Equally discreetly, Aziz fanned a dozen of the most recent stubs. The amounts scrawled in a variety of cheap pens got smaller each time.

  “If you could just wait here.” He vanished through an oak door to check her balance, something he could have done quicker by flicking alive a flatscreen angled into the countertop. This was discretion apparently.

  She knew the answer the moment Kaysar reappeared, long before he had time or need to frame his reply.

  “Empty?”

  “I’m sorry…”

  Sally shrugged. “Not your problem if my father’s a prick.”

  His blink was lightning-fast.

  “Cancelled,” Sally explained. “Until I come home. He’s been threatening it for months. Now he has… You got a loo round here?”

  Aziz looked blank.

  “Toilet,” Sally said. “Which way?”

  Rinsing her hands to wash off the soap, Sally started on her face and realized, too late, that she was splashing water down her front. The decision made itself. Unwrapping her scarf she shoved it into the pocket of her jeans and pulled her damp T-shirt over her head, revealing bite marks below one breast and a barbed-wire tattoo round her upper left arm. The tattoo was a mistake, an old one. The jury was still out on the navel stud and the gold dumbbell through her left nipple.

  The body of an animal, Wu Yung had said, and that was when Sally knew she’d finally outgrown him. The old man meant lean and muscled like a predator but he’d missed the essential truth. What he thought was a compliment was merely a statement of the obvious. And the fact Wu Yung never realized this disappointed her. She was an animal as was he, as were Bozo and Atal, that overprivileged, underchallenged little idiot with his kangaroo-skin shoes.

  Homo sapiens. One point three percent off being a chimpanzee. A species outside evolution and seriously in need of an overhaul.

  Sally sighed.

  When she’d wrung out as much water from her hair as she could Sally wrapped it still damp in her scarf, splashed cologne onto her breasts from a bottle on a glass shelf above the basin, struggled back into her T-shirt and turned to go. That was when she noticed an elderly Arab woman sitting in an alcove.

  Gazes met and held, pale blue and darkest brown and Sally nodded, shrugging off the lack of a nod in return.

  To make a point she left her last US dollar in the saucer by the door.

  “Well, that went perfectly,” Sally announced as she slumped into the chair opposite Per and reached for her Leica.

  “You got your money?”

  “Yeah.” Sally picked up the dregs of Per’s espresso and downed it in a single gulp. “Every last penny in my account.”

  “What now?” Per asked.

  “We go our separate ways I guess.”

  “And your way is where?”

  “Into the desert.”

  Per smiled. “You’ve been practising that,” he said.

  “Practising what?” Sally demanded, her puzzlement real.

  “That line,” said Per, brushing aside his floppy hair. He put one hand to his pale eyes to shade out a sun already kept at bay by a café umbrella and pretended to peer into the far distance. “Searching for your famous weasel?”

  Sally nodded and Per laughed.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “Not even an Englishwoman chases into the desert after a weasel.”

  “I do,” said Sally. “Chasing things is how you find them.”

  “But they’re not even rare,” Per protested. “I know, I looked them up.” He pulled a battered Nokia from his rucksack and flipped up the number pad to reveal a foldout keyboard and pop-up screen. “So what are you really after?”

  “Really?”

  Per nodded.

  “Lions,” said Sally, smiling at his expression. “Barbary lions. The kind that ate Christians in the Roman circus.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Much like this,” Sally said and she pulled a tatty newspaper clipping from the back of her wallet. It showed a lion cub so pale it almost looked grey. “The last known Barbary lion was shot in Morocco eighty years ago.”

  “So how are you going to find one?”

  “By looking,” Sally said flatly. “There’ve been rumours for years that a pair exist in captivity at a private zoo.”

  “Whose?”

  Sally smiled. “The Emir’s own,” she said. “Apparently he sees nobody, but I think he might see me. He’s partial to single blondes…” She tapped quote marks either side of the words, stressing the irony.

  “You want company?”

  Sally was about to point out the contradiction between what she’d
just said and his question when she noticed the local newspaper tucked into the side pocket of Per’s rucksack. It was folded open towards the back and she could just about see the small-ad headings from where she sat, not that she needed to. The boxed-out advertisement for Hertz told her all she needed to know.

  “You’re going to hire a car?”

  “Too expensive,” said Per. “I’ll buy one.”

  “This works out cheaper?”

  “Depends what I buy. Get a Mahari and it’ll run like clockwork, Soviet clockwork… Four-cylinder, two-stroke, made in Portugal,” he added, seeing Sally’s blank look.

  “And that runs like…”

  “It was a joke,” he said patiently. “Maharis break down daily but even a child can mend them. What I actually want is a Jeep.” Tossing the paper across, Per said, “Take a look.” He’d ringed three possibles and put lines through two of those. “Too old,” he said, jerking his head towards the first one. “And the other’s too expensive. The last one looks okay though.”

  As she expected the price was substantially more than Sally had. “You off to see it now?” she asked hopefully.

  “I wish.” Per shook his head. “I called and the first time they can do is ten o’clock tomorrow. Which means finding somewhere for the night.”

  “Not a problem,” said Sally. “There were a dozen guesthouses near Gare de Tunis. We can try there.” And so they did, although they ended up with separate rooms because the woman behind the desk refused to rent them a double. She did this through the simple expedient of refusing to understand what Sally and Per were asking for.

  One room was under the roof of a narrow four-storey guesthouse that advertised itself as L’Hôtel Carthage, the other on the second floor, up a flight of stairs from the reception area. Both looked onto a narrow side street parked with cars but only the lower one had a shower and loo. Sally chose the roof because her window had a better view. That was what she told Per anyway, in fact the main thing her room had going for it was being a third cheaper than the room Per took.

  “You want to go eat?”

  “Not really hungry,” said Sally. “Although you could always pick up a bottle of red if you go out.” She watched Per nod and smiled to herself. Now she had a reason to drop by his room later if that was the route she decided to take; it would be, but Sally was planning to spend an hour or two fooling herself first.

  CHAPTER 21

  Tuesday 22nd February

  Empirical evidence proved that sitting quietly in front of a half-eaten croissant could keep a waiter from Le Trianon at bay for half an hour. The secret was not to run over thirty minutes. Doing so resulted in someone coming to ask if there was a problem with the food.

  Opening her laptop, Hani called up a photograph and stripped off yesterday’s additions, starting again. The foreigner’s strange shirt was replaced with a new scoop-neck top, her hair made presentable courtesy of digiGloss, which billed itself as the software makeup experts used. Hani had downloaded a fourteen-day trial version of this and a freeware version of Wardrobe v3.1 from a teen site in Kansas City.

  Her uncle was missing, check.

  Khartoum knew why but wouldn’t say, check.

  And check Zara moping about in the qaa like some consumptive. Merde and merde again, as Zara herself would say. Hani took a large bite from her croissant and chewed hard. Yesterday she’d come across the woman sitting by the small fountain in the qaa reading Rumi. If this was a side effect of love then…

  Hani sucked her teeth.

  “Is everything all right?” The waiter who materialized beside her table looked worried, his eyes flicking from the child’s face to her plate.

  “The croissant is delicious,” Hani said firmly, “and I don’t need another coffee. But actually I do need to see the maître d’…to borrow a pen,” Hani added, when the man looked worried. Slipping down from her chair, she strolled through the terrace door into Le Trianon and headed for the elderly person standing at a small lectern, leafing through a reservations book.

  “Problems?” Hani asked politely.

  “Nothing serious.” The thin Italian smiled at her. “A double booking for the same cover…” He nodded to a table for six beneath a mural, the one decorated with a dancing girl in jewelled slippers and a wisp of cloth. “Sometimes I just think it would be easier to do everything myself.”

  “It is,” said Hani, raising the lip on her notebook and hitting a hot key. It would have been obvious even to someone less versed in the ways of Lady Hana al-Mansur that the child was hovering on the edge of a question.

  “What is it?” the maître d’ said and kept his smile in place to stop the girl from being anxious. “You can ask…”

  Hani held up her pink plastic notebook. “My uncle’s on a mission,” she said seriously. A flick of her eyes around the almost empty café found it safe to talk. Her look swift, instinctive and enough to convince the man that Hani believed what she said. And why not…? Everyone had heard the rumours that her uncle Ashraf Bey was in the direct employ of the sultan in Stambul.

  “A mission?”

  “Secret,” said Hani. “Very secret.”

  Not being too sure how else to proceed, Hani thrust the screen at the man. “I have to find this woman,” she said and watched his eyes. Glad that he didn’t like the look of her either. “To deliver a message.”

  “This message is from His Excellency?”

  Hani shook her head and left it at that.

  “I see,” said the thin Italian, visions of the Khedive using his young cousin to pass secret messages to unsuitable foreigners flicking through his head. Or maybe it was Hamzah Effendi, because rumours had the industrialist quietly financing a return to power for Saiid Koenig Pasha.

  “The thing is,” Hani began. “I was wondering if she’d ever eaten here?”

  “I forgot to give you this…” Hani held out the pen.

  “Thank you.” The maître d’ smiled. It was only after she’d slipped away the previous afternoon that he realized Lady Hana had taken his silver Mont Blanc with her. He should have known she’d return it just as soon as she realized.

  “A parcel came for your uncle.”

  “I know,” said Hani, “I’m here to collect it.”

  The maître d’ looked doubtful.

  “It’s wrapped in brown paper,” said Hani. “Madame Ingrid brought it down this morning. Gave it to you herself.”

  At least Hani imagined that was what had happened. She’d been very specific in her instructions to the bank. His Excellency needed the money wrapped in paper and delivered to his office. The parcel was to be given only to Madame Ingrid. The note Hani sent to Madame Ingrid on her uncle’s behalf was actually a postcard taken from a box in her dead aunt’s old room. The card’s surface was waxy, ivory rather than white. Across one side, at the top, ran the words, al-Mansur Madersa, Rue Sherif, El Iskandryia. That alone must be enough to make the card an antique, since the door onto Rue Sherif had been walled up for…

  Hani wasn’t sure, but ages anyway. And it had only been unbricked after Aunt Nafisa died. She’d risked using her printer to fake Uncle Asraf’s signature on this, because she was pretty certain Madame Ingrid wouldn’t be feeding the card through any machine. All the woman would do was what she was told, which was deliver any parcel left at C3 straight to the maître d’ at Le Trianon.

  It was a smooth-flowing, perfect circle of transferred responsibility.

  Hani held out her hand.

  “The parcel’s in my office,” said the maître d’ and Hani nodded wisely, although she hadn’t even known the Italian had an office. “Why don’t I have someone bring you a cappuccino while I fetch it?”

  Hani did her best not to sigh.

  CHAPTER 22

  Wednesday 23rd February

  Mubahith came looking for Raf. At least they did according to Isabeau. But this Raf only found out later, and first there was another shift to get through. His seventh in three days. Two scraping di
shes, one suds diving, three prepping vegetables and now this.

  “More fire…” Chef Antonio skimmed the hot chicken breasts across his kitchen, one after the other and a commis chef ducked.

  It was inevitable the new broiler man should fumble the catch. If only because he had two hands and there were five flying breasts of chicken. But he caught three and won $20 for Idries who’d bet Raf would catch more than he dropped.

  “Owe you,” Idries told him.

  The kitchens at Café Antonio were thick with steam. The floor slippery. A radio spat raiPunk and the only thing louder than the fury of Cheb Dread was the chef’s voice.

  “Burn it,” Antonio snarled. “Blackened chicken needs to be fucking blackened.” With a scowl he swung round, gearing up to persecute somebody else.

  Out of the fat chef’s sight Raf grabbed a hand towel and began to wipe off his fumbled catches.

  “Run them under a tap,” Idries said over his shoulder.

  So Raf did, then tossed the five chicken breasts back into oil and smoking butter. Sixty seconds later, having seared both sides to charcoal against the pan’s heavy bottom he scooped them out, rolled them on cheap kitchen paper and dumped them back on a plate.

  “Ready,” he shouted and discovered the plate was already gone.

  “Swordfish two,” came the cry from a teller, “and let’s hustle, tagine three.”

  The tagine would be lamb because that was the only kind Café Antonio served. Lamb tagine, blackened chicken and pan-seared swordfish, those were Antonio’s bows to ethnic cookery; and if the Soviet kids with their rucksacks and cheap condoms didn’t know that tagine came via Morocco, the chicken courtesy of the Caribbean and the swordfish recipe from Malta then Antonio wasn’t about to tell them. His ingredients were local, mostly… The fish caught by boats from Odessa and frozen on-site. When the Soviet crews docked at Tunis, which was rarely, Antonio would be waiting, ready to come to an agreement.

  The captain would eat free for his entire stay, much vodka would be drunk and one or maybe two sides of frozen swordfish would go missing.

  Other than these dishes Café Antonio served pizza and that was all. Antonio pushed the pizza because he was from Naples after all, and his staff also pushed pizza, whatever their nationality, because that’s what they were told to do. Pizza was good to eat, quick to cook and the markup was excellent; the other dishes took more time, cost more to make and irritated Antonio with their inauthenticity.