Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Per meanwhile had a white T-shirt at arm’s length and, between sobs, was waving it frantically through his window. Sally almost pointed out that in the desert white wasn’t necessarily the colour of surrender (the Mahdi’s battle flag had been pure white; until dust, blood and machine-gun bullets rendered it into sullied rags), but she decided not to bother. The Emir’s guard looked competent enough to recognize an idiot when they met one.

  “Prince Moncef?” said Sally, pointing to the complex below. Although no one replied, she got the feeling that at least one of them understood. Unless it was just that the word Moncef was familiar.

  “He’s famous,” Sally added. “For making plants grow where most plants die.”

  The soldier with the highest cheekbones stared at Sally with interest. Since the entire troop was female and any vibes, conscious or otherwise, came in under Sally’s school-tuned gaydar, she figured the soldier’s look was entirely professional.

  “He improves on nature,” said Sally and promptly wondered if what she’d just said counted in North Africa as blasphemy. “Takes the potential God has given it,” she amended, “and develops that.”

  “You think this is good?” Although she obviously understood English, the lieutenant asked her question in French, in an abrupt and very Parisian way that made Sally glance at her, wondering.

  “The man’s a genius.”

  “Whatever that means…”

  “It means,” said Sally, “that you leave an area of art or science changed from how you found it… I learnt that at university,” she added.

  “What did you study?”

  “Genetics at Selwyn College, Cambridge.” She named a college at random. Although, when she thought about it, that wasn’t entirely true. Selwyn was where Drew, the nanchuku nut, went, which was random enough.

  The woman nodded and loosened the kufiyyeh that was half-obstructing her mouth. She was not, Sally realized, Arab in origin; her face was European. And now, when she spoke, her amusement came through clear and unobstructed.

  “I suppose you want to see Moncef Pasha?”

  “Yes,” said Sally, “if that’s possible…”

  Blond hair, small breasts, skin like milk… Once the questioning was done, then yes. “Chances are that might prove possible,” said Eugenie de la Croix. The smile on her face turned sour.

  Halfway down the track, with the Jeep temporarily abandoned somewhere behind them and the Emir’s complex up ahead, Sally clutched at her gut and begged, practically in tears to be untied. She needed to use a nearby thornbush and she needed to use it now if she wasn’t to soil herself.

  “You leave your bag with me.”

  Sally nodded meekly and dumped her rucksack at the feet of the officer, running towards the bush with indecent haste. Only, once there, what Sally actually did was kneel, hook out her contraceptive cap and kick sand over it. Then she counted to sixty and pulled up her shorts.

  “Feeling better?”

  Sally smiled at the woman. “Much,” she said. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Monday 28th February–1st March

  Goats grazed in three rooms at the back, wandering in from a darkened courtyard through a hole in the rear wall. They were white with black faces and stunted horns, too fat, overfed and pampered to be convincing scavengers. Besides, their leather collars betrayed them. Most goats kept within the medina made do with string, if they had collars at all.

  Chef Edvard kept the goats to amuse. And amuse his dinner guests they did. But then Maison Hafsid’s evening crowd were usually friends of Kashif Pasha, those with money and those who had actually travelled outside Ifriqiya, the kind of customers cosmopolitan enough to pay for the privilege of eating elegantly prepared retrofusion in the dining room of a draughty, half-wrecked Ifriqiyan palace opposite a mosque still called new because it was constructed during a trade boom in the mid-eighteenth century.

  Maison Hafsid was owned by a tall and elderly Madagascan called Abdur Rahman, so labelled because this was one of the names specified by the Prophet as beloved by God. And, as his mother had reminded him often, “Names matter. So will you be called on the day of judgment…”

  On his arrival in Tunis ten years earlier Abdur Rahman changed his name to Edvard. And under this name he was known to most, even Kashif Pasha and his mother Lady Maryam. But it was as Abdur Rahman he owned Maison Hafsid, because this was the name that mattered. And it was as Abdur Rahman that he had shares in Café Antonio and three other restaurants.

  “You done yet?” Chef Edvard shouted.

  “Nearly,” said Raf and raised his chopper. Steel bit into flesh, then wood. Slicing the lamb into rough chunks, Raf slid them off his chopping board and into a glass bowl. Some kitchens kept specialist butchers. At Maison Hafsid the work was done by whomever Chef Edvard designated. It kept the cuts from getting too neat.

  “I’ll take it,” said Isabeau and the bowl was gone.

  “Well,” Raf said, entirely to himself, “we’re here.” His voice echoed the fox’s growl. That was their compromise. The fox still spoke but now Raf realized the fox was him. So far it seemed to work for both of them.

  “Yeah,” said Raf. He tried not to mind that the fox sounded impossibly smug. As if it, rather than chance or Raf, had been responsible for getting Raf to the kitchens of Maison Hafsid, site of one murder and supplier of culinary staff to the notables of Tunis. “Right where we need to be…”

  Had the fox been someone else, Raf could have reminded it that its plan of sneaking off to hunt down Ibrihim Ishaq of Isaac & Sons, Kairouan, had not been an unmitigated success. As well as mentioning that Those Who Went Naked had not turned out to be the revolutionary masterminds Eugenie seemed to suggest. He could even have admitted that he missed Hani and Zara and was adrift in a city with only an instinct that here was where he was meant to be to keep him from going home.

  But he’d only be telling himself. And they both knew that.

  There were Turkish baths less hot than the cellar kitchens at Maison Hafsid, so everyone kept telling Raf, who was beginning to believe them. Idries had already taken him to one of the city’s poorer public baths, a place of cracked tiles and broken mosaic situated just behind the central market, where he’d sat surrounded by a dozen strangers, sweat dripping from every pore as a robed attendant ladled water onto heated stones.

  The cleansing room had stunk of physical effort and butchers who killed most days but sweated themselves clean once or twice a week because that was all they could afford. They were polite to the stranger in their midst. Not friendly but polite. And once, when talk touched on Carthage Dynamo vs. Sophia Crescent, the conversation widened to include him. Other than that, the atmosphere had been restrained, almost elegant in a peeling, impoverished sort of way.

  Maison Hafsid was something else. No one was polite. At least not down in the kitchens. And what constituted conversation was a hard-edged banter likely to get you knifed in most bars in Seattle. Ear-bleeding nu/Rai ripped from a corner-mounted wall speaker. In the kitchen Raf didn’t speak at all. He screamed into the steaming chaos. And others shouted back. Mostly about his parentage, race, sexual orientation and short life expectancy.

  Anyone who took offense at Chef Edvard worked elsewhere. Actually, anyone who took offense, full-stop, left for some other industry: one not driven by impossible hours, heavy attitude and dirt-cheap drugs.

  “You,” he said to Raf, next time Raf staggered by under the weight of a lamb carcass. “I want to know where to file you.”

  Three kinds of scum ended up in kitchens apparently. Those on the run too stupid to do anything else, brilliant and spoilt artists, and finally mercenaries, those in it for the money, mostly solid and reliable line cooks. Some American years back had given his name to this law, but Chef Edvard didn’t mention that, he merely wanted to know which label fitted Raf.

  “All of them,” said Raf.

  “All?” The elderly Madagascan eyeballed his newest recruit for a long s
econd, then slapped Raf on the shoulder. “Misfits are good,” he said, his Arabic thicker than coffee grounds, “they stay longer.”

  Everything Raf had learnt at Café Antonio was unlearnt at Maison Hafsid. At Hafsid no one ever served swordfish or blackened chicken, even if customers asked politely. Right now Raf’s job was to braise those chunks of lamb (bone and fat and skin and all). The ironically crude chunks reached the table drizzled with a custard-yellow sauce made from cloudberries flown in from Table Mountain. Given the price Maison Hafsid charged for its speciality dishes, Raf could only imagine the berries travelled first class.

  “Faster,” Edvard barked.

  Raf nodded, but the chef was shouting at someone else.

  On a marble slab to Raf’s left were a series of bowls filled with herbs and spices, which a kid of about eleven kept topped on a regular basis by ripping handfuls of wilting oregano from fat twigs or grating nutmeg against a tiny grid hung on a string around his neck. Raf used a lot of oregano and nutmeg; also olive oil, anchovies, dried juniper berries and small pods for which Raf didn’t yet have a name. The chef seemed to use those in almost every dish.

  A great aluminium pot roiled on the edge of a hundred degrees at a station behind Raf, creating its own microclimate, waiting to soften whatever pasta was required. Linguine mostly, with a weird locally made thread noodle that came semiopaque and ended up near invisible; not that much of either got eaten to judge from the quantity scraped from dirty plates into a metal trough that ran the edge of one wall. The noodles and pasta seemed to be something between a base and a garnish.

  “A hand to six…”

  The chef’s eyes found Raf, who held up five fingers and nodded. Five minutes to braise the lamb for table six and pass it across for plating. That was the difference between home cooking and doing it for real. Restaurant food got dressed, just like the customers. And an artistic sprig or a near-odourless/tasteless swirl of sauce could hide culinary sins as easily as discreet makeup and good clothes could hide sins of the flesh. Warm plates, flamboyant furnishings, elegant garnishes and adequate food, the demands of haute cuisine at Maison Hafsid were less than its devoted clientele imagined.

  “Three,” shouted the chef and Raf swirled his pan, smelling oil, seared flesh and oregano. Across the other side of the cellar was a wood oven for which Raf sometimes seared lamb or beef to be roasted, so that no steam from raw meat might dampen the oven’s desertlike dryness. It wasn’t really Raf’s job but Raf was racking up favours, taking shifts he didn’t want, helping to hump crates too heavy for one person alone. He’d even rescued a cucumber sauce for wild greyling with a nylon sieve, a splash of Chablis and nerves of steel, decanting it onto a warm plate seconds ahead of the plate heading for the hatch.

  Mind you, Raf probably wouldn’t be forgiven that one. The sauce came from an Algerian sous-chef and the deputy was less than happy. Particularly now Chef Edvard had decided Isabeau’s earlier boast about Raf’s having been a sous-chef himself in Seattle was true.

  To test the claim, Raf had been handed a red fish of a species he’d never seen and been told, in front of a watchful kitchen, to find a knife and fillet the thing.

  Pulling a Sabatier from the back of his belt, Raf oiled up a sharpening block and set about giving himself an edge. All the while checking the fish, noticing its every curve and the geometric relationship between anus, eyes and upper fin, the way the scales changed near the tail.

  When Raf cut, it was swift, taking his stance and the looseness of his wrist from a Sushi master who ran a dockside café his old boss Hu San often frequented. Raf spent one memorable evening there near the beginning of his time with the Five Winds, as Seattle’s most influential triad was named. And for a while, with tiny dish after dish reaching their table and Hu San chewing in silence, her eyes closing at particularly impressive slivers of raw fugu, Raf thought he was in disgrace. And then, when she looked up and smiled almost without thinking, he realized she intended to sleep with him.

  He still hadn’t started to shave and she was in her late thirties, maybe more, but her tastes were for the raw and the fresh. Whatever, the moment never arose and as her Lincoln pulled up outside his flat Hu San dismissed him with a polite good-bye and left him standing on a sidewalk in the rain.

  Raf cut three times in all. Once to gut the fish and discard its entrails. Once to fillet one side of the fish and once to fillet the other. The skin he’d already removed in a single scoop of his thumb, not using his knife and not damaging the flesh.

  “Done?” Chef Edvard had asked, his face impassive.

  Raf nodded and waited while the chef told a boy to fetch a set of scales. First Edvard weighed the entrails, then both fillets and finally bones and skin.

  “Not as bad as I expected.”

  Behind his eyes Raf scowled but he kept silent, eyeing a strip of skin so clean it could have been sent for tanning. Not a flake of flesh clung to the spine or ribs, the cut at tail and gills was near perfect.

  “I’m out of practice,” Raf announced finally and the skeletal chef almost smiled.

  Then came three questions.

  Where had he cooked before?

  Raf named Antonio’s pizza place and a five-star hotel in Seattle so famous that even the silent and anxious Isabeau recognized its name.

  “This true?”

  That question was for Isabeau. Asked almost politely. No one had said anything to Raf but he’d caught the glances. There wasn’t a single person in the kitchens unaware of her brother’s murder. Even Chef Edvard was making allowances.

  “He’s been working for Antonio,” she said. “I can’t guarantee the other.”

  “Why do you want to change jobs?”

  “Debts,” said Raf. “Waiting to be paid.”

  “I work my staff harder,” Chef Edvard told Raf flatly. “Believe me I make you sweat for every extra cent.”

  And so the slot became his, at least until Idries’ cousin got released from prison, if he did. Two points went unspoken. One, should Raf turn out okay then Edvard might keep him on anyway, and two, if Idries’ cousin was not released, then Raf had the job until someone better came along.

  But first Raf had to do a day’s suds diving to show he was serious. And do it for nothing. Those were the rules. So he scraped plates, hosed them down and loaded them into a washer the size of a small truck for as long as it took for some elderly Philippino to fry his own fingers in a red-hot wok—which was about four hours. The man wanted to work on but Edvard insisted on wrapping his hand in a towel filled with ice and ordered him home. Only the promise of a full day’s pay got the crying man out of the kitchen and into a corridor that ended in steps leading up to an alley at the back. Even then someone had to walk the man up the stairs and shoo him out into the alley.

  “Want me to handle his station?”

  “Screw up and you’re out.”

  Raf took that as a yes and stripped to the loose cotton trousers he’d borrowed from Antonio’s and would one day return, with luck. He took a coat someone handed him.

  “Nice scars.”

  The chef’s smile was mildly mocking, as if his own might prove far more impressive if only he could be persuaded to discard his white jacket with the word Edvard embroidered over the pocket in red silk. And to judge by the jagged seams up both wrists and a yellow callus thick as tortoiseshell at the base of one thumb anything was possible.

  So Raf cut lamb and braised goat, spatchcocked quail and generally kept the meals coming, on time and done as ordered.

  “It’s not a skill, you know…”

  “What isn’t?”

  “This shit. Being able to do everything. That’s just a design function. You telling me you can’t recognize an adaptive mechanism when you see one?”

  “Hey, white boy… You okay?” Raf looked up from wiping out his iron skillet to find the tall Madagascan standing next to him, frowning. A couple of the others were staring across as well.

  “Sure,” Raf said. “Jus
t talking to myself.”

  “Well,” said Chef Edvard, “when you’ve got a moment.”

  They went to the table, an old black thing that looked as if it came from a French farmhouse that had burned down. Fire damage chewed along one edge but someone, probably years before, had scraped most of it away with the flat of a knife and put that edge to the wall.

  “Drink,” Chef Edvard said, pouring Raf a glass of marc. “And then listen… I’ve got a job if you’re interested. You know about Kashif Pasha’s party?”

  The whole of Tunis knew. At his mother’s suggestion, the Emir’s eldest son was holding a dinner to celebrate his parents’ forty-fifth wedding anniversary. If both of them turned up, it would be the first time they’d met in slightly over forty-four years. The meal was Kashif Pasha’s attempt to heal the rift, a peace offering to his father and a sign of the pasha’s developing maturity where the Emir was concerned. That was the official version anyway.

  “You want me to cook?”

  Amusement tinged the old man’s eyes. “You’re not that good,” he said. “You wait tables… Still interested?”

  “Oh yes,” said Raf, “it’s exactly the kind of opportunity I’ve been waiting for.”

  Juggling a fat cowpat of harissa in her hands, Isabeau tried to stop it from dripping oil onto her jeans. Chef Edvard preferred dry mix that needed added oil but none Isabeau and Raf had seen in Marché Central looked good enough, so she’d bought freshly made paste.

  That was a difference between them, Raf decided. If the old Madagascan had sent him to buy dried harissa, then that’s what Raf would have bought. The best he could find from the range available. However, he was there to buy lamb. And talk to Isabeau.

  Raf sighed.

  “What?” Isabeau asked.

  “Chef Edvard’s worried about you…” He shrugged. “Everyone’s worried. So if you need to take time off, maybe go back to Tarbarka?” Raf named a town on the northern coast. The only town in Ifriqiya where descendents of French colonists still outnumbered residents of Arab and Berber stock.