Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Micromesh, fine enough to be virtually invisible, lined the far side of the gate’s flowing wrought iron. Its heavy, old-fashioned lock was electronic. Cracking paint covered hinges that Raf was willing to bet conformed to some exacting military standard he didn’t even know existed.

  “You step out of the car,” said Murad. “And then someone opens the gates if they like the look of you… I’ve been here before,” he added, without glancing up from his toy Ninja Nizam. Hani and he had spent from Tunis to Bizerte arguing about whether or not action figures were childish.

  Hani kept on saying they were. Until finally Murad announced that as Hani did nothing but play with a stupid cat, her opinion didn’t count.

  “Ifritah’s not a toy.”

  “Did I say she was?”

  After that came blessed silence, from Bizerte to just past Cap Serrat, where Raf turned the Bugatti off the crumbling blacktop onto something that barely qualified as track. The Ettore-Bugatti-built coupé Napoleon had been a present from the Prince Imperial in Paris to the Emir’s grandfather and, until Raf claimed it, had been garaged in a mews at the back of the Bardo Palace.

  No one had dared to stop Raf from commandeering the 275bhp, 12.8-litre monster. But then, from the chamberlain who ran the nearly empty palace to the uniformed sailor who first saw a blond notable in shades and black Armani suit striding towards its main door, no one had known how to treat Ashraf al-Mansur at all.

  Finding a new suit had been as easy as kicking in the window of a boutique opposite Ibn Khaldoun’s statue in Place de la Victoire, about three hundred paces from Bab el Bahar. By then, dawn’s call to prayer had come and gone and only isolated trucks still circled the medina like flies disappointed by the quality of their meal. The boutique was very elegant, with a wide range of supposedly embargoed Western goods, but it should have spent more on security.

  On his way out Raf met a handful of other looters on their way in. They liked his suit too. In fact they liked it so much he went back to point out the appropriate rack. And it was only after he left the second time that he put on the shades he’d taken to match, casually ditching his cheap contacts into a storm drain.

  An hour’s walk from Ibn Khaldoun’s statue had taken him to the edge of the Bardo. A complex of original buildings with rambling faux al Andalus additions, the Bardo featured palaces built on palaces, the bedrooms of one situated over the reception rooms of another until the different parts ran together into one impossible mess.

  No one had ever cataloged its contents. Records even differed as to the number of rooms. And each attempt at rationalization made matters worse. Although it was widely agreed among architectural historians that the rebuilding of 1882, during which medieval mashrabiyas were replaced with sash windows along one whole side, was undoubtedly a low point.

  All the same, the Bardo complex still counted as the most recognized façade in North Africa. One result of an old etching featuring in the opening credits of A Thousand Flowers, a long-running, widely syndicated Turkish soap based in the nineteenth-century harem of Ahmed Bey, where a thousand concubines languished under the guard of five eunuchs, played by bald Sudanese women.

  No men were ever seen. And although some flower would occasionally be plucked from her languid divan and sent through the Door, she would return an episode later, usually in a state of unspecified bliss, distraught or just more worldly-wise.

  Gossip, treachery and friendship, the plot ran regular as celestial tram lines. Its avid following the by-product of the originator’s desire to draw her cast from a dozen nationalities, as Ifriqiya’s beys had filled their harems with a variety of Egyptians, Turks and Southern Europeans, mostly captured slaves.

  Various bearded Jesuits were sent, both in reality and in the soap. And indeed, in reality one such missionary spent three years camped in a wing of the Bardo Palace waiting for an audience that never actually came; despite an invitation from a bey devoted to the memory of his nasrani mother.

  Now the Bardo was home to the world’s largest collection of Carthaginian mosaics, an unquantifiable number of bad Victorian paintings and Kashif Pasha, his retinue and his mother. (With only Kashif’s direct appeal to the Emir ensuring that Lady Maryam and he were allocated different sections of the crumbling complex.)

  No flag flew from the mast over the main gate when Raf arrived, which meant no adult member of the al-Mansur family was currently at home.

  “We’re closed.” The young sailor guarding the gate held his rifle slung across his chest, the way those on guard always did. His face was set. And only his eyes revealed uncertainty.

  Raf halted, smiled… Made a minute adjustment to his maroon Versace tie. “Good morning,” he said. “I’d like to see your commander.”

  Sailor and notable stared at one another. Although all the sailor saw was himself reflected in the blankness of Raf’s new shades.

  “Now,” Raf added, his voice polite but firm. He’d once watched his school doctor use just that mixture of courtesy and menace on Raf’s Swiss headmaster.

  “I don’t have a commander.”

  Raf sighed. “Then get whoever you do have,” he suggested.

  Leaving his post, the boy vanished through a small door cut into one of two double doors behind him. Endless heavy nails had been hammered into both to form repetitive patterns which, to Raf’s eye, looked out of place against the delicacy of the pink marble columns supporting the arch into which the doors were set.

  With a shrug, Raf stepped through the arch after him and found himself in a courtyard.

  “You left the door open,” Raf pointed out, when the returning guard opened his mouth to complain. Behind the boy Raf saw a grey-haired man in blue uniform raise his eyes to heaven.

  “Morning, Chief,” Raf said.

  The elderly Petty Officer nodded. And in that nod was everything he felt about using untrained conscripts as guards and about notables who turned up at dawn, expecting to be shown round the Bardo.

  “The palace is shut, Excellency.”

  “I know.” Raf knew nothing of the sort, but that wasn’t really the point. Straightening up, he adjusted his cuffs almost without thinking. “I’m Ashraf al-Mansur,” he said, “the Emir’s middle son. I’ve been asked to investigate last night’s attack on my father.”

  “Attack?”

  Raf didn’t bother to reply.

  “So it was…” The NCO’s voice faltered.

  “I think you’d better introduce me to your commander,” Raf said and stepped farther into a courtyard overlooked by fifty sashed windows and a dozen balconies. The European kind.

  He looked around him. “My father here?”

  The old man shook his head.

  “Lady Maryam?”

  Another shake and a quick suck of yellowing teeth.

  “Okay,” said Raf. “How about Kashif Pasha?”

  The NCO opened his mouth, then shut it again. Had the pasha been in residence then, as well as having the al-Mansur flag flying, that gate would have been guarded by Kashif’s own soldiers instead of raw recruits. As it was, Kashif’s men were rumoured to be busy, making wide-ranging arrests.

  The one person Raf did find was Hani, although he found Ifritah first, scooping the grey kitten up from a tiled floor and tossing it over his shoulders like a stole.

  “Hey,” shouted a young girl who slid through a door and kick stopped, leaving a smear of burned leather on the marble under her heel. “That’s my…”

  She took a look at the man facing her.

  “Oh,” she said crossly, “you’re back.”

  “No,” said Raf, “I’ve been here for days. You’re the one who’s just arrived.”

  “I was here yesterday,” Hani said. “You can ask him.” She pointed to a door through which a young boy appeared. He was dressed in a blazer and had a striped tie quite as smart as the one Raf wore.

  “Murad al-Mansur?” said Raf and watched the boy glance round before nodding. They both knew what was missing from th
e picture. “Where’s your bodyguard?” Raf asked.

  “Kashif Pasha doesn’t think I need one.”

  “Because no assassin would want to kill a child?” Raf’s voice made it obvious what he thought of that.

  “That wasn’t what I said.” Shrewd eyes watched the newcomer. “Or what he meant.”

  “Murad’s my cousin,” Hani announced.

  “And this is my niece,” said Raf, nodding to Hani. “I do apologize.”

  The boy looked between them. “Then you’re…?”

  “Ashraf Bey,” said Raf. “Your half brother, her uncle and the new Chief of Police.”

  At the bey’s side the NCO froze, his reflex reptilian. Almost as if stillness could put a wall up around his thoughts. All it did was draw Raf’s attention.

  “You,” Raf said to the man. “Tell me what you’ve heard…”

  “Heard, Your Excellency?”

  “Outside, you said, So it was… The question is, so it was what?”

  “The Army of the Naked,” said the man, his voice hesitant. “My chief said they’d carried out an attack.”

  “That’s a lie,” Murad Pasha said. And blushed when the NCO gazed at him in surprise. “I’ve got a radio,” he explained hurriedly. “A Radiotechnika Atlas… The kind that gets all the stations… A birthday present from the Soviet ambassador,” Murad added, as if owning a radio needed explanation. “The AN absolutely deny having anything to do with the attack.”

  “They have a radio station?” Hani asked.

  “A pirate station,” Murad stressed. “Which changes frequency every night. You have to look for it.”

  Hani nodded. “Zara’s brother has a pirate station,” she said. “But Avatar only has to change every week.”

  “Whose’s Zara?”

  “My uncle’s mistress,” said Hani, then stared in bewilderment at the elderly NCO who suddenly broke into a coughing fit.

  “The AN want to overthrow the government,” Murad said. “But they didn’t try to kill my father.” A tremble in his voice was the first sign Raf had sensed that the boy was not nearly as composed as he wanted to appear.

  “I thought you said you were in the government?” Hani sounded puzzled.

  “Minister for Education,” Murad agreed. “Also for archaeology. Kashif’s everything else apart from bioscience and technology. The Emir kept those for himself.”

  “Did you see the attack?” Raf demanded.

  Murad nodded. “We were there,” he said. “I was invited and Hani invited herself. We sat next to Kashif Pasha as it happened.”

  “When what happened?” Raf asked.

  “Someone tried to shoot the Emir,” said Hani. “Eugenie died saving him. And two guards, a Sufi and a musician. Now everyone’s arguing about…”

  “Who tried?”

  Hani paused. She’d got older without him noticing, Raf realized. More confident. A little bit taller. He tried to remember back to that age and couldn’t.

  “Well,” said Murad, “there was this waiter.”

  “You can’t go in there.” The birdlike woman was out of her seat before Raf got halfway to the door of Kashif Pasha’s inner office.

  “Tell me about it,” Raf said tiredly. People telling him where he couldn’t go was getting to be something of a refrain. He kept walking and the woman dropped her hand, as if she’d somehow just scalded her fingers on the cloth of his sleeve.

  Used to wielding power but resigned to it always belonging to someone else, the woman fell back on formality. “Can I ask if you have an appointment?”

  “I don’t need one,” said Raf. “Police business.” He pulled a leather cardholder from his pocket and flipped it open, flashing an identity card he’d taken off Kashif’s unconscious soldier. It was shut again before her eyes even had time to focus.

  “Well, he’s not here.” The woman’s hair beneath her scarf was thinning and deep lines slashed down both sides of a thin mouth. The world had not been kind to her. “So you’ll still have to come back.”

  “Even better,” said Raf, hand already turning an enamel door knob. “That gives me a chance to search his office.”

  “You can’t…”

  “What’s your name?” Raf asked her.

  “Leila el-Hasan. I’m the pasha’s private secretary.”

  “Get yourself another job then,” Raf told her, not unkindly, and shut Kashif’s door behind him, shooting its bolt.

  The décor could go either way. High Arabesque, which got called Moorish in guidebooks, or ersatz European, which usually meant oak panels, dark furniture and oil paintings. Those were the default options when it came to North African government buildings. There was a third alternative, of course. Seattle Blond was what you got if you fed old Scandinavian through late-period Edo, but pale kelims and steam-shaped ash was never going to be Kashif Pasha’s thing.

  What Raf found was High Arabesque. An office centred around an alabaster fountain so massive that this bit of the Bardo had to be last century despite the obvious antiquity of the horseshoe arch surrounding its door. No floor underpinned with anything but steel could have supported that weight. Beyond the fountain began carpets, large and probably priceless; obscured by a faded leather ottoman and a couple of wing chairs. And against the farthest wall, beneath a window so vast it needed sandstone pillars down the middle to support it, stood an office desk, notable only for its ordinariness.

  Raf read the subtext in a single glance. Look at the magnificence imposed upon me by birth. Notice how modest my own expectations. Contrast the two and be aware of my modernity. And it must work, because half of Europe regarded Kashif Pasha as Ifriqiya’s up-and-coming saviour.

  The only thing missing from the room was a portrait of the Emir and it didn’t take a man of Raf’s talents to read that. Although he read the subtext below the subtext, that suggested that while Kashif was ambitious he lacked advisers to help him plan his moves with subtlety.

  But then lack of subtlety was never a problem when dealing with Paris, Washington or Berlin. Particularly Berlin.

  None of Kashif’s desk drawers were locked. Which either said look how open I am, or else, so great is my power no locks are needed to protect my privacy. Alternatively it might have been because there was nothing in the desk of the slightest significance.

  No state papers or smoking gun. Not even a bottle of Jim Beam or a Hustler imported under diplomatic seal. Mind you, Raf had expected little less. He’d visited Kashif’s office for one reason only: to rattle a few bars and see what tried to bite.

  And to judge from the hammering at the door he was about to find out.

  Opening the door was one option; letting whoever was on the other side smash apart original ninth-century panels was another.

  “Wait,” Raf ordered, voice hard.

  On the other side of the antique door the hammering ceased.

  Raf took his time to walk across the office, but then, given the size of Kashif Pasha’s room, this was not unreasonable.

  “Right,” said Raf, slipping back the bolt. “It’s open.”

  Two men in bottle-green uniforms came tumbling into the room. They had heavy moustaches, light stubble and hard glares. One glance at the glowering pasha behind them showed where that look originated.

  “Up against the wall,” the thinner of the two barked. “Now.”

  Raf shook his head. “You can go,” he told the man. “Take your fat friend and shut the door. I want to talk to my brother.” That got their attention. Got the attention of Kashif Pasha as well.

  Ashraf Bey stepped forward and held out his hand. “This won’t take long,” he told Kashif Pasha. “I need to ask a few questions about last night’s shooting.”

  “You need…” Despite himself, Kashif Pasha’s eyes slid to the chelengk recently pinned to Raf’s lapel. Such exalted signs of Stambul’s favour were rare. Given only to victors in battle and those who had rendered personal service to the Ottoman throne.

  “Who are you?”
/>   “Ashraf al-Mansur,” said Raf, letting his hand drop. “Acting on behalf of the Emir.” Which was almost true. He’d been asked to act by Eugenie, who’d led him to believe that this was the Emir’s suggestion. Close enough to count. He shrugged. “I thought you’d like to be first,” said Raf. “Before I track down your guests.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Kashif Pasha crossly. “Everyone who should be has already been pulled in for questioning. My men were arresting people all last night.”

  “Everyone who should be…?” Raf raised his eyebrows.

  Kashif Pasha’s nod was abrupt. Furious.

  “So you’ve questioned the Marquis de St. Cloud?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Kashif’s fingers were knotted into fists. Although Raf doubted if the man even realized that. “The Marquis is a personal friend.”

  “How about Senator Malakoff? Ambassador Radek?” Raf was enjoying himself. “Or are you carefully ignoring anyone important…”

  A crowd had gathered in the outer office and through the door he could see Kashif Pasha’s secretary, her face twisting with anxiety as a man in a grey suit attempted to comfort her. Behind them hovered a handful of clerks.

  This was exactly what Raf had needed most, an audience.

  “So,” said Raf, “why haven’t you questioned the Marquis?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Kashif Pasha stepped in close, like someone facing down an enemy but Raf knew different. Once, longer ago than he remembered, a Rasta on remand in the same jail as him had explained about clinches. They were where weak fighters hid when seeking protection, nothing more.

  “I don’t know,” said Raf. “Why don’t you tell me.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Wednesday 2nd March

  “Why did Kashif’s soldiers walk you to the car?” There was something in Murad’s voice that said he’d been mulling over this question for most of the trip. Which he had. He’d been trying to decide if asking it would be rude.