Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “I put a gun to his throat,” said Raf. “That’s usually enough to make anyone afraid.”

  The boy nodded uncertainly. “But he’s St. Cloud,” Murad said, obviously unable to think of another way to put it. “Even my brother Kashif Pasha is scared of him.”

  “Kashif is scared of Uncle Ashraf,” Hani pointed out. “Anyone with any sense is. He works for the Sublime Porte.”

  “No, I don’t…”

  “Then why wear the chelengk?” Hani asked triumphantly.

  He thought about what she’d said before that. “Are you?” he asked.

  “Afraid of you? Of course I am,” Hani said. “Every time you do whatever you did back there.”

  Raf sighed. “Did you notice a mark left on his neck afterwards from the muzzle of the gun? And my hand on the back of his neck?”

  Hani nodded.

  “I cut off his blood supply. Oxygen starvation combined with panic. It made an ancient part of St. Cloud’s brain kick in, nothing else.”

  “That was it?” said Murad.

  “Sure,” Raf said. “Simple oxygen starvation.” He avoided mentioning the flames still dancing djinnlike across the inside of his eyes or the rawness that tightened his face like the aftereffects of searing heat.

  CHAPTER 36

  Thursday 3rd March

  “Wait in the car,” Raf told them when they finally reached Kairouan. “I’ll get some breakfast.”

  “Crêpe,” suggested Murad, “with jam and cream cheese.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hani said. “Does it look like that kind of place?” She wound down her window and sniffed, inhaling the cafés, street stalls and rotisseries. “Get some briek,” she told Raf. “And Coke, if you can find any.”

  A dozen signs for local colas swung in the breeze. All variations on a theme of red and blue. None had names Hani recognized. This whole country was less like El Iskandryia than she’d first imagined.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Raf promised.

  Watching her uncle stride away, Hani waited until he was lost in the crowd. His black coat swallowed by the burnous and jellabas of those around him. “Okay,” she said, turning to Murad, “I’m going shopping. You wait in the car.”

  Murad Pasha stared at her.

  Hani eased open her door and checked that the road was clear before beginning to slide herself out.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No,” Hani said hastily. “Someone has to stay with the car,” she insisted, “and you’re the boy…”

  “So?”

  Wide eyes watched him, apparently shocked. “I’m a girl,” said Hani. “Surely you don’t expect me to stand guard over the car all by myself in a strange city?”

  Murad settled back. His eyes already scanning the shop fronts. “Don’t be long,” he said.

  The first chemist Hani entered was full of old men who stared as if she’d walked in from another planet. So, muttering an apology, she gave an elegant bow, which she hoped would muddle them even further. The second catered to Soviet tourists. Hani knew this because a poster in the window had pack shots of painkillers and cough mixture above simple descriptions written in five languages, three of which Hani could read.

  Catering to Soviet tourists was entirely different to there being any. Hani realized this as soon as she pushed her way through the shop’s bead curtain and found the place empty, apart, that was, from an old man with what looked like the inward stare of a mystic or kif smoker. Although, it turned out to be neither because when Hani got closer, she realized his eyes were milky with cataracts.

  “Saháh de-kháyr,” she said politely.

  “Saháh de-kháyr,” he replied, then added, “Es-salám aláykum.”

  So Hani had to start all over, replying and to you peace, before rewishing him good day. Formalities complete, she stopped, unsure how to continue. She could see what she thought she needed on a shelf behind the counter, low down and almost out of sight.

  The man waited while Hani opened and shut her mouth so often she was in danger of turning into one of Zara’s promised carp.

  “Telephone?” she muttered finally.

  Absolute silence greeted this request.

  Pulling a note from her pocket, Hani held it out to the old man. The note was American, a five-dollar bill.

  The man called something over his shoulder and a young woman appeared, hastily wrapping her scarf around her head. Only to relax slightly when she discovered her customer was a child.

  “Telephone?” Hani repeated.

  Taking the bill from the man’s hands she held it up to the light and slipped it quickly into her dress pocket. Man and woman had a hasty conversation, so fast and so low that overhearing was impossible. Whatever the content, they seemed to reach a conclusion.

  “No telephone,” said the woman. “Not here. But I take you…” She gestured towards the rear and Hani realized that she was meant to follow. For about fifty paces she fought her way down a busy back alley, then the woman steered her towards a small door set in a crumbling wall.

  “Through here,” she said, as she pushed Hani ahead of her, shouting “Hamid!” as they came out into a small courtyard.

  A second yell produced a head peering from an upstairs window. Another burst of conversation followed in what Hani finally realized was chelha, the original dialect of Kairouan’s Berber inhabitants.

  “Where do you want to call?” asked the woman, tossing Hani’s answer up to the boy, then stopping for his reply.

  “El Iskandryia we can do,” she agreed, “but it will cost more than five dollars…”

  Reluctantly Hani peeled another note from the roll in her dress pocket and palmed it into a small square before making a pretence of searching her remaining pockets, muttering crossly all the while.

  “My last one,” she said.

  The cell phone was a Siemens. Unquestionably illegal in a country where all cell phones had to be registered with the police.

  “Two minutes,” said the woman, “call me when you’re done.” And she vanished into the house to give the foreign girl some privacy. The boy remained sitting on a stone bench next to the courtyard entrance just to make sure Hani didn’t suddenly disappear with his phone.

  Hani could just imagine it. Donna stood in the kitchen surrounded by pans, trying to ignore the buzz of the coms screen, Zara out shopping and Khartoum lost in thought or rereading tales of the Ineffable Mullah Nasrudin, all of which he already knew by heart.

  She sighed.

  The message Hani left was simple. She was in Kairouan with her uncle. On her way to Tozeur. There was nothing to worry about.

  “Where have you been?” Murad demanded when Hani finally got back.

  “Getting these,” said Hani, handing him a cardboard dish of makrouth, lozenge-shaped sweetmeats filled with date paste. She dropped a cheap paper napkin next to his knee and clambered up into the huge Bugatti. The rest of the napkins she stuffed into a side pocket. She let Murad eat the sweetmeats because, unfortunately, even after her walk her tummy still had cramps.

  CHAPTER 37

  Thursday 3rd March

  Second coffee. That was how Eduardo counted his days. First coffee, second coffee, third coffee…

  The first always found Eduardo listening to IskTV. While others watched the newsfeed avid for every close-up, Eduardo listened carefully as he doodled hats and moustaches onto pictures in Iskandryia Today or filled in the Os in every headline.

  The Emir of Tunis had been taken into protective custody following the declaration of martial law in Ifriqiya. The story was in his paper as well as on-screen. Iskandryia Today treated this as news while IskTV assumed it was background, leading with a different story. One that had His Excellency Kashif Pasha, the Emir’s eldest son, swearing that his father was alive, safe and would remain that way. Apparently Kashif Pasha swore this on his life.

  What IskTV found interesting was the fact that this promise was relayed on Kashif’s behalf by a half broth
er, Ashraf al-Mansur, who personally visited the Mosque de trois ports in Kairouan to pass the message to the head of the Assiou Brotherhood.

  The head of the brotherhood had, as requested, released Kashif Pasha’s promise to the world.

  So Eduardo wasn’t surprised to receive a scrambled call just after second coffee. Although it took him a moment to remember that he needed to connect an optic from the silver Seiko he wore to the computer on his desk. That was what the man had told him to do, plug in as soon as Eduardo heard the hiss and never try to make a connection using infrared. Which was fine, because Eduardo wouldn’t have known where to start.

  A doctor at the Imperial Free once suggested Eduardo reduce his coffee intake to one cup a day but Eduardo had barely paused to consider this. The man was a foreigner, newly arrived in the city, and would learn. No one who actually lived in El Isk for longer than a week could have made that suggestion.

  Instead, Eduardo had agreed with himself to cut his intake to eight cups a day. This wasn’t always possible, given the nature of his job; but his success or failure gave Eduardo something to talk about to Rose, a mild-natured whore he’d met a few months earlier, when the man sent him to do a job at Maison 52, Pascal Coste.

  Rose claimed to be English and, although she had the hips and buttocks of an Egyptian, the smallness of her breasts convinced Eduardo that this might be the truth. As did the half-smoked Ziganov forever hanging from her fingers, its gold band stained with lipstick. In Iskandryia, even licensed whores didn’t smoke in public.

  But then women tended not to visit cafés either. Unless it was one of those expensive places around Place Saad Zaghloul like Le Trianon, where ordinary rules seemed not to apply. Money did that, Eduardo had decided. It rewrote the rules. Or perhaps it just remade them into something so complex and discreet that ordinary people like him no longer understood what they were. The man was like that, governed by rules Eduardo took on trust.

  Eduardo’s office was above a haberdasher’s at the back of a bus station on Place Zaghloul. The place was a walk-up with winding stairs and a toilet on the half landing, which Eduardo had to share with the shop below. It had a melamine desk, a cheap chair in black plastic that looked almost like leather and a grey metal filing cabinet. Plus a state-of-the-art computer, quite out of keeping with the rest of the furniture.

  The computer lived on a side table. Well, it would have been a side table if it hadn’t actually been an old door supported at either end by plinths of crudely mortared bricks. Eduardo, whose work it was, had tried to apologize for its ugliness but the man had waved away Eduardo’s explanation. It seemed Ashraf Bey liked the door/table combination more than he liked anything else in the office.

  Sharing Eduardo’s office space were two cockroaches and a colony of ants who dwindled come autumn and, Eduardo imagined, would be back with the spring. He wasn’t sure, not having had the place long enough to find out. The cockroaches remained, however, sharing his desk and living off a diet of sugar that fell from Eduardo’s morning doughnut.

  With his first coffee, which he drank just after dawn, Eduardo ordered an almond croissant. He’d adopted the habit after having breakfast one morning with the bey because this was what the bey ate.

  “Eduardo?” The voice came hollow with static and thin from being bounced off a satellite too far above El Iskandryia for Eduardo to really comprehend. All the same, he would have known it anywhere.

  “Excellency…”

  The voice sighed.

  Eduardo was meant to call him boss on the phone. Even when answering his watch in the office out of sight of everyone else.

  “I’m here, boss,” the small man said hurriedly.

  “You listening?” The voice on the other end wasn’t cross, just careful.

  “Sure, boss. Always… No, I mean it.” Eduardo tried to sound hurt but the man was right, Eduardo hardly ever listened. And when Eduardo did he always had to concentrate extra hard to make sense of what the other person said.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Eduardo said finally, when the voice had finished explaining what Eduardo was expected to do. “Well, except for that bit about becoming a policeman…”

  Life was a series of comings and goings…

  Some philosopher said that, or it might have been Cheb Rai; every time the thought popped into Eduardo’s head he got a tune just out of reach. Three chords leading to a fourth that Eduardo knew would, should he ever remember it, give him the whole.

  All the same, whoever said or sang them, the words rang true. People came and went. They walked into one’s life and walked out again with no reason that Eduardo could see, but then he wasn’t very clever. Lots of people had told him that. Smarter people could see the threads that tied together events. And none were smarter than the bey. Eduardo really believed that.

  In the cafés people talked of how the trial of the warlord Colonel Abad was tied to a dock strike rolling out across the North African littoral. And how Ashraf al-Mansur, now in Tunis, had gone there to kill the father who’d abandoned him. Others insisted he was there to save the old man’s life. And a few, mostly Bolsheviks, were of the opinion that the Emir was already dead and all al-Mansur wanted was to make sure he got his share of the inheritance.

  Eduardo knew different.

  Ashraf Bey was trying to find his mother’s original wedding certificate… Sometimes politics were way more complicated than Eduardo could understand.

  CHAPTER 38

  Friday 4th March

  An elegant young woman outside Arrivals was waving for a taxi. Something Eduardo didn’t need to do since he had a car already waiting. At least, he had a uniformed driver clutching a board with Eduardo’s name on it so Eduardo assumed he had a car as well.

  Eduardo almost offered the woman a lift into the centre but when he nodded to her she just scowled. So Eduardo went back to helping Rose navigate her way through a crowd of C3N cameramen waiting for taxis at the front of Tunis Arrivals.

  This was what happened if one suddenly lifted the embargo on flights to facilitate the departure of nonessential diplomatic staff. More people turned up than left. He was pretty sure that wasn’t what the UN had in mind.

  “We’re here, sir.”

  Eduardo liked that last word. It suggested that the driver thought he and Rose looked properly Western, which they were more or less. Soviet tourists would have got commissar, not meant obviously but always good for increasing baksheesh as tourists called tips, getting wrong both country and language. Anyone local wearing a suit like Eduardo’s would have merited effendi, just to be on the safe side.

  So that sir meant the young driver realized Eduardo was not local and not a Soviet tourist. Unless, of course, the boy called everybody that.

  Originally Eduardo had been planning to fly alone and travel first class, the man having said buy any ticket he liked as long as the flight left that afternoon. But when Eduardo realized that premium cost half the price of first he decided Rose should come with him.

  So that was what they did. And though Eduardo got the feeling Rose had never flown before, she insisted she’d flown dozens of times to numerous destinations. But then he’d told her exactly the same.

  What’s more, she’d enjoyed the flight. Eduardo knew, because he’d been careful to ask. And she looked great. He’d been careful to tell her that too.

  The Benz waiting outside Tunis Arrivals was big and black, smarter than Eduardo could ever have expected, with metal pipes coming out of the engine and running down either side of the hood. The pipes had been silver to start with but now they were grey with wide bands of kingfisher blue, like petrol floating on top of a fresh puddle.

  Alexandre, who was young and wore the uniform of a Tunis detective (something he suspected his visitors might not yet have realized), walked round to the back door of the Emir’s second-favourite car and held it open.

  At a nod from the small man, the woman clambered in and smoothed a black dress covered with red roses down over her pink knees.
Leaving her partner still anxiously eyeing their luggage, such as it was.

  “My case…”

  Ashraf Bey’s original call had told Eduardo to buy a new suit, new shoes, several shirts and a tie. The man had even specified the colour of each: dark blue for the suit, white for the shirts and red for the tie (no stripes). He’d said nothing about buying a case in which to put these things.

  “Of course, sir.” Alexandre was apologetic. “I should have realized you’d need your case with you.” He picked up the cardboard box with its cheap handle, wondering at its lightness, and waited for Eduardo to join the woman. Only then did Alexandre put the case in the well of the borrowed car, beside Eduardo’s feet.

  “Where to, sir?”

  Eduardo thought about it. “What are my options?”

  Alexandre tried not to sigh.

  Accelerated entry to officer level and descent from an ex-colon family that had owned dairy farms in the High Tell guaranteed he got given the shitty jobs by sergeants who grew up in the medina or the nouvelle ville, people he’d outrank within the year and who knew that fact but could never forgive it.

  All the same, the fact Alexandre had been warned to handle this job with discretion meant the anxious-looking man in the rear seat had to be somebody important. Exactly why that might be became clear when Alexandre opened his mouth to answer, only to discover that the man sat behind him was already talking, mostly to himself.

  “We could start with the Police HQ, I suppose.”

  Alexandre nodded.

  “Or we could go find the boss…”

  To Alexandre that meant his colonel. He got the feeling this man had someone else in mind. “The boss?” Alexandre asked, in a tone he hoped was politely casual.

  “Ashraf al-Mansur…”

  “You know the bey?”

  “He’s my boss.” Eduardo sounded as proud of the fact as he felt, which was very proud indeed.

  “And my boss too,” Alexandre said. “Apparently Ashraf Bey is the new Chief of Police.” That was what he’d been told anyway. It was all change at HQ.