“Actually…” Eduardo glanced at Rose and looked embarrassed. “The thing is, you see… I’m the new Chief.” Eduardo tasted the words as he said them and sat up a little straighter in his seat.
And, like a good detective, he noticed the way Alexandre immediately did the same, straightening his shoulders and quickly adjusting his cap. That was when he realized Alexandre was one of his men.
“I’m sorry, Your Excellency. I didn’t know.”
“Why should you?” Eduardo said, feeling expansive. “And you don’t need to call me Excellency, sir is fine… All the same, I have a question for you. An important question.”
Alexandre froze.
“What do you know…?” Eduardo whipped out a leather notebook he’d bought at Iskandryia airport, flipped it open, and watched the opening page come alight. “Let me see, what do you know about a pâtissier called Pascal Boulart? Other than the fact he was stabbed in an alley behind Maison Hafsid and a sous-chef was arrested…”
It turned out Alexandre knew even less than that. He knew the killing all right, he just had no memory of anyone having been arrested by the police. As Alexandre tried to point out, as circumspectly as possible, this might just mean the murderer had been picked up by Kashif Pasha’s men.
Although the military wing of the police was meant to liaise with the civilian branches, this sometimes failed to happen, very occasionally, obviously.
“Find out if they did,” said Eduardo. “And get me files on everyone killed in the massacre at the Domus Aurea.”
“There were only four.” Alexandre regretted the remark as soon as he made it. “I mean, the fifth one got away.”
“Four is enough,” Eduardo said firmly. “Now take me to the hotel.” He needed a shower, as did Rose. And with luck, if the shower was big enough, they could share.
“Hotel…?”
Eduardo nodded.
“You are not staying at a hotel, sir. My orders were to take you wherever you wanted and deliver your luggage to the Dar Ben Abdallah.”
“Dar, maison, hôtel,” said Eduardo, “it’s all the same, you know.” He turned to Rose. “In French,” he explained, “hôtel means big house, like in Hôtel de Ville… Isn’t that right?”
Alexandre nodded, not taking his eyes off the road.
On their way into the city all the other traffic moved out of the way. Eduardo was wondering about this until he remembered the flag. He wasn’t sure what the flag on the hood stood for but it looked very official.
CHAPTER 39
Sunday 6th March
Palms shaded yellow earth, so that sunlight sketched patterns across the banks of a narrow stream, highlighting twigs and dead fronds. The water in the seguia was dirty, the grass edging the ditch and the undersides of the palms less bright than Zara expected. Only ungrown dates, tiny and green and still vulnerable to the sand winds, seemed created from a brighter scheme altogether. This was a world of ochres and earth hues. An Impressionist umbrella restricted to the palette of a Klee.
Farther along, half-in/half-out of the stream lay a fallen palm with its trunk ringed like an endlessly extruded pinecone. The crown was gone but, since fronds extended fingerlike from beneath the sand that covered a newly repaired footbridge, the reason was not hard to find.
The coolness of the gardens was in welcome contrast to the last fifty miles across the chott, when the air had been salt and hot, unseasonably so the taxi driver had told her, several times.
“I’m here to collect Lady Hana al-Mansur.”
Zara stood on the edge of Tozeur’s famous grove, home of the translucent deglet nur and site of a quarter of a million palms fed by two hundred springs that carried water to the date trees. The only thing to stop her reaching a small palace on the other side of the stream was a single soldier guarding a narrow bridge. The palace had been built by one of the old beys or emirs. It must have been, because only a notable could get away with building a palace on land historically reserved for growing dates.
Over the centuries, gold and slaves had passed through this area, carpets and priceless manuscripts, swords and spices. None of them creating the wealth of the date palms. At its height, a millennium before, a thousand dromedaries a day were said to have left Tozeur, laden with dates and even now many of the town’s inhabitants were khammes, sharecroppers who maintained the groves and in return took one-fifth of the harvest as their pay.
Behind Zara in an airport taxi sat a driver, looking in disbelief at a pile of notes on his lap. She’d paid him what was on the meter, Tunis to Tozeur, having brushed away his offer to negotiate.
In fact, the man could honestly say she’d hardly glanced at the meter their entire trip, most of which she’d spent watching distant green fields turn to sahal before becoming moonlike around the phosphate town of Gafsa. A place of which a wise man once said, “Its water is blood, its air poison, you may live there a hundred years without making one true friend…”
“She is here?” Zara said, frowning at the guard. “Hani al-Mansur?”
The soldier to whom Zara spoke was thickset, with cropped hair more salt than pepper. He’d been having one of those weeks.
“I’m not sure, my lady…” The man made a show of unclipping a radio from his belt, wondering as he did so, why the young woman’s face suddenly tightened. “I’ll make a call.”
“Zara Quitrimala,” Zara said, “Ms. Zara Quitrimala.” The way she said it made her name begin with a hiss. “And you don’t use honorifics when talking to me. I’m perfectly ordinary.”
The look the guard gave her begged leave to differ.
Moncef Hauara was unmarried which was rare for a middle-aged man in Tozeur, unmarried and about to retire from active duty. Living with his mother, a woman who’d spent her life repairing clothes for notables, he recognized both shot silk and the French way of cutting on the bias. Although, if asked, he’d have said the jet buttons were what he noticed. Most manufacturers used black plastic while a few of the flashier labels chose machine-cut obsidian. Only Dior and Chanel still used buttons hand-carved from Italian jet, the way they’d always done.
He knew, the way he knew a storm was brewing, exactly how long it would have taken someone to sew that jacket. How long it took to double-stitch the hems and edge each buttonhole. There were a dozen differing grades of silk, variable in their wear and lasting qualities as well as their ease of cutting and ability to hold dye.
There was nothing ordinary about that dress or the cut. And Corporal Hauara doubted strongly that there was anything remotely ordinary about the woman who wore it. At least not in any sense that a soon-to-retire soldier who still lived with his mother would understand.
“Yes, sir. I’ll do that.”
The corporal clicked off his radio and promptly dialled a fresh number. Sweat was beginning to show beneath his arms. A short conversation followed, of which Zara heard only one half.
“A young lady.”
“Zara Quitrimala.”
“Quitrimala.”
“Yes, sir. Quite possibly.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll ask.”
“Forgive me,” said the guard, “but Major Jalal would like to know if Hana al-Mansur is expecting you? Also, why you think she is here…”
For someone so determined Zara did a good imitation of not having foreseen that question. “My father’s…”
Corporal Hauara knew who her father was. At least he did now.
“He’s guardian to…” Stumbling over the sense as much as the words, Zara tried to work out exactly what her father was to Hani, other than extremely fond. A fact replete with problems for someone whose own childhood memories were of a loud, occasionally threatening figure; a version of himself Hamzah Effendi seemed to have left behind.
“She told me she’d be here,” said Zara finally, waving a piece of headed paper, signed by her father and the Khedive of El Iskandryia. This announced that they were the child’s trustees and Zara acted with full authority. It slid over the fact th
ey were trustees only where the child’s money was concerned. Zara’s furious request to her father that he let her go save Hani from imminent civil war had seen to that.
As for the Khedive, Zara had no doubts that he countersigned Hamzah’s letter because she had tears in her eyes when she asked.
“What time does curfew begin?” Zara demanded.
Corporal Hauara looked at her. “Curfew?”
“It was on C3N. What time do Kashif Pasha’s troops lock down the streets at night…”
“There is no curfew,” the guard said carefully. “At least not in Tozeur. Perhaps in Tunis.” He wanted to add something else, but the years had taught him to swallow such thoughts. That was the secret of surviving. To stay silent while seeming to do nothing but talk.
The small anteroom into which Zara was shown looked vast, largely because all four walls were mirror. Each mirror was framed within an elaborate double arch, each arch supported on stick-thin pillars topped by gilded capitals that displayed endless repetitions of a simplified, stylized acanthus.
It was in the worst possible taste.
The left-hand arch of one wall hid a door. Zara thought she knew which mirror it was but had a feeling that, if she so wished, it would be easy to forget. Forgetting about her reflection was more difficult.
An intense, neatly dressed Arab woman with scraped-back hair, still not yet out of her teens and with perfect, almost American teeth. Thinner than she used to be if not as slim as she wanted. Unmarriageable, way richer than could be justified and very much alone. Zara swept tears out of her eyes with a furious hand, only to wince as a thousand doubles made the identical movement.
First Raf had gone, then Hani. So she was here to take Hani back, while there was still time. As for Raf…
“My lady.”
“I’m not…” She turned to where a man in major’s uniform stood by the open door, his sudden appearance and the opening of the door having rendered the room small again.
“His Highness is busy welcoming his mother, Lady Maryam. So he sends his apologies. When this is done, His Highness requires a word.”
“About what?” Zara demanded. Only too aware that her eyes were red.
Major Jalal shrugged. “I’m only Kashif Pasha’s aide-de-camp,” he said modestly. “But these are difficult times so I imagine His Highness is worried for your safety.”
CHAPTER 40
Tuesday 8th March
“Okay, let’s try that again.”
Eduardo spun the knife in his hand and tossed it at a door scarred by more cuts than it was possible to count. At least, impossible to count without taking the offending object off its hinges, having the thing carried to Police HQ and getting someone to shoot it, resize the photographs and cross off the cuts one at a time.
A lifetime’s worth of staff at Maison Hafsid had stood in a short corridor outside the cellar kitchens and honed their throwing skills or taken out their frustration on that cupboard door.
“You know what’s really interesting?” Eduardo said.
No one answered, but then that wasn’t surprising. He’d recognized them all. Not the names and not even the faces, but the types. Loners and misfits. The usual scum found working in kitchens. And they’d recognized him. As one of them.
Besides, the knife he threw was the one found plunged into the heart of Pascal Boulart. In the alley behind Maison Hafsid.
“What’s really interesting is that the killer left no fingerprints on his blade…” There were, in fact, dozens of fingerprints on the blade, but all of them belonged to the coroner, his assistant or members of the police who’d processed the knife later, when it was being bagged for evidence.
“Why do you think that is?” Eduardo asked.
A boy shrugged.
“Because he wore gloves?” The man who spoke was tall and dark-faced, his hair grey with age. A heavy bruise ripened over one high cheek and his mouth was split. According to a report recently filed by Kashif Pasha’s mubahith, Chef Edvard could be a difficult and sometimes violent man. So far there had been nothing to suggest that either of those statements was true.
“Gloves? Possibly,” Eduardo admitted. “But then there are none of the victim’s fingerprints on the blade either. Which is very odd, because Pascal was stabbed five times…” He paused and was disappointed to realize they didn’t all immediately see the implication. “Have you ever been stabbed?”
Only Chef Edvard nodded.
“Show me your hands,” Eduardo demanded.
There were faded slash marks across one palm and a long cicatrix that vanished beneath his sleeve. In return Eduardo showed the chef his own hands with their wounds from days Eduardo did his best not to remember.
“There were no defensive cuts on the hands of Pascal Boulart. His fingerprints were missing from both blade and handle. Do you know what this suggests to me?”
Ripping the knife from battered wood, Eduardo walked ten paces to the far end of the corridor and threw again. Another bull’s-eye. Straight into the middle of the door, where it joined a hundred other cuts.
Behind him, where the corridor gave way to the kitchens, someone clapped, probably mockingly but maybe for real. That was Eduardo’s tenth throw and the tenth time he’d put the knife in the door exactly where he wanted it.
A misspent childhood had its uses.
“You try.” He pointed to the boy who’d been clapping. A thin youth with a rash on his chin hidden beneath what looked like blusher. “Come on…”
Reluctantly Idries stepped forward. Well aware that he had no choice.
The first thing Eduardo had done on entering the cellar was flash his shield. This was gold, maybe real gold, in a crocodile-skin case with a top that flipped up, like one of those little vidphones. It had been left for him at Police HQ, in his office, along with a matte black .45 paraOrdnance and a scribble pad of notes covered with Ashraf Bey’s writing.
Eduardo hadn’t even known he had an office until a fat man with sweat stains under his arms, a man who wouldn’t meet his eye, silently offered him the key. Concerned with trying to make sense of His Excellency’s terrible writing, it took Eduardo until the next morning to realize his scowling deputy with the striped shirts and perspiration problem was the old Chief.
In the end, unable to translate Ashraf Bey’s notes into any language he understood, Eduardo stored them for safety in the top drawer of his new desk and turned to the files he’d asked Alexandre to bring him. Sometimes in life it was just easier to start over.
And he was right; the files were much more interesting.
“Find me the man with stripy shirts,” Eduardo demanded. He had a box on his desk that let him talk to a serious-looking woman in the office outside without having to get up and open the door.
“You wanted me?”
Eduardo indicated a seat without looking up from his files. “You used to run this place?”
The man’s nod was sullen. Although he added, “Yes, sir,” when Eduardo raised his head from a folder.
“You can have it back once I’m done,” Eduardo said. “I don’t imagine I’ll be staying. In fact”—he stared at the unhappy man—“assume you have total autonomy in everything except the Maison Hafsid case, but first find me…” Eduardo glanced down at a crime report. “Ahmed, cousin of Idries, who worked at the Maison Hafsid.”
At first Chef Edvard felt sure Eduardo was there to shut down his restaurant. Given the disaster at Domus Aurea and the fact he’d put an Egyptian deserter on the staff list as Hassan, because that was the only way to get the man through security clearance, Chef Edvard could hardly have been surprised if this was true.
Mind you, if the mubahith had even suspected that second fact he’d already be dead. Chef Edvard’s position, held to under questioning, was that he’d assumed the thin-faced blond waiter was just another undercover police officer providing protection.
Neither he nor his staff had ever seen the man before.
“Throw it,” Eduardo tol
d the boy.
“What about prints?” Idries glanced back at the others, looking for support. At least that’s what Eduardo assumed he was looking for.
“I don’t want to trick you,” Eduardo said. “I just want to see you throw the knife.” Pulling a pair of cheap evidence gloves from his suit pocket, he tossed them across. “Wear these.”
The boy threw as expertly as Eduardo had expected. Without even bothering to heft the knife to find its balance.
“Now you,” he told a girl hovering silently near the back.
She struggled with the gloves, finally throwing with the latex fingers only half over her own so they flopped like a coxcomb. The knife bounced off the door.
“Try again,” said Eduardo as he handed Isabeau the knife and a clean tissue, something Rose insisted he carry. “Get rid of the gloves,” he said, “then wipe down blade and handle when you’ve finished. I don’t mind.”
She stared at him.
“Throw,” said Eduardo.
Without the gloves to hamper her, Isabeau put the blade straight into the door.
“I don’t understand,” Chef Edvard said into the silence that followed the thud of the blade. “Are you saying Ahmed flung this knife at my pastry cook? That was how Pascal was killed?”
“Of course not,” said Eduardo. His tone of voice made it clear he’d never heard anything quite so ridiculous. “Wipe the blade,” Eduardo told the girl, “and give it to someone else.”
They all threw after that. Taking the handkerchief and carefully wiping clean the knife before passing it to the next person. Even Chef Edvard, his throw little more than a dismissive flick of the wrist that buried the blade in the door at throat height.
“Right,” said Eduardo. “Only two more questions and we’re done.” Plucking the blade from the door one final time, he wiped it on his own shirt and dropped it back into its evidence bag. The stain on its steel blade was rust not blood and its edge was blunt. The only thing this knife had ever been good for was throwing at a door.
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