“He might. That fat Englishman two tables to our right is a reporter for the London Telegraph, and he actually got into Zaathah for a few days two months ago. He says Suleiman is going to succeed.”
“Should I know him?”
“Suleiman?” Allison looked startled.
Philip laughed. “No, the fat Englishman.”
“Come here often enough and you won’t have a choice – unless he has a heart attack first.”
“You don’t like him?”
“Oh, he’s probably harmless. That’s the woman from Newsweek with him, by the way, who comes out from Athens every month. She’s probably paying for his lunch, and he’s helping her with a story. Bernard’s the Gulf equivalent of an old China hand. Speaks Arabic well enough to identify accents, which I suppose means he used to work for the government. Takes a rather pessimistic view of the region’s future. Says the person to watch is some young member of the bin-Laden family. They’re rich contractors, originally from Yemen, who have found favour in Riyadh. Bernard knows members of the Saudi royal family and says they told him so. Bernard knows a hell of a lot, as a matter of fact. I just prefer to keep my distance.”
Philip looked round the room. There were plenty of other women, though mostly with male or female friends. “You come here a lot?”
“I’m addicted.”
Philip looked through the glass doors to the terrace. “Ever use the swimming pool?”
“Nooo.”
“I suppose a woman’s position is ambiguous here,” he said.
“It can be managed. Sometimes Tommy comes, when he’s in town. I’m a regular, so Ian looks out for me, as you’ve seen.”
“I hope I get to meet him soon,” said Philip, meaning her husband. “But getting back to the begats, what you’re saying is that Suleiman has a reasonable shot at becoming Sultan of Zaathah, which is why people don’t talk about the subject in Alidar.”
“Right,” said Allison. “An interest in the subject suggests an interest in change closer to home.”
“Who in Alidar would want that?”
“Young men, impatient for power. Some of the Buhara, of course. You know about the Alidi/Buhara thing?”
“Remind me.”
“Buhara are supposed to be thirty-five per cent of the population but they’re probably a majority. Always lived on the coast, or always since they came here in the sixteenth century from Persia, as Iran was called back then. Buhara are Shias. Alidi are Bedouins, and Sunni. Settled here much later and still relate to the desert. The Buhara own all the businesses, but have no status. They’re assumed to be funding Suleiman.”
“Who else has a strong interest?”
“The administration.”
“Well, yes, I suppose the king would prefer not to be disposed.”
“Not your client, Philip, your country.”
The lack of irony with which she spoke stirred memories, primarily involving helicopters, and it took Philip a moment to respond.
“America,” he said finally.
“Right,” said Allison. She was immaculate.
“So why do we care?”
“Alidar is friendly. After what’s happened around the region in the last few years, that counts for something. His Majesty has good relations with the Saudis, which we like. We probably have landing rights, if we need to use them, though M-Two is a bit cagey about that. Union with Zaathah would create a country with ten million people and the money to arm them. Who needs that?”
“Are the Zaathis Sunni or Shia?” Philip wanted to sound as knowledgeable as he could.
“Well, that’s very interesting. They are Sunni, but perhaps only on the surface?”
“Crypto-Shia, like crypto-commies?”
“Well, back in the eighth century, when the Shias were on their sixth imam – imams are like divinely inspired head priests – anyway, this imam named Jafar al-Sadiq got so worried about Sunni persecution that he decreed that Shia should practise taqqiya, which means dissimulation, so that the faith could survive. After a few hundred years of taqqiya, a lot of them had pretty much forgotten that they weren’t Sunnis, but some remained Shia, at least privately. One place that is supposed to have happened is the mountains of Zaathah.”
“You know quite a bit about this, don’t you?” said Philip.
“Yes, I do,” said Allison. After a second, she added, “There’s very little for a trailing spouse to do out here you know.”
“Do you run?” It was an unpremeditated question, prompted perhaps by Allison’s momentary intensity.
She did run. Or rather, she didn’t but she wished to. Passionately. She’d run back home. In America. In Alidar, it was impossible for a woman to run alone. And Tommy was away so much. And in any case, he wasn’t as keen as she was.
“I’ll take you out if you’d like,” said Philip.
“I’d like,” she said.
They agreed on late afternoons, three times a week, starting tomorrow. Mornings were awkward.
Philip returned his attention to the napkin with the diagram, but Allison was putting her things in her handbag. “There’s your boss,” she said. “I should go.”
6
When Allison Baxter was eleven years old and still called herself Mary Androvik, she discovered that her mother was having an affair. She was pretty sure her mother didn’t know she knew.
Mary didn’t have a father. He’d walked out. She blamed her mother for that. She didn’t remember her father, but she felt the loss. Other girls, who had fathers, seemed to get attention from them that was different from the attention one got from a mother. The relationship seemed to gratify both parties. Mary watched girls who had fathers. She could tell.
There was also the matter of money. Fathers had it. Mary and her mother lived in very modest circumstances. They’d moved to a depressing part of town and she’d had to switch from parochial to public school. Mary had no allowance whatsoever, which could be embarrassing, until she figured out that her mother never knew how much change she had in her purse, and learned the right times to scavenge.
It would have been nice to believe that the man who sometimes showed up at their house would turn into a father, but he didn’t pay much attention to Mary, so it seemed unlikely. After a while he was gone.
When Mary was thirteen, she realised her mother had more than one “boyfriend.” She believed that gave her the right to spy. If there were two, neither could be special. She began to pay attention to sofa cushions that had been disturbed, callers who hung up when she answered the phone. It only took her a month to figure out there were actually three men in her idiot mother’s life. Or maybe more.
Actually physically watching her mother supplement the family income was difficult, but by cutting classes and walking quietly into the house she sometimes got opportunities. Her mother was careless about the bedroom door, and the hall was dark. It was also quite easy to stay awake, slip out of the house at night and look in the window, since they lived in a bungalow, but that didn’t pay off very often. Most of her mother’s admirers seemed to be day fuckers.
Close inspection of her mother, which could be accomplished by just walking into the bathroom, convinced Mary she’d better do well in school if she didn’t want a career as a waitress, because the family business was going to run out of capital about the time Mary was supposed to go to college. Her mother didn’t seem to be able to save money any better than she could keep her blouse buttoned. So when Mary was fourteen she turned into a model student. And because it seemed like the sort of name a conscientious young girl would have, she started calling herself Mary Alice. Which was actually her name.
Being a model student was not, in a boring California town in the late sixties, a conventional response to adolescence. Most of Mary Alice’s classmates preferred vodka with orange juice and blind fumbling in the back seats of parked automobiles. It was not difficult to avoid dates, however. Big breasts were considered important, and God had spared her that. Nor was it d
ifficult to get straight As. Memorization was easy for her, and that was about all it took.
When Mary Alice was seventeen, she told her mother goodbye and got on the bus for college. The campus she had chosen, based on no one’s advice but her own, was new and on the edge of a desert. She intended never to speak about where she came from. She intended to find out who the interesting professors were, learn something for a change, figure out how to use makeup, and be dated by graduate students. She was pretty sure she was attractive enough. And perhaps she’d start exercising. People were beginning to do that.
She hadn’t actually decided never to go back, but she had been vague enough about which campus she was going to that just possibly her mother wouldn’t be able to find her. She intended to not go home at Christmas. As an experiment. If her blubbering mother called, she’d have the excuse of a Christmas job in a store. And if she didn’t, fine.
Intending as she did to reinvent herself, Mary Alice decided while still on the bus to change her name completely. You had to get a court to do it. It was too bad she hadn’t thought of it earlier in the summer. She’d have to register as Androvik and get her records changed later. Or perhaps not. Why not use the new name now, tell the registrar it had just happened, and get the legal stuff done later? Anyway, you probably had to be eighteen.
The route the bus took was through a lot of towns, and Mary Alice began to study the names of the stores and restaurants. She’d have to decide before she got there, before she had to introduce herself to anyone. She intended to introduce herself to people. She intended to be more outgoing.
Martha’s Dress Shop…Fenstiger’s Real Estate…McDonald’s… Taco Bell. She didn’t think she could be a “Belle.” It would be too sick a joke. My mother’s a prostitute, she could tell people. She hoped I’d grow up to be a madam.
Anyway, she should probably choose a name she’d recognise if anyone called out to her. How did movie stars do this? Or spies? Or people with names like “Moon Unit Zappa,” when they grew up and wanted to be actuaries. Moon Unit Zappa, FSA. Her mother’s dwindling clientele had included an actuary. He had cornered Mary Alice one day and explained what those initials mean. The maths part was not appealing. Nor was the evident requirement that you be a jerk.
Being what she would have described as slightly superstitious, Mary Alice decided to close her eyes and let ideas come to her. Almost immediately one did. “Alice” would become “Allison,” child of Mary Alice, child of Mary. Hold that thought and go on, she told herself. Be patient and the rest will come. Be patient as you have for the last six years, waiting to disappear.
Slouching through another town, the bus stopped with a jolt at a red light. Next to a steakhouse. Allison opened her eyes and became Miss Prime.
7
Allison vanished almost before Philip could look around. Ian Elliot was ushering the prime minister to his table in the corner. Sheik Fawzi now had on a lightweight black cape with a gold border, and looked very grand. The king and his son had been wearing similar garments. Philip wondered what entitled a person to wear one. He’d have to ask Allison.
Ian made a show of trying to get a young woman in a beach towel to sit down with the prime minister, but she scampered away. Probably a stewardess.
Ian seemed to specialise in them. On their flight two days before, he’d asked one for a drink, and at the exact moment she brought it contrived to be asking Philip whether he’d ever “had a woman on a plane.”
Philip said he had not.
Ian turned to the stewardess and asked her the same question, as if he were conducting a survey.
“Every trip,” she said, glancing meaningfully over her shoulder at a long-legged colleague. Ian followed her look, and as he did so, she poured his gin and tonic into his lap. “Oh, look what you’ve made me do,” she said. So they’d gone to the upstairs area, which Pan Am configured as a sort of lounge, where Ian claimed to have taken off both his trousers and his underpants, which she’d hung under an air-conditioning vent until they dried.
“Wrapped me in a blanket. Would have done more if I’d asked,” said Ian.
“You are kidding, aren’t you?”
“Not in the least. You’ll be delighted by the infantile behaviour that goes on among the expats. And a lot of the Poms are in it as a capital-raising exercise. Find the right admirer and they can accumulate enough to start a shop back home. That is, if they don’t get hooked on the sunshine, or have something they ran away from to begin with.”
“You make it sound like the place is full of misfits.”
“People do come to Alidar for a reason.”
Whatever Philip had come for, it seemed to include having lunch with his boss. Ian was motioning him over to their table, and ordering a waiter to bring a new version of his half-eaten meal.
Sheik Fawzi began telling a string of dirty jokes from the moment Philip sat down – and told them very well. He asked Philip about his sex life, about which Philip had substantial reticence. He asked Philip about his other appetites. Did he own any gold? Did he gamble? Did he plan to buy a boat?
“I run,” said Philip, feeling both stupid and defiant.
“So I recall,” said the prime minister, “but do you run quickly or thoroughly?”
“Thoroughly, I suppose.”
“And when you are finished, do you take cold showers or hot?”
“Cold when I’m angry, hot when I’m sad. Prime Minister, why are you asking me this?”
“My curiosity is boundless. Tell me, Cooper, what would make you sad? Harvard beating Yale or the reverse?”
“Westfield beating Rahway,” said Philip. “But we moved a lot. And I wasn’t big enough for serious football.”
“What was your sport, then?” He turned to Ian. “Americans always have a sport, Elliot.”
“Street fighting,” said Philip.
The prime minister studied him for a moment. “You know, Elliot, I believe him. And what do you intend to accomplish in Alidar, Cooper?”
“I hope to serve my employer,” said Philip, thinking it might be an opportunity to make amends for his behaviour that morning.
“Yes, yes. Very correct. Elliot, we must introduce him to Abdulrahman. They are peas in a pod. Abdulrahman is Minister of Planning, Cooper. What I mean is, what do you hope to experience or discover? Do you not have curiosity about the elegant young women who live here, half hidden, half educated? Do you not wonder about the Palestinians, who do all the work? Do you not want to see the ruins?”
“I am curious about the music,” said Philip.
“The music?”
“What the loudspeaker plays from the tower beside my hotel – several times a day, it seems.”
“The call to prayer?”
“I figured that’s what it was.”
“And?”
“What does it say?”
The prime minister’s face softened slightly, and he turned his head, as if listening to an inner voice. “God is great,” he said. “God is singular. It goes on in that vein. Do you wish to study Islam?”
“No…but it would probably save me embarrassment later if you explained the difference between Sunni and Shia – if that isn’t too intrusive.”
The prime minister turned to Ian Elliot. “He does it better that I do,” he said.
“My party trick,” said Ian. “The Shia broke with the Sunni over an issue of who would become the next head priest. The Shias favoured one of Muhammad’s descendants. They took the view that divine inspiration flowed with the chromosomes. The Sunni saw it as a consensus decision, with emphasis on who could keep order. At an early stage there was a major battle at Karbala, in what is now Iraq, where Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, was killed.
“But none of that is important to you and me. What we need to understand is the cultural difference. The Sunnis are English Protestants and the Shia are Irish Catholics – except that the Sunni came first. After Muhammad launched Islam, the Sunni conquered so much so fast that th
ey got into the habit of thinking they were supposed to be in charge, and that their power and success were proof of God’s favour. You know the phrase, ‘God is an Englishman?’”
Philip nodded.
“Same principle. And they kept their religion simple. ‘God is singular,’ as Prime Minister translated it. There are things you have to do – pray five times a day, keep the fast during Ramadan, make a pilgrimage to Mecca – but no images, no stained-glass windows. The Holy Quran is to be taken literally, and you don’t need a priesthood claiming to explicate hidden meanings.
“The Shias, on the other hand, are professional underdogs. Their biggest festival is Ashoura, when they commemorate Hussein’s martyrdom. When it comes around you will see what I mean. Big processions, lots of shouting in unison, a bit of self-wounding, maybe even some self-flagellation. The Shias have lots of saints, lots of shrines. And their priesthood has the inside track on truth, whether that means interpreting passages in the Holy Quran or advising on domestic disputes, just like Catholic village priests. And the Mass should be in Latin.” Ian paused. “Does that cover it?”
“I wasn’t listening,” said Sheik Fawzi, and then winked at Philip.
“So…the king’s a Sunni?”
“Naturally,” said the prime minister.
“As is His Excellency,” Ian added.
“Have to be,” said Sheik Fawzi. “Couldn’t be the prime minister otherwise. But I had an Iranian grandmother.”
“Meaning Shia,” said Philip. He’d learned that much in the Fodor guide.
“Useful grandmother to have had,” said Fawzi quietly, “when dealing with the merchants.”
“Meaning Buhara,” said Philip.
“So, knowing that should keep you out of trouble,” said Fawzi. And then: “Do you wish to know about the fighting in the mountains?”
“If I should.”
“I understand you have military experience.”
“The climate was different,” said Philip.
“No one in Alidar knows anything. Elliot will brief you. Elsewhere. You should be aware. It is more than a peripheral annoyance.”
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