Music from the late nineteen-sixties drifted into Philip’s consciousness: songs that came over the portable radio while one spit-shined boots, polished floors, cleaned rifles. The South, which is where the United States Army mostly lives, is full of mournful music – not Negro spirituals anymore but white girls singing about white boys who for unspecified reasons jump to their death off railroad bridges, and white boys singing about white girls who are trouble.
Shia sensibility, as Philip had come to understand it, was the poor white South: at once forlorn and heroic. Philip had lived wherever his father found work, which meant essentially the smaller cities of the Northeast, a category pretty completely devoid of glamour. It was only when he joined the army, and listened to what the radio stations played in Columbus, Georgia and Fayetteville, North Carolina, that he learned how sadness was meant to be expressed, learned it could be beautiful.
The South was the right place for America to keep its army. There is a raw quality to the region that goes with killing other men. In the South, four out of every hundred boys die in car crashes before they’re twenty-one. Fourteen out of every hundred girls get pregnant before they finish high school. He’d learned that in Officer Candidate School – in a lecture entitled “Caring for Your Platoon.” Philip speculated that no small per centage of “lifers” had a daddy who’d “whupped” them with a belt, that they’d joined the army as soon as they were old enough because it was safer than home. If you are going to low crawl, as the army likes you to, which is partly training and partly pure humiliation, then red clay dirt is what you ought to crawl in, and the South has plenty of it. Same colour as the desert Philip was looking at, only slimy in the morning dew. Philip and his colleagues had made the acquaintance of red clay dirt their first week of training, and their underwear had never been white again. It was as if they’d been wounded.
Philip returned to his corporals, who had brewed coffee and were waiting for further instructions. The only thing left was to camouflage the mortars and bury the ammunition. He explained the task in a mixture of English, Arabic and sign language. They caught on right away. He smiled as some of them began to dig, and others moved down the hill collecting brush. Good soldiers are uncomplicated beings.
In another part of Philip’s brain, there were many complications, but he held them at bay without difficulty. He was practising his craft, and that always cheers a man up.
27
If a man thinks he is about to be rich and famous he will copulate more freely. I do not know about women. I have only been to bed with a few of them. Strictly for money. They have other needs. Or at least my small sample did.
If a man thinks you find him attractive, that can also help loosen his inhibitions. Or if you have been thrown together in such a way that what he does with you “doesn’t count.” Or if you will do certain things to him. Or let him do them to you.
My business makes me an observer. You watch them, while they do what they are supposed to do, and you see what they really want. What they want is sometimes extremely embarrassing. One gets used to that, but they don’t. There is energy in that embarrassment: tension and release. What they want is sometimes simple. Little more than mothering, really. I can also manage that.
I suppose what I have is a craft but not an art, in that my best work is invisible and the evidence I leave is quickly discarded. Men made brave or briefly happy. People say – Greeks I think – that art is balance. What I know about is the fuel.
Alidar appears to most of those who come here as a place to make their fortunes. So the expatriate compounds are full of ambitious, oversexed fools. The Alidar English-Language Dramatics Society has asked me to join. I am tempted to do so, and see how many men I can get to dress up as women – that being the fundamental British idea of theatrics, going back to Shakespeare. Or I could try the reverse. How many bank managers could I induce to take their clothes off in public? I induce men one at a time, so this would be a logical progression. There are no end of bank managers here. From experience I can tell you that some of them want to take their clothes off in public, some will do it on a dare, and some will do it because everything else they’ve had to do since they were seven years old was painful, so this must just be what comes next. What a sad race we are.
Philip, dear creature, has no “special requests.” But he lets me alleviate his distress. He accepts pleasure, but he will not seize it – leans into his loneliness like an athlete training hard. He clearly assumes he will never be rich and famous. Even though he is famous. Famous at least here. He has the sexiest job, the best body and the most dinner invitations of any man in Alidar.
He is, I can tell, strongly attracted to that woman he runs with. Which is something of a puzzle. Why would a man who has one of the best whores in Europe ministering to him want a skinny girl he can’t fuck? The obvious answer is that he enjoys not fucking her. I will not say that he is in love with her, because I do not think he knows how to do that. I hope he learns, but not with her.
The ambitious oversexed expatriates are all atwitter about the attempt on Mrs. Valentine. It confirms them in their belief that Alidar is a place where things will happen. And because the attempt did not succeed, they assume they are all safe. If I were in business here, I’d raise my prices.
From Mubarek I know that this is the first time the Lady Assassin has missed. So far as they know. They assume it was the same person. The police spent all day looking around the Valentines’ back courtyard, and eventually found the bullet, but they can’t match it up with the others because in the past she used a pistol and this time it was a rifle.
I would not have assumed that Alidar had a ballistics lab, but there are evidently quite a lot of murders in connection with the smuggling, and Mubarek likes to keep track of who’s doing what to whom. He doesn’t necessarily have the police arrest anyone, so long as the disputes are just commercial, and kept within the guild. Smuggling being Alidar’s raison d’être.
In principle, the smuggling is into somewhere else. Iran mostly. Historically it was into India, which as the Honourable George has taught me, is not that far away. This is why we have our famous gold souk, full of raggedy merchants who sell by the gram. Everyone in India wants gold, so the government taxes it. You can make a fortune if you can get it past Indian customs. Alidar does impose taxes on some products, giving scope to smuggling, but Mubarek does not seem to mind. He will not say so, but I think he has a customs service simply to weed out the incompetent smugglers. And as another source of information.
I would feel more charitable towards the ambitious oversexed Europeans if they were smugglers, and risking their necks. I like men who do that. I suppose I would eventually have taken a smuggler for a lover, if things hadn’t worked out as they evidently have, though I am not sure how I would have met one. Stand around on the beach at midnight? Then again, how does one arrange to meet a king? I have always been fortunate in my chance encounters.
To be fair, not all the expatriates assume they are exempt. The Honourable George is engaged in elaborate displacement activity to deal with his fear. Mubarek has given me to understand that Alidar is practically the only place George can live without being arrested, so he presumably does not want to leave, which he might have to do if there were a change of administration, and which George is smart enough to realise is what the Lady Assassin is aiming to achieve. George is organising the bun fight to end all bun fights. In aid of which charity, I cannot remember – maybe all of them – but he is going about persuading young women to auction themselves off. Or perhaps he is making that up.
A king, at least this one, is like a winemaker. His skill is in controlling a process of decay. This requires a mixture of acquiescence and ruthlessness. Or so Ian Elliot says. One way I know Mubarek intends to keep me is that he is having Ian Elliot tell me things he does not want to talk about himself. I appreciate being told.
The Arthur person who so troubles Philip, and who is evidently both famous and rich, play
s an important part. Mubarek trusts Arthur because of his relationship with the prime minister. The relationship is that they met at one of those silly conferences in Europe, and some Italian told Fawzi that the Arthur person is the secret head of the American spy agency. Fawzi doubts this is true, but he is intrigued, so he sees him a couple of times a year, and the Arthur person tells him stuff you would know anyway if you read the Economist. Presumably he learns enough from Fawzi to make it worth his time.
One day Mubarek sends Ian to see the Arthur person. Asks him to do a very private piece of business. It gets done. Mubarek waits to see whether Fawzi learns anything about it. Ian eats lunch with the little weasel every week, but there’s no indication that the Arthur person has told Fawzi about the transaction. So a year later Mubarek sends Ian back. His Majesty, Ian tells the Arthur person, cannot travel, but if you were ever in the Gulf, and happened to visit your friend, Fawzi Alwara, His Majesty would be pleased to receive you. So a few months later the Arthur person turns up in Alidar and Fawzi keeps him busy for forty-eight hours and the Arthur person never says, “By the way, His Majesty asked me to stop by,” and they never meet. Which Mubarek likes.
They go on this way for about five years, with Ian bringing little assignments every so often, and paying the bills out of a bank account Mubarek maintains in Scotland of all places, and then one day Mubarek has a real problem. There is an assassin loose in his country who is not a smuggler. Which means politics. Mubarek asks the Arthur person what to do. Or to be accurate, he has Ian go and ask him.
The answer turns out to be Philip. How Philip is supposed to find the assassin, Ian confesses he does not know, especially as he isn’t supposed to be told that that’s his real objective. But the Arthur person has assured Mubarek that he will do it. “He’s good in the dark,” he said. “I’ve read his file.”
Mubarek never touches me. I have come to believe it is a form of seduction. To be alone, by his choice, day after day, with a masculine, intelligent absolute monarch and have him never brush one’s knee, touch one’s elbow, say anything intrusive…It has occurred to me that perhaps he is curious to see how long it will be before I begin to fall apart.
He does look at me. A king may look at anyone, I suppose. One day out of sheer perversity or professional pique or something I wore no bra. He noticed. He didn’t mind. I haven’t done it again. I may do, but I haven’t. I suppose that is all right.
“I think you have done a nice job with Fatima,” he says one day. “She listens now, a little. Growing up will take care of the rest.” Nothing more – which I conclude is his way of indicating that I am no longer a governess but a guest. His guest.
I still live in my small house. There has been no suggestion to move anywhere grander, and I prefer it that way. It would not be correct. There do, however, now always seem to be soldiers about, which gives me a cosy feeling.
“Do you know,” says His Majesty, “how Ian Elliot came into my employ?”
“No.”
“He showed up at the back door of the Palace. Talked to my Nubian, and said he wanted to live here, in Alidar. He was here already, and we aren’t fussy, as you will have observed if you’ve been to many parties. Isa suggested I see him, and I did. He explained that he’d lived in quite a few places and it always ended badly so he thought the thing to do was be on good terms with the management. So I said to him, effectively, ‘Make friends with the prime minister, and tell me if he’s stealing.’ Which he’s done. Made friends with Fawzi, that is.”
“So I understand.”
“Eventually we gave him a passport under his new name.” Pause. “No one else could have visited the American lawyer for me, the one who sent us Cooper.”
I say nothing. Ian Elliot has led me to understand who else he goes to see with his new passport, and I wouldn’t want to know them. They sound like the people who blew up my father.
“It would be interesting to meet Mr. Arthur Allison someday,” says Mubarek. “Elliot avoids describing him. But perhaps he knows something about Elliot. I have to assume there are things Elliot does not wish to tell me about himself. That is true of most people one comes to depend on. Or care about. I accept that.”
His Majesty looks at me for a while. Being looked at by a handsome king is like massage. This one is wise as well. There would be sorrow in his fingers. You would be amazed what you can learn from a man’s regard, if you take the trouble.
“Can I trust you, Cassandra?” he says, taking me by surprise.
“Certainly not.”
“Well, I’ll have to do something with you.”
Nicest thing anyone’s said to me in years.
Power, money, courage, brains, humour, looks or pheromones. What is it that makes a man attractive? There have even been idiots – Greeks again, probably – who claimed virtue does it. I have not had occasion to meet any like that. On the other hand, there is a sort of holiness about pure desire, men who want one badly, however temporarily. I suppose each one of us has a code or fingerprint stamped on our being, which makes us prey to a particular combination. Makes us fall in love, even.
28
Allison hadn’t seen Maloof in several weeks. She recognised immediately that he was exhausted. He was sitting on a rock with his back to the sun. He had broken a branch off a bush and periodically swept the ground in front of him with it. He didn’t speak as she approached, though he must have seen her shadow. She walked around behind him and began massaging his shoulders. It was an intimacy she had never attempted before.
“I missed the Valentine on purpose,” she said after a few minutes, “but I still think you should punish me.”
“Later,” he said.
“It created plenty of excitement,” she went on, “as I’m sure you know, but no headlines back in England. I suddenly figured, when I was about to pull the trigger, that what you didn’t need right now was foreign attention.”
“What I wanted was hysteria.” He was angry. That was good. “Please remember, Allison, that I have devoted my life to the study of politics, with particular attention to the Arab world…”
“Let’s get it over with,” she said.
So he let her undress and scourged her with the leather belt she took off and handed him: only four blows, but rather hard. It improved his mood, as she knew it would. And it certainly burned off some of her adrenaline. The thing was, she had to be completely nonchalant about Philip.
“You should cane me some time for no reason,” she said as she was dressing. “Just because you can.”
Maloof studied her for a full minute as she sat on the ground, tying her shoelaces.
“Is there no limit to what you will accept?”
“Try me,” she said, without looking at him.
For answer, Maloof scooped up some sand from the ground between them. She went over to him at once on her hands and knees and ate it out of his palm. You could eat sand, she told herself. It wouldn’t hurt you. Otherwise all the children in the world would be dead.
Allison stood up and dusted off her knees. “The American you wanted me to charm,” she said.
“Yes?” said Maloof.
“I’ve started fucking him,” she said. This wasn’t true, much as she wished it to be.
“Well, don’t get sentimental,” said Maloof. “We will have to kill him.”
“Do I strike you as a sentimental person?”
Again Maloof studied her for a while before he spoke. She was used to that, but she did actually want to know what his answer would be. “That was a nice gesture, what you did a moment ago,” he said.
“Well, let’s not make it a regular feature,” she said, “or I’ll sink when I go swimming.”
“You know you can’t go swimming in Alidar.”
“My tattoo?”
“What does the American think of it?”
“I haven’t let him see it,” she said. “I told him I am exceptionally modest, and wore a nightgown.”
“It was his idea to h
ave sex?”
“Had to be,” she said. “And it’s taken months to get him to have it.”
“Is he any good?”
“Not particularly.” Allison found she had to look away as she said that, and pretended to have a bit of sand in her eye. “Anyway,” she went on quickly, “he told me that the king or Ibrahim or whoever is calling the shots has a plan for aborting your revolution...” Allison stopped. “Pardon me, the pretend king evidently has a plan.” She thought about adding “Your Majesty,” but he’d told her never to use the phrase, for security reasons, and that might have been overdoing it. Eating sand might have been overdoing it, in fact. Her mouth was still full of grit.
“Pillow talk,” said Maloof.
“Sex makes some men overconfident.”
“Mr. Cooper did not strike me as being that foolish, the one time I met him.”
“Well, anyway, they need another month or so, and…”
“So do I,” said Maloof.
“They evidently don’t know that, or at least they haven’t told Cooper. By the way, when do you want me to kill him?”
“Not yet.”
“O.K.,” she said. “Do I keep going to bed with him?”
“So long as he keeps talking,” said Maloof.
“He didn’t say much else,” said Allison, “except that killing people was something he thought he’d left behind in the army. I assume you know he gives lessons to their army?”
“Yes.”
“Will it make any difference...to what you have in mind?”
“No.”
“Why is that – if I am permitted to know?”
“I suppose you are allowed to know,” Maloof said pensively. “The essence of it is that the police control the city. Fawzi, of course, controls the police. Fawzi professes to be with me, but if not, that can be dealt with easily enough. There are two or three middle-ranking officers I know I can trust. Modern men. If necessary, I will simply tell each of them that he is my choice, assuming he can eliminate Fawzi. I will hint at doubts about the others, as well, and then I’ll see which one survives.”
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