The huge room was hot and dark. The smell of vomit obvious. A glass of water stood on a table beside a hardly touched bowl of couscous. Most of what had been eaten splattered the floorboards beside the bed.
Within the round belly of a wood-burning stove flames flickered. On a mattress, leaning back against his pillows lay the old man, his pillowcases tallowed with sweat. A window that shouldn't have been open was. So it was just as well that Lady Maryam remained outside, kept from entering by a shout that reduced her husband to a coughing fit.
"She keeps cooking me food," the Emir said tiredly when his breath was back. He smiled at Raf's surprise. "Don't worry," he added. "I make her eat a spoonful of everything first. She's only here to look after me because she knows how much I hate it."
It was Raf's turn to smile.
"So tell me," said the Emir, "before we talk about things that matter. What did you do to get her wretched son so upset? I've had Kashif on the line swearing undying loyalty and warning me not to trust you." The Emir sounded amused. "What did you do, besides tell him you were now Chief of Police? Which, I have to say, was news to me . . ."
"I didn't say that at all," said Raf. "Merely that I was investigating the attack. And I suggested, obliquely, that he might have hired the Sufi."
"Do you think he did?"
"That depends," said Raf, glancing round the room until his gaze reached an angular chair made from pine and painted in a brown so deep it looked black, "on who else would like to see you dead."
"Paris, Washington, Berlin. Half the mullahs in Kairouan. That woman outside. And then there's you . . . Feel free to sit," he added as if he thought Raf was angling for permission rather than working out exactly what worried him about the Emir's room.
"Why would I want you dead?"
Moncef's only answer was to glance at a ring resting between a revolver and a copy of the Quran. The ring was gold, set with bloodstone and a swirl of script; the tughra engraved into its surface was that found on every fifty-dinar coin for more than forty years.
The gun was a Colt .38 with pearl grips.
"There's more to ruling than owning a ring," Raf said.
"Not much," said the Emir, his laugh a foxlike bark, carrying more pain than amusement. "Especially if you have the other two as well. You don't really like me, do you?"
"Probably more than your wife does," Raf said sourly. "She tells me this is the first time she's ever visited . . ."
"First and last," said the Emir. "This house was bought for Eugenie. Government money but her name on the deeds. She was many things, that woman. Only one of them my chief of intelligence." Unashamed tears were in his eyes. Or maybe just unnoticed.
"You were lovers?" Raf said. It was barely half a question.
"That's one way of describing it."
"She said you weren't."
He smiled sadly. "Eugenie kept her life in compartments," he said. "Jobs that people knew about. Those they didn't. Her personal life was one of the smallest. Maybe the least visited. Sometimes Gene needed to forget what she kept there . . . You see," he explained, "sleeping with me was probably the only unprofessional thing Gene ever did in her life. And all I did was get her killed . . ."
The Emir gestured to the table beside his bed where the ring lay between the book and the gun. "Make your choice," he said, "and learn to live with it. That's all any of us can do."
A glow from the wood-burning stove gave the Emir's face the look of a fallen angel, broken and beautiful; haunting in its promise and cruel beyond imagining. Behind the words was a desolation so deep it went beyond Raf's ability to understand. And in that moment he finally believed something his mother once said, which in itself was unusual.
His father was certifiably insane. She'd been holding a vodka when she said this. Her anger filtered through a freebase crash and the bottom of a Bohemian shot glass. Somehow they'd moved from filming Arabian wildcats as they learned to hunt, her latest project, to Raf's father, the man she refused to talk about. Of course, back then Raf thought she'd been talking about the Swedish hitchhiker.
"Why come now?" the Emir said into Raf's silence. "When you wouldn't come before?"
"I was busy."
"Having your garden rebuilt with someone else's money . . . Going to a job you didn't do . . . What changed?" asked the Emir, his eyes watching from within the red shadows of the stove. The very fact he hadn't asked why Raf wore shades in a room that sweltered in near darkness told Raf that Eugenie's original suggestion was right and he had been wrong. Whatever had been done to Raf, his mother had not made those choices alone.
"What changed . . ." The answer died on Raf's lips. The snide, the furious and the easy comebacks all wiped by the obvious. "I did," said Raf.
CHAPTER 34
Thursday 3rd March
Dr. Pierre smirked from the side of a barn, his mouth supercilious above the fading remains of a silk cravat. A lifetime of rain had worn his luxurious sideburns to a ghost of their former glory. A jagged scar split his chin where a builder had repaired cracked brickwork with no thought for the advertising mural beneath.
He was advertising pâté dentifrice. As used in Paris.
"Where are we going now?"
"Cap Bon," said Raf. "To question the Marquis de St. Cloud."
It said much for Murad's cool that he didn't ask why his half brother had the Bugatti's headlights switched off. Recalibrating his eyes, Raf glanced in the mirror and saw Murad lit by screen glare from Hani's pink plastic laptop.
"Can you turn the screen down . . . ?"
"Why?" Her voice was petulant. As if she still hadn't quite forgiven him for one or more of the many things for which he still needed her forgiveness.
"Because too much light makes driving difficult."
"If I must," said Hani and flicked off her laptop. Adjusting the screen was much too easy an option.
Raf didn't tell Hani his other reason. That somewhere above them would be a UN spysat capable of tracking their journey from the farmhouse to Cap Bon. If they were lucky, that was. If they were unlucky, then the satellite had probably just captured every one of Hani's keystrokes.
He drove in silence. Letting darkened walls and hedgerows flow around him until the dirt track became a minor road, then something that actually had central lines. Shortly after that came the périphérique around Tunis, the city flickering by in a smudge of suburbs as the huge Bugatti burned up the outside lane, lights out and its three passengers shadows held in darkness, like ghosts going on holiday.
One of the cardinal points of the Emir's work creation programme was that everyone in Ifriqiya should have a job. And if that meant more road sweepers, line painters or ditchdiggers than there were roads then so be it.
What Ifriqiya needed, of course, at least in the opinion of every visiting dignitary, was fewer donkeys and wider roads. Only the land lost to build the roads would, when added together, shave hectare after hectare off the country's reserve of perfectly good smallholdings. On the Emir's orders, a survey had been carried out after some commissar with mining interests in Gafsa had complained that trucking phosphate was becoming increasingly uneconomic.
In response to a hint from Moscow that the CCCP might help Tunis fund a programme to build new motorways, the Emir sent them the address of every family who'd lose land and invited Moscow to write to each, explaining why it was necessary.
To the reply that this would be pointless, since most of those would undoubtedly be unable to read, he pointed out that the literacy rate in Ifriqiya was slightly higher than western Russia as a whole, and at least 25 percent above that of Georgia, which was where both the commissar and the Soviet president originated.
The roads remained unwidened, still lined with prickly pear except in the far south, where the ground was too barren to grow even that.
"What are you thinking?" Hani asked, her voice no longer sullen. On her lap the computer balanced on top of Ifritah's cat basket. Now forgotten.
"About prickly
pears," said Raf.
Hani nodded, as if that was to be expected. "The roads," she said, "and Moscow's plan to widen them. It's mentioned in the official guidebook."
"Probably," said Raf. From what he'd just seen, Emir Moncef was quite capable of having it included just to signal his independence from the only country still willing to trade openly with Ifriqiya.
"How do you two do that?" Murad demanded, his tone more interested than aggrieved.
"Do what?" Hani and Raf asked together.
And the answer was he didn't know. Raf accepted that he'd no more understood what his own mother was thinking than she'd known what hid inside his head. They had remained, from his birth until her death, two strangers separated by common blood and long silences: every glance between them was embarrassed, each hug brief and gratefully cut short. If ever he took her hand she flinched. Every time she touched him he froze.
It was a relationship safe only when conducted at a distance by e-mail or letter. So maybe Zara was right and he really was the last person to be looking after a troubled, hyperintelligent, unquestionably lonely small child.
Alternatively, he was ideal.
"You okay?"
Raf glanced in the mirror and saw Hani watching intently.
"Thought not," she said. One thin hand came up and gripped his neck, small fingers digging into muscle knots on both sides. "Twist your head," said Hani.
Raf did and heard bones crunch as something slid back into place. "Donna does it," she said, "every time I get a headache."
"You get many headaches?" Murad asked. And Raf realized he had no idea of the answer either.
She looked at Murad. "Since my uncle arrived," said Hani, "life's been one long headache." She smiled as she said it and neither of the other two quite noticed she'd avoided answering Murad's question.
"Almost there." Hani's announcement came just before Raf turned right between two houses and edged his way through a tiny village, headlights still unlit. She'd been collecting old advertising murals and so far she had a Dr. Pierre, two Fernet-Branca (la digestif miraculeux), a faded blue dubo, dubon, dubonnet and one for underwear by Rhouyl, which, if she understood the faded French correctly, was guaranteed to induce health-giving static.
Staring from his window of the still-moving car, Murad tried to focus on the world outside. Just enough moon was filtering through the clouds to bathe the soft slopes of Cap Bon in a ghostly fuzz which was almost, but not quite, light. "How do you know that?" he asked.
Hani shrugged. "I just do."
Around them were orange groves in blossom, wizened pine trees, the occasional villa set back from the coast and even a wrought-iron bandstand. The spindly confection set down on a promenade overlooked blue-painted fishing boats that bobbed at anchor.
On the wall opposite, another notice, paper this time, reminding everyone that falcons could not be captured for training until the second week of March. The warning was pasted next to an older poster advertising the festival de l'épervier, dated from June the previous year. Light from a bakery window lit both and through its glass could be seen an old man in vest and floppy trousers kneading dough . . .
They ate their brioche from the bag, the pastry still warm enough to make the paper turn translucent down one side. The old man had been polite. Totally unsurprised to be disturbed at 3:00A .M. by a man and two children wanting food. And he threw in two tiny tarte tatin for Hani and Murad, smiling and nodding as he shooed the three of them towards the door.
"Work to do," he explained.
Raf nodded.
What passed for a plan in Raf's mind the fox would undoubtedly have dismissed as cage circling, the dysfunctional repetition of a narrow range of gestures. Have an idea, repeat it endlessly until all value is wrung from the original . . . With a sigh, Raf straightened his shoulders and pulled a bell handle.
Welcome to the Andy Warhol school of detective work.
Somewhere inside Dar St. Cloud a Victorian bell tipped sideways far enough to hit a silver clapper and the faintest tremor of that blow whispered back through the wire to reach Raf's fingers. The bell was an affectation. One made worthless by two small Zeiss cameras that swivelled, cranelike to catch Raf and his companions in their gaze.
Retuning his eyes, Raf shifted through the spectrum. Checking out what he already knew, the three of them were blanket-lit by infrared and targeted at waist height by pinhead lasers. He could see tiny lenses set into the portico walls. Then the door opened and Raf forgot about armaments. Only panic could make the Marquis do something that stupid and this was not a character trait associated with Astophe de St. Cloud, recognized bâtard of the French Emperor and a man who'd once offered Raf more money than he could even begin to imagine.
Three percent of the price of North Africa's biggest oil refinery, plus the same cut on oil fields in the Sudan and various offshore sites. All Raf had needed to do in return was betray Zara's father. Hamzah Effendi would fall. His share of a refinery that flickered ghosts of flame across the night sky on the edge of El Iskandryia would go up for sale. Enabling St. Cloud to significantly increase his prestige and personal wealth.
Raf had not forgotten that offer any more, he imagined, than St. Cloud had forgiven Raf's refusal to oblige.
"Tell St. Cloud that Ashraf Bey needs to ask him some questions."
"Is His Excellency expecting you?" The man who showed them into the hall was Scottish–though he spoke in an Edinburgh accent so clipped it could have come from an English film, the kind where butlers wore frock coats, which, actually, was what he seemed to be wearing.
"What do you think?" Raf replied.
"I'll see if His Excellency is in." And with that St. Cloud's majordomo shuffled off towards an arch outlined in two shades of rose marble, leaving the three of them alone in a hall lit by gas-fired sconces designed to look like candle flame.
"Well, what a pleasant surprise." The voice was higher than one might have expected given the undoubted gravitas of the man limping his way toward them in gold dressing gown and leather slippers.
"You know why this room is so high?"
"No," said Raf. "But no doubt you'll tell me."
The Marquis laughed. "I had to make a trip," he said and something in those words raised hairs on the back of Hani's neck. "So I left my butler in charge . . . This was years ago," he added, as if the age of the house wasn't obvious. "And I told him to tell the felaheen when to stop and gave him a height to which to work."
The old man raised a silver-topped cane and gestured at the nearest wall, where tiny alternating blue and white tiles filled the spaces between evenly spaced double pillars, each of which was topped by a broad capital. The pillars were pink marble, the capitals sandstone.
"You based it on Cordoba," Hani said.
St. Cloud nodded. "Only my man got so drunk that when I got back, this had happened." He pointed to a second tier of double pillars above the first. "Not those pillars, obviously, just the height of the wall behind. The workmen expected to be told to stop so they kept on building." The Marquis shrugged. "Fair enough," he added, in a tone of voice that made Hani decide on the spot that, where St. Cloud was concerned, fairness was unlikely to come into it.
"What happened to your butler?" asked Murad Pasha, his voice thoughtful.
A smile broke across the face of the Marquis and in it Raf saw pure emptiness. "There was a building accident," said the Marquis. "Such things happen. Well, they do in North Africa." Glancing from Hani to Murad, St. Cloud raised his eyebrows. "You should know," he told Raf, "I've been very cross with you–so it was sensible to bring me presents."
Hani merely blinked, but Murad's eyes widened and he might have stepped backwards if the girl at his side hadn't taken his hand, then hastily let it go. Both Hani and Murad suddenly blushing.
"This isn't a social visit," Raf said flatly. "And the children stay with me. We're here so Murad Pasha can meet the man who tried to murder his grandfather." He turned to the still-flustered boy, almost
as if intending to introduce him formally to St. Cloud.
"I did no such . . ." Outrage froze words in the old man's throat.
"You are not to leave this house," announced Raf. "And you will surrender your carte blanche to me and the keys to all the cars in your garage."
"And the helicopter," Hani whispered. Catching Murad's eye, she shrugged and explained, surprisingly gently for her, "there's a helipad on the lawn."
"Out of the question." St. Cloud had found his voice. One that Raf could only describe as oozing bile. "I have total diplomatic immunity. God . . ." The old man shook so hard with fury that for the first time since his visitors had entered Dar St. Cloud he actually need his silver-topped stick. "You can't just march in here."
"Actually," said Raf, "I think you'll find I can. Because the alternative is that I place you under arrest and call police HQ in Tunis to have a van come out to collect you." Raf shrugged. "Who knows," he added, "given your tastes you might enjoy a week in the cells with a child molester. I'm sure you'd have lots to talk about . . ."
"And if I refuse?"
"Refuse what?" Raf asked. "To be arrested?"
St. Cloud's nod was stiff. His scowl that of a man who'd faced worse things than two nervous children and the black-suited son of an Emir. "What will your officers do," said St. Cloud coldly, "manhandle me into a car? They wouldn't . . ."
"Dare?" One second Raf was watching St. Cloud, the next he had a pearl-handled Colt pressed hard into the side of the old man's neck, at an angle guaranteed to remove most of his skull.
No one could remember seeing him move.
"Other people might be afraid of you," said Raf. "I don't have that problem." Pulling back the hammer the way the Sufi had done, he squeezed the trigger so that only his thumb kept the hammer from falling. "You really think you can resist arrest?"
Around the Marquis the hall began to darken as the face in front of him changed unexpectedly/impossibly from human to something positively other.
The old man could taste smoke and feel a flat wall of heat that threatened to sear his papery skin. Every tile beneath his feet was burning. Except that there were no tiles because he was walking over a glowing chasm of red ember and flickering flame, while some unseen thing ripped mouthfuls of flesh from his shoulder.
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