Luckily the object of his interest kept moving, eyes fixed into the far distance. Drugs, familiarity or fear had emptied the adolescent’s smooth face of anything except boredom and an instinct for absolute obedience.
“Show him in.”
“Sir?”
“Show in al-Mansur.”
The majordomo bowed and withdrew, walking backward from the chamber.
“The Marquis will see you now.” He gestured politely towards a large door and the unacceptability of what lay beyond. “You may find him . . .” The majordomo hesitated. “A little distracted.”
Raf entered without knocking. Unlike the tiled, fountained and pillared Moorish fantasy that was Dar St. Cloud, the Marquis’ villa overlooking Cap Bon in Tunisia, the drawing room of his house at Aboukir could have been transported wholesale from Paris.
Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche hung in pride of place on the far wall. An adolescent Cupid chastely kissing the brow of a blonde girl who stared wide-eyed straight at the door where Raf stood, her hands folded neatly below naked breasts. A Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars hung beside it, a huge canvas edged in heavy gilt, with the frame so massive that it almost touched both ceiling and floor. And on other walls, endless young nymphs gazed innocent-eyed at lean shepherd boys, oblivious to their own seminakedness.
A Napoleon III sideboard was positioned directly beneath the Gérard, its top a single slab of horsehair marble cut from a quarry outside Milan. Along the top were ranged naked glass figures, mostly Lalique, and two decanters.
“Pour yourself a small drink.” The Marquis spoke without looking up or releasing the figure still sitting on his lap (what with the shaved skull and baggy shirt, it was impossible to tell if St. Cloud’s companion was male or female). “This won’t take long.”
“It might,” said Raf, “if we’re going to cover who had Kamil Quitrimala kidnapped, why three tourists were butchered to order, a casino burned and the pipeline to a refinery cut. And that’s before we . . .”
“Out,” said St. Cloud crossly. And the adolescent to whom he spoke disappeared in a flurry of coltlike legs and a flash of thin buttocks. The oversized shirt was St. Cloud’s own, Raf realized; its use a badge of ownership or fondness received, perhaps both.
“Gang warfare for the casino and kidnapping . . . Psychopaths for the murders, variously dead, I believe. And I assume the Sword of God was behind the refinery, just as it was behind those outrageous EMP bombs.” The Marquis gave a smile.
“You assume wrong.”
St. Cloud looked at him.
“What,” said Raf, “do you know about the Osmanli Accord?”
“Less than nothing.” St. Cloud’s voice was firm. “I never bother myself with politics.”
“So it would shock you to discover that, behind the scenes, Berlin needs French agreement to retain its spheres of influence . . . As does Moscow?”
The Marquis snorted. “The idea that Berlin would ask anything of Paris is as unbelievable as . . .”
“The idea that someone French might demand a price of Berlin,” Raf said smoothly. “Well, while you’re at it, imagine that breaking Hamzah was the only result to matter in our little local crisis.”
“Hamzah Effendi?” St. Cloud shook his head. “Surely not . . .”
Raf nodded. “Imagine everything else was just so much means to an end. So the question I have to ask is, Who would want to damage Hamzah?”
“Who indeed . . .” said St. Cloud. “I suspect we’ll never know. Always assuming there was somebody.” He stood up from his elegant Louis XVIII chair, casually slipped himself back inside his trousers and made for the sideboard.
“Are you sure . . . ?” His hand hovered above a brandy balloon.
“Absolutely,” said Raf. “Beyond doubt.”
“Your choice . . .”
St. Cloud poured himself a generous measure of Courvoisier and swilled it round the balloon, bending close to inhale the heavy fumes. “Of course,” he added as an apparent afterthought, “even if this were all true . . . It doesn’t change the fact that Hamzah is guilty as hell. And there’s always the future ownership of that refinery to consider . . .”
“Plus the Midas oil fields in central Sudan and certain Mediterranean offshore sites.”
“Quite,” said St. Cloud. “Now, should a senior official find himself in a position to facilitate the transfer of Hamzah’s part of those holdings . . . After they’ve been legally forfeited by Hamzah, obviously. Then any country intent on consolidating its interests would undoubtedly be very generous.”
“Generous?”
“A commission is usual in these cases.”
“Five percent?”
St. Cloud looked shocked. “One or two. Three at the absolute maximum.”
“And what would three percent come to?”
The Marquis told him.
Raf decided to take that drink after all.
CHAPTER 56
1st November
The trial proper began two days after Raf’s visit to the house at Aboukir. On the morning of 5th Safar 1472, a day that Raf thought of as Monday 1st November . . .
Within the first hour, Zara reached the inescapable conclusion that the man whose bed she’d twice shared was about to destroy her father. So now she sat at a long desk at the front of the temporary court and shuffled papers, while atrocity after atrocity unravelled itself on-screen.
Atrocity was the word Raf used to describe what the judges were seeing. It wasn’t a term to which Zara felt she could object.
Hani, however, sat at the back. And although the steady swing of her legs, which earlier had been flicking backward and forward to scuff the floor, had stopped completely, she resolutely watched one of the screens, her dark eyes darting from horror to horror; though whether to see more or allow herself to take in less was hard to tell.
She shouldn’t have been on board the SS Jannah anyway, which the Khedive had declared Iskandryian soil for the duration of Hamzah’s trial. But Khartoum had been strangely willing to be persuaded that he should accompany her, and the soldiers at the door had done nothing but stare at the cat on her shoulder. As a result, she now sat beside the skeletal Sufi in a makeshift public gallery, watching things she was pretty sure she didn’t want to see.
The picture quality was terrible, the contrast too sharp, and the camera juddered with the reporter’s every step, none of which really mattered. It was what the camera showed that counted. Oh, and spinning numbers near the bottom that gave time, date and an accurate GPS reading.
The ownership of the battleground itself was moot. So the location was translated underneath as “Northeastern Sudan/Southern Egypt (disputed) . . .”
At first, as Raf gestured at the early images, inviting the judges, press and public to watch the evidence being presented, he’d thought the juddering was due to gyroscope malfunction in the original handheld camera, but as the lens panned across another dead boy, fist stuffed into his mouth to prevent himself from crying out, he realized the gyroscope just hadn’t been able to compensate for the photographer’s shock.
Raf pushed a button on his control and the picture froze.
The assignment had both made and destroyed Jean René; turning the man into a living saint and consigning him to forty years of knowing his single most significant work was already behind him.
Raf stepped back to give the judges clear sight of the elderly, shock-haired Parisian, who stood in a witness box built overnight by carpenters at the Khedive’s order.
“Who took these photographs?”
The elderly man stared down his hawklike nose. “You know who took those,” he said crossly. “Why else would I be here . . . ?”
Raf smiled sympathetically. Nodding to show he understood the tumble of emotions through which the man must be going. “Who took these photographs?” Raf repeated, his voice loud enough to carry to the public gallery.
“I did,” said Jean René.
“You did?” Flipping open a le
ather notebook, Raf pretended to check its screen. Working hardware, decent lighting and reliable power had ceased to be a problem the moment Tewfik Pasha relocated the court to the ballroom of the SS Jannah.
“You are a war reporter?”
“I was,” said the man bitterly.
“And you gave up when?”
The man’s leonine mane of white hair rippled as he nodded towards the frozen screen, where the dead boy still lay with one fist in his open mouth. “I gave up after that,” he said. “How could I not?”
“And you became what?” Raf asked, glancing again at his notebook.
“I founded Sanctuary,” said Jean René, staring at the judges. His gaze bathed St. Cloud, the Graf and Senator Liz in ill-hidden contempt. “So long as countries like yours fight their wars by proxy there will always be work for people like me.”
Senator Liz opened her mouth but shut it again at a glance from St. Cloud.
“Excellency . . .” St. Cloud’s tone made it clear Raf could continue.
Only Raf was thinking, of nothing.
Less than nothing.
“Excellency . . .”
Raf came awake with a start, glanced at the judges and realized it was still his witness, but he had no questions for Jean René. Not real ones. Hamzah had been there, DNA matching marked him out as the soldier found on the battlefield by the Red Cross. His fingerprints, taken by a teenage Jewish nurse who hoped to reunite the boy with his parents, had identified Hamzah as the person who loaded and fired the HK21e machine gun.
If that wasn’t enough, the boy’s inky thumbprint validated a typed confession found locked in a Chubb in Koenig Pasha’s study; typed, it seemed, on an old Remington Imperial, to ensure no trace was left on any datacore. The confession had been witnessed by a certain Major Koenig Bey. A copy of this rested among the documents piling up in front of the three judges.
As for the defendant himself, guilt oozed from Hamzah’s skin like sweat. Expensive and overtailored though his clothes might be, they still hung from his diminished body like a beggar’s rags. Everything about the man conceded defeat.
There was very little chance that Raf could blow this case. And inside his own head, Raf was already writing his closing speech, the winning address he’d make once all the evidence, both direct and circumstantial, had been heard. Once the transcripts, old newsfeeds and actual weapons had been examined.
The press were already his, Raf could tell that just from watching them. The public gallery were glued to every unfolding moment. It was undeniably time to wind up his examination of this witness and let Zara take the floor.
Flicking his eyes from the photograph on-screen, back to where Jean René stood in the makeshift witness box, Raf opened his mouth to thank the man and did what he’d been avoiding doing all morning, somehow allowed his gaze to shift past René to where Zara sat.
Pain.
Absolute loneliness.
Enough of both to rock the courtroom around Raf.
If ever he’d needed the fox it was now. The fox would have known what to do because the fox always knew what to do. That was why it existed. To take from Raf the need to make those kind of decisions.
Ashraf al-Mansur, sometime ZeeZee, shuddered at this sudden understanding. Or else the courtroom shuddered. Whatever, something did as his eyes adjusted. And the rococo magnificence of the ballroom, with its borrowed ceiling, faux marble and fat gilded cherubs faded to a pixillated blur.
“Safety off,” said a gun.
Raf blinked at the words in his head and felt the cherubs reappear. Nothing had changed except for him and that change was so small, he wasn’t even sure it was real. But then, he’d never been too sure about anything. Mostly he just accepted things. Accepted, then assimilated the accepting. Whatever he needed to become he became . . .
Some people regarded that as a psychologically adaptive advantage. Others knew it as negative capability. A few said, without quite realizing what they said, “There but for the grace of . . .”
And then Raf found himself inside a battle.
Standing beside Ka, Zac said nothing. He’d talked little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he spoke even less . . .
Ka thought that strange.
“Distance?”
“Half a klick and closing . . .”
It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the kid with the amulets didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered. But then the kid was just that, a kid. Someone too young to make the link between action and . . .
Everything that Raf had ever read about The Hague Convention suddenly ran like water through the parched soil of his mind.
“Did you actually photograph this man?” Raf turned to point at Hamzah who, for the first time since the trial had begun, lifted his head and looked around the well of the court. Maybe it was something in Raf’s voice or else he too could hear clouds growling low like thunder.
Justice. That was what a court was supposed to provide. And he was Ashraf al-Mansur, Ottoman bey and supposedly Governor of El Iskandryia, for the next few hours at least. Raf looked at Zara, then inside himself.
The living saint looked puzzled.
“It’s a simple enough question,” Raf insisted. “Did you photograph Hamzah Quitrimala?”
“Back then?”
“Yes,” said Raf heavily, “back then . . .”
Jean René nodded.
“You photographed Hamzah Effendi as a child?” Raf said slowly, as if trying to get something straight in his head.
“I did. Yes.”
“Describe him.”
Puzzled, the elderly man glanced from Raf to the row of judges who sat watching from their raised bench. Above and behind them, alone at a higher bench sat the Khedive.
“Hamzah’s over there,” said Raf. “Not on the judicial benches. That is, if you need to take another look.”
Jean René hesitated.
“Tell us,” demanded Raf. “How did he look?”
They stared at each other across the well of the court. And somewhere at the back of the bey’s mind, thoughts continued to resonate until their growl manifested as a shiver that ran the length of his spine.
“Nothing unusual,” Jean René said finally. “Scruffy. Wearing a man’s shirt, trousers held up by a broken belt.”
“Broken?”
“The buckle was missing. The belt was tied round his waist. He had bare feet but then they all did. After a while, hot sand and gravel baked their feet to leather . . .”
“You’ve looked at this photograph recently?”
Raf paused, seeing Jean René look uncertain. “It’s a simple enough question,” he said. “Did you dig out your photograph of this murderer?”
“Objection . . .” Zara was on her feet.
The Khedive shook his head. “Objection overruled.” He turned to Raf, eyes hard. “Presumably you have sound reasons for this line of questioning . . . ?”
Raf nodded. He had reasons all right. Half a dozen within his own head. Plus another, still standing, glaring at him. Although his main reason sat at the back of the court beside Khartoum, her eyes spilling over with tears as they flicked between him and Zara.
What was justice anyway?
Nothing most people would recognize. Nothing Hani had ever been given.
“Find the photograph,” Raf demanded. “I want the court to take a good look at this killer.”
Finding the shot took a minute or two of skipping forward and backward, looking for the right image. And all the while, screens flickered with figures that came and went as Jean René trawled angrily through his notebook’s data sphere.
A girl half-buried in a sand dune.
Camels starved to a sack of fur and protruding bone.
A burned-out Seraphim driven by something reduced by flame to the texture of bitumen. Teeth grinning from a lipless mouth.
Images enough to make the ballroom fall silent and its gilded elegance suddenly appear frivolous and out of place. And fi
nally, when it seemed not even the judges could stand another close-up of a dead child, Jean René found the picture for which he’d been looking.
A boy shading his face against the sun as he stared into a hungry lens. The shirt he wore lacked buttons and the trousers had been hacked short in the leg. At his feet rested an open water bottle and a radio.
Half a dozen amulets hung around his neck. Most were beaten silver or brass, with one no more than a bundle of hawk feathers tied tight with a leaf. But the last one, the one that mattered because it led aid workers to get wrong which side he was on, was a small cross carved from bone. The boy’s eyes were hidden by thick dark glasses and a cigarette hung from his bottom lip, tendrils of smoke vanishing into the hot-afternoon air.
Not that much older than Hani really.
“How old would you say this child was?”
“Irrelevant question.” Senator Liz Elsing was out of her chair.
“Overruled,” said the Khedive. “The prosecutor still has the floor, as is his right . . .” Tewfik Pasha’s smile was thin. “Mind you,” he said, “if this is the prosecution, I can’t wait for the defence.”
“How old?” Raf repeated.
Jean René thought about it, looked at the screen, then back at Hamzah, an element of certainty leaving his face. Finally the man shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.”
“Then perhaps we should find somebody who can tell us . . .” Raf stared at the public benches and a dozen cameras clicked. “Presumably the SS Jannah has a doctor . . . ?”
There was silence while the judges tried to work out which of them Raf was asking. Finally, they realized he was talking to the Khedive.
Tewfik Pasha nodded, reluctantly.
“And may I borrow your medical officer as an expert witness?”
The boy scowled, skin darkening under immaculately applied makeup. “Of course,” he said. “Provided the captain also agrees.”
The court recessed while the ship’s medical officer was summoned. And then everyone waited again while a tall German woman introduced herself to the court and was sworn in.
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