Arabesk (107 page)

Taking a single sheet of headed paper from its holder on Uncle Ashraf’s desk, Hani promptly changed her mind and slipped a thick wad of the stuff into her rucksack. One never knew when it might become useful. As an afterthought, she added a rubber stamp that sat on the desk beside the wooden box holding the paper. It was a very ornate rubber stamp with brass claws to hold the block of rubber and an ivory handle, but it was still a rubber stamp.

From the desk of Colonel Pashazade Ashraf al-Mansur, Ashraf Bey.
Looking at the faint script left by the stamp on the inside of her wrist Hani raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t realized her uncle was a colonel; at least, she didn’t remember knowing that, but the fact didn’t surprise her. Secret agents and assassins were bound to have military ranks, it was obvious really. Everyone in North Africa had a rank of some kind or other.

Hani was just letting herself out of the office when she finally realized what she’d missed. A briefcase, with a gunmetal grey combination lock, below a black coat hanging from a rack topped by an Astrakhan hat she’d never seen Uncle Ashraf wear, tight curls of baby fur soft enough to make Hani cringe.

Hat, coat, briefcase.

Hide in plain sight.

Since Madame Ingrid might notice if the case disappeared, Hani resolved to examine it in situ. Would it be very conceited…? Assuming she really was eleven, not ten, Hani fed her own birthdate into the combination lock and Uncle Ashraf’s case opened first try. Which was just as well, because there was serious potential for stalemate if it had been his own birthday and it was bound to be the birthday of someone or other.

Statistically most combination locks used a birth date within the owner’s immediate family, 73 percent of them in fact. And Hani knew just how hard her uncle worked at appearing normal. Being a son of Lilith required one to hide in plain sight, normal being interchangeable with invisible. Hani knew all about it. And if she ever forgot, all she had to do was stare in a mirror.

Hani paused to think that last thought through, which was slightly recursive but necessary. She had no doubt she could become exactly like her uncle if she tried. Actually, Hani suspected she’d become like him whatever. Flipping open his case, she spread her catch on the tiles. Another gun. No, she corrected herself, a Colt
revolver
… Specifics were always important. A
carte blanche
which was—Hani flipped it open—less than a month out of date. And inside it something else.

Folded within the
carte blanche
was a letter from a lawyer in Tunis addressed to her aunt Nafisa. Skimming the script as it flowed, elegant and fluid, from right to left across a perfectly ordinary piece of office paper, Hani began to memorize the contents word for word. It seemed that Zari Moncef al-Mansur, eldest son of the old Emir of Tunis had married Sally Welham, an English photographer on the…

The date was so wrong that Hani brushed it aside, stumbling over the fact that he’d divorced her five days later and halting altogether when she got to the date of her uncle’s birth. Had the letter been printed out on some computer she’d have dismissed the year as a simple typing error but the note was handwritten, which made the date either beyond careless or very odd indeed.

Pocketing the letter, Hani turned to a strip of Zaras, the photobooth kind. Younger, somewhat fatter, her eyes less troubled than now, despite the scowl with which she faced the camera. And then a photograph of Uncle Raf, staring into the sun with the
Jammaa ez Zitouna
in the background.

Okay, so whatever he’d told Aunt Nafisa before she died, Uncle Raf
had
been to Tunis because la Grande Mosquée, built by the Emir Ibrahim Ibn Ahmed in 856
C.E.
was not only the second largest mosque in Ifriqiya (the largest was in Kairouan) but also one of North Africa’s most instantly recognizable heritage sites.

In the photograph he looked older. That was, Uncle Ashraf looked as he did now, not as he should have done back when this was obviously taken. There was one final photograph.

“Oh…” Hani placed it facedown on the tiles and carefully packed the Zaras and Uncle Ashraf outside la Grande Mosquée into her rucksack, sliding them between sheets of headed paper. The Colt she put back into her uncle’s case. That left his final photograph.

The girl didn’t look poor—on her wrist was an Omega and an empty camera case hung around her neck. But the Fat Boys were definitely frayed and her feet were both bare and dirty. Her hair also looked like it needed a wash, being matted into rat tails around her thin face.

What shocked Hani was not the dirty hair or bare feet. Not even the half-open shirt she wore, washed so fine that what couldn’t be seen of the woman’s breasts through the gap was revealed by the translucence of the cloth. It was the way she leered into the lens, her mouth half-open, her eyes obviously fixed on the person holding her camera.

This Hani hadn’t considered and she doubted if Zara had either. Men went to brothels and, if they were sensible, women ignored this fact. So Hani had learnt from listening at the door to her late aunts, Nafisa and Jalila. As for mistresses, if a man could afford to run more than one house, this too was acceptable. Not least, Aunt Nafisa had sighed, because it did so help to lighten the load.

But a
nasrani
girlfriend… One who was thin, dirty and badly dressed?

Hani took another squint at the photograph. What with her rat’s nest of fair hair and narrow face, washed-out eyes and tight lips the barefoot woman was unlikely to be anything but
nasrani
… If this was the real reason her uncle refused to marry Zara, then that changed everything. For the first time since he’d stamped up the stairs into the
qaa
all those months ago, Hani came close to deciding that maybe she didn’t like her uncle after all.

Flashback

“Too fucking hot.” Even at 30 mph, which was way too
fast for the ruts in the track, the wind roared in Sally’s ears and swept words from her mouth. So she said it again, just in case Per hadn’t heard her the first time.

“Yeah,” said Per tightly, “I know.” Swinging the wheel of his black Jeep to avoid a missing bit of road, he bounced Sally hard into her door, setting off a new round of swearing. The Jeep was eighteen years old, cigarette burns pocked the top of its plastic dash and he’d been forced to buy a petrol rather than diesel version. Black was also, in Sally’s opinion, just about as stupid a colour as it was possible to find for skirting a desert; since it positively lapped up direct sunlight and made the interior too hot to touch.

The Jeep’s air-conditioning—and there’d been air-conditioning when they started—had lasted for all of three days. Per blamed Sally’s habit of hanging out of her side window for burning out the unit. Sally’s view was that if he’d bought an open top model as she originally suggested, he wouldn’t have needed air-conditioning and she wouldn’t have had to keep opening the window to take photographs.

She now knew about his interest in mythology, bush meat and oral sex. His plans to open a restaurant and the age he first smoked blow. He knew she liked cameras.

Having first dwindled into tight-lipped sentences, their conversation had since shrunk into near silence. They still fucked like animals but no longer had anything to say to each other afterwards. There were a lot of relationships like that, Sally realized. And she did enjoy fucking Per far more than talking to him. And they were animals. So…

Opening the Leica with one hand, Sally removed a completed roll of film and dropped it into the foil packet she’d already ripped from its replacement.

“What the fuck is there to photograph?”

The whole absurd and cruel beauty of Ifriqiya’s Chott el Jerid. Shrubs so hardy they came back from the dead, Lazarus-like; grasses able to tolerate saline levels that killed other plants; the distant pinks and yellows of minerals blooming across a flatbed of salt.

“Nothing,” Sally said, snapping shut her camera. “Absolutely nothing.” Beside the road stretched the largest salt lake in North Africa. Rock-hard in summer and partly flooded in winter, drying in early spring to brine pools and a treacherous skim of crust. Mysterious and wonderful. Utterly at odds with the olive groves and ubiquitous hedges of prickly pear that had made up yesterday’s trip south. Those could have been found in southern Spain, Sicily or Greece.

This was different.

How different the Swede could not even begin to realize. Here life was leaner, sharper and better able to deal with exotic levels of deprivation. At the edges of existence, life was forced to make a compromise. One that the world would soon find itself forced to make if the canker of global interests could not be cured.

In that at least Wu Yung was right. Although his way was not her way. Something the old Chinese man had still to realize. Any more than her way was Atal’s way or even Per’s…

Sally Welham shook her head. Per had the soft liberal reflexes of his class, race and age. He would no more understand what she wanted from the chott than accept how she intended to achieve it. He was a mindless fuck and a zipless one at that; defined by overprivilege, education, a simplistic rejection of Calvinism and a carpetbag of beliefs strip-mined from other cultures.

Whereas she…

At least Sally had the grace to grin. Grin, shrug and discard the comparison. She was the same, the difference was that she knew it.

“Ruin,” said Per, seconds ahead of slamming on his brakes. Sand slid down a bank like snow and when the Jeep stopped it was half on the track and half off, one rear wheel hanging over the side of a ditch.

“How about giving me some warning?” Sally snapped.

“I just did,” Per said and, pushing open his door, he was gone, all stiff-backed and straight-shouldered.

Sally sighed.

Once out of the jeep, she casually dropped her jeans then stayed to watch the warm stream run mercury-like over the sand’s crust, hardly touching its surface. That was the problem, rainfall raced across the desert’s surface like piss, filling oueds and flooding chotts and wadis. Grasses grew, flowers happened, insects bred; life blossomed and died in the time it took the sky to squat.

Still grinning ruefully, Sally stepped out of her jeans, yanked her T-shirt inside out and went to find Per. He’d be looking for mosaics in the ruins of some hovel he’d insist was Roman.

“Don’t walk on it,” Per said, not looking round. He was on his hands and knees sweeping rubbish from a floor with his fingers. Sally was willing to bet it was made from stamped-down dirt and that she had a better chance of becoming pope than Per did of finding a priceless mosaic beneath the crap that carpeted his goat hut.

Still, she let him brush away ring pulls and screw caps, plastic bottles and disposable nappies until his enthusiasm faded and he looked round to see Sally behind him, naked and with filthy feet. An equally dirty grin written across her face.

“Lie flat,” she told him, so Per did and Sally stepped forward and squatted again. His face was hot between her thighs, his tongue frantic. He licked and (later) fucked with the hunger of someone still drunk on her body. And Sally might have found such innocence endearing if she wasn’t already waving Per good-bye in her head.

She found the Swedish kroner at the bottom of his sleeping bag, along with a passport that revealed Per to be three years older than he’d admitted. For a second Sally was tempted to take the money but Ottoman banks liked dollars, marks and francs; even sterling gave them trouble, so God alone knew what they’d have made of kroner.

Besides, her quest was almost over. And what Sally already had, sewn into the lining of her rucksack, was worth more than Per’s cash or passport could ever be. Still smiling, she put his money back.

Sally woke Per with a hand job, something of a speciality for her, then rolled him onto his back and unzipped his bag before Per had time to notice its bottom end had been slashed open. He fucked with his eyes closed, even in daylight, spasming beneath her.

Little death they used to call it.
They
being almost every culture at some time or other. And so it was, in its way. Sex was the point at which individuality became unimportant. Life’s purpose over in everything but name the first time one fucked and was fertile; or would have been, but for contraception, medical advances and falling levels of fertility introducing design flaws into Darwin.

When the deed was done the torch was passed, to flame or die, except that now science kept even the weakest flames alight. Mutations happened for a reason, Sally accepted that utterly. And benevolent or not, Galton was right. This was not a statement Sally would have dared say in front of anyone she knew. Only to herself did she dare say it and only recently, once she realized that if the planet could not be saved, then humanity itself would have to be changed.

What the world needed was fewer farmers and more hunter-gatherers. Fewer cities and more wilderness…

“Sally?”

“What?”

“I need a pee,” Per said suddenly. He looked apologetic.

Sally stopped trying to rock the Swede back into action. “No problem,” she said, shrugging as she clambered off him, watching Per watch the darkness between her legs.

“I’ll see you in a second,” he said, blushing.

The moment he was gone, she rolled up his sleeping bag with the money and passport still in the foot, and stashed the roll in his Jeep alongside her own. And by the time Per came back Sally was dressed and in the passenger seat, ready to go.

“What about…?”

“Later,” said Sally. “First let’s get breakfast.” Glancing at their map, she pointed to a gap between two red hills. “There’s a town on the other side with a government hostel. It’s got showers.”

For the first time in days Per looked almost happy.