Arabesk (110 page)

“Okay,” agreed Raf. That did explain the marble Madonna of his imagining.

There were plane trees beyond the window. Chrome blinds. A crack that ran across the floor where grouting between tiles had snapped along a stress line, then opened up, until the crack changed direction and broke tiles instead.

But the tiles were clean and recently scrubbed. Come to that the whole room was spotless.

“Which says what?”

That Pascal was too poor to afford repairs on the flat he shared with his sister but still liked it kept clean?

“Or wasn’t anal enough to worry about interior decoration.”

That too, except the tiny music system, sandblasted metal bed and chrome table had anal-retentive written through them like rock. Walking to the bedroom door, Raf glanced at the area beyond. A living space with Toshiba screen. Black leather sofa. Another chrome-and-glass table. Doors led to a small kitchen. A bathroom with shower stall. And finally, a second bedroom, half the size of the one in which he awoke. The other difference was a lock recently fixed to the inside of that door. Ceramic foals sat on a glass shelf but there were no posters or pictures and no slim marble Madonna. Nothing of real interest in the small bedside cabinet.

“Well,” said a voice behind him, “find what you were looking for?” The question came from Isabeau. She was leaning against the doorframe of what he now knew was her own room, wearing a towel, which only made Raf more aware of his own nakedness.

“What I was looking for?”

“You were going to find out who Pascal was, remember? Get inside his head and work out who might have really killed him. Since everyone believes Idries, who’s convinced it wasn’t his cousin. And apparently I’m meant to believe Idries too…”

Raf put a hand to his aching head. “I told you I wanted to come here so I could
empathize
?”

Isabeau nodded.

“And the other stuff,” he looked at her towel, “that just happened?”

“Sure,” said Isabeau, turning away. “If you must put it like that.” Raf heard her feet on the tiles all the way back to the room they’d shared. There was a slam of the door. Two minutes of muted shuffling, then the noise of the door being opened again. He listened to her shoes slap the tiles, then she was gone with a slam of a different door.

Having dressed, Raf let himself out.

Tuesday 1st March

A neatly bearded man in a tarboosh stared out from a
creased page. Below him a caption informed the scruffy girl in black headscarf, jeans and silver trainers that the Emir’s eldest son would be dining at the Domus Aurea and, in a return to best Ottoman tradition, his mother had asked that all attendants at the celebratory meal be both deaf and dumb.

Unfortunately, finding staff who fitted this profile while possessing sufficient experience had proved impossible. They had, however, all been carefully screened for suitability.

The rest of the page was equally bland, its headlines subdued and reverential; which was probably why someone had dumped that day’s
El Pays
under a chair in the buffet car.

Putting down the paper, the girl swallowed the last of her coffee and returned her plastic cup to the attendant, even though she had to stand on a cat basket to reach his counter. Then, just to be tidy, she collected up half a dozen other discarded cups and returned those too.

“Thank you.” The man at the counter smiled. “Are you this tidy at home?”

Hani nodded, even though it wasn’t strictly true. Donna did all of the kitchen cleaning at the madersa and got cross if Hani tried to help. And although Khartoum had explained that Donna was the kind of person who preferred others not to interfere, this wasn’t much help because Hani’s aunt Nafisa had spent her life telling Hani to pick things up, tidy away her toys and generally be busy and industrious, preferably somewhere else.

So now Hani tidied on instinct. It was a hard habit to break.

“Problems?”

“Not really,” said Hani, putting down the last of the cups and nodding towards the next carriage. “Unless you count blocked loos and messy basins.” She shrugged. “You know soldiers…”

The man looked at her. “Ifriqiya needs conscripts,” he said, more serious than before.

Hani looked like she wanted to disagree but all she did was shrug her thin shoulders and wrap her
hijab
more tightly around her face. “You’re probably right,” she said, “but I’m not entirely sure it needs them to vomit in the basins…”

Despite himself the man smiled. “Luckily,” he said. “I have my own loo.”

Hani looked at him.

“For attendants only,” he explained carefully.

The girl kept looking and it was the man’s turn to sigh.

“Through there,” he said and pointed to a blank door. “Don’t take long. I’m closing up in a minute.”

The girl who entered the first-class carriage wore dark glasses with drop-pearl earrings; and the only thing that detracted from the look, besides the fact Hani’s glasses were too big and blood smudged one ear (where an earring had been forced through flesh), was a tatty rattan cat basket so large it scraped against her leg as she walked.

Catching sight of herself in a window Hani wiped away the blood with her finger and thumb and adjusted her shades.

“Is that seat taken?”

The foreigner in the stripy jacket looked so bemused that Hani switched to French and, as she thought, the seat by the door was free. Hani hadn’t really expected him to understand Arabic, but Zara insisted its use was politically essential so Hani tried to remember to use it first. Quite why Arabic should be the natural language of North Africa when almost everyone she met spoke French, Hani wasn’t sure.

“Okay,” said Hani as she scratched a fingernail against rattan. “We’re here.”

Inside Hani’s basket, Ifritah scratched back, meowed noisily and then hurled herself against the grille with a thud, leaving the foreigner looking more bemused than ever.

“Wild cat,” Hani said, reaching for its handle. And it was almost true. The one thing Ifritah wasn’t was house-trained…

Even before she stepped onto the platform Hani knew she was going to like Tunis. It had as much history as El Isk plus pirates, corsairs and freebooters. She really didn’t understand why the Germans, in particular, and the Americans hated it so.

“Ready?” Hani asked her basket. Without waiting for Ifritah’s answer, Hani pushed herself out of her seat, slammed down the window of her still-moving carriage and swung open the door to a shout of outrage from a porter on the platform.

Jumping down Hani almost tripped over her new shoes. Really she’d wanted to keep her trainers, but dumped them in a bin along with her jeans, T-shirt and
hijab
… In their place Hani wore a skirt made from red silk with an embroidered green waistcoat over a white shirt. Since the silk, velvet and white cotton were sewn together, the outfit probably counted as a dress even if it didn’t look like one.

On the breast of her green waistcoat Hani had pinned a spray of diamond feathers so impossibly extravagant they had to be fake. As the white shirt left more of her neck bare than Hani really liked, she’d borrowed a fat row of amber beads from Aunt Nafisa’s old leather jewellery box. She knew the beads weren’t of good quality. If they had been, her aunt would have sold them.

Stalking past the scowling porter, Hani worked hard on looking like someone who knew exactly where she was going. Grown-ups tended only to notice anxiety. So the secret to being invisible was to be seen. Hani smiled at that, pleased to realize she was finally beginning to think like her Uncle Ashraf.

“Okay,” she told Ifritah, “first we send Zara a postcard, then we find a taxi…”

The postcard bit was easy. Hani had taken a free card from a rack in the transAtlas express and also a free pen; one of those cheap blue ones too short to write with neatly. It was currently pushed under half a dozen rattan strands on Ifritah’s basket.

“Table,” Hani told herself, looking round the crowded platform. There were a lot of soldiers at one end, plus a dozen men in black uniforms with guns who might have been police. Whoever they were, they were so busy watching the soldiers separate people by sex and herd them into a tent or under a metal arch that they forgot to glance at Hani as she slid under a barrier and strode towards a café near the entrance to the station’s marble concourse.

“Is this seat taken?” This time the man Hani asked understood Arabic and smiled an old man’s smile as he told her it was free. He left Hani in peace to scribble her message and no one appeared from inside to take her order, both of which were a blessing. Message written, Hani thanked the old man for partial use of his table and headed for a nearby postbox.

Zara was going to be cross, that much was obvious. She’d been coldly furious when she first realized Raf was gone without a word and now she’d be more furious still. And not just with Uncle Ashraf.

“Tough.” By the time her card got delivered Hani intended to have found her uncle, delivered the diamond
chelengk
, and given him back his dark glasses. So if Zara did turn up in Tunis, she’d never know that Raf wasn’t really on a secret mission. Mind you, that would probably just make her more furious still.

In the end Hani decided against trying to get a taxi. All her notes were too big anyway and she wasn’t really sure where she needed to go…

Lieutenant Aziz liked station duty. It was undemanding, he got to drink endless cups of hot sweet cocoa given free by grateful cafés, and there was a long list of brother officers only too happy to share the work. This meant the lieutenant got to go home on time. He wasn’t a real lieutenant, of course, just some math student from Bizerte unable to graduate until he’d done national service. That was the deal. Between passing his finals, which he already had, and actually graduating came a year in the army.

That he’d been commissioned into the National Guard the same month that he got married was his own bad luck. Or bad planning on the part of his mother. Either way, he’d been taking weeks’ worth of grief from his colonel about his eagerness to sneak off early.

Of course, some of that eagerness really was about getting back to his new bride. The rest of it, well, politics weren’t his thing but somehow everyone else in the regiment seemed to feel different.

“Excuse me…”

Lieutenant Aziz looked down to see a girl in ludicrously large dark glasses holding a rattan basket. She wore a dress that might have belonged to a gypsy princess in some German operetta.

“I’m trying to find my cousin.”

The girl looked so serious that Aziz almost laughed. Luckily he had a young sister and enough imagination to know that his sister hated people laughing at her. So instead he dropped to a crouch, aware that his men were watching.

“Are you lost?”

“Not yet.” The girl looked around her. “But I will be soon if you don’t help.”

Aziz smiled. “When did you lose him?” He took it for granted that her cousin was male.

Hani looked blank.

“Your cousin,” said the lieutenant.

“He’s not lost,” Hani said. “I just haven’t found him yet.”

Lieutenant Aziz paused. “Okay,” he said. “Your cousin was meeting you from the train…”

Hani shook her head.

“He didn’t expect you to find your own way home?” Aziz looked so shocked that Hani reached out and patted his shoulder without thinking.

“Of course not,” she said. “He doesn’t know I’m coming yet.”

“He doesn’t…?” Runaways were the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Order, which meant he’d be perfectly justified in handing over the child and walking away. Something the lieutenant knew he wouldn’t be doing.

Aziz started again.

“Where does your cousin live?”

“In the Bardo Palace. But he’s going to be at Domus Aurea tonight.”

Hani wasn’t quite certain how to put what happened next but whoever had been smiling out of those eyes was now hidden. All she got was perfect blankness.

“Domus Aurea…” Lieutenant Aziz dragged the address out as if uncertain where it should stop.

“That’s right,” Hani twirled round to show off her outfit. “I’ve come for the party.”

“And your cousin…”

“Kashif Pasha,” Hani said. “Or the Emir, he’s also a cousin.” She put her head to one side as she thought about that some more. “Actually,” she said, “everyone’s a cousin, except Zara…”

The lieutenant commandeered a parked taxi by the simple expedient of telling its driver that his passenger was Emir Moncef’s cousin. And having handed the child to a flustered officer at the gates of the Golden House, Lieutenant Aziz told the taxi to take him home.

Flashback

“So, tell me…” Accompanying the demand came a mild
slap. An aide-memoire, little more. A warning of what might become real. “Why are you really here?”

“To see Prince Moncef.” Sally chewed the inside of her lip, hard enough to tear flesh, then spat the salt taste from her mouth, allowing it to dribble slowly down her chin. “As I already told you. So why not just fuck off and…”

The second slap splashed blood across her cheek, as Sally had known it would. She spat more of the salt onto her chin, readying herself for another blow.

There were rules to this game. Hell, there were whole Web sites devoted to handling how to be questioned. Not that Sally needed Web sites for instruction. She’d been through the mill for real in London, Vienna and Florence. She’d got away without questioning in Madrid and never even been picked up in New York.

In Zurich the police had skipped on questioning and tossed her over the border with a warning that to return would result in a long prison sentence or worse. A leer from a fat uniform as he told her this was intended to indicate what might be worse than several years’ incarceration in Europe’s most boring country.

“Enough,” said a new voice. The light in Sally’s face went out. A moment later fingers grabbed her bottom lip and yanked it down.

“Quite the little professional.”