Arabesk (115 page)

The farmhouse had been built into the hill, with its back only slightly higher than the front. This meant that the room into which they finally passed had earth reaching two-thirds of the way up its outside walls; good for warmth in winter and useful in other ways too.

“Don’t tell me,” Raf said, “the place was like this when Eugenie found it.”

Emir Moncef smiled.

“She made a few adjustments,” he admitted. “Mostly involving chicken wire and concrete. Well, loosely…” Which was true. If chicken wire included military-grade titanium mesh and reinforced polyfoam walls could be described as concrete.

“How much of the farmhouse is actually left?”

“Ask Major Gide,” he said and clapped his hands.

It seemed the answer was virtually nothing. Apart, that was, from the original eagle gateposts, the granite fireplace and the flagstones in the hall. All walls, internal and external, conformed to Moscow’s best standards for blast resistance. Steel-cored doors hid beneath veneers of oak. Screamer wire looped the immediate forest at ankle height. A Molniya spysat hovered high overhead, streaming live data to combat software stashed in the cellar. The fat pantiles on the roof featured thermal feedback to keep the surface at ground ambient, day and night. Even the glass in the windows, double-glazed and shatterproof, vibrated at a random pitch to confuse anyone hidden outside with a parabolic mic.

All of it was black tek. All of it shipped in contravention of numerous UN resolutions banning the sales to Ifriqiya of weapons-grade technology.

“Those hunters,” said Raf.

“Georgian
Spetsnaz
.”

“What about the boar?” Hani demanded.

“Fake,” interrupted the Emir. “Eugenie de la Croix’s idea.” He nodded to Hani and smiled at Murad, who just looked at him, eyes wide, then glanced between the Emir and Raf and scowled.

“You think we look alike,” Moncef said. It wasn’t a question.

The small, dark-eyed boy nodded but Hani just shook her head.

“No,” she told the Emir, “you look way older.”

“It’s flu,” Lady Maryam said when Raf finally asked.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure.” Lady Maryam’s voice was sharp.

“How do you know?” Raf demanded. He’d already seen the whole farmhouse and apart from two large rooms upstairs, one used by the Emir, with another on the ground floor now claimed by Lady Maryam, meaning Major Gide had to share the dorm with her troops, that was it. Apart from the hall, kitchen and cellar. The
Spetsnaz
slept at a house in the village. One of the major’s jumpsuited teenagers did the cooking. There was no one else and nothing that looked like a surgery. As it was, Raf and the others were going to have to make their way back to Tunis that night because anything else presented too much of a risk.

“Major Gide is also his doctor,” Lady Maryam said shortly. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

They were back in the hall by the fire. The darkness outside was such that stars bled diamonds across black velvet through the one window left uncurtained. The longer he stayed, the jumpier Lady Maryam became, her politeness becoming ever more brittle by the minute. She’d already added Murad to the list of things at which she was unable to look, banishing Hani and her cousin to the kitchen.

“I should go,” Raf said.

“Yes,” agreed Lady Maryam and as she clapped her hands a wattle of flesh on her wrist quivered. She was old, Raf realized. The way the Emir was old. Made older by bitterness and four decades of marital exile. All she had on her side was that her son had been born first.

“I’ll have someone fetch the children,” Lady Maryam said.

Raf nodded. “That would be kind,” he replied, knowing that kindness had nothing to do with it. “But first I need to ask the Emir some questions… That’s why I’m here,” Raf said, when the woman looked at him blankly. Turning for the stairs, he was irritated to hear Lady Maryam’s heavy steps following behind.

“I need to see him alone.”

“He’s my husband,” said Lady Maryam.

And my father, apparently
, Raf said. But he said it under his breath.

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.

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.