Arabesk (118 page)

Eduardo knew different.

Ashraf Bey was trying to find his mother’s original wedding certificate… Sometimes politics were way more complicated than Eduardo could understand.

Friday 4th March

An elegant young woman outside Arrivals was waving
for a taxi. Something Eduardo didn’t need to do since he had a car already waiting. At least, he had a uniformed driver clutching a board with Eduardo’s name on it so Eduardo assumed he had a car as well.

Eduardo almost offered the woman a lift into the centre but when he nodded to her she just scowled. So Eduardo went back to helping Rose navigate her way through a crowd of C3N cameramen waiting for taxis at the front of Tunis Arrivals.

This was what happened if one suddenly lifted the embargo on flights to facilitate the departure of nonessential diplomatic staff. More people turned up than left. He was pretty sure that wasn’t what the UN had in mind.

“We’re here, sir.”

Eduardo liked that last word. It suggested that the driver thought he and Rose looked properly Western, which they were more or less. Soviet tourists would have got
commissar
, not meant obviously but always good for increasing
baksheesh
as tourists called tips, getting wrong both country and language. Anyone local wearing a suit like Eduardo’s would have merited
effendi
, just to be on the safe side.

So that
sir
meant the young driver realized Eduardo was not local and not a Soviet tourist. Unless, of course, the boy called everybody that.

Originally Eduardo had been planning to fly alone and travel first class, the man having said buy any ticket he liked as long as the flight left that afternoon. But when Eduardo realized that premium cost half the price of first he decided Rose should come with him.

So that was what they did. And though Eduardo got the feeling Rose had never flown before, she insisted she’d flown dozens of times to numerous destinations. But then he’d told her exactly the same.

What’s more, she’d enjoyed the flight. Eduardo knew, because he’d been careful to ask. And she looked great. He’d been careful to tell her that too.

The Benz waiting outside Tunis Arrivals was big and black, smarter than Eduardo could ever have expected, with metal pipes coming out of the engine and running down either side of the hood. The pipes had been silver to start with but now they were grey with wide bands of kingfisher blue, like petrol floating on top of a fresh puddle.

Alexandre, who was young and wore the uniform of a Tunis detective (something he suspected his visitors might not yet have realized), walked round to the back door of the Emir’s second-favourite car and held it open.

At a nod from the small man, the woman clambered in and smoothed a black dress covered with red roses down over her pink knees. Leaving her partner still anxiously eyeing their luggage, such as it was.

“My case…”

Ashraf Bey’s original call had told Eduardo to buy a new suit, new shoes, several shirts and a tie. The man had even specified the colour of each: dark blue for the suit, white for the shirts and red for the tie (no stripes). He’d said nothing about buying a case in which to put these things.

“Of course, sir.” Alexandre was apologetic. “I should have realized you’d need your case with you.” He picked up the cardboard box with its cheap handle, wondering at its lightness, and waited for Eduardo to join the woman. Only then did Alexandre put the case in the well of the borrowed car, beside Eduardo’s feet.

“Where to, sir?”

Eduardo thought about it. “What are my options?”

Alexandre tried not to sigh.

Accelerated entry to officer level and descent from an ex-
colon
family that had owned dairy farms in the High Tell guaranteed he got given the shitty jobs by sergeants who grew up in the medina or the nouvelle ville, people he’d outrank within the year and who knew that fact but could never forgive it.

All the same, the fact Alexandre had been warned to handle this job with discretion meant the anxious-looking man in the rear seat had to be somebody important. Exactly why that might be became clear when Alexandre opened his mouth to answer, only to discover that the man sat behind him was already talking, mostly to himself.

“We could start with the Police HQ, I suppose.”

Alexandre nodded.

“Or we could go find the boss…”

To Alexandre that meant his colonel. He got the feeling this man had someone else in mind. “The boss?” Alexandre asked, in a tone he hoped was politely casual.

“Ashraf al-Mansur…”

“You know the bey?”

“He’s my boss.” Eduardo sounded as proud of the fact as he felt, which was very proud indeed.

“And my boss too,” Alexandre said. “Apparently Ashraf Bey is the new Chief of Police.” That was what he’d been told anyway. It was all change at HQ.

“Actually…” Eduardo glanced at Rose and looked embarrassed. “The thing is, you see… I’m the new Chief.” Eduardo tasted the words as he said them and sat up a little straighter in his seat.

And, like a good detective, he noticed the way Alexandre immediately did the same, straightening his shoulders and quickly adjusting his cap. That was when he realized Alexandre was one of his men.

“I’m sorry, Your Excellency. I didn’t know.”

“Why should you?” Eduardo said, feeling expansive. “And you don’t need to call me Excellency, sir is fine… All the same, I have a question for you. An important question.”

Alexandre froze.

“What do you know…?” Eduardo whipped out a leather notebook he’d bought at Iskandryia airport, flipped it open, and watched the opening page come alight. “Let me see, what do you know about a pâtissier called Pascal Boulart? Other than the fact he was stabbed in an alley behind Maison Hafsid and a sous-chef was arrested…”

It turned out Alexandre knew even less than that. He knew the killing all right, he just had no memory of anyone having been arrested by the police. As Alexandre tried to point out, as circumspectly as possible, this might just mean the murderer had been picked up by Kashif Pasha’s men.

Although the military wing of the police was meant to liaise with the civilian branches, this sometimes failed to happen, very occasionally, obviously.

“Find out if they did,” said Eduardo. “And get me files on everyone killed in the massacre at the Domus Aurea.”

“There were only four.” Alexandre regretted the remark as soon as he made it. “I mean, the fifth one got away.”

“Four is enough,” Eduardo said firmly. “Now take me to the hotel.” He needed a shower, as did Rose. And with luck, if the shower was big enough, they could share.

“Hotel…?”

Eduardo nodded.

“You are not staying at a hotel, sir. My orders were to take you wherever you wanted and deliver your luggage to the Dar Ben Abdallah.”

“Dar, maison, hôtel,”
said Eduardo, “it’s all the same, you know.” He turned to Rose. “In French,” he explained, “
hôtel
means big house, like in
Hôtel de Ville
… Isn’t that right?”

Alexandre nodded, not taking his eyes off the road.

On their way into the city all the other traffic moved out of the way. Eduardo was wondering about this until he remembered the flag. He wasn’t sure what the flag on the hood stood for but it looked very official.

Sunday 6th March

Palms shaded yellow earth, so that sunlight sketched patterns
across the banks of a narrow stream, highlighting twigs and dead fronds. The water in the
seguia
was dirty, the grass edging the ditch and the undersides of the palms less bright than Zara expected. Only ungrown dates, tiny and green and still vulnerable to the sand winds, seemed created from a brighter scheme altogether. This was a world of ochres and earth hues. An Impressionist umbrella restricted to the palette of a Klee.

Farther along, half-in/half-out of the stream lay a fallen palm with its trunk ringed like an endlessly extruded pinecone. The crown was gone but, since fronds extended fingerlike from beneath the sand that covered a newly repaired footbridge, the reason was not hard to find.

The coolness of the gardens was in welcome contrast to the last fifty miles across the chott, when the air had been salt and hot, unseasonably so the taxi driver had told her, several times.

“I’m here to collect Lady Hana al-Mansur.”

Zara stood on the edge of Tozeur’s famous grove, home of the translucent
deglet nur
and site of a quarter of a million palms fed by two hundred springs that carried water to the date trees. The only thing to stop her reaching a small palace on the other side of the stream was a single soldier guarding a narrow bridge. The palace had been built by one of the old beys or emirs. It must have been, because only a notable could get away with building a palace on land historically reserved for growing dates.

Over the centuries, gold and slaves had passed through this area, carpets and priceless manuscripts, swords and spices. None of them creating the wealth of the date palms. At its height, a millennium before, a thousand dromedaries a day were said to have left Tozeur, laden with dates and even now many of the town’s inhabitants were
khammes
, sharecroppers who maintained the groves and in return took one-fifth of the harvest as their pay.

Behind Zara in an airport taxi sat a driver, looking in disbelief at a pile of notes on his lap. She’d paid him what was on the meter, Tunis to Tozeur, having brushed away his offer to negotiate.

In fact, the man could honestly say she’d hardly glanced at the meter their entire trip, most of which she’d spent watching distant green fields turn to sahal before becoming moonlike around the phosphate town of Gafsa. A place of which a wise man once said, “Its water is blood, its air poison, you may live there a hundred years without making one true friend…”

“She is here?” Zara said, frowning at the guard. “Hani al-Mansur?”

The soldier to whom Zara spoke was thickset, with cropped hair more salt than pepper. He’d been having one of those weeks.

“I’m not sure, my lady…” The man made a show of unclipping a radio from his belt, wondering as he did so, why the young woman’s face suddenly tightened. “I’ll make a call.”

“Zara Quitrimala,”
Zara said, “
Ms
. Zara Quitrimala.” The way she said it made her name begin with a hiss. “And you don’t use honorifics when talking to me. I’m perfectly ordinary.”

The look the guard gave her begged leave to differ.

Moncef Hauara was unmarried which was rare for a middle-aged man in Tozeur, unmarried and about to retire from active duty. Living with his mother, a woman who’d spent her life repairing clothes for notables, he recognized both shot silk and the French way of cutting on the bias. Although, if asked, he’d have said the jet buttons were what he noticed. Most manufacturers used black plastic while a few of the flashier labels chose machine-cut obsidian. Only Dior and Chanel still used buttons hand-carved from Italian jet, the way they’d always done.

He knew, the way he knew a storm was brewing, exactly how long it would have taken someone to sew that jacket. How long it took to double-stitch the hems and edge each buttonhole. There were a dozen differing grades of silk, variable in their wear and lasting qualities as well as their ease of cutting and ability to hold dye.

There was nothing ordinary about that dress or the cut. And Corporal Hauara doubted strongly that there was anything remotely ordinary about the woman who wore it. At least not in any sense that a soon-to-retire soldier who still lived with his mother would understand.

“Yes, sir. I’ll do that.”

The corporal clicked off his radio and promptly dialled a fresh number. Sweat was beginning to show beneath his arms. A short conversation followed, of which Zara heard only one half.

“A young lady.”

“Zara Quitrimala.”

“Quitrimala.”

“Yes, sir. Quite possibly.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll ask.”

“Forgive me,” said the guard, “but Major Jalal would like to know if Hana al-Mansur is expecting you? Also, why you think she is here…”

For someone so determined Zara did a good imitation of not having foreseen that question. “My father’s…”

Corporal Hauara knew who her father was. At least he did now.

“He’s guardian to…” Stumbling over the sense as much as the words, Zara tried to work out exactly what her father was to Hani, other than extremely fond. A fact replete with problems for someone whose own childhood memories were of a loud, occasionally threatening figure; a version of himself Hamzah Effendi seemed to have left behind.

“She told me she’d be here,” said Zara finally, waving a piece of headed paper, signed by her father and the Khedive of El Iskandryia. This announced that they were the child’s trustees and Zara acted with full authority. It slid over the fact they were trustees only where the child’s money was concerned. Zara’s furious request to her father that he let her go save Hani from imminent civil war had seen to that.

As for the Khedive, Zara had no doubts that he countersigned Hamzah’s letter because she had tears in her eyes when she asked.

“What time does curfew begin?” Zara demanded.

Corporal Hauara looked at her. “Curfew?”

“It was on C3N. What time do Kashif Pasha’s troops lock down the streets at night…”

“There is no curfew,” the guard said carefully. “At least not in Tozeur. Perhaps in Tunis.” He wanted to add something else, but the years had taught him to swallow such thoughts. That was the secret of surviving. To stay silent while seeming to do nothing but talk.

The small anteroom into which Zara was shown looked vast, largely because all four walls were mirror. Each mirror was framed within an elaborate double arch, each arch supported on stick-thin pillars topped by gilded capitals that displayed endless repetitions of a simplified, stylized acanthus.

It was in the worst possible taste.

The left-hand arch of one wall hid a door. Zara thought she knew which mirror it was but had a feeling that, if she so wished, it would be easy to forget. Forgetting about her reflection was more difficult.