Arabesk (121 page)

“I’ll go,” Hani said. “You went first last time.”

The difficult bit turned out to be lowering herself over the edge, what with tiles scraping against knees, legs and tummy until the pull of gravity left her hanging. And that was before Hani edged rapidly along the drop looking for a tear she’d seen in the tarpaulin. Swinging once for luck, Hani flipped through the gap to land inside the mashrabiya.

It was all she could do not to miaow.

“Now you,” Hani hissed, ripping aside some of the rotted canvas. “That should make it easier.”

She saw his shoes first, scuffed oxfords followed rapidly by socks, turn-ups from his flannel trousers and then the length of his body up to the waist. She thought for a second Murad was about to freeze but he kept coming until he hung, eyes shut high above the courtyard.

“Do it,” Hani said.

So Murad swung once, jackknifing like a gymnast and when he landed it was on his toes.

“That was okay,” Hani admitted and Murad almost smiled. Together they refixed the rotten canvas as best they could. Hanging the tarpaulin from the holes that Hani had made when she ripped some of it down.

The empty house had two exits, a main one onto an alley and a small door, cupboardlike, that opened into a cul-de-sac so tight it was little more than the gap between two barely separate walls, one obviously much newer than the other. They chose the narrow way and finally exited on a street called Rue des Jardins, walking quickly with their heads down until they passed through a car park behind a hotel.

Walking slowly would have made more sense. Only neither one quite had the nerve so they hurried instead, trying hard not to run. And when they finally reached the market on Rue Ibn Chabbat, Hani made Murad stop in the shadow of a lorry.

“Let me,” she said. Her handkerchief was unused and still held creases from where it had been ironed by Donna. Just looking at it made Hani want to cry. Licking a corner, she steadied Murad’s chin with one hand and wiped crusted blood from the side of his mouth with the other. When she tried to wash blood from his left ear Murad began to cry as well.

“We
are
running away, right?” Murad asked, once his face was clean again.

“Not exactly,” said Hani. She smiled at the boy’s exasperated expression. “We’re staying out of trouble…”

It was Murad who first saw the bus. And Hani who pointed out that the vehicle was actually a coach. A brief argument about the difference then followed before Murad eventually bowed to Hani’s insistence that coaches had smoked-glass windows, air-conditioning and their own loos.

This one even had onboard newsfeed, computer games and four private cabins. A fact advertised in large gold letters along both sides. Right below a line that read
Haute Travel: Tripoli
and above the URL for a site few locals could get, because Web connections without licence were banned by law in Ifriqiya. Not to mention most other parts of North Africa.

“We need a disguise,” said Hani.

Murad stared at her.

“Think about it,” said Hani. “Those soldiers were after Murad Pasha and Lady Hana al-Mansur.” That Hani admitted her own first name was unusual in itself.

“If they
are
actually after us,” Murad said. He’d been thinking about that.

“Who else would they be after?”

“Ashraf Bey?”

“They waited until he was gone,” Hani said firmly. She turned to Murad, face serious. “You’re certain they were Kashif’s men?”

“I’m sure,” said Murad.

“Even though they said they were the Army of the Naked?”

“Yes,” Murad said. “That’s why I’m sure.”

“Okay,” said Hani. Peeling $5 from her roll she gave it to Murad. “You got this as a tip from an American journalist,” she told the boy.

“Why?”

Hani sighed. “It doesn’t matter… For showing her the way. For fetching her a glass of water. Make it up.”

“What do you want me to get?” Murad demanded.

He bought a white T-shirt, made in Morocco, size XXL and a pair of plastic sandals with
sputnik
in red across the strap. Murad also bought a Dynamo’s hat, which he wrecked by ripping off the brim so that from the front it looked like a skullcap.

“What did you buy that for?” Hani asked.

“The cap?”

“No silly, that…” She pointed at the T-shirt still draped over his arm.

“Watch,” said Murad and stripped off his soiled Aertex shirt and scrunched it into a ball. Slipping the new shirt over his head, Murad turned his back on Hani and unbuttoned his trousers, stepping out of those as well. With a T-shirt down around his knees, his socks gone and cheap sandals Murad looked like most other kids in the market, his new shirt making do for a robe.

When he turned back Hani was pointedly staring into the distance.

“Your turn,” said Murad.

Friday 11th March

“You came,” said Major Jalal, as if he’d been waiting
hours
for Raf to appear. Hawk eyes glittered above a sharp nose and heavy moustache. And the smile that accompanied his comment hovered on the edge of contempt.

“How could I refuse my brother?” Raf said lightly. A single glance was enough to swallow the scene: Major Jalal in full uniform, a lieutenant and, standing behind him, the inevitable black Jeep.

Two soldiers stood by the Jeep trying to look casual.

“Well, now you’re here,” said Major Jalal, “where would Your Excellency like to sit, front or the back…?”

“Zara?” Raf asked, not moving.

“Your mistress is safe,” Major Jalal assured him. “And you can see her soon. But, before that, I’ve got orders to take you to Kashif Pasha. He would like a word.”

Raf smiled. “You know how it is,” he said. “Family comes first.”

“I understand that’s one of the things His Highness wants to talk about.” Major Jalal’s voice was dry. “The fact you seem to believe he’s your brother.”

Kashif hadn’t always been manipulative. So people said. Mostly those who’d never met him. As a small boy he’d been loved and loving, open and happy to consider the feelings of others. That was how Kashif Pasha’s official biography reported it anyway.

One day, maybe thirty years ago when he was first made a general, so sometime around seventeen, Kashif had demanded sight of his early school reports. Harrying some minor archivist into finding the file and doing whatever was necessary to get it released.

This was during one of Emir Moncef’s periodic bouts of madness. With the man camped out under a summer sky somewhere south of Wadi al B’ir, speaking to no one and sleeping between two of Eugenie’s troop for warmth. Wearing nothing, apparently. Although the girls were allowed to retain their pants. It was all extremely adolescent.

Of course, only Lady Maryam dared call it madness. Everybody else spoke of the Emir’s retreats and his need to remain in touch with the land. But it was madness all the same. A howling depression that had Moncef claiming (literally) to be someone else. At these times only Eugenie could help. Wherever she was and whatever she might be doing, Eugenie stopped doing it and came, elegant and stern-faced. He was quieter after her visits. Sometimes for months and once for the period of a whole year.

The school Kashif attended was at the rear of the Bardo Palace next to a mosque. School and mosque were not connected. It was, however, reasonable to assume they were and many people did, both in Tunis and abroad. There were eighteen and a half pupils in Kashif’s class, this being the national average. And his year was taught the national syllabus, which included French, gymnastics, mathematics and poetry. The half pupil was achieved by allowing one boy to attend every other lesson.

If one left out the fact the other seventeen and a half pupils in Kashif’s class were either his cousins or chosen from the sons of government ministers, then Bardo High was a typical local school of the kind found all over Ifriqiya. What most news reports forgot to mention was that Kashif’s school had only one class, his own. The school opened when he reached five and shut when he reached fifteen; there never was a year below Kashif or a year above. The pupil to staff ratio was two to one.

His reports had been as exemplary as his marks. Each master describing a warm and outgoing child. A boy who’d unquestionably have had a great future ahead of him irrespective of birth.

Having reread these, Kashif Pasha demanded the real reports—on the basis that these must exist. A request which sent the already nervous archivist into near-terminal decline. Faced with arranging the forbidden, the archivist tried to explain to Kashif about
secret bags
, inadvertently offering the seventeen-year-old boy a whole new source of information and income.

Secret bags were kept in a vault below the Bardo, that much the archivist knew. Once sealed they could only be opened in the presence of a witness, provided… There’d followed a long list of stipulations to which the young Kashif hadn’t bothered to listen.

Practically dragging the archivist to where the man believed the secret bags were stored, Kashif demanded they both be given entry. With the Emir gone and that wing otherwise empty, the chamberlain had done the obvious; opened the front door and saluted smartly. It had taken Kashif ten minutes to identify the vault and another five to bully someone into unlocking the door. A problem never to arise again after Kashif relieved the porter of his key.

Goatskin, Kashif decided, maybe sheep, nothing too fancy. Cured in a way that was almost intentionally perfunctory and stitched crudely with gut. Impressive signatures covered each bag, mostly from his father and occasionally Eugenie. One from the Soviet ambassador and even one from the Marquis de St. Cloud. Any person wanting to open a bag to examine its contents had to sign the outside before the seal was cut. Some of the newer seals were almost silver, others oxidized down to a dull black.

Kashif was inordinately proud to discover that he had a whole rack to himself. Seven leather bags in total. Starting with the first, Kashif cut its seal and began to read an account of his life that he recognized.

He was surly, bad at games and prone to violence. His unbroken run of goals, his easy knockdowns in boxing and rapid fencing victories owed more to who he was than to any innate physical talent.

His marks suffered an automatic 25 percent inflation. The French mistress he liked most had been paid off after complaining that he’d molested her in a corridor.

The summer Kashif turned seventeen was the year he got his reputation for working hard. He’d appear every morning at the relevant wing of the Bardo, notebook in hand and a nervous young archivist two steps behind. And each evening he’d make his way back to his mother’s dar with another courtier’s life pinned to the board of his memory.

He made friends fast that summer and was given three cars, including his first Porsche and a speedboat he used to take Russian girls water-skiing, until he hit a sunken rock and an attaché’s daughter ended up a casualty. The high point was when he acquired his own villa on Iles de Kirkeah, from an elderly general whose devotion to his childless, long-suffering wife was apparently exceeded only by his devotion to a long string of pretty Moroccan houseboys.

Every bag he chose Kashif dutifully signed, leaving it to the archivist to repack the contents and affix a new seal. The one for his mother was especially interesting. Particularly in relation to a visit made to Gerda Schulte three weeks before she married his father. A surgeon briefly famous for patenting the only medically undetectable, biologically foolproof method of restoring virginity. A technique surprisingly popular among the middle classes of North Africa and the source of her heir’s considerable wealth.

It was a snippet of information Kashif parlayed with his mother into a new apartment in the Bardo, one with its own entrance. His other knowledge Kashif kept close as an enemy, deadly as a friend; using it only as necessary once that first flush of power was gone. Murad wasn’t even born when Kashif discovered the bags and, by the time he was, the bags had gone. Exactly when they vanished Kashif never discovered. He’d gone to Monte Carlo one Monday and come back two years later to find the room empty and repainted, awaiting delivery of an apparently valuable collection of late-nineteenth-century tax returns.

One thing Kashif knew for certain though. No bag had made reference to his father having married again. At least not until that American girl to whom Eugenie introduced him, Murad’s mother. The one who went off a cliff. And the bag that dealt with Moncef’s bastards made no reference to an Ashraf al-Mansur or Ashraf anything else, come to that… Whatever the late Eugenie de la Croix or his father might claim.

“Afternoon,” Raf said to a guard by the side of the path. The man looked at Major Jalal, trying to work out if he was meant to salute Ashraf Bey or not. Just to be safe, he saluted anyway.

Up ahead stood Kashif Pasha, with no one else in sight. At least not obviously; one sniper hid in a clump of palms to Raf’s left.
Phoenix dactylifera
, tree of the Phoenicians with finger-resembling fruit. Raf had Hani to thank for that snippet of information.

Another sniper was behind him. The smell of tobacco as Raf entered the amphitheatre had been too strong not to whisper its warning. That Kashif Pasha felt such protection was necessary almost made Raf feel better.

“Brother.” Raf drawled the word. No greeting and no title, zero hostility either. Let the other man make the running on this. Kashif Pasha was supposed to be a poker player, famous for it apparently…

Raf smiled.

“Feeling happy about something?” asked Kashif.

“Always glad to see you,” Raf said. “You know how it is.”

“No,” said Kashif, “I can’t say I do.”

Raf’s grin was bleak as he adjusted his Armani shades and smelled the hot wind. Sweat, fear, anger and triumph. Beneath the distant tobacco and Kashif’s cologne there was a veritable symphony of olfactory molecules being ripped apart by a breeze that filtered between salt-stunted thorns.

“Oh well,” he said.

They stood in the ruins of a small Roman amphitheatre with fifteen circles of seating cut direct into crumbling pink rock. The central circle was half-buried in dust and a cheap kiosk near the entrance had signs that read
Closed
in seven languages. Its filthy window and padlocked door suggested the site had been shut since autumn.