Arabesk (127 page)

Thursday 17th March

Eduardo sat on the edge of a metal table swinging his
feet. Every time his shoe scuffed the floor it produced that unmistakable mouselike squeak of leather against ceramic.

A noise that was driving everybody else in the room insane. And the really great part was that none of them could do a thing about it. He was the most senior officer present at the briefing, a thought so bizarre that Eduardo shut his eyes just to savour it.

“I’m sorry, Boss.” Alexandre looked worried. Under the misapprehension his question had been stupid enough to drive the Chief to anger.

“No,” said Eduardo, “it’s a good point. Just not one I can answer.”

This truth elicited a frown from a thickset sergeant at the back. A man with a bald patch, common enough, and a Kashif-like moustache, which now made him something of a rarity in the Tunis PD. It was truly staggering the number of officers who’d decided in the last twenty-four hours to shave off their moustaches, reshape them or else begin to grow a beard.

“Got a problem?” Eduardo asked the man.

“Yeah,” a bull neck raised an even heavier chin. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t see how a case involving a dead pastry chef can be so secret that the master file has to be shredded in front of two witnesses.”

It was obvious from his tone that respect was the last thing the sergeant felt for the small
morisco
in the leather coat sitting on the old Chief’s table.

“I can understand that,” said Eduardo, “to you it looks like a simple open-and-shut murder, hardly worth bothering about. To me it had all the marks of a
cause célèbre
from which Ifriqiya needs to be protected. Maybe that’s why I’m kicking my heels up here and you’re kicking yours at the back.”

Several officers smiled and Eduardo resisted the temptation to take a brief bow. He was in the operations room; a large space of cheap desks and dirty grey chairs, wall charts, holiday rotas and a small kitchen, which might have been slightly too grand a name to describe a corner partitioned off with hessian boards and containing a sink, two ancient kettles and a cheap microwave.

Eduardo had called his officers together to make an announcement and the announcement was simple, the Maison Hafsid case was closed and, for internal security reasons, the files would be shredded and all evidence sealed in sterile bags and remain so for the next hundred years. The reason was actually very simple but Eduardo had explained this only to Rose.

She’d been lying there on a big double bed in their room at the Dar Ben Abdallah. And as she’d rolled over, a frown on her face, Eduardo had smiled as a breast popped out of her dressing gown. He’d almost forgotten what he intended to say, the way he did some mornings when he looked over the foot of the bed and saw Rose, with her back to him in the early dawn, wearing nothing but a G-string and black tights.

“So what happened to Cousin Ahmed?” She’d read the files and knew the names.

“There was no cousin.”

“So who did the
mubahith
arrest?”

“No one,” said Eduardo with a satisfied smile. “That’s the whole point. No one vanished in police custody. I’ve had every file checked. Even the ones that don’t exist.”

“So who killed Isabeau’s brother?”

“I think that’s got to remain a secret,” said Eduardo. It seemed odd to be making those kind of decisions but no one else was available and someone had to… Well, Eduardo assumed that was true. His Excellency couldn’t have dragged him from El Isk just to unravel who did what, that would be far too simple.

There was unquestionably more to the equation than could at first be seen.

It had taken Eduardo a while to work out the unseen integer but he’d got it the moment he saw the knife supposedly used for the murder. Once, long before, Eduardo had worked in a kitchen, although there was nothing very special about this, everyone worked a kitchen at some time in their lives. At least, everyone Eduardo ever knew.

The first rule of kitchen culture was that no one, repeat no one, touched anyone else’s knives. Spit in their face, mock them and, if you must, insult their football team, that was fine, but no one messed with another person’s steel.

Knives were sacred.
Touch my arse before you touch my knife. Mess with my arse and die
… Eduardo knew the sayings. Three months grilling
merguez
in a workingmen’s café in Karmous had been enough to guarantee that.

So what was anyone meant to think when presented with a blade that was blunt, bent at the tip and stained? Well, Eduardo couldn’t actually say what anyone else might think. To him, however, it suggested no one really owned that knife. And if no one owned it…

The more Eduardo thought about it the more he was convinced he was right.

Notes said the mysteriously arrested Ahmed owned the knife when it was obvious that no one owned it or it wouldn’t have been such a mess. Someone was lying. Actually, he told Rose, several people were lying.

She’d been dressing when he said this. After she’d undressed at his insistence and gone to take a shower while he lay in bed getting back his breath, Eduardo had returned to his thoughts.

They ate breakfast in a café. Rose choosing coffee and a croissant and Eduardo eating rough flatbread cooked on a clay griddle by a middle-aged woman who sat on a stool by the door. With the unleavened bread he ate slivers of some meat that obviously wasn’t pork, with a helping of menakher dates, as befitted a man making the most of being in a different country.

Then he left Rose to her shopping and jumped a cab to the Police HQ without bothering to wait for his official car. A decision made easier by his discovery, right at the start, that naming the Police HQ as his destination was enough to ensure that no driver ever asked him to pay the fare. Their surprise on the few occasions he did offer payment was worth double the handful of change his journey actually cost.

So now he was on a table in the operations room, trying to explain without really doing so that there was no murderer; at least not one who could be arrested by the police. Eduardo knew exactly who killed Pascal Boulart and he was certain (as certain as he ever was about anything), that His Excellency knew too. Why else would he have brought in Eduardo but to tidy up such loose ends?

Saturday 19th March

Isabeau checked her rail ticket and re-counted the
notes. No writing appeared anywhere on the envelope and she was willing to bet there’d be no fingerprints either. In her memory, she had it that the small man with the black coat kept his gloves on throughout his entire visit.

She was bathed and dressed, standing on the platform of Gare de Tunis beside a cardboard suitcase that looked like leather until one got close. She wore new shoes and black Levi’s, a shirt and a shawl as befitted the cooler weather. Her hair was covered in a waterfall of blue silk; not quite a
hijab,
not exactly a scarf; something elegantly in between. And though Gare de Tunis was less than a klick south of St. Vincent de Paul and the air was clear enough for sound to travel, Isabeau ignored the bells. Despite the small cross she wore, politics not religion had been her life. All seventeen years of it.

The
MediTerre
ticket in her pocket was an open one. A month’s rail travel anywhere in North Africa and Southern Europe. With the ticket came a student ID, an Ifriqiyan passport and glowing references from Café Antonio. So far as Isabeau could see all of these looked real; except they couldn’t be, for a start she’d never passed her baccalaureate and no university would take her.

Isabeau had no illusions about what was happening. She was being bought off, which was, she realized, preferable to being jailed or killed. The small man who’d limped into her life with a simple telephone call had more or less said as much.

All he wanted was a meeting. It seemed not to have occurred to him that Isabeau might refuse and it was only afterwards, once she’d meekly agreed, that Isabeau realized it had never occurred to her either. And no, he didn’t need an address.

He seemed scarily knowledgeable on most aspects of her life.

Four o’clock would do. He expected her to meet him in the hallway and to let him in. She would recognize him by… His voice had paused at that point. She would recognize him by a copy of that afternoon’s
Il Giornale di Tunisi
, which he would carry under his left arm, folded in three.

And so a small man limped up the tired steps to her apartment block, his black leather coat bigger than it should be, a fedora pushed down over his eyes. The paper he held had a black border round the whole of the front page and was folded to reveal a headline:

L’emiro morto…

And below the news a picture of someone Isabeau had been telling herself for at least a day she didn’t recognize. Only half of his face was showing because of the way Eduardo had the paper folded, but it was that double worry line like a knife flick that gave him away, where the top of his nose met his eyebrows. They’d thought Ashraf Pasha was
mubahith
.
An infiltrator. And then Domus Aurea happened.

“Mademoiselle Isabeau Boulart?”

Respectably dressed in a blue jersey and denim skirt, sneakers without socks. Her lack of makeup made her seem younger than he expected, but then she was younger. All the same, Eduardo wondered if that look was intentional.

“I’m…” Eduardo paused, thought about it. “You don’t really need to know my name,” he said and glanced round the entrance hall. “Where’s the lift?”

Isabeau smiled. “We have stairs,” she said. Whoever the man was, he lived somewhere other than Tunis. The only places Isabeau knew with their own lifts were big hotels and those huge stores in nouvelle ville, the ones with canvas awnings over street-front windows and French names.

“Show the way then.”

She looked at him and he stared back, indicating the stairs with a slight wave of his hand; nothing impolite, just impatient like a man unused to being kept waiting.

“After you,” he said.

Isabeau walked ahead, all five flights, and at the second she stopped worrying about him staring at her bottom and concentrated on climbing, each turn of the stairs widening the gap between them. By the time she reached the third floor’s half landing, Isabeau was a whole quarter turn ahead and he’d lost sight of her anyway.

“Can I get you anything?” Isabeau asked when Eduardo reached the door she’d left open.

“Water,” he said. And then said nothing for a whole five minutes.

On the street below, workmen were busy stringing green-and-red bunting from one lamppost to another and adjusting crowd barriers under the bored gaze of traffic policemen. One of the many street parties would be held there. Enthusiasm fuelled by Ashraf Pasha’s announcement that all the food would be free.
Bread and circuses
… Eduardo was still trying to work out exactly when His Excellency meant.

“You own this?”

“I rent it from the city,” Isabeau said. “My brother also used to live here.”

“You have a bedroom?”

“Obviously.”

“Show me,” Eduardo said.

The sex was perfunctory, almost matter-of-fact. And Eduardo thanked her when it was done. Not daring to show her contempt, Isabeau shrugged, sat up from where she’d been tipped backwards onto her bed and adjusted her denim skirt, smoothing it down over her legs and his smell. She’d known what was coming. Expected it.

For his part, he hadn’t bothered to use a condom or remove her shoes.

“Now what?” Isabeau asked.

“We talk…” Zipping his fly, Eduardo reached for his notebook and tapped it to make it open. “I know you killed Pascal. That’s not the issue.”

Eduardo paused, giving the girl an opportunity to deny it but she just looked at him.

“You want to tell me why it happened?”

Isabeau shook her head. “You don’t want to know.”

“But the others knew? The rest of your group…?”

She spread her hands, neither denying nor agreeing.

“And so when you killed Pascal they covered for you,” Eduardo said. “In itself, that is significant. The way I see it.” He was proud of that phrase. “You stabbed your brother in the kitchen and had someone help you drag his body up to the alley… All those clean stairs,” Eduardo explained. “But first you swapped knives. Probably put your own through the industrial washer.”

Isabeau smiled.

“So what did you do with the real one?”

“There was no real knife,” said Isabeau. “And he died in the corridor outside the chill room. The stab wounds came later. Someone else did those.”

“So how did you kill him?”

“With a leg of lamb,” she said flatly.

Eduardo looked at her.

“It was frozen.”

“Ah…” Eduardo thought about the coroner’s report. A perfunctory half page with a throwaway line noting the victim had obviously smashed his skull on the cobbles of the alley when falling. “And what happened to the leg of lamb?” asked Eduardo.

“We ate it. One night when a shift was finished. Me, the others, even that Egyptian waiter, the one who looked so very much like…”

Eduardo held up his hand, consulted his notebook. “I believe the waiter’s dead,” he said.

Isabeau nodded. “A bit like my brother.”

As she waited for her
turbani
at Gare de Tunis, the first Fez-Iskandryia express to stop there in thirty years and a sign of the West’s sudden faith in the new regime, Isabeau told herself to be realistic. Everything in life had a price, including freedom. And if two perfunctory bouts of unwilling sex with a stranger were it, then there were worse ways to stay out of jail. As well as worse people to have such sex with, much worse.

When he was done questioning, Eduardo had tipped Isabeau onto her back again, pushed up her skirt until it reached her hips and, almost apologetically, grabbed the sides of her new knickers and pulled those down. Unzipping, he’d given himself a few jerks to strengthen his resolve and pushed into her, the toes of his shoes sliding on the tiles…

“I’m pregnant,” Isabeau said, her words enough to startle Eduardo into stopping midstroke. “Did you know that?”