Arabesk (30 page)

Without thinking, Raf put an arm round her shoulder to help Zara into the warehouse, and felt rather than just heard her intake of breath and sudden hiss of pain.

“Forget it,” said Zara, brushing his apology away with a sour smile. “No one else seems to think it’s important. So what do you think of the place?” She stepped past him and into the warehouse. “The collective use it. I just pay the rent.”

“The collective?”

“Friends…”

“But you all share the profits?”

Zara shook her head. “I let them sell stuff at the club, at their own risk. CdH takes nothing off the top… Took,” she corrected herself. “We
took
nothing off the top.”

“Doesn’t look like that made a difference,” said Raf, one finger tracing a raw welt that ran round the side of her neck. Its edges were puffy and pinpricked with blood. This time Zara didn’t flinch.

“Bastards,” said Raf.

Zara laughed. “You think the police did this?” There was a slow-burn anger in her voice, like slightly damp black power getting itself ready to hiss and flare. “The
morales
were politeness itself. Even drove me back to Villa Hamzah in an unmarked car. This is my mother’s handiwork.”

“Because you were arrested?”

“Because I was naked. Because I was with you. Because no one worth anything will ever marry me now… How many fucking reasons do you think she needs?” Zara took a deep breath, steadying herself. “Why do you think I was so desperate to get away to New York?”

There was no answer to that.

Raf eyed the ladder doubtfully. Seeing Hani crouched at the top, watching them with a blind intensity.

“I’m up here,” she told Zara. “Do you want me to come down?”

By way of reply, Zara began to pull herself up the ladder, wincing at every new rung. By the time she reached the top, pain had her breathing only through her mouth, though she tried to hide the trembling in her hands.

“Antiseptic,” Hani told Raf, “and cotton wool.” She put them into his hands and returned with a spray that read
plastic skin,
another of analgesic and a small bottle of mineral water… Ripping a stained blanket off a lopsided camp bed, she nodded for Zara to lie down, which the young woman did, being too tired to disagree.

“This will hurt,” said Hani, her voice serious.

“Really,” Zara said dryly. “What a surprise.” For the first time in hours the child almost cracked a smile. But that vanished the moment Zara tried to take off her shirt and found it was stuck to her back.

Hani proved to be more than adept when it came to dressing the wounds, which she did with minimum fuss and maximum patience, stopping every time Zara swore or jerked under her touch. When one blast of analgesic proved not enough, Hani resprayed Zara’s bare back and counted up to fifteen before she began again to lift off dried blood with wet cotton balls.

Hani’s proficiency wasn’t what held Raf’s attention. What gripped it—so tightly he had to remind himself he’d actually seen Zara naked, not just without her shirt—was the curve of one full breast as it pressed out at the side, as she lay face down on that rickety camp bed. He’d seen his share of naked women, although none of them quite that beautiful; but this was heartbreakingly different, and he felt the breast’s shape in his head like a shiver.

Somewhere in his psycho-profile files at Huntsville there was probably an explanation. Which, no doubt, Dr Millbank would have been happy to expound. Back there sex was something to be talked about, analysed and discussed, preferably in open meetings. In return, Huntsville ran “access weekends” in a block of log cabins that looked like a bad lakeside motel. Every window had red checked curtains, little beds of nasturtiums prettied up both sides of the front door and books stood in neat rows on shelves inside, along with framed prints of snowcapped mountains and a fridge full of Miller Lite and that pale Mexican beer. The low-rent kind that made it hard to get drunk.

But the
normalizing
touches were irrelevant. All anyone was really interested in were the big Shaker beds with their disposable sheets that got replaced each morning.

It hadn’t mattered that Raf had no one to come visiting. At the end of his first month Dr Millbank signed him off as in need of ongoing psychosexual therapy. His designated therapist was a blond academic in her early thirties who was writing a thesis on
regressive institutionalization.
One weekend the academic didn’t arrive and a dark-haired serious Canadian student of hers turned up instead. All the Canadian wanted to do was heavy pet and then take breaks to make notes. It was from the student that Raf learned his therapist had been working on the same paper for eleven years. Which sounded pretty institutionalized to him…

When Zara’s welts were clean, Hani sterilized the area with antiseptic, waited for it to dry and then graffitied over each one with a thick line of plastic skin; and all the while the child’s face was frozen into a mask, seconds away from dissolving into tears.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Zara insisted. “It just stung a bit, you know?”

Slowly, Hani nodded. And the movement was all it took to tip the drops from her eyes and spill them down her cheeks: rendering Raf instantly irrelevant, though he didn’t know why.

The two girls looked at each other, then back at Raf.

“South of here,” said Zara, “you’ll find a boat, just before the railway jetty.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, revealing a flash of breast as she dipped one hand into her jeans pocket. “You’ll need this,” she said firmly. The card she gave him was grey, scratched and dull with age. It was blank on either side. “We won’t be long.”

“What about…”

“Hani’s going to clean up my face, aren’t you, honey? And then we’re going to talk, in private. Then we’ll do our prayers. After that, we’ll come and find you…”

The first vessel Raf came to stank of oil and rested so low in the water that any half-decent wave could lap over its side and finish the job of sinking it. The next two were small tunny boats, battered red hulls and peeling oak decks warped and split with heat. Old-fashioned steel padlocks locked tight their cabin doors.

After that was a long gap of jetty where rusting bollards waited vainly for bow ropes from container ships that would never come back. The new boats docked in the deeper waters behind him. Ferries and cargo vessels from Marseilles and Syracuse, roped fast to the jetty of Maritime Station. And beyond those were, anchored sleek grey cruisers and an elderly aircraft hangar that stood off from the entrance to the naval base at Ras el-Tin. The General was rumoured to keep certain prisoners aboard the
Ali Pasha,
held below decks in conditions of both sumptuous luxury and restraint.

Ahead of Raf, where shallows condemned the water to near-emptiness, the main dock came to an abrupt halt as the dockside jerked back onto itself to become a long jetty which angled out towards the middle of the harbour. The glint of wheel-hammered tracks confirmed that the spur was still in use. Probably to shunt containers out to Soviet cargo carriers too vast even to dock alongside Maritime Station.

Raf was still looking for the right boat when he realized he’d been staring at it for the last ten seconds without registering the fact. It was there, all right, in a vee of greasy water where the dockside folded back to become the jetty. Only what Raf first saw as dead water beyond the boat turned out to be the mouth of Mahmoudiya Canal, feeding from a large hole in the side of the dock.

Two centuries before, twenty thousand
felaheen
had died in three years digging the fifty miles of waterway that now linked El Iskandryia to the capital. The canal was built on the orders of the khedive, so goods could flow from Cairo to North Africa’s greatest port, while fresh water from Iskandryia could be diverted to irrigate the hinterland. First started in 1817 on the orders of Mohammed Ali, it was built by a French architect—as was much of Iskandryia from that period.

For the first hundred years the canal, or at least the bit that circled the city, was lined by some of Isk’s grandest houses, each with a luxuriant garden leading down to the water’s edge. But the houses crumbled and the rich left. The clear water clogged with madder rose, effluent and finally bodies as Spanish Influenza hit the city and, for ten weeks or so, Iskandryia emptied of the living, leaving only the dead.

Now Zara’s black boat rested in the shadow of that canal mouth, lying so low in the water it too might have been slowly sinking; except this vessel was designed to ride almost level with the waves. Fifty feet long, ten wide at the stern once its chisel-edged prow had finally flared out, the boat was an ex-UN-issue combat craft. Stealth-sheeted and proof against infrared sensors.

Its retractable glass antenna was just visible at the rear. Turned off, the antenna was transparent to radar. Only in the brief periods when it was broadcasting or receiving did the inside of the hollow glass whip turn to plasma, as a single metal electrode at its base stripped electrons from gas.

The last time Raf had seen a VSV had been ten years before on CNN when one of the 15,000bhp craft had been in the middle of being freighted aboard a McDonnell Globemaster V to be air-lifted to some emergency in Indonesia. If he remembered correctly—and, as always, he did—out of the water it looked like a cigar tube that someone had pinched flat at the front end. That, and the fact it had once been the fastest ocean-going vessel in the world.

“Well…” Raf glanced from the old VSV to the grey card in his hand. “Why not?” There was a lot about Zara he didn’t know. In fact, he suspected that there was a lot about her that a lot of people didn’t know, starting with her parents.

A slot next to a small door at the rear of the long cockpit swallowed the card and then spat it out again. Without any sound, without a single diode lighting or any other clue that the VSV’s computer even knew he was aboard, the door frame scanned Raf for weapons and confirmed the card was real. The multiple check-sums matched those in memory and Felix’s revolver was judged not hazardous.

A lock clicked and the door opened outwards. The cabin inside was as clean as the boat’s outside was filthy and Raf realized the litter on the decks, the tide marks and oil smears were intentional. Someone had ripped out the original bucket seats that had run down both sides of the cabin and replaced them with two metal beds, a small fridge, a bank of comms, kit and, most bizarre of all, a shower cubicle.

The only other thing in the stripped-bare cabin was a white telephone, the old-fashioned kind with a handset that needed to be picked up. The phone was busy taking a message and a read-out on its base announced that its memory was already backed up with ten others. Probably all from the same man by the sound of it…

“Zara.” Anger fought worry in the caller’s voice, worry winning. “Your mobile’s turned off and I’ve tried everywhere else. If you’re there, pick up…”

“Zara, are you there?
Zara…”

For a second, Raf was tempted to leave the receiver in its cradle and let Zara deal with her father when she finally turned up: always assuming she did and that sending him ahead wasn’t her ploy to get Hani away from a dangerous maniac. But there was something approaching desolation in Hamzah’s gruff voice. His fury a flip side to a love he’d probably never put into words but which was there all the same.

Raf lifted the receiver. “She’s not here.”

“Not…”
Hamzah sounded stunned. “Who is…?”

Realization hit him a second later.

Zara refused to use the word
beat.
Grown-ups either hit children or they didn’t, in her opinion. Calling it something else might soothe an adult conscience but it made little difference to the child.

“It’s okay, honey. You’re allowed to tell me.”

Hani didn’t answer. Partly because she’d never really seen another person naked and she was looking at Zara with the disturbed fascination of someone who knew that, one day, strange things would happen to her body too. And partly it was because Hani didn’t know the right answer.

Hani tried very hard to give only right answers, even if other people thought that wasn’t true.
Other people
had always been Aunt Nafisa and Donna, but now her aunt was dead and Donna was still at the madersa and
other people
were Ashraf and the woman standing in front of her, struggling to get into her filthy shirt without letting the cloth scrape her back.

“Do you want me to do that?” Hani asked.

Zara nodded, and sat back on the edge of the camp bed.

“This arm first,” Hani said.

Obediently Zara threaded one arm through the offered sleeve.

“Now this one…”

“Did she?” Zara asked, gently moving Hani round so the child stood facing her. The child blushed, though at what Zara wasn’t certain.

“She did, didn’t she?”

Very slowly Hani nodded.

“Often?”

“Sometimes.” By now the child was gazing anywhere but at the young woman in front of her.

Zara didn’t need to ask if the blows were hard. She’d faced that question for herself and could answer as a child. All blows were hard when it was someone who was meant to love you and someone you were meant to love—did love—until you finally taught yourself not to…

“Something happened, didn’t it?” Zara said gently.

Hani shook her head.

“Yes,” said Zara. “When Lady Nafisa came home… You saw her come in and something happened. Was she angry?”

“No,” Hani said, nodding. The answer was there on her tongue but her mouth was closed into a bitter, troubled trap, holding in secrets too heavy to speak.

“Tell me,” Zara said. “She came home and you were where…?”

“In her study,” Hani’s voice was a whisper. “She’d taken Ali-Din.” Hani clutched the rag dog tight, as if someone might be about to confiscate the toy again.

“So she hit you…” Zara could understand the child’s hurt. She’d inhabited that world until first thing this morning. Now her world would be different.

“No,” said Hani. “She missed. So I ran away.”

“She missed?”

Hani nodded. She was thinking. Remembering, but not quite understanding. “Aunt Nafisa was falling over. She shouted at me because her head hurt.”