Arabesk (49 page)

“Zara.”

She turned when he called, the smile freezing on her face. Her eyes raked over him, seeing nothing in the darkness but distant light reflecting off the emptiness of his shades.

“Still wearing disguises, I see.”

“You know him?” Major Halim took a hand from his pocket.

“Oh yes.” She turned to the watchful major, her eyes bitter. “How could I possibly forget Ashraf al-Mansur…”

“The
bey
?”

Raf put out his hand, then lowered it again, unshaken. The police had a file on the General’s
aide de camp,
but then they had a file on pretty much everyone. “Whatever,” said Raf.

Major Halim had both hands clenched into fists, something Raf doubted the man even realized. And busy emotions worked their way across his movie-star face. Distrust battling doubt, caution fighting mistrust.

Caution lost.

Looking at the major’s handmade uniform, his immaculate leather boots, the careful disorder of his dark hair and a discreet signet ring on his left hand that signalled membership in a family known for its closeness to the Sultan in Stambul, Raf knew what was coming. He’d heard those rumours too…

“I have a brother at court,” said the major flatly.

“An elder brother,” Raf agreed, “Faud Pasha.” Facts collected themselves for use, the structure of the Sublime Porte’s directorate, the rank therein of Faud Pasha. “Second Minister for Internal Affairs.”

“First Minister,” Major Halim corrected.

“Acting First Minister,” said Raf firmly. “Married well. Trusted notary to His Sublime Majesty…” He could do this. He’d always had the skill, right back to when he was a kid. Every fact in his head was filed, cross-referenced, graded for likely importance. When he was seven Raf failed an exam. He did it to prove to himself that he could. There were other reasons too, but time was teaching Raf that it didn’t pay to dwell on those.

He glared at the major. “As for you… Unmarried, this year’s mistress in Al Qahirah, last year’s in Abukir, neither serious. An adequate trust fund but no capital and currently no way to pay your share of the extortionate repairs to the roof of Miclavez Court…”

Zara’s eyes when Raf checked were wet. For a woman who’d once told him she never cried, she’d taken to doing a good imitation.

“…Oh yes, and you once shot an eleven-year-old
felaheen
rioter.”

“He was…”

“Holding an empty starting pistol,” said Raf. “Something cheap, generic and Taiwanese.”

There were files on every member of Koenig Pasha’s staff. Even one on the General, though the ex-Chief had drawn the line on keeping one on the Khedive himself. Either that, or it was so well hidden Raf had yet to find the thing.

Keeping those files up-to-date had turned out to be simplicity itself. All Raf had to do was nothing. The web of informers put in place by his predecessor, Felix Abrinsky, kept spinning, once they realized they’d continue to get paid for each snippet of information. “Anything else you’d like to know about your friend?” Raf asked Zara, who promptly turned her back on him.

“What about you…?” Raf asked the major. “With me so far?” He watched uncertainty replace anger in the major’s eyes. Rumour might hurt but hard information was actively dangerous and Raf tossed it around like a throwing knife.

“There’s no record of…”

“Look,” said Raf, “let’s simplify things. Your brother checked me out in Stambul and found no record of my being an honorary attaché in Seattle…” He ticked points off on his fingers, trying not to miss any. “No one in special forces has heard of me, Sandhurst say I’m not on their files, St. Cyr ditto, I’m not on the Sultan’s official payroll and so far as your brother can find out, I don’t exist.”

Raf’s cold smile was wasted in the darkness, but his voice carried enough ice to make even Zara shiver. “Have you any idea of the level of security clearance that signifies?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Major Halim shook his head.

“Did you check me with my father?” Raf continued.

“The Emir?”

Yeah, the Emir of Tunis, apparently. That was what his aunt Nafisa had said, just before she got herself stabbed; Raf still didn’t believe it, and it was hard to know in retrospect if she’d believed it or not. Whatever, no one had yet come out and said it wasn’t true.

“Well? Did you?” said Zara, sounding suddenly interested.

“Yes, I did.” The major looked nervous. “He wasn’t able to answer.”

“Why not?” Raf asked, and knew he’d won when the major actually shuffled his feet, looking like the small boy he must once have been back before Zara was born.

“He was unwell.”

“You mean my father’s mad,” said Raf. “Stark raving.” That was what Iskandryian intelligence had down in their files. The Khedive’s second cousin lived in a tent near Nefzaoua Oasis, surrounded by heavily armed girls in green jumpsuits and guarded at all times by an elderly Frenchwoman. In private the Emir apparently favoured simple wool jebbas, but his public dress never changed from a striped jellaba, worn with a general’s peaked hat.

He lived for hawks, grew generation after generation of saline-resistant grasses in a biodome on the edge of Chott el Jerid, Tunisia’s salt-crusted inland sea, and had once hired a Soviet cryptographer and one of Caltech’s most brilliant geneticists to extract meaning from the randomness of junk DNA.

Political decisions the Emir made after consulting the heavens. Not listening to a pet astrologer, though that would have been bad enough, but asking questions of the constellations themselves. And when he spoke, in public or private, reports had it that he spoke only in complex couplets, perfectly cadenced and delivered after long thought.

Among the Berber tribes, who still traversed the empty sands and rock seas with little care for international borders, he was regarded as North Africa’s sole sane ruler. It was a minority opinion and one with which it was obvious Major Halim didn’t agree.

“So tell me,” said Raf, “who am I?”

The major looked at the young princeling in the black leather coat, the dark glasses and black gloves whose pale hair blew in the slight night breeze. “The son of the Emir of Tunis,” he said without hesitation.

Raf nodded and offered his hand. This time they shook.

“Very touching,” said Zara. “Now if you’ve both finished with the male-bonding shit, perhaps Major Halim could escort me home. Of course,” she added crossly, “if this wasn’t El Isk I could get myself home. Since I’m perfectly capable of walking, chewing gum and looking where I’m going at the same time. But since this
is
Iskandryia and any woman alone at night is
obviously
a prostitute…”

Raf grinned. Then smiled some more at Major Halim’s discomfort. “This is nothing,” he said, “you wait until you know her better and she gets really cross.”

“Better…?”
The major executed a tiny bow in Zara’s direction. “Much as I’d welcome the chance to get to know Miss Quitrimala better, I’m afraid that’s impossible.” His tone was genuinely regretful.

“Don’t tell me,” said Zara, “you couldn’t cope with a third mistress.”

“It’s not that,” the major said, looking shocked. “I’m leaving for Berlin next week, on secondment to the
Thiergarten.
After that, if everything goes smoothly, I hope to become Iskandryia’s attaché to Stambul.” For a moment, admitting this, the major seemed almost bashful. But Zara was too cross to notice.

“Then what,” she asked furiously, “was gate-crashing my supper about? All that sucking up to my mother. And the crap about me needing air and taking a walk…”

“This is difficult,” said the major and glanced at Raf. When it became obvious that Raf refused to take his cue to withdraw, Major Halim sighed. “The Khedive intends to take a holiday… Well deserved obviously.”

Zara opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. A sudden tension locked her shoulders, which refused to budge, even when she twisted her head from side to side. Zara had a nasty idea she knew exactly what was about to come next.

“His Highness was wondering if…”

“Have you talked to my parents about this?”

“Of course,” the major said nervously. “Your father said it was your decision where you took your holidays and with whom. Which was not, to be honest, the reaction I was expecting. Your mother thinks it’s an excellent idea.”

I bet she does, thought Zara. Somewhere in her mother’s finely gradated misunderstanding of Iskandryian society, the woman undoubtedly believed that being mother to the Khedive’s mistress was even better than having a bey in the family.

Zara had been spot on about her mother’s desperation that she take this walk, totally wrong about the motives. “It’s not going to happen,” she said calmly.

So calmly that even the major could hear her keep the anger in check.

“Tell the boy I’m not interested. Just that, nothing else. Don’t make it polite, don’t give my apologies or regrets because I’m not sending them…”

“You misunderstand,” the major said carefully. “You misunderstand completely. The Khedive’s intentions are entirely
honourable.
” He stumbled over the word, not certain how much he could actually say. In his own mind, before supper, when he’d been running through how to approach the coming evening, he’d seen them both taking a moonlit stroll through the terraces of the Palace Ras el-Tin while he proffered the Khedive’s invitation and she accepted gratefully.

“He doesn’t want to get me into bed?”

The major’s lips twisted. “Let me repeat myself. His intentions are strictly legitimate.”

Zara’s eyes widened. Impossible visions of palaces, sleek yachts, long holidays aboard the SS
Jannah
opened like flowers before her.

“And if I go on this holiday?”

“Then he’ll propose,” said Raf, “won’t he?”

Major Halim looked pained. “You can’t honestly expect me to comment.”

“God.” Raf laughed. “Koenig Pasha must be climbing a wall… Only my cousin could decide he needed to marry a hard-line republican. Not to mention occasional communist.” They had files on Zara too, back at the precinct. Files he could recite from memory.

“Have you spoken to my parents about that bit as well?” Zara asked the major.

Major Halim shook his head. “Only tentatively about the holiday. Enough to make clear that you would be an honoured…”

“Well, don’t,” Zara stressed. “Speak to them, I mean. It’s nothing they need to know.”

“They’re your parents.”

“Talk to either of them about this,” said Zara, “and I guarantee I won’t go.”

“But the Khedive is determined to do this properly. By the book…”

“You do realize,” Zara interrupted crossly, “that if the Prophet had been a woman, there wouldn’t even have been the Book, because no one would have listened, never mind written it down…”

8th October

The first of that Friday’s calls to prayer found Raf
leaning against a seawall, watching smugglers run empty cigarette boats into Western Harbour under protection of both darkness, which came free, and the Commander of Ras el-Tin, whose protection came anything but…

And the Terbana Mosque’s definition of dawn seemed open to debate. The Mufti had defined it as the point not when light first touched the sky but when the absolute utterness of the night first lessened.

Raf thought the man was being unduly optimistic.

Hamzah’s call came four hours later, just as Raf was about to shower away the black dog of his wasted night. Because even blasting his police Honda to Abu Sir and back, fifty klicks along the shore, had done nothing to improve Raf’s mood, even though early mist had hung over the Mariout marshes and the Mediterranean had still worn her night colours.

“For you,” shouted Hani, her call echoing up the lift shaft from the haremlek below. “It’s Effendi.”

Raf had warned Hani not to call Hamzah that, but currently the child was paying zero attention to anything he said.

“Tell him I’ll call back.”

“He says it’s important.”

Sighing, Raf picked up his dressing gown from the floor and pulled on some old leather slippers that Khartoum insisted once belonged to Hani’s grandfather. When Raf made some glib comment about dead men’s shoes, the old porter had pulled deeply on the wrong end of a cigar and nodded like it was obvious.

“This alone is true,” he’d told Raf. “This here, at this time, for this person.” Khartoum had announced it like that was also obvious. Three days later Raf was still puzzling over that one.

“Uncle Raf…” Hani’s voice was tight with exasperation.

“I’m on my way.”

“…You could always get comms installed up there.”

Raf nodded and slid back the metal grille to step into the lift. He could indeed, but he wouldn’t. His floor was the only level of the madersa not fitted with a screen and he liked it that way.

“…or you could try turning on your watch,” added Hani, when he finally reached her floor.

“But then you wouldn’t have an excuse to complain, would you?” Raf said and punched a button to activate a screen. Hani stalked off in silence, chin up and shoulders rigid, and though Raf heard the slam of her bedroom door he didn’t call her back.

Just after their Aunt Nafisa was murdered, Raf had made a promise to Hani not to send her away to school. Keeping his word was proving harder than he’d imagined. Particularly as everyone else seemed to think the girl would be better off living somewhere different, somewhere he wasn’t. Until recently he’d have disagreed.

“Hamzah.”

“Your Excellency.”

“You don’t need to call me…”

“This is official.” The industrialist’s face was tight, with a greyness that suggested acute shock.

“Zara.”

“My daughter is here,” Hamzah said. “And she’s fine. Although for reasons I don’t understand, I gather you met her early this morning.”

“And Avatar?”

The man looked embarrassed. “Avatar’s gone,” he said simply. “Kidnapped…”

“Avatar?”

Raf’s explosion of anger brought Hani out of her room; or maybe it was the way he slammed the wall with the side of his fist. “How do you know?”

“I’ve had a note.”