Arabesk (87 page)
Authors: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
People nearby looked surprised when the fox made Raf click his fingers but the fox was too tired to care. It needed more champagne and then some sleep. A long dark sleep with no dreams. But most of all it wanted this party to end before Hamzah got round to making more speeches.
It just knew Raf was going to offend the man.
“She was right,” Raf told the Marquis, once both their drinks were refreshed and a nervous young waiter had vanished. “Your woman got it right. I’m not a bey. I don’t belong in El Iskandryia. My name isn’t Ashraf al-Mansur…”
He watched the man walk away.
“I doubt I’m even Berber,” Raf added quietly, to no one in particular. “Hani probably isn’t my niece.” He glanced across to where the small girl stood next to Zara, half-listening to someone, half-staring at Raf. “Maybe I’m just someone who got lucky…”
“Uncle Ashraf.”
Everyone in the room was looking in his direction, Raf realized. Hamzah, in particular, was waiting expectantly for something.
“He wasn’t listening,” said Hani. She sounded obscurely proud of this fact. “He was probably talking to his fox.”
“His what…?” Zara sounded puzzled.
“It’s a long story,” Hani told her. “Weird too.”
“Well,” said Zara. “Are you going to take Dad’s money this time?”
“Your reward.” Hamzah’s grin had become slightly anxious.
“No,” said Raf. “I really don’t think…”
What stopped him finishing his sentence was the anguish that flooded Zara’s face when she realized he was about to hurt her father’s feelings again.
“The thing is…” Raf paused.
“Oh really!”
said the fox.
“The thing is what?”
“The thing is,” said Raf carefully, “my niece needs a dowry. And since she can’t hold property for herself…” He didn’t make Iskandryia’s laws and pretty soon he was going to stop trying to uphold them. “I thought perhaps His Highness and Hamzah Effendi… As trustees?”
Tewfik Pasha looked shocked, then resigned, Hamzah looked delighted.
“You want all the reward to go to Hani?” It was Zara who spoke.
Raf nodded and saw St. Cloud shake his head in disbelief.
“It’s a large sum.” Koenig Pasha sounded doubtful.
“Good,” said Raf. “Maybe it’ll be enough to keep her out of trouble.”
Hani stuck out her tongue.
Later, when everyone had gone back to talking to each other, mostly about Hani’s fabulous newfound wealth, St. Cloud reappeared at Raf’s side. “Well,” he said, “you won’t take my bribe and you won’t take Hamzah’s… That either makes you unbelievably stupid or even more dangerous than I imagined.”
“I’ll settle for a drink,” offered Raf.
“And I’d get you one,” St. Cloud said, “but your pretty little girlfriend thinks you’ve had enough.”
“She’s right,”
a familiar voice said in his head, but Raf shushed the fox into silence. There was something about St. Cloud that required absolute concentration.
“Fifty million dollars… That’s a lot to turn down.”
Behind his dark glasses, Raf blinked. “Money,” he said flatly, “isn’t everything.”
Or was that life?
“Maybe not,” said St. Cloud. “But if ever I need to buy you, I can see it’ll have to be with something other than cash.”
“I’m not for sale.”
“Everyone is for…” The Marquis looked at Raf, then shrugged in disgust. “People like you,” he said, “fuck up the bell curve.”
“I’m impressed.”
“I’m not.” Raf looked round the discreetly lit drawing room. The elegant invitations with their gilt edges, china clay surface and hand embossing had given the party’s duration as 2.30–6.30
P.M.
and it was now just after 10.30
P.M.
Raf had sobered up somewhat, mostly with the aid of proprietary alcohol inhibitors and, as yet, no one showed much sign of leaving.
“They don’t dare go,” Zara said.
Raf didn’t ask how she knew what he was thinking, just accepted it as something he’d have to get used to. Like the smell of her skin or the fact she looked better in old trousers and a silk cheongsam than any other woman in the room looked in that season’s Dior. And there was a surfeit of that season’s Dior.
There was one other thing about her. At no time had she tried to shoo Hani away, even though Hani had glued herself to Zara’s side from the moment she arrived to the point she dropped in her tracks, dead to the world. And it was Zara’s Chinese silk jacket that now made do as a blanket, covering the small girl who lay curled up on a sofa.
“Marry me,” said Raf.
It was Zara’s turn to blink.
“You want to get married because I gave Hani my coat?” Zara smiled. “I saw you check to see the kid was okay,” she added, by way of explanation. “Then I saw you notice the goose bumps on my arms. You’re not the only one who can play detective.”
“That’s finished,” said Raf. “I resigned ten minutes ago as Chief of Detectives. Ibrahim Osman gets the job. The Khedive will be appointing a new governor in the morning…”
“Koenig Pasha?”
“The Khedive seems keen to take the job himself,” said Raf. “Apparently there’s nothing in law that says the city needs a governor.”
“There’s nothing to say it needs a Khedive…” Zara’s voice was louder than it should be. With a rawness that he’d missed earlier.
Raf looked at her. “He proposed, didn’t he?” said Raf, suddenly understanding what had been right in front of his face.
“Oh yes.” Zara’s voice was bitter. “Despite the fact I’m apparently your lover. It seems he simply couldn’t help himself… One way and another, it’s been quite a night for proposals.”
“Then I take mine back,” Raf said hurriedly.
“No,” said Zara. “Don’t… If you do that, I won’t have the satisfaction of turning you down as well.”
“That’s your answer?”
She was about to nod when Hamzah and Madame Rahina jostled their way out of the crowd. Zara’s mother had changed her outfit, but still wore head-to-toe Dior and smelled of some number Chanel that was impossibly difficult to find. She also sported a scowl and an air of barely restrained fury at the way her husband had hooked his arm through her own.
“So what are you two up to?” Hamzah asked brightly.
“Oh”—Raf glanced at Zara—“I was just asking her to marry me.”
Hamzah’s grin died as his wife yanked herself free. Unfortunately, even on tiptoe, she remained too short to spot the Khedive over the heads of her other guests.
“By the window,” said Zara, “sulking.”
“So,” Hamzah asked, “it’s agreed? You’re going to marry Raf…”
Zara shook her head. “Not a chance. But Hani’s busy trying to persuade me to move into the al-Mansur madersa.”
Which was the first Raf had heard of it.
Copyright
FELAHEEN
A Bantam Book / January 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Cover art by Robert Larkin
Cover design by Yook Louie
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grimwood, Jon Courtenay.
Felaheen: the third arabesk / Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 987-0-553-38378-2
ISBN-10: 0-553-38378-7
1. Attempted assassination-Fiction. 2. Ex-police officers-Fiction.
3. Fathers and sons-Fiction. 4. Africa, North-Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.R56 F45 2006
2005053621
Printed in the United States of America
www.bantamdell.com
BVG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jamie CG, Sam B and for my father, who has lived
many of the things I only write about.
I owe you all, as ever…
“Since the prince needs to play the animal he chooses among the beasts the fox and the lion, because the lion cannot protect itself from snares and the fox cannot protect itself from wolves. Therefore the prince must be a fox to recognize traps and a lion to frighten the wolves.”
—Machiavelli
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him…”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Unlike foxes.”
—Tiri
FELAHEEN
Monday 14th March
“Dig,” said the fox.
So Ashraf Bey dug. Fingers bleeding and grit compacted beneath his broken nails. With only their sticky rawness to persuade him that he was still in the world of the living.
“Dig harder.”
So he did that too. Handful after handful of coarse salt tumbling into his face, blinding his eyes and filling his mouth, half-open to drag oxygen from dead, fetid air. The voice in his head had promised to help Raf reach the surface but only if he obeyed every order without argument. Foxes were good at digging their way out of traps apparently.
