Arabesk (97 page)

“This was delivered to my office.”
My office
, Eduardo still liked the sound of that.

“When?” asked Raf.

Eduardo examined his rather impressive silver Seiko. “Twenty-eight minutes ago,” he said firmly, then watched the big hand click forward and amended his answer to twenty-nine.

“Who delivered it?”

“A woman,” said Eduardo, “very neat. Looked old, behaved young…” He paused, shuffling his thoughts into a logical order, the way he imagined an ex-detective like His Excellency might do. “She had a grey jacket, neat skirt, dark shoes. A watch…” Eduardo smiled at his own powers of observation. “Which was silver like this one.”

It had been platinum and matched Eugenie’s cigarette case. Made long enough ago that the metal was grey and slightly matte, having been manufactured in the early 1920s before jewellers discovered how platinum might be polished as brightly as white gold. A fact Raf didn’t bother to mention.

“And her hair?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“Long,” said Eduardo, “and grey.” He stopped to look at the bey. “You recognize her?”

Taking the envelope, Raf noticed that its flap was folded inside, the way his mother insisted he do. The snakeskin he wasn’t expecting; the photograph Raf was. He shook the skin from its envelope the way Felix once taught him, dropping it onto an open napkin without once touching it, so that he left no DNA traces of his own. To handle it this way was ridiculous, because Raf knew who’d sent it, as one simple call to her hotel would confirm.

In fact, one simple call was what he would make. Toggling his watch, Raf chose
voice only
and told his Omega to connect him to the Hotel Cavafy.

“I’d like to speak to Madame de la Croix.”

“When?”

“You’re certain?”

“What flight?”

Madame de la Croix had checked out. Her limousine had been booked the previous night. And the clerk on the desk didn’t know which flight she’d been catching. Not one to Tunis, certainly. A UN resolution, bolstered by edicts from the IMF, had closed down commercial flights to Ifriqiya more than forty years before. To get the ban lifted, all the Emir had to do was sign the UN Biodiversity (Germ Line Limitation) Treaty and allow entry to an international team of inspectors, the makeup of which was to be chosen by Washington, Paris and Berlin.

Until then, flights to Tunis remained banned.

All this meant, of course, was that she’d catch a flight to Tripoli and join the bullet train for Tangiers, changing at the border before the
turbani de luxe
was sealed for its journey through Ifriqiya. A variety of local diesels ran from just over the border to Tunis itself.

Raf knew this because in the week following his arrival in El Iskandryia he’d checked the trans-Megreb timetable and in so doing had memorized it.

“Is Your Excellency all right?”

Raf looked up to find Eduardo standing rather too close. “Sit,” Raf said and Eduardo did, suddenly self-conscious to find himself on view in the city’s most famous café.

“Have you had lunch?”

Eduardo shook his head. In the top pocket of his coat he had a pair of Armani sunglasses, like the ones Raf wore. Only Eduardo didn’t quite dare wear his, what with the grey sky and Place Zaghloul being a patchwork of slowly drying puddles.

His Excellency on the other hand always wore shades, even after dark.

“Omelette,” Raf told the waiter. “And for you?”

“The same,” said Eduardo. “And a Coke with ice,” he added, keen to show his independence. “Make it Diet.”

“As Your Excellency wishes.”

Eduardo grinned.

While Eduardo ate most of the bread basket, Raf extracted the brittle photograph from its wrapping and flipped it over. Then spent the rest of lunch trying to make sense of the picture. He’d expected to find himself in the face of his father as he’d done once before. And in that, at least, Raf was right. A young man with a goatee beard and drop-pearl earring did stare into the camera, shading his eyes from sunlight. It was the two people with him who were wrong.

Behind the Emir stood a huge patchwork tent sewn from strips of striped carpet, old prayer rugs and squares of black felt, its flap held open with ropes. And in the entrance, smiling and topless was a blond girl wearing a smile and baggy shorts. A leather choker with a fat amber bead was around her neck and her breasts had been made prominent by a trick of the sun. She was unquestionably beautiful.

She was also, Raf realized, undoubtedly his mother.

A bare-chested boy in ripped jeans and open-toed sandals sat at her feet, his blond hair pulled up into a samurai topknot and tied with red ribbon. One of his legs was in plaster, his arm firmly around Sally Welham’s legs. He was glowering.

On the back, in one corner, Raf found two dates in black ink, one under the other and beneath these a question mark. The second of those dates Raf knew. It was the death of his mother. While the first, presumably the death of Per, was long before Raf had even been born. Which made no sense at all.

“Suppose the Emir dies,” Eugenie had written, “who will you ask then…?”

“Yeah right,”
said the fox.

“What?” Eduardo glanced up from his omelette, realized he might have been rude and amended his question. “Did Your Excellency say something?”

Flashback

Four nuns sat by one window, two pairs facing each other
across the carriage like sour-faced crows. They had black habits and whatever those white hats were that went straight down, giving them cheekbones they didn’t deserve.

They all wore sensible shoes for the journey, flat soles and laces. And they carried sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper and a salami in its own cotton case, like a fat cloth condom. Sally was pretty sure she’d seen sisters in New York wearing pale blue jumpsuits,
God Loves Baseball
caps and trainers; but maybe convents were tougher in North Africa or perhaps this kind were just a different genus—or should that be species?

Whatever, they didn’t approve of Sally’s bare legs and T-shirt and that struck her as unfair. Particularly as she’d been on her best behaviour ever since tumbling into the carriage at Banghazi in a clatter of rucksack and carrier bags, with her ancient Leica still safe in its pigskin case. And it wasn’t her fault the boy opposite her had decided to practise his English, which was adequate, or his seduction techniques, which stank…

Sally, however, had to admit that whipping up his white shirt to show her a stab wound was a new one. Clever too, since it let the boy show off his six-pack and slim hips without being obvious. Unless, of course, it really was his wound she was meant to be admiring.

The scar was bigger than Sally expected. An ugly strip speckled with pigment-dark dots where both edges had been stitched. A nightclub was involved somewhere and a Danish girl, blond like her but not as beautiful, the last said hastily as if Sally might suddenly take offence…

“Seven litres,” he told her proudly, “that’s what I lost.”

Sally considered pointing out that the human body couldn’t hold seven litres of blood but restrained herself. Maybe the red stuff had been pouring out one side while being pumped in the other.

He’d told Sally his name, she was sure of that. And unfortunately they were several hours too far into a conversation for her to ask it again. Particularly since her name peppered his every sentence, Sally this and Sally that…

If every compartment hadn’t already been full and the corridor outside locked solid with people standing, she could have moved; but the very thought of pushing her way from carriage to carriage past hundreds of grinning men was enough to make Sally stay where she was.

So what if the nuns stank of garlic sausage cut in fat slices from that salami? She didn’t smell so hot herself. A stink was on her own fingers from using a station loo at Tripoli, and she needed a bath. It was five days since she’d stayed at a tiny pensione outside Catania airport, where a fat Sicilian customs inspector had stopped midsearch when he reached the box containing her contraceptive cap.

“What’s in here?” he’d demanded.

Dropping to a squat, Sally had spread her knees and mimed shoving a finger into her vagina. He’d let her go after that although his scowl followed her all the way through the air-conditioned hell of Arrivals and out into the sweet heat that told her she was back in Sicily.

The pensione was the first one she’d come across. A drab little house with peeling yellow paint that turned out to be immaculate once she stepped through the door. Clean sheets in her attic room, a double bed charged as a single as there was only one of her and the little hotel was hardly overbusy. A dining room that they opened especially, so that the English student didn’t have to eat alone in her room.

And then a bath to wash away the dirt of New York. The pensione had plenty of hot water the owner told her proudly, little knowing that Sally would take hers shallow and almost cold. A habit she traced back to school.

She was tired from the flight and a twelve-hour stopover in London. Most of her spare money had gone towards a ticket that agreeing to the stopover made just about affordable. Although breaking at London meant she spent one night camped at Heathrow fighting off bad pickup lines and assuring the security staff that yes, she did have a valid ticket for onward travel. Of course, Sally could have afforded to fly more or less direct, with a simple change of planes in Frankfurt but then she wouldn’t have had enough money left for what she needed to do.

Later, as she dried, staring in the looking glass of the pensione’s attic, Sally tried to see herself as Atal had seen her, as Wu Yung and the boy before the man that Wu Yung was. Wondering what had they seen, the three men she’d bedded in the two years since she first let herself seduce Drew, the nanchuku nut, from boredom… She’d told Wu Yung fifteen lovers, to stop him thinking she might take him seriously; which Sally had, though common sense made her keep that private.

A thin face. Good bones, her grandmother would have said. Pale blue eyes. Narrow shoulders and small breasts. A flat stomach and no hips. That was her most obvious flaw. She had, an early gym mistress once told her, the figure of a natural athlete. That was shortly before the woman tried to massage knots from the cramped muscles of Sally’s inner thigh.

Examined coldly in the flecked mirror of a cheap pensione within spitting distance of the airport’s razor wire, Sally still looked good; a fact that made life easier but did nothing to make her proud. She kept herself fit, she didn’t take drugs, not even the pharmaceutical kind, and she avoided meat. All the same, her looks and intelligence were the product of good genes which were, whether she liked it or not, the result of careful breeding on the part of her grandparents and parents. Though her grandmother referred to it, rather sweetly, as making a good marriage.

Something Sally had no intention of doing.

After rough bread and rougher wine for which she was not charged, Sally relinquished her room, the bed unused, and took a bus south to Siracusa. She’d been planning to hitch but the owner’s wife told Sally that good girls didn’t do that in Sicily and when Sally discovered how little a ticket would cost, she decided to be good after all. She stayed with the bus until it reached its destination, the port.

So white in the sunlight that it almost burned Sally’s eyes, the SS
Gattopardo
was anything but inside. Stairs scabbed with chewing gum, heat-mottled lifeboats, walkways and rusting steps painted an institutional green and rough unshaded benches bolted in rows on the upper deck. Made worse by a stink of oil from the engine room and a sour tang of static that clung to every surface.

To top it all the
Gattopardo
broke down six hours out from Malta, its first stop, and, having sat out a blazing afternoon, decided to limp back at dusk, arriving just as Valletta’s cathedral rang midnight. Invited to go ashore and return at daybreak, Sally refused and ended up sleeping on a floor in a women’s loo, having first made safe the door by tying a short length of climbing rope between its handle and the nearest tap. Just one of the survival tips she’d picked up on her travels.

Noon next day found Sally arguing with a steward who refused to accept she’d been aboard the previous day and was thus entitled to the complimentary lunch recently announced over the ship’s tannoy. Eventually the man gave up and watched in disgust as Sally stuffed her rucksack with oranges and figs, pocketed a fat shard of hard cheese that wanted to be Parmesan but wasn’t and took a dozen slices of prosciutto just because she was pissed at him. The fruit and cheese she kept, the meat went Frisbee style over the side to feed the gulls.

All that remained after that was to negotiate customs at Banghazi and she was running for a carriage, filthy clothes, rucksack and all.

“Sally…”

The Arab boy with the scar was tapping her bare knee, which was a new one, except that it seemed he really did want to get her attention.

“What?”

Looking round, Sally realized their train had halted in the middle of nowhere. At least nowhere that looked like anywhere. All she could see from her dusty window was a wide expanse of red earth dotted with bushes of some kind.

“We’ve stopped,” she said.

The boy nodded and one of the nuns suddenly started to fire short, frightened sentences at her in a language Sally definitely didn’t understand. When Sally shrugged, the woman repeated herself louder.

“Any idea what she’s saying?”

He nodded.

“Well,” said Sally. “Are you going to tell me?”

“Sure,” shrugged the boy. “Why not…? She says this train’s been hijacked by bandits who will kill her because of her faith and rape you because you’re not wearing enough clothes.”

“Is that true?”

He shrugged. “Anything’s possible,” he told her. “Not likely, but possible.” The boy looked from Sally to the nuns and back again. “Do you have anything with longer sleeves?”