Blood Rules (3 page)

Robbie gazed at the map book spread out across his thighs, looking for a route of a different sort and finding none. He wanted to talk about his mother. About Leila. When she left, he’d hated her at first; what kind of monster

abandoned her family? He’d cried a lot, too. Now he no longer hated her, but there were things he needed to
know.
Like: why had Mum and Dad divorced? Was it his fault his parents couldn’t get along?

Whenever he thought of his mother he knew sorrow, rather than anger. But it was a sorrow that sapped his strength and gnawed his guts, and he was sick of it.

“Dad.” The word came out quietly; there was a definite tremor to it. Colin was pulling off the motorway, heading for the slip road. Robbie didn’t want to wreck his father’s concentration, really he didn’t…. “Dad, it’s about Mum. I’d like—”

“Sorry, Robbie, just a mo: which exit do we need?” Colin sounded panicky. “Which way do we need to go here?”

“I—”

“Quickly!
I’ve got to make up my mind.”

“But I don’t—”

“Well, look at the tickets, for Christ’s sake! Oh, damn, I’ve missed it!”

He drove on, hugging the inside lane, while Robbie wrestled with the briefcase’s clasps.

“Oh, come on!”

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it, wait…” Robbie flicked open the cardboard wallet in which the travel agent had sent them their tickets. “Terminal Three!”

Suddenly, Colin laughed. Not out loud, just a little puff of air through the lips. He turned his head slightly, enough to look at Robbie’s miserable expression and wink. Robbie pumped out the same half laugh.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Colin cried, “this is our third circuit of the Heathrow slip-road roundabout. And now, by popular request, let’s go around one more time.”

So they did. They could hardly see for laughing, and it healed the breach that had threatened to spoil a wonderful first day of the holiday, but it made them late. So late,in fact, that by the time they came to check in the flight was overbooked and Robbie no longer had a seat, because he’d been bumped.

The passport was French, the name on its front
susannah duclerc
, and both were false. The document lay aligned with the lip of the plain wooden dressing table. To judge by the way its owner had placed it, just touching the rim of the qibla disk that indicated the direction of Mecca, it belonged to a neat, methodical person possessed of a tidy mind. Beside it were a first class air ticket, Bahrain-Kuala Lumpur, two thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and a black Étienne Aigner purse. Apart from these things, the dressing table was bare.

She sat squarely, facing the point where dawn would begin to define her reflection in the mirror. First a line of whiteness picked out the side of her nose and left cheek-bone … forehead … chin. Slowly, slowly, she blended out of the night—the Arabic word for which was
lailah,
her real name.

She watched without flinching, hands clasped over the arms of her chair. Once enough light had insinuated its way through the half-drawn curtains, she rose to switch off the twin bulbs flanking the mirror before settling back into her former position. She had this gift of absolute stillness, so that if you had come upon her in a waxworks you could have been forgiven for taking her to be an exhibit. She’d once found herself locked in the Uffizi gallery because the curators simply hadn’t noticed her sitting there, lost in contemplation. She was not quite of this world, not all of the time.

She had an excellent figure, this woman of thirty-six. The first thing you noticed about her was the athletic body, the streamlining that had survived both marriage and pregnancy. She was particular about the cut of her clothes, preferring to have the material beneath and around the breasts drawn a little tight so as to hint that her bust was a large one kept in check, whereas really it was smaller than she would have liked. She carried her head high, chin up, like the nannies taught, and when she looked someone in the eye—her lifelong habit—their brilliant whites contrasted so starkly with the mahogany of her irises that the person observed would sometimes blink, feeling pierced. Perfectly matched, finely plucked eyebrows hooded those sparkling eyes; they and the mouth, suggestive of iron will, gave the face what character it had. But on the whole it was an unremarkable countenance: one that passed unremarked, and often, before the watchful gaze of those whose duty it was to hunt her down. She had been lovely once; in those days she had yearned, as young girls do, to be noticed. Now she asked nothing more than to go, as the diverse languages of her many passports had it, “without let or hindrance,” fading from the mind like a portrait executed in disappearing ink.

When she rose and moved across to the window of her suite set high in Bahrain’s Intercontinental Hotel, the creamy light of a Persian Gulf dawn greeted her without kindness. She was Lebanese by birth, her skin palest olive, allowing her to pass as European in Beirut or Arabian in Paris, whichever might prove expedient; but this morning it was greasy with the fatigue of long vigil. From her aerie she could just discern the beginnings of the sea. Ahead of her, beyond the desolate void of the largest parking lot she had ever seen, and one entirely empty of vehicles, lay the business and financial district, its glass skyscrapers unmarred by the dense mists of dawn that surrounded the island without encroaching on it. A spit of sand, its northern end smothered with concrete, the whole veiled in fog. If Bahrain had not already existed, God would surely have felt no need to fill the gap.

She let the gauze curtain slip from her beringed hand, her mouth curling in contempt at the thought of the rowdy Europeans she had observed spilling out from the bar the night before. Yes, and there had been
ghutras
as well, red and white headdresses, Saudi accents, so many tomcats swarming down the causeway in search of outlets for their unsanctioned thirsts and lusts. Scum … but profitable scum, oh, very, with their never-ending willingness to pay for the death and destruction Leila dispensed, for a Saudi contract would always hold up.

The Arabs in the bar were not the real ones, anymore than the pseudo-princesses who had haunted the Hamra shopping district of her Beiruti childhood represented the European aristocracy they so pitifully aped.

The silver coffeepot felt cold beneath her hand. She dialed room service, making her request with the minimum of words. Because she had not spoken for over a day, her voice sounded alien to her.

Those people were not the real Arabs. They were not even real people.

There once had been a certain house, where real people lived and loved.

Yarze, overlooking the whole coastal swath of Beirut, with its stunted skyscrapers, red-tiled roofs, and white walls amid the concrete. It was an L-shaped, three-story house called “Kharif,” Arabic for autumn, not far from the American ambassador’s official residence; you turned off the road, through high wrought-iron gates that were always left open, and climbed a steep drive that curved tightly around upon itself to reach the oak front door. Inside, coolness and peace. An expanse of exquisite mosaic flooring, leading you seductively onward, past

doors, all open, ever open, to the French windows at the back and the garden.

Leila, coming home from school, would run through the house, blind to all else, until she burst out into the sunshine again. But this was her own personal source of sun: Grandfather, sitting under the jacaranda tree in his wicker throne beside the marble pool, dozing, oblivious to the leaves as they shifted their shadowy lattice patterns this way and that across his pale face. “Grandpa!” she would shriek, and he would jump awake as if electric current had been passed through him, allowing the book (there was always a book) to slide from his lap, often as not colliding with his thick ebony silver-tipped cane; and he would reach forward to pick these things up, but Leila was there ahead of him, sweeping everything aside in her need to clamber onto the old man’s lap, put her arms around his neck, and nibble at his gray beard that smelled of latakia and Eau de Portugal.

Then Azizza would come out, hands clasped in front of her as usual, Azizza the servant; perhaps there was a piece of paper somewhere—in a registry, say, or some ministry—that described her occupation as “servant,” because you couldn’t write down
loved
as a job. Maybe not. Leila hoped not. She knew that Grandpa would have had the tact to enter her as “aunty,” because that was his way. Azizza would come out, scolding across Grandpa’s pleas for a bowl of strawberries, or a piece of that wonderful Nestlé's Devon Milk chocolate that only he knew where to buy.

“I hear she was terrible at school today,” Azizza would bark. “Three out of ten in English,
mais, c’est affreux!”

Then Grandpa would tilt his patrician head on one side, just five degrees, so, and look as if he wanted to burst into tears, and Azizza would unclasp her hands for long enough to throw them high above her head in a gesture of despair before retreating to fetch whatever treat the old man had requested.

While they ate together—the three of them, naturally all three, Azizza as well—Halib might come back, and for a moment Leila could bring herself to abandon Grandpa while she rushed to be picked up by her brother and swung around. Afterward he would throw himself down at Grandpa’s feet, resting his head on the old man’s knee, while Grandpa told them one of his stories. About his youth, as a pirate in Malacca. Or when he was a merchant prince in Africa and the black men wanted to eat him, but he escaped, with the help of a beautiful slave, “Not as beautiful as Grandmother, but close, close!” And then sometimes they would hear the chimes of the front door and know they had a guest. “Stay there,” Azizza would say, “I’ll get it!” The old woman would trot through the house, eager to know who had come. And she would open the door. Yes. Azizza opened it, because that was the rule.

A buzzer sounded; not in the house at Yarze, overlooking the blue Mediterranean and its Phoenician city of gold, but here in Bahrain, on a morning of damp mist and memory.

Leila, caught between two worlds, remained immobile for an instant; then she walked over to the dressing table and picked up her handbag. She opened it to check that the P7 pistol was in its proper place before advancing, slowly, to the door.

She hated opening doors, admitting people into her life. Even when—a peek through the viewer confirmed the fact—it was room service, bearing hot coffee: the only drug she permitted herself to take as antidote against a poisoned past.

The check-in clerk saw father and son as two entries on a bar graph: side by side, one shorter than the other but wearing similar clothes (white top, dark trousers), connected and somehow absolutely relevant to each other.

“I’m very sorry,” she said, “but we do sometimes get this overbooking problem. It does say on your ticket to arrive at the airport early, at least two hours before flight time.”

She wondered what they would do next. She’d been trained to deal with all eventualities short of a homicidal attack with malice aforethought, and she liked to think she knew how individual passengers were going to react to the news that, thanks to her employer’s greed and indifference, they had been bumped. So it surprised her when Colin Raleigh said, “I’m afraid we got caught up in traffic, miss. I wonder, is there anything you can do to help us?”

For he, too, knew a lot about people. He understood that the satisfactions of letters to the chairman, perhaps even a county court action, lay far in the future. What mattered now was getting them both seats.

“You see,” he went on, “I’m a law tutor and I’ve been invited to Kuala Lumpur by some of their senior academics to give a talk. Look.”

He produced a letter from his friends in K.L., putting his hand over the lower half and keeping up the patter while the clerk’s eyes flickered between him and the paper.

“This is my son; he’s fourteen and he’s never flown before; they’re meeting the flight, bit of a delegation, actually"—winsome smile, self-deprecating gesture—"so it would be rather embarrassing if the British Council bod and the Dean of the Law School and so on all piled up at K.L. airport and I didn’t.”

“But you’re on the flight, Mr. Raleigh.”

“Ah, but I could hardly travel without my son. The house is locked up, we’ve nowhere to go and stay; I mean, what’s he supposed to do, check into a hotel for the next eight weeks?”

“There might be a seat for him at the weekend—”

“No, I’m sorry. Both or neither.”

She gnawed her lip. Colin continued to smile at her in a way she appreciated.
She
knew that
he
knew none of this was her fault. “Let me have a quick word with my supervisor,” she said, slipping off her stool.

Colin looked at his son.
Colin
knew that
Robbie
knew he was to blame for everything.

“Don’t worry,” he said, laying a hand on Robbie’s shoulder. “They’ll sort something out.” Robbie shook off the hand, going to lean against an adjacent unmanned check-in desk so Colin couldn’t see his face.

“Mr. Raleigh"—the clerk had come back and was leaning forward to invite confidential discussion—"I’d be awfully grateful if you’d keep this under your hat,” she said, “but we’re going to give one of you a seat in business class.”

Colin nodded gravely, wondering if this girl knew of the irony whereby he’d cashed in his own business class ticket just so Robbie could fly. “Thank you, miss. You’ve been so helpful. Do you think I could have a note of your name?”

“Patsy.” But by now she was in a hurry; it took her less than a minute to check their bags through to Kuala Lumpur before sliding two boarding passes face down across the counter as if they were dirty photographs and she wanted to be rid of them.

Once in the duty-free shop Colin dithered over what brand of malt to buy for the Fadillahs, their hosts in Malaysia.

“Honestly, what is it about you and these big decisions, Dad? First the roundabout, now the scotch.”