Florence of Arabia (25 page)

"Not you. It's Florence calling."

"What do you want?"

"To trade. Me for the sheika."

"Why should I trade? You will be dead or captured before dawn."

"Just p
ut her on a plane. The moment it
lands a
nd I see her on TV, getting off
. I'll turn myself in. I'll confess to whatever you want."

Maliq laughed. "You will confess in
any
event."

"Look. Maliq, you're bringing the veil back to
Matar
,
Yes?"

"Certainly, but what does this have to do with it?"

"There are two and a half million women in
Matar
. How long will it take you to look underneath every veil to find me?"

"There is no rush. My days of racing are over. Cod be praised."

"Come on, Maliq, do you really want to wait that long before chopping off my head?"

"Imam
Maliq, if you please." he said
almost flirtatiously. "Cut off your head? No, no, I
have somet
hing else in mind. All in good t
ime. And now I must go. It seems I have a country to run."

T
he television sets wer
e showing file footage of Maliq
addressing a crowd. He looked rather stylish for an Islamic religious leader, but then his clerical garb had been designed in Paris.

There was a long gla
ss counter of cell phones and G
ameBoys and other electronic items. It was locked. Florence found a metal bar by the cash register for threatening robbers. She picked it up
and began smashing through the g
lass.

Bobby watched. "Flo,
what are you doin'?" "Launching the counterrevolution."

She gathered all the cell phones into a plastic shopping bag. She pointed to another locked glass display case full of video equipment "Break that, would you, please?"

Bobby went to the display and smashed it with a single blow of his pistol butt. Florence pulled out several video cameras and put them in the now bulging bag.

"That one. too." She pointed.

Bobby obediently broke another case. "Mr. Dera'a isn't gonna be real happy."

Florence gathered up some battery-operated televisions. H
aving completed her looting, she grabbed her orange
ab
aaya.
She kissed Bobby on the cheek.
"Goodbye,
baby," she said.

"What are you talkin' about?"

"Bobby. A man, a Westerner, blond, wanted for killing one of the
new ruler's men in a garage? H
ow long do you think you'd last in the new Matar?"

"I got my veil."

She smiled and stroked his cheek. "You'd do me more harm than good."

She put
on
her orange
ab
aaya
and picked up the bulging shopping bags. She looked like any Muslim woman who'd spent the afternoon at the mall.

Florence put her head out the door, looked both ways, cast a backward glance at Bobby and left.

H
e gave her a head start, then put on his own
ab
aaya
and followed.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR

The
coup in
Matar
, or, as the
State
Department was calling it, "the developing
situation in Matar," had taken the United
State
s government co
mpletely by surprise. The White House gamely asserted that
it had been aware "for some time now" that a viole
nt takeover had been in the offi
ng, and they had been working "behind the scenes and around the clock" to avert crisis. This, however, was a souffle that refused to rise.

On Capitol Hill, the cries of "Who lost
Matar
?" grew louder and louder. Senators pounded their podia, demanding answers.
The president declared that he, too,
wanted answers. The CIA said
that
although it would have no official com
ment, it, t
oo. perhaps even more than the president and the senators, wante
d answers. The secretary of stat
e said that there might in fact be no answers, but if there were, he certainly would be interested in hearing them. The secretary general of the United Nations said that he was reasonably certain answers existed, but first the right questions must be asked, and then they would have to
be translated, and this would t
ake time.

There were those who urged caution, and those who urged that now was a time not for caution but for boldness. Then there were those who urged a middle course of cautious boldness. 'There were extremists on bo
th sides: the neo-isolationists,
whose banner declared. "Just s
ell us the damned oil." and the neo-inte
rventionists, who said
, "Together, we can make a bett
er world, but we'll probably have to kill a lot of you in the process."

Privately,
the American president was said to be torn—between dispatching an aircraft carrier (perhaps the most dramatic gesture available to a president, short of actually landing on one); and dispatching a nuclear submarine. A distinguished naval historian pointed out on public television that submarines are every bit as l
ethal as aircraft carriers, but,
being underwater, are harder to see and therefore "less visually impactful." It was, as another historian said on public television, "a time of great ambiguity." And yet about even that much, reasonable people
differed
.
One fact, however, asserted itself
stubbornly,
insistently, over and ov
er, until it could not be ignored or swept or channel-surfed away: that nearly one third of America's imported oil. without which there would be
much shivering in January, now f
lowed through a country ruled by— as one more historian put it on public television—"a race-
car driver turned aya
tollah, installed by France." On this point, there was little ambiguity. The ques
tion was, what to do about it? F
rance had
played
her cards with elan and panache, savoir faire and a heaping helping of
je
ne sais quoi.

Within day
s, snippets of film
taken in the late Gazzir Bin Haz's "summer" residence at Um
-beseir had made their way ont
o the Internet and television, Canal Qu
atre in Paris aired a documentary about the emir's harem that would have made Casanova, the authors of the
Kama Sutra
and
. quite possibly, the Marquis d
e Sade blush. The film had been (apparently, since no one would take credit for it) shot by some hidden camera. (Annabelle had been a busy girl, indeed.) In one particularly riveting sequence, the emir of
Matar
was seen spooning beluga caviar onto the breasts of a pair of (admittedly delectable) Russian la
dies named Tatiana and Svetlana, and then gobbling it up,
pausing only to take puffs from a hookah that seemed to contain more than mere tobacco, and gulps from a bottle quite clearly labeled "Southern Comfort" while periodically shrieking, "God
be praised
¹
."
True, every man wor
ships God in his own way, but su
ch vignettes made it somewhat difficult for the exiled noblesse of Matar, now dug into their bunkers in Cann
es, Gstaad and Portofin
o, to assert convincingly—between swigs of Chivas and Cristal—that the late emir had been guided by a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.

Expensive media consultants were duly engaged by the exiled Bin Hazzim to make the ease that life in
Matar
under the emir, decadent and even downright naughty as he may have been, had been more benign than the Matar
that the neo-conservat
ive Maliq had in mind. Religious converts often try to make up for lost piousness with heightened fervor. Maliq's motto was a perverse paraphrase of Saint Augustine:
Oh God. make me bad—right now
:
Within days of taking over, he had revoked driving privileges for women
; reinstituted the veil; made it
illegal for women to leave the house except with a male blood relation: and decreed female laughter punishable by twenty lashes, on the theological grounds
that
if a woman laughed, she was probably happy about something, and that would not do.

The citizens of Matar did not embrace this new pietism with open arms, but then Maliq had never said he cared what they thought one way or the other. A large construction crane was driven into Robespierre (formerly Churchill) Square, and several counterrevolutionary Matari citizens were duly suspended from it by the neck. Several women, frisky enough to venture out in broad daylight without their heads covered—and, if you
please,
without male chaperones—were swiftly made an example of. It was quite obvious, declared the
mukfellah
official who announced their sentences, that they had been on their way to fornicate with loathsome blackamoor cooks. There was no actual evidence of this, but the advantage of a religious judiciary is that you don't need evidence. The unfortunate women insisted that they were just going out to pick up milk and the dry cleaning, but you can't be too careful.

Much as he enjoyed a fl
ogging or beheading,
or even the occasional stoning,
Maliq could take or leave them. He would much rather watch NASCAR and formula One racing on television (though he now had to be a bit discreet about this). It was his Wasabi patrons who were behind all the chopping and lashing. They insisted. And since it was they who had put him on his throne, Maliq had no choice but to play along.

TV
Matar and his late half brother Gazzir—whose helicopter had been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, not a tree—had caused the House of Hamooj nothing but ridicule and humiliation. Now it was payback time: time, moreover, to set an example for all the Wasabi women back at home who had gotten all sorts of dangerous ideas from
all those months of watching TV
Matar.

H
ow different was its programming now! Recipes, tips on how to please the husband, how to keep from being trampled during the hajj, comedies about greedy Israelis and fat infidel Americans. Thursday nights at eight.
Everyone Lov
es Imam!,
w
ith Maliq reading aloud from the
B
ook
of
Hamooj
and giving his own unique textural interpretations. True, ratings were a sliver of what they once had been. But then you need to give new shows time to build.

F
rance. Wasabia's co-partner in the Maliq installation, was not altogether thrilled by this grim slate of affai
rs. But as the Ministere de Petr
ole (Ministry of Oil) was about to sign an
entente economique
(sweetheart deal) with Wasabia for a 2
0 percent discount. F
rance was not disposed to make too loud a
bruit
(noise) about it.

Confronted in the men's room at the IN Security Council by the U.S.
permanent representative, the F
rench permanent representative shook his head and rolled his eyes and
said. "Yes, yes, yes,
but what can one
do
with these people— they are
impossible."
leaving the American representative with an even more deeply beetled brow and requiring further instruction from Washington.

F
rance was also about to sign a mutual security pad with
Matar
, providing her with a deep-water naval base in the Gulf. The new government in Paris was manife
sting neo-Gaullist (some said ne
o-Napoleoni
c) designs in the Proche-Orient,
where the tricolor had once flapped proudly in the breezes. All the insults of 1922 were finally being avenged. Another distinguished historian— there seemed to be no end of them—said on public television that
France
was no longer content to sit back and watch the United
State
s screw things up in the region. Did not
France
have her own proud history
of screwing things up? Took at Algeria, Vietnam, Syria,
Haiti—Quebec—all still reeling from their days of
French
rule. Clearly.
France
was ready and eager to show the world that she, too. could wreak disastrous, unforeseen consequences abroad, far more efficiently
and almost certainly with more fl
air than America.