The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (128 page)

“Ask,” Raf told her.

She swallowed. “Your Highness…”

The only way Clair duBois could force herself to ask was to pretend someone outside her did the asking. The same way that many years before, as a sixteen-year-old, she’d turned up on the doorstep of a haunted-looking soap actress and forced herself to ask the woman about a miscarriage, vomiting in a flower bed the moment the actress slammed the door in her face, having first called Clair every name under the sun. All the confirmation her editor had needed.

“You have a question for me?” Moncef’s voice dragged Clair back from her memories and shrivelled the snakes knotting inside her stomach. The very fact Emir Moncef prompted her meant he intended to answer.

Briefly the woman toyed with asking whether he had flu. What Major Gide, as his doctor, had diagnosed. How he was feeling… But then she asked the single best question of her career.

“Are you dying?”

“It’s probably safe to say,” said the man, his voice amused, “that we’re all dying…” He sat up straighter in his bed, rug still tight around him and spoke direct to his interviewer rather than the camera, his hooded eyes never leaving her face. “Except, of course, those already dead. And those who are immortal.”

And then he smiled that smile seen in stills around the world. The one that was either ineffably wise or completely insane. Verdicts differed, with Berlin willing to consider the first and Paris and Washington definite that it was the last.

“Is that your only question?”

If the Emir found it odd to be answering questions while blood glazed like sugar icing on a carpet he’d refused to remove, then Moncef didn’t let it show, but then…

Clair duBois shrugged, mostly inside her head. Who knew what the Emir found odd?

“Ask if he’s immortal…”

Jumping, Clair looked round. It took her a moment to realize that Antoine, her backup cameraman had activated his throat mic and was hissing the suggestion through her Sony earbead.

She asked it.

“No,” said the Emir, “not since I ate the mushrooms.”

CHAPTER 50

Thursday 17th March

Bells rang from the twin towers of St. Vincent de Paul,
that Gothic monstrosity with all its pews removed and a Persian carpet covering the altar. Flags hung from office windows or whipped in the slipstream of car aerials. Drifting on the wind came the stink of cordite, bastard cousin to the endless firecrackers let off all morning, too close to gunfire for the peace of everyone.

Martial law had been lifted, the act signed by Ashraf Pasha, newly created heir to the Emir. He’d signed the edict on behalf of his father, a man now too weak to hold a pen, even to write his own signature.

The return to normal law came the day after Raf had questioned his half brother in the presence of their father. This took place in the al Andalus-inspired HQ of Dar el Bey, overlooking Place du Gouvernement.

Raf sat at a desk with Kashif on the other side; the Emir had a motorized wheelchair and only Major Gide stood.

It was a very polite questioning. There wasn’t a blowtorch in sight and no one in the room, from the Emir to the major, even suggested tying anyone else to a table.

“The snake,” Raf said to Kashif. “That was your first mistake. A simple enquiry could have revealed that all venomous snakes at Tunis Zoo have their poison sacs removed. Only Major Jalal couldn’t risk asking that question, could he? So you made an assumption, the Emir got bitten and Ifriqiya got its very own miracle…”

“I know nothing about a snake.”

“Of course you don’t. How about the death of two guards, bribed or blackmailed into releasing the snake in the Emir’s tent…?”

“I know nothing about any guards.”

“They got shot,” said Raf, “at the banquet you threw for your father. Remember? The one where Eugenie died.”

Kashif was blaming it all on his dead
aide-de-camp
… In fact, he was horrified to discover some of the things Major Jalal had done in his name.

“I take it,” said the Emir, “that you have proof for this accusation against your brother?” His words were thin and took longer to say than they should, but there was amusement in them and something close to admiration lit his lined and leathery face.

“If Kashif is my brother…”

Moncef looked at him then. “Meaning?”

“I just wondered.”

“You are Ashraf al-Mansur,” said Moncef, almost firmly. “And I am Emir of Tunis. Your mother was the love of my life.” Sad eyes swept the small office, barely noticing Kashif as they passed over Raf, a selection of police files in front of him. One of which contained the results on DNA testing that Raf had yet to mention to anyone.

When the Emir’s gaze finally alighted, it was on the young girl half-perched on an office chair and the boy who gripped her hand, rather tightly. “You have your responsibilities and I have mine.”

“Obviously,” said Raf. And when the Emir smiled, Raf was waiting with the only question that really mattered. “What do you want done with Kashif Pasha?”

“And if I say kill him…”

“Then he dies,” said Raf and took a gun from its holster under his arm. Placing it on the desk at which he sat.

“If I say let him go… Which is what I’m minded to say?”

Raf paused, all too aware that Hani was watching him, just as Murad watched the Emir, both holding their breath.

“If you say let him go,” said Raf, “then that’s what happens. But it places this family above the law. And gives victory to everyone who thinks Ifriqiya is corrupt beyond redemption.” He added the second consequence as an afterthought. Not quite realizing how much weight it would carry with the Emir.

“So what would you suggest?”

“Let him stand trial…”

The Emir nodded and struggled with the control pad of his wheelchair. Waving Murad away, Emir Moncef rolled slowly towards the door and stopped, one hand reaching for the doorknob, his other edging the chair into reverse. “You’re right about everything,” he told Raf in a voice little more than a whisper, “except for Alex and Nicolai. The decision to have them shot was mine. My only regret is not warning Eugenie, but then”—Moncef shrugged—“she’d only have tried to stop me.”

CHAPTER 51

Thursday 17th March

Eduardo sat on the edge of a metal table swinging his
feet. Every time his shoe scuffed the floor it produced that unmistakable mouselike squeak of leather against ceramic.

A noise that was driving everybody else in the room insane. And the really great part was that none of them could do a thing about it. He was the most senior officer present at the briefing, a thought so bizarre that Eduardo shut his eyes just to savour it.

“I’m sorry, Boss.” Alexandre looked worried. Under the misapprehension his question had been stupid enough to drive the Chief to anger.

“No,” said Eduardo, “it’s a good point. Just not one I can answer.”

This truth elicited a frown from a thickset sergeant at the back. A man with a bald patch, common enough, and a Kashif-like moustache, which now made him something of a rarity in the Tunis PD. It was truly staggering the number of officers who’d decided in the last twenty-four hours to shave off their moustaches, reshape them or else begin to grow a beard.

“Got a problem?” Eduardo asked the man.

“Yeah,” a bull neck raised an even heavier chin. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t see how a case involving a dead pastry chef can be so secret that the master file has to be shredded in front of two witnesses.”

It was obvious from his tone that respect was the last thing the sergeant felt for the small
morisco
in the leather coat sitting on the old Chief’s table.

“I can understand that,” said Eduardo, “to you it looks like a simple open-and-shut murder, hardly worth bothering about. To me it had all the marks of a
cause célèbre
from which Ifriqiya needs to be protected. Maybe that’s why I’m kicking my heels up here and you’re kicking yours at the back.”

Several officers smiled and Eduardo resisted the temptation to take a brief bow. He was in the operations room; a large space of cheap desks and dirty grey chairs, wall charts, holiday rotas and a small kitchen, which might have been slightly too grand a name to describe a corner partitioned off with hessian boards and containing a sink, two ancient kettles and a cheap microwave.

Eduardo had called his officers together to make an announcement and the announcement was simple, the Maison Hafsid case was closed and, for internal security reasons, the files would be shredded and all evidence sealed in sterile bags and remain so for the next hundred years. The reason was actually very simple but Eduardo had explained this only to Rose.

She’d been lying there on a big double bed in their room at the Dar Ben Abdallah. And as she’d rolled over, a frown on her face, Eduardo had smiled as a breast popped out of her dressing gown. He’d almost forgotten what he intended to say, the way he did some mornings when he looked over the foot of the bed and saw Rose, with her back to him in the early dawn, wearing nothing but a G-string and black tights.

“So what happened to Cousin Ahmed?” She’d read the files and knew the names.

“There was no cousin.”

“So who did the
mubahith
arrest?”

“No one,” said Eduardo with a satisfied smile. “That’s the whole point. No one vanished in police custody. I’ve had every file checked. Even the ones that don’t exist.”

“So who killed Isabeau’s brother?”

“I think that’s got to remain a secret,” said Eduardo. It seemed odd to be making those kind of decisions but no one else was available and someone had to… Well, Eduardo assumed that was true. His Excellency couldn’t have dragged him from El Isk just to unravel who did what, that would be far too simple.

There was unquestionably more to the equation than could at first be seen.

It had taken Eduardo a while to work out the unseen integer but he’d got it the moment he saw the knife supposedly used for the murder. Once, long before, Eduardo had worked in a kitchen, although there was nothing very special about this, everyone worked a kitchen at some time in their lives. At least, everyone Eduardo ever knew.

The first rule of kitchen culture was that no one, repeat no one, touched anyone else’s knives. Spit in their face, mock them and, if you must, insult their football team, that was fine, but no one messed with another person’s steel.

Knives were sacred.
Touch my arse before you touch my knife. Mess with my arse and die
… Eduardo knew the sayings. Three months grilling
merguez
in a workingmen’s café in Karmous had been enough to guarantee that.

So what was anyone meant to think when presented with a blade that was blunt, bent at the tip and stained? Well, Eduardo couldn’t actually say what anyone else might think. To him, however, it suggested no one really owned that knife. And if no one owned it…

The more Eduardo thought about it the more he was convinced he was right.

Notes said the mysteriously arrested Ahmed owned the knife when it was obvious that no one owned it or it wouldn’t have been such a mess. Someone was lying. Actually, he told Rose, several people were lying.

She’d been dressing when he said this. After she’d undressed at his insistence and gone to take a shower while he lay in bed getting back his breath, Eduardo had returned to his thoughts.

They ate breakfast in a café. Rose choosing coffee and a croissant and Eduardo eating rough flatbread cooked on a clay griddle by a middle-aged woman who sat on a stool by the door. With the unleavened bread he ate slivers of some meat that obviously wasn’t pork, with a helping of menakher dates, as befitted a man making the most of being in a different country.

Then he left Rose to her shopping and jumped a cab to the Police HQ without bothering to wait for his official car. A decision made easier by his discovery, right at the start, that naming the Police HQ as his destination was enough to ensure that no driver ever asked him to pay the fare. Their surprise on the few occasions he did offer payment was worth double the handful of change his journey actually cost.

So now he was on a table in the operations room, trying to explain without really doing so that there was no murderer; at least not one who could be arrested by the police. Eduardo knew exactly who killed Pascal Boulart and he was certain (as certain as he ever was about anything), that His Excellency knew too. Why else would he have brought in Eduardo but to tidy up such loose ends?

CHAPTER 52

Saturday 19th March

Isabeau checked her rail ticket and re-counted the
notes. No writing appeared anywhere on the envelope and she was willing to bet there’d be no fingerprints either. In her memory, she had it that the small man with the black coat kept his gloves on throughout his entire visit.

She was bathed and dressed, standing on the platform of Gare de Tunis beside a cardboard suitcase that looked like leather until one got close. She wore new shoes and black Levi’s, a shirt and a shawl as befitted the cooler weather. Her hair was covered in a waterfall of blue silk; not quite a
hijab,
not exactly a scarf; something elegantly in between. And though Gare de Tunis was less than a klick south of St. Vincent de Paul and the air was clear enough for sound to travel, Isabeau ignored the bells. Despite the small cross she wore, politics not religion had been her life. All seventeen years of it.

The
MediTerre
ticket in her pocket was an open one. A month’s rail travel anywhere in North Africa and Southern Europe. With the ticket came a student ID, an Ifriqiyan passport and glowing references from Café Antonio. So far as Isabeau could see all of these looked real; except they couldn’t be, for a start she’d never passed her baccalaureate and no university would take her.

Isabeau had no illusions about what was happening. She was being bought off, which was, she realized, preferable to being jailed or killed. The small man who’d limped into her life with a simple telephone call had more or less said as much.