Arabesk (104 page)

“Secret,” said Hani. “Very secret.”

Not being too sure how else to proceed, Hani thrust the screen at the man. “I have to find this woman,” she said and watched his eyes. Glad that he didn’t like the look of her either. “To deliver a message.”

“This message is from His Excellency?”

Hani shook her head and left it at that.

“I see,” said the thin Italian, visions of the Khedive using his young cousin to pass secret messages to unsuitable foreigners flicking through his head. Or maybe it was Hamzah Effendi, because rumours had the industrialist quietly financing a return to power for Saiid Koenig Pasha.

“The thing is,” Hani began. “I was wondering if she’d ever eaten here?”

“I forgot to give you this…” Hani held out the pen.

“Thank you.” The maître d’ smiled. It was only after she’d slipped away the previous afternoon that he realized Lady Hana had taken his silver Mont Blanc with her. He should have known she’d return it just as soon as she realized.

“A parcel came for your uncle.”

“I know,” said Hani, “I’m here to collect it.”

The maître d’ looked doubtful.

“It’s wrapped in brown paper,” said Hani. “Madame Ingrid brought it down this morning. Gave it to you herself.”

At least Hani imagined that was what had happened. She’d been very specific in her instructions to the bank. His Excellency needed the money wrapped in paper and delivered to his office. The parcel was to be given only to Madame Ingrid. The note Hani sent to Madame Ingrid on her uncle’s behalf was actually a postcard taken from a box in her dead aunt’s old room. The card’s surface was waxy, ivory rather than white. Across one side, at the top, ran the words,
al-Mansur Madersa, Rue Sherif, El Iskandryia.
That alone must be enough to make the card an antique, since the door onto Rue Sherif had been walled up for…

Hani wasn’t sure, but ages anyway. And it had only been unbricked after Aunt Nafisa died. She’d risked using her printer to fake Uncle Asraf’s signature on this, because she was pretty certain Madame Ingrid wouldn’t be feeding the card through any machine. All the woman would do was what she was told, which was deliver any parcel left at C3 straight to the maître d’ at Le Trianon.

It was a smooth-flowing, perfect circle of transferred responsibility.

Hani held out her hand.

“The parcel’s in my office,” said the maître d’ and Hani nodded wisely, although she hadn’t even known the Italian had an office. “Why don’t I have someone bring you a cappuccino while I fetch it?”

Hani did her best not to sigh.

Wednesday 23rd February

Mubahith came looking for Raf. At least they did
according
to Isabeau. But this Raf only found out later, and first there was another shift to get through. His seventh in three days. Two scraping dishes, one suds diving, three prepping vegetables and now this.

“More fire…”
Chef Antonio skimmed the hot chicken breasts across his kitchen, one after the other and a commis chef ducked.

It was inevitable the new broiler man should fumble the catch. If only because he had two hands and there were five flying breasts of chicken. But he caught three and won $20 for Idries who’d bet Raf would catch more than he dropped.

“Owe you,” Idries told him.

The kitchens at Café Antonio were thick with steam. The floor slippery. A radio spat raiPunk and the only thing louder than the fury of Cheb Dread was the chef’s voice.

“Burn it,” Antonio snarled. “Blackened chicken needs to be fucking
blackened
.” With a scowl he swung round, gearing up to persecute somebody else.

Out of the fat chef’s sight Raf grabbed a hand towel and began to wipe off his fumbled catches.

“Run them under a tap,” Idries said over his shoulder.

So Raf did, then tossed the five chicken breasts back into oil and smoking butter. Sixty seconds later, having seared both sides to charcoal against the pan’s heavy bottom he scooped them out, rolled them on cheap kitchen paper and dumped them back on a plate.

“Ready,” he shouted and discovered the plate was already gone.

“Swordfish two,” came the cry from a teller, “and let’s hustle, tagine three.”

The tagine would be lamb because that was the only kind Café Antonio served. Lamb tagine, blackened chicken and pan-seared swordfish, those were Antonio’s bows to ethnic cookery; and if the Soviet kids with their rucksacks and cheap condoms didn’t know that tagine came via Morocco, the chicken courtesy of the Caribbean and the swordfish recipe from Malta then Antonio wasn’t about to tell them. His ingredients were local, mostly… The fish caught by boats from Odessa and frozen on-site. When the Soviet crews docked at Tunis, which was rarely, Antonio would be waiting, ready to come to an agreement.

The captain would eat free for his entire stay, much vodka would be drunk and one or maybe two sides of frozen swordfish would go missing.

Other than these dishes Café Antonio served pizza and that was all. Antonio pushed the pizza because he was from Naples after all, and his staff also pushed pizza, whatever their nationality, because that’s what they were told to do. Pizza was good to eat, quick to cook and the markup was excellent; the other dishes took more time, cost more to make and irritated Antonio with their inauthenticity.

“So why serve them?”

Idries shrugged. “Have you seen the real thing?”

Apparently Antonio needed the ethnic dishes for the kind of tourists who thought they wanted to eat local food but never did when actually presented with lumps of goat heart, fatty lamb still on the bone or fish that scowled back from the plate.

“Swordfish three.”

“Got it,” said Raf and reached for a dish, realizing suddenly that it was empty. “I’m…”

“Fucking amateur,” said a dark boy, dumping a pile of swordfish by Raf’s station. He was wearing check trousers and clogs, a white jacket and a scarf to keep curling hair out of his eyes; only his grin removed sting from the words. “Next time, call me before you get eighty-six.” They both knew the boy should have got there first.

A quick flick with a blade to free a steak from the frozen stack and Raf rattled it, still hard, onto the griddle, following it with a second and a third. Ninety seconds later the fish was seared.

“Chicken, fire five.” Antonio grabbed a ticket from a teller he felt was working too slowly and shouted out the orders, hanging each yellow slip from a peg when the list was done.

“Come on,” he howled at Raf. “What are you waiting for?”

Fallout from the oil that hissed in his pan worried Raf not at all. He’d assigned the pain to colours, running the rainbow according to intensity and length. Most of his double shifts sped by in a low-level intensity of blue with the occasional flashes of purple.

Already his wrists were freckled with tiny burns and his first finger raw from pressing down on a knife. There would be real calluses later, Isabeau had explained to Raf the day before, turning over her own hands. Somehow he’d felt the need to check and then, holding her hands, had not known how to give them back.

Which, obviously enough, was the point Hassan slammed into the cold locker. And the sudden snatch of her fingers had looked like guilt to all of them.

“Chicken,” Raf shouted and scooped blackened breasts onto kitchen paper, rolled them over, then dumped them into a heated dish. Someone else would dress the plates. Glancing over to the hatch to see what other orders were headed his way Raf found the teller leaning against the wall, a cigarette ready for lighting.

A redheaded Australian waitress with a flour handprint on her behind was scowling as she dusted the ghostly fingers from black jeans. Raf looked round for anybody with an answering print on their face but all he got was Hassan looking smug.

The last order had just been served. Wind-down could begin.

Café Antonio had a shower room in the basement. This saved the staff from having to climb five flights to their dorm in the attic. Unfortunately there was only one shower and both sexes worked the kitchen, so it alternated as to who got to use it first.

But today that didn’t matter because Isabeau was doing a morning shift at Maison Hafsid, the Australian waitress refused to wash at all, something about natural oils and the Bosnian dishwasher and the one who wore tights but no knickers had resigned yesterday, shortly after Raf was promoted to work the broiler instead of her.

“Call for you,” said a pearl diver, soap suds still gloved down both wrists. He held the dripping phone in one hand, a plate in the other and was looking at Idries.

“Tell them to fuck off,” Antonio ordered. “We’re going drinking.”

“I think you should take it,” the boy said to Idries, very carefully not looking at the chef.

“It won’t take a minute,” Idries promised as Antonio scowled.

Afternoon sessions were banned unless the chef suggested them. In the three days he’d been working double shifts Raf had discovered a dozen such rules. Spoken and unspoken. Along with a web of loyalties, pragmatic friendships and alliances, feuds that simmered below the surface and a few that didn’t. All institutions were the same and few places came more institutional than a restaurant kitchen.

Small wonder Raf felt at home.

Over at the vidphone Idries was talking intently. His body hunched around the phone in his hand.

“Time’s up,” said Antonio. His voice hard. A tumbler of cooking brandy away from developing a dangerous edge.

“It’s Isabeau,” Idries said over his shoulder. “She needs to talk to Raf.”

“You like snakes?” Isabeau’s voice was neutral. All the same Raf knew it was a loaded question because he’d sensed her distance grow as he went from one dirty window to the next, matching labels to the reptiles inside. By the time they’d reached the third row she barely bothered to glance into the cases at all.

She was lost somewhere inside herself. Arms folded across her front. Shoulders hunched as she walked beside him. Dressed in what looked like new jeans and a pink T-shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves. A blue scarf hid her face.

If Raf hadn’t known better he’d have said she was afraid.

Maybe he was meant to have reacted more to her news. That strange men were searching for him. At least, they were searching for someone. A soldier on the run. Only, Raf knew there was no soldier, was there…

Or if there was it wasn’t him.

“Put it this way,” said Raf. “Snakes remind me of my childhood.” Absentmindedly sliding his hand into the pocket of his own jeans to touch the memento Eugenie had given him, Raf added, “You could call it a family interest.”

His mother had once shot a series in the Amazon with the working title
Good Snakes Gone Bad
, probably for the Discovery Channel. It became
Renegade Reptiles
and paid less than zilch and took eight months out of her life. She came back with dysentery, ringworm, different colour hair and a brooding Brazilian boy who lasted two months in New York before demanding a ticket home.

Before this was footage for Channel5 involving a python and a naked baby, taken using a table-mounted Sanyo with remote control, so she could also be in shot. A thin woman in her early twenties, bare-breasted and with hennaed toes on a Berber rug beside the snake and child. Because she showed no fear of the reptile, the infant showed no fear and because the infant lacked fear it yanked happily at the sleepy python, digging small fingers into snake flesh and pushing the python around like a toy.

When this didn’t elicit a response, the child dragged a heavy coil to its mouth and tried to chew its leatherlike skin. Finally the infant got bored and crawled out of shot, leaving the woman smiling into the camera.

A fifteen-second snip later got used for a campaign selling life insurance.

It was years before Raf realized the child was he.

“But do you like them?” Isabeau insisted.

Raf shook his head.

“Then why suggest we meet here?”

“You wanted to talk…”

She would age, Raf realized as he watched her frown. Her compact body would fill out and her face acquire lines. That residual puppy fat on her arms would become less puppyish, more obvious, her looks would go and breasts lose their battle with gravity. She would put on weight and grow old, something the fox once promised would never happen to him.

“Sometimes,” said Raf. “I get voices that tell me what to do…”

Or maybe that was
invent
? Raf was uncertain. For as long as he could remember there had been a fracture between mind and body, observed and observer. A rupture of identity that kept him distanced from himself, often thinking of himself as
he.
What if the fox was right and it didn’t exist… If his memory wasn’t as perfect as he pretended?

What if he was just running away?

Isabeau stared back. Worried but not frightened, not yet.

“And these voices told you to look at snakes?”

“Actually,” Raf’s smile was rueful, “I think that was my idea.”

“Your…” And after a second Isabeau almost smiled back. It was a nervous smile but it lifted her face and bled some of the anxiety from her eyes.

“These voices?”

“Once there was a fox,” said Raf, staring into a darkened case. “A dangerous and deadly ghost. Always waiting, always there.” On the other side of the filthy glass a bootlace tasted the air with a sullen tongue. Around its nostrils splashed colours that no human eye could see. Knowledge Raf could tell Isabeau or keep to himself. “And then it wasn’t.”

“What happened?”

Raf looked at her. There were no colours hidden in her face. Nothing Isabeau couldn’t see in her own reflection.

“To the fox?”

She nodded.

“Someone repaired the bloody thing…”

Hammered into a grassy bank between the ring road and the main fence surrounding the zoo were enamel signs every hundred paces or so, to warn visitors not to climb over. A crude silhouette of a wolf reinforced that message.

At the bottom of the track stood metal gates and on the far side of those, just before a main road, was a neat ornamental lake crowded with wading birds and waterfowl. Around the edge strolled what looked like smart Tunis. Girls walking hand in hand and young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders in expressions of friendship that could only have been political back in Seattle.