Arabesk (111 page)

They’d met before on the ridge overlooking the complex. Only this time Eugenie de la Croix wore black trousers and a white shirt, Jimmy Choo slingbacks and a scarf that did little to hide a waterfall of dark hair. Her beauty was such that Sally almost forgave the fingers pulling at her bleeding lip.

“Where did you learn that little trick… Seattle?”

“I wasn’t in Seattle,” Sally replied from instinct and saw Eugenie grin.

“How about New York?” Although her eyes were amused, Eugenie’s hold on Sally’s lip tightened and there was a realness to her questions lacking until then. Eugenie was not the baby-faced guard she’d replaced. She could, and would, rip apart Sally’s mouth. “Well?”

Sally’s answer was just about comprehensible.

“Really,” said Eugenie, suddenly letting go the lip. “You weren’t in New York either?” She dropped a handful of papers onto a table and stood back so Sally could see. Photocopies of NYPD reports, mostly. Plus a fat file from a detective agency in Kuala Lumpur. There were also a handful of flimsies but what Sally noticed first was a P10, request for arrest, issued by MediPol, the terrorism-clearing group for Southern Europe, the Levant and North Africa.

“Cut off her clothes,” Eugenie ordered the puppy-faced recruit, who blinked. “What?” said Eugenie. “You have a problem with that?”

The recruit shook her head. “No, ma’am.” She glanced between Eugenie and the English girl tied to a camp chair. “Which end do you want me to start?”

The only remotely painful thing to happen after this involved a caustic lip salve and Eugenie’s demand that Sally rinse her mouth out several times with Listerine. What remained of her shorts and the T-shirt she’d been wearing on arrival were removed, along with the contents of her pockets, never to reappear.

Having been washed and shampooed in a canvas bath, Sally was handed a cotton towel and told to dry herself and dress. The robe the young recruit offered Sally was white. The shawl was red, with tassels and geometric patterns. It took Sally a second to realize that she was meant to put it on her head.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Eugenie said, stepping through a curtain that separated the bath from a room beyond. She was holding a gun, but loosely, like some expensive fashion accessory.

“What is?”

“To have Moncef Pasha’s babies…”

The two women looked at each other. Their hard stares holding until it seemed that neither would break the gaze binding them tight. And then Sally nodded.

“He’s been working on…”

“Quite probably,” said Eugenie. “He’s always working on some plan.” Her voice was studiedly dismissive. “Most of them come to nothing. Does your friend know what you intend?”

The woman meant Per, Sally realized. “I doubt it,” she said. Driving straight at the soldiers had been Per’s choice. And if the Swede wanted to be that stupid then, once again, that was also his choice. All Sally wanted to do was meet the pasha and make her offer. Although, looking down at her gown, Sally realized this wish might be redundant. The man was already one giant step ahead of her.

Berlin always insisted the al-Mansurs controlled a network of spies that threaded the cities of the world, corrupting and turning good to bad. Offshore oil provided the means and dogma the driving force. Camps deep in the desert hid training facilities; shown only as occasional smudges against sand in satellite photographs released on
Heute in Berlin,
usually in the run-up to an oil summit.

Sally had always dismissed it as so much propaganda. Now she was no longer sure.

“What will happen to Per?”

Eugenie stopped twirling her Colt. “He’ll be shot,” she said lightly. “Unless Moncef Pasha has a better idea.” Sally found it hard to work out whether or not the woman was joking.

“Why should humanity change?” Sitting next to Sally in the rear seat of a small Soviet attack helicopter, Eugenie was having trouble making herself heard. “Especially given we’re the ones winning…”

“What!”

Eugenie smiled at Sally’s outrage and nodded towards the ground. “Kairouan,” she shouted at the English girl. “Almost there.” They were on their way to Tunis, to an annexe of the great mosque where Moncef Pasha had an iman waiting.

If the Emir’s eldest son wanted this woman, then fine. Equally fine if he wanted access to those precious papers she’d found in New York. But it was as well he’d lacked the time to research her properly. Eugenie had read Sally Welham’s files, copies of the originals. Had her boss understood that Sally was a card-carrying atheist, he’d never have proposed what was to come next.

Static crackled in Eugenie’s headphones. “I have a message.”

“From Moncef?”

For a second Eugenie was irritated. “Who else?” she said. “His message is this, The smaller the lizard the greater its hopes of becoming a crocodile… I hope that means something to you because I doubt it means anything to anyone else.”

Eugenie took a sideways glance at the English girl. Thinner, taller, a little younger than Eugenie had been expecting from the photographs snatched along the way. Trailing Sally had been Eugenie’s idea from the moment she came to Moncef Pasha’s attention. An intrusive foreigner scouring the Net for awkward information.

A blackbird had followed the woman for much of the most recent trip before fading into the background with a change of clothes towards the end.

For a while, early on, Moncef himself had decided that flying a blackbird might work, but even without having met the target Eugenie could have told him otherwise. No one that desperate to become Moncef’s lover would risk being foolish. Which was why Eugenie steadfastly refused to believe a single word of Per’s story about passionate nights spent with this girl.

“You ready?”

Sally adjusted her headscarf and nodded.

“Wait for the blades to stop,” said Eugenie, “then follow me.” Ducking under the doorway, she dropped to a crouch, eyes already scanning La Kasbah for the Zil that would drive them to meet Moncef Pasha.

“I’ll be your interpreter,” Eugenie added. “But for the actual marriage you have to make the responses yourself, in Arabic. They’re very simple and I’ve written them out phonetically on a piece of card.”

Tuesday 1st March

“Quiet,” hissed a black-haired boy sitting next to Hani.
He stared down at his plate, on which a tiny bird sat in the centre of an elaborate matrix of sauce dribbled into the shape of recurring arabesques. So far he had yet to touch his meal.

“Why should I?” Hani demanded, still not bothering to lower her voice. She wanted to know why her Uncle Ashraf was not at Domus Aurea and no one seemed able to tell her. Hani found it hard to believe he hadn’t already achieved what he set out to do. Whatever that was.

It also hadn’t occurred to Hani that her uncle might miss Kashif’s party.

Dressed in a silk kaftan with gold embroidery around the neck and wearing a Rolex several sizes too big, Murad Pasha glanced nervously across to where his half brother sat watching them. “My brother doesn’t approve of noise.”

“And I don’t approve of the pasha,” Hani announced rather too loudly. A grey-haired woman standing with two Soviet guards behind the Emir glanced across to smile. Hani got the feeling she didn’t like Kashif either. “Anyway,” Hani said, “if he prefers silence, why are
they
here?”

A jerk of her chin took in a white-robed group who stood slap-bang in the middle of the cruciform dining room, below an impossibly huge chandelier. Five of them were chanting while a sixth beat time on a goatskin drum.

“These are the Emir’s choice,” Murad Pasha said, as if that should be obvious. “Those are the artists selected by Kashif.” He pointed behind him to a group of
nasrani
over by a far wall, all dressed in black suits and white shirts with black bow ties, like Kashif, in fact. One of them carried a Perspex violin, which he swung loosely by its neck.

“Great,” said Hani. “I can’t wait.”

The boy seemed roughly her age but still half a head shorter, which made him rather small for eleven. He had narrow shoulders and girl’s wrists and might have been good at running, except he looked far too sensible to run anywhere. Everybody else at the top table was talking, but the only time the boy opened his mouth was to answer one of Hani’s questions. The rest of the time his eyes slid past her to watch Kashif, the Emir and Lady Maryam.

“Don’t you want that?” Hani pointed at his quail.

Murad shook his head without bothering to look at her.

“Why not?”

Murad Pasha sighed. “I’m vegetarian,” he said. “I don’t approve of killing animals. And I’m only here under protest.”

“So you don’t mind if my cat has it?”

The area in which they sat had once been a
biat bel kabu
, the living quarters for a corsair and his family. Shaped like a fat, crudely drawn cross, with a long downstroke leading to a courtyard, now glassed over, and the shorter upstroke opening onto a smaller, still-uncovered courtyard where Chef Edvard had set up his kitchens, the cruciform room had sidebars that led nowhere.

In total there were six archways into the dining room. And in the centre, below the chandelier, three tables had been positioned, one high table at which sat Murad Pasha and Hani, Kashif, the Emir and Lady Maryam and two lesser tables, at right angles to the top table.

The Berber musicians occupied the open space between the three and because they always faced the Emir, everyone on the side tables saw the singers only in profile. Behind the Emir stood Eugenie de la Croix, flanked by two guards in jellabas, their striped robes in contrast to the drab uniform of a single major who stood behind Kashif Pasha.

Hani didn’t recognize Eugenie or anyone else and was happily unaware that at least one of the men sitting at a side table had recognized her.

“So who’s the girl?” Senator Malakoff demanded of his elderly neighbour, a Frenchman famous for knowing everything about everyone. His enemies, who were legion, would say this was because St. Cloud traded in souls. His friends, of whom there were fewer, limited themselves to describing the Marquis as the kind of man who never let go a favour or forgave a good deed.

“The al-Mansur brat.”

“But I thought…” His American neighbour looked puzzled. “Aren’t they all al-Mansur?”

“After a fashion,” St. Cloud said heavily, helping himself to oysters flown in from Normandy. Without thought, he held up a glass and felt its weight change as a waiter hurriedly filled it with Krug. St. Cloud made a point of not noticing servants unless they were both young and beautiful, and then, man or woman, his charm hit them like prey caught in a hunting light. The sex of his conquests mattered little: as St. Cloud readily admitted, he was strictly equal opportunity.

“That’s Lady Hana al-Mansur,” he explained, returning to the question. “She recently came into a rather large sum of money. Courtesy of Hamzah, Quitrimala…” Having mentioned North Africa’s richest man, St. Cloud watched understanding finally reach the American’s face.

“Ahh, yes,” said the Senator. “Her uncle is Governor of El Iskandryia. Wasn’t he implicated in that dreadful…”

“Ex-Governor,” St. Cloud said firmly. “He
resigned
.” The way the Marquis said this suggested that Ashraf Bey’s resignation had been anything but voluntary.

“Wasn’t there also something last year about his niece being kidnapped?”

“Apparently,” said the Marquis, draining his glass. “Something like that. And I have to admit to being rather surprised to see Lady Hana.”
Not to mention furious
, St. Cloud thought to himself. Quite apart from the fact he was now unable to gossip loudly about Ashraf al-Mansur, and the Marquis had been counting on doing precisely that, St. Cloud had paid hard currency for a
complete
list of guests, then paid out again to swap his chair for one two down, less prestigious, obviously, but infinitely more useful.

Five thousand dollars had been the cost of getting to sit on Senator Malakoff’s left rather than his right. US dollars well spent because Malakoff’s right ear was perforated, a fact known only to its owner, his doctor and the Marquis de St. Cloud who’d made a point of acquiring his medical records. Apparently the Senator’s partial deafness was the result of a recent diving accident in Baja, California. And since the Senator was forbidden to dive by his wife, who believed he’d been revisiting his misspent youth with a prostitute in Tijuana, well…

So now the Soviet first secretary was juggling the upside of finding himself in a better seat than expected with wondering exactly why America’s latest roving fact finder consistently ignored every comment the ambassador made.

“I’m having a little party afterwards,” St. Cloud said quietly. “Very select. I was wondering if you’d be interested?”

“A party?”

“Out at Cap Bon. At my house.”

The building in question was actually a palace erected for an exiled prince of Savoy and St. Cloud’s parties were anything but small. The Marquis was relying on the American to know that. “You, me, some friends, a few girls…”

He’d have mentioned boys but the Senator had voted against repealing legislation outlawing homosexuality and St. Cloud was not someone to come between a man and his prejudice. At least not when that someone was retained by some of the biggest oil shippers in the world.

“Mostly Japanese girls,” St. Cloud admitted. “Although I have borrowed a rather lovely Mexican, a bit inexperienced but very beautiful.” The girl in question, who was actually Spanish, had been told to keep that fact to herself.

“Mexican?”

St. Cloud nodded. “Lovely girl,” he said, “you’ll adore her.”

After oysters and champagne, Kashif Pasha’s nod to the two terms he’d spent studying at the Sorbonne, came wood pigeon stuffed with dates and wrapped in layers of fine filo pastry, so that each mouthful became an adventure in archaeology.