Arabesk (113 page)

Raf freed the rats and shook the stick insects onto grass at the front of the block. This had seemed like a good idea at the time. Although later, looking down from his burning attic at fire trucks lining up on the lawn he realized he hadn’t given them a better life at all. He hadn’t known what to do with the fish so he removed most of the water from the guppies because their tank was dirtier than that of the Siamese fighting fish, then tipped one tank into the other. If Raf couldn’t free the fighting fish he could at least give it a decent meal.

He’d never liked guppies anyway.

Some soldier had lit the spotlights around Domus Aurea but these only did what they were meant to do, threw walls into relief or picked out aspects of architectural interest.

There were trucks on the road beyond the medina, circling the old city walls with soldiers hanging from their open doors. Kashif Pasha’s men. All of them searching for him. A grinding of gears came from a square ahead, more trucks arriving for the hunt. From Raf’s left came shouted orders. Farther away, to his right, beyond a low line of workshops, more orders, more shouting. Engines racing and truck doors that slammed.

This was no way to track a fugitive. Even without the fox Raf knew that. Or rather he knew that without needing the fox, because he
was
the fox. One and the same. Separated not at birth but standing on that burning girder. What Raf knew (such as it was), he knew for himself and in himself. Just as Raf knew that he needed to get out there. To become himself. A man with responsibilities and a life.

And if not a man, then whatever he was.

Wednesday 2nd March

On the dirt track a group of hunters struggled with a
dead boar. They had its carcass lashed to a pole and slung between two of their party. A third man had a Ruger across his back and carried the rifles of the first two, one slung under each arm. Behind those three walked two more men, rifles ported across their broad chests.

Gravel crunched beneath their boots and each wore a loden coat with broad belt, tweed plus fours and long woollen socks.

Every last one of them watched the Bugatti Royale grind past. All their guns had telescopic sights and featured extended magazines that came only as an (expensive) optional extra. The man at the back had two dead rabbits hanging from his belt.

“Season ends in about three weeks,” said Hani. She waved to the hunters, who stared back, eyes hard. The Bugatti, one of only seven ever made, had been climbing for the last five minutes towards a distant farmhouse that kept vanishing behind the hill. The track over which it rattled was rough, edged with thorn and a few bare oaks unwilling to accept that spring was due.

“There it is…”

Thick walls washed white under a roof of red pantiles. Windows kept small to protect the inside from winter winds. Protecting the glass were oak shutters, their wood stripped bare by winter frost and summer heat. A hunting lodge really, built by a wine shipper from Cahors. It could have been lifted wholesale from the Lot valley and set down amid the pines and oaks of Ifriqiya’s rugged north coast.

Its original owner was long dead. His marble tomb was decaying in a colonial churchyard where a pubescent angel stood guard over his final resting place, her downcast eyes at odds with the plumpness of her body and the thinness of her robes. Now she waited, rendered wingless by vandals, an atrocity victim waiting for eternity.

Claude Bouteloup began his life as a peasant farmer and ended it a baron, gold having dug deep enough to discover a previously overlooked family title. The walls of his old home remained lined with heads taken from the boar he’d shot in the Northern Tell. An implausible spread of horns over the main door stood memory to his plan to reintroduce aurochs, a few of which still roamed the hills, but fewer by the year.

All this Hani read out to Murad and Raf as her uncle yanked the Bugatti’s fourteen-foot wheelbase round a tight bend in the dirt road while trying to ignore a drop that fell away to a white, storm-fed river far below.

“Put the book down,” Raf told her. “Before you make yourself feel sick.”

“Too late,” said Hani. She flicked backwards for a few pages, then flicked forward. “This guide doesn’t say who owns it now,” she complained, skim-reading the entry again.

“It wouldn’t,” said Raf.

The first clue that this wasn’t just another hunting lodge came at the gates. These looked normal until Raf got close enough to see otherwise. Tiny cameras tracked his arrival, watching from stone gateposts where they were bolted discreetly between the open claws of granite eagles.

Micromesh, fine enough to be virtually invisible, lined the far side of the gate’s flowing wrought iron. Its heavy, old-fashioned lock was electronic. Cracking paint covered hinges that Raf was willing to bet conformed to some exacting military standard he didn’t even know existed.

“You step out of the car,” said Murad. “And then someone opens the gates if they like the look of you… I’ve been here before,” he added, without glancing up from his toy Ninja Nizam. Hani and he had spent from Tunis to Bizerte arguing about whether or not action figures were childish.

Hani kept on saying they were. Until finally Murad announced that as Hani did nothing but play with a stupid cat, her opinion didn’t count.

“Ifritah’s not a toy.”

“Did I say she was?”

After that came blessed silence, from Bizerte to just past Cap Serrat, where Raf turned the Bugatti off the crumbling blacktop onto something that barely qualified as track. The Ettore-Bugatti-built coupé Napoleon had been a present from the Prince Imperial in Paris to the Emir’s grandfather and, until Raf claimed it, had been garaged in a mews at the back of the Bardo Palace.

No one had dared to stop Raf from commandeering the 275bhp, 12.8-litre monster. But then, from the chamberlain who ran the nearly empty palace to the uniformed sailor who first saw a blond notable in shades and black Armani suit striding towards its main door, no one had known how to treat Ashraf al-Mansur at all.

Finding a new suit had been as easy as kicking in the window of a boutique opposite Ibn Khaldoun’s statue in Place de la Victoire, about three hundred paces from Bab el Bahar. By then, dawn’s call to prayer had come and gone and only isolated trucks still circled the medina like flies disappointed by the quality of their meal. The boutique was very elegant, with a wide range of supposedly embargoed Western goods, but it should have spent more on security.

On his way out Raf met a handful of other looters on their way in. They liked his suit too. In fact they liked it so much he went back to point out the appropriate rack. And it was only after he left the second time that he put on the shades he’d taken to match, casually ditching his cheap contacts into a storm drain.

An hour’s walk from Ibn Khaldoun’s statue had taken him to the edge of the Bardo. A complex of original buildings with rambling faux al Andalus additions, the Bardo featured palaces built on palaces, the bedrooms of one situated over the reception rooms of another until the different parts ran together into one impossible mess.

No one had ever cataloged its contents. Records even differed as to the number of rooms. And each attempt at rationalization made matters worse. Although it was widely agreed among architectural historians that the rebuilding of 1882, during which medieval mashrabiyas were replaced with sash windows along one whole side, was undoubtedly a low point.

All the same, the Bardo complex still counted as the most recognized façade in North Africa. One result of an old etching featuring in the opening credits of
A Thousand Flowers
, a long-running, widely syndicated Turkish soap based in the nineteenth-century harem of Ahmed Bey, where a thousand concubines languished under the guard of five eunuchs, played by bald Sudanese women.

No men were ever seen. And although some flower would occasionally be plucked from her languid divan and sent through
the Door
, she would return an episode later, usually in a state of unspecified bliss, distraught or just more worldly-wise.

Gossip, treachery and friendship, the plot ran regular as celestial tram lines. Its avid following the by-product of the originator’s desire to draw her cast from a dozen nationalities, as Ifriqiya’s beys had filled their harems with a variety of Egyptians, Turks and Southern Europeans, mostly captured slaves.

Various bearded Jesuits were sent, both in reality and in the soap. And indeed, in reality one such missionary spent three years camped in a wing of the Bardo Palace waiting for an audience that never actually came; despite an invitation from a bey devoted to the memory of his
nasrani
mother.

Now the Bardo was home to the world’s largest collection of Carthaginian mosaics, an unquantifiable number of bad Victorian paintings and Kashif Pasha, his retinue and his mother. (With only Kashif’s direct appeal to the Emir ensuring that Lady Maryam and he were allocated different sections of the crumbling complex.)

No flag flew from the mast over the main gate when Raf arrived, which meant no adult member of the al-Mansur family was currently at home.

“We’re closed.” The young sailor guarding the gate held his rifle slung across his chest, the way those on guard always did. His face was set. And only his eyes revealed uncertainty.

Raf halted, smiled… Made a minute adjustment to his maroon Versace tie. “Good morning,” he said. “I’d like to see your commander.”

Sailor and notable stared at one another. Although all the sailor saw was himself reflected in the blankness of Raf’s new shades.

“Now,” Raf added, his voice polite but firm. He’d once watched his school doctor use just that mixture of courtesy and menace on Raf’s Swiss headmaster.

“I don’t have a commander.”

Raf sighed. “Then get whoever you do have,” he suggested.

Leaving his post, the boy vanished through a small door cut into one of two double doors behind him. Endless heavy nails had been hammered into both to form repetitive patterns which, to Raf’s eye, looked out of place against the delicacy of the pink marble columns supporting the arch into which the doors were set.

With a shrug, Raf stepped through the arch after him and found himself in a courtyard.

“You left the door open,” Raf pointed out, when the returning guard opened his mouth to complain. Behind the boy Raf saw a grey-haired man in blue uniform raise his eyes to heaven.

“Morning, Chief,” Raf said.

The elderly Petty Officer nodded. And in that nod was everything he felt about using untrained conscripts as guards and about notables who turned up at dawn, expecting to be shown round the Bardo.

“The palace is shut, Excellency.”

“I know.” Raf knew nothing of the sort, but that wasn’t really the point. Straightening up, he adjusted his cuffs almost without thinking. “I’m Ashraf al-Mansur,” he said, “the Emir’s middle son. I’ve been asked to investigate last night’s attack on my father.”

“Attack?”

Raf didn’t bother to reply.

“So it was…” The NCO’s voice faltered.

“I think you’d better introduce me to your commander,” Raf said and stepped farther into a courtyard overlooked by fifty sashed windows and a dozen balconies. The European kind.

He looked around him. “My father here?”

The old man shook his head.

“Lady Maryam?”

Another shake and a quick suck of yellowing teeth.

“Okay,” said Raf. “How about Kashif Pasha?”

The NCO opened his mouth, then shut it again. Had the pasha been in residence then, as well as having the al-Mansur flag flying, that gate would have been guarded by Kashif’s own soldiers instead of raw recruits. As it was, Kashif’s men were rumoured to be busy, making wide-ranging arrests.

The one person Raf did find was Hani, although he found Ifritah first, scooping the grey kitten up from a tiled floor and tossing it over his shoulders like a stole.

“Hey,” shouted a young girl who slid through a door and kick stopped, leaving a smear of burned leather on the marble under her heel. “That’s my…”

She took a look at the man facing her.

“Oh,” she said crossly, “you’re back.”

“No,” said Raf, “I’ve been here for days. You’re the one who’s just arrived.”

“I was here yesterday,” Hani said. “You can ask him.” She pointed to a door through which a young boy appeared. He was dressed in a blazer and had a striped tie quite as smart as the one Raf wore.

“Murad al-Mansur?” said Raf and watched the boy glance round before nodding. They both knew what was missing from the picture. “Where’s your bodyguard?” Raf asked.

“Kashif Pasha doesn’t think I need one.”

“Because no assassin would want to kill a child?” Raf’s voice made it obvious what he thought of that.

“That wasn’t what I said.” Shrewd eyes watched the newcomer. “Or what he meant.”

“Murad’s my cousin,” Hani announced.

“And this is my niece,” said Raf, nodding to Hani. “I do apologize.”

The boy looked between them. “Then you’re…?”

“Ashraf Bey,” said Raf. “Your half brother, her uncle and the new Chief of Police.”

At the bey’s side the NCO froze, his reflex reptilian. Almost as if stillness could put a wall up around his thoughts. All it did was draw Raf’s attention.

“You,” Raf said to the man. “Tell me what you’ve heard…”

“Heard, Your Excellency?”

“Outside, you said,
So it was
… The question is,
so it was what?
”

“The Army of the Naked,” said the man, his voice hesitant. “My chief said they’d carried out an attack.”

“That’s a lie,” Murad Pasha said. And blushed when the NCO gazed at him in surprise. “I’ve got a radio,” he explained hurriedly. “A
Radiotechnika Atlas
… The kind that gets all the stations… A birthday present from the Soviet ambassador,” Murad added, as if owning a radio needed explanation. “The AN absolutely deny having anything to do with the attack.”

“They have a radio station?” Hani asked.

“A pirate station,” Murad stressed. “Which changes frequency every night. You have to look for it.”