Arabesk (116 page)

Staring from his window of the still-moving car, Murad tried to focus on the world outside. Just enough moon was filtering through the clouds to bathe the soft slopes of Cap Bon in a ghostly fuzz which was almost, but not quite, light. “How do you know that?” he asked.

Hani shrugged. “I just do.”

Around them were orange groves in blossom, wizened pine trees, the occasional villa set back from the coast and even a wrought-iron bandstand. The spindly confection set down on a promenade overlooked blue-painted fishing boats that bobbed at anchor.

On the wall opposite, another notice, paper this time, reminding everyone that falcons could not be captured for training until the second week of March. The warning was pasted next to an older poster advertising the
festival de l’épervier
, dated from June the previous year. Light from a bakery window lit both and through its glass could be seen an old man in vest and floppy trousers kneading dough…

They ate their brioche from the bag, the pastry still warm enough to make the paper turn translucent down one side. The old man had been polite. Totally unsurprised to be disturbed at 3:00
A.M.
by a man and two children wanting food. And he threw in two tiny tarte tatin for Hani and Murad, smiling and nodding as he shooed the three of them towards the door.

“Work to do,” he explained.

Raf nodded.

What passed for a plan in Raf’s mind the fox would undoubtedly have dismissed as cage circling, the dysfunctional repetition of a narrow range of gestures. Have an idea, repeat it endlessly until all value is wrung from the original… With a sigh, Raf straightened his shoulders and pulled a bell handle.

Welcome to the Andy Warhol school of detective work.

Somewhere inside Dar St. Cloud a Victorian bell tipped sideways far enough to hit a silver clapper and the faintest tremor of that blow whispered back through the wire to reach Raf’s fingers. The bell was an affectation. One made worthless by two small Zeiss cameras that swivelled, cranelike to catch Raf and his companions in their gaze.

Retuning his eyes, Raf shifted through the spectrum. Checking out what he already knew, the three of them were blanket-lit by infrared and targeted at waist height by pinhead lasers. He could see tiny lenses set into the portico walls. Then the door opened and Raf forgot about armaments. Only panic could make the Marquis do something that stupid and this was not a character trait associated with Astophe de St. Cloud, recognized
bâtard
of the French Emperor and a man who’d once offered Raf more money than he could even begin to imagine.

Three percent of the price of North Africa’s biggest oil refinery, plus the same cut on oil fields in the Sudan and various offshore sites. All Raf had needed to do in return was betray Zara’s father. Hamzah Effendi would fall. His share of a refinery that flickered ghosts of flame across the night sky on the edge of El Iskandryia would go up for sale. Enabling St. Cloud to significantly increase his prestige and personal wealth.

Raf had not forgotten that offer any more, he imagined, than St. Cloud had forgiven Raf’s refusal to oblige.

“Tell St. Cloud that Ashraf Bey needs to ask him some questions.”

“Is His Excellency expecting you?” The man who showed them into the hall was Scottish—though he spoke in an Edinburgh accent so clipped it could have come from an English film, the kind where butlers wore frock coats, which, actually, was what he seemed to be wearing.

“What do you think?” Raf replied.

“I’ll see if His Excellency is in.” And with that St. Cloud’s majordomo shuffled off towards an arch outlined in two shades of rose marble, leaving the three of them alone in a hall lit by gas-fired sconces designed to look like candle flame.

“Well, what a pleasant surprise.” The voice was higher than one might have expected given the undoubted gravitas of the man limping his way toward them in gold dressing gown and leather slippers.

“You know why this room is so high?”

“No,” said Raf. “But no doubt you’ll tell me.”

The Marquis laughed. “I had to make a trip,” he said and something in those words raised hairs on the back of Hani’s neck. “So I left my butler in charge… This was years ago,” he added, as if the age of the house wasn’t obvious. “And I told him to tell the
felaheen
when to stop and gave him a height to which to work.”

The old man raised a silver-topped cane and gestured at the nearest wall, where tiny alternating blue and white tiles filled the spaces between evenly spaced double pillars, each of which was topped by a broad capital. The pillars were pink marble, the capitals sandstone.

“You based it on Cordoba,” Hani said.

St. Cloud nodded. “Only my man got so drunk that when I got back, this had happened.” He pointed to a second tier of double pillars above the first. “Not those pillars, obviously, just the height of the wall behind. The workmen expected to be told to stop so they kept on building.” The Marquis shrugged. “Fair enough,” he added, in a tone of voice that made Hani decide on the spot that, where St. Cloud was concerned, fairness was unlikely to come into it.

“What happened to your butler?” asked Murad Pasha, his voice thoughtful.

A smile broke across the face of the Marquis and in it Raf saw pure emptiness. “There was a building accident,” said the Marquis. “Such things happen. Well, they do in North Africa.” Glancing from Hani to Murad, St. Cloud raised his eyebrows. “You should know,” he told Raf, “I’ve been very cross with you—so it was sensible to bring me presents.”

Hani merely blinked, but Murad’s eyes widened and he might have stepped backwards if the girl at his side hadn’t taken his hand, then hastily let it go. Both Hani and Murad suddenly blushing.

“This isn’t a social visit,” Raf said flatly. “And the children stay with me. We’re here so Murad Pasha can meet the man who tried to murder his grandfather.” He turned to the still-flustered boy, almost as if intending to introduce him formally to St. Cloud.

“I did no such…” Outrage froze words in the old man’s throat.

“You are not to leave this house,” announced Raf. “And you will surrender your
carte blanche
to me and the keys to all the cars in your garage.”

“And the helicopter,” Hani whispered. Catching Murad’s eye, she shrugged and explained, surprisingly gently for her, “there’s a helipad on the lawn.”

“Out of the question.” St. Cloud had found his voice. One that Raf could only describe as oozing bile. “I have total diplomatic immunity. God…” The old man shook so hard with fury that for the first time since his visitors had entered Dar St. Cloud he actually need his silver-topped stick. “You can’t just march in here.”

“Actually,” said Raf, “I think you’ll find I can. Because the alternative is that I place you under arrest and call police HQ in Tunis to have a van come out to collect you.” Raf shrugged. “Who knows,” he added, “given your tastes you might enjoy a week in the cells with a child molester. I’m sure you’d have lots to talk about…”

“And if I refuse?”

“Refuse what?” Raf asked. “To be arrested?”

St. Cloud’s nod was stiff. His scowl that of a man who’d faced worse things than two nervous children and the black-suited son of an Emir. “What will your officers do,” said St. Cloud coldly, “manhandle me into a car? They wouldn’t…”

“Dare?” One second Raf was watching St. Cloud, the next he had a pearl-handled Colt pressed hard into the side of the old man’s neck, at an angle guaranteed to remove most of his skull.

No one could remember seeing him move.

“Other people might be afraid of you,” said Raf. “I don’t have that problem.” Pulling back the hammer the way the Sufi had done, he squeezed the trigger so that only his thumb kept the hammer from falling. “You really think you can resist arrest?”

Around the Marquis the hall began to darken as the face in front of him changed unexpectedly/impossibly from human to something positively other.

The old man could taste smoke and feel a flat wall of heat that threatened to sear his papery skin. Every tile beneath his feet was burning. Except that there were no tiles because he was walking over a glowing chasm of red ember and flickering flame, while some unseen thing ripped mouthfuls of flesh from his shoulder.

He knew, without needing to be told, that he was standing over the entrance to hell.

“Well?”

St. Cloud blinked.

The tearing in his flesh dissolved as the pressure against his throat lessened, then almost disappeared.

“Well what?” he asked in a voice little more than a whisper.

“Still feel like resisting arrest?”

Merely blinking was enough to spill tears down cheeks no amount of laser peel had been able to give back their beautiful youth. “No.” St. Cloud shook his head, the slightest movement. All he wanted to do was check his shoulder for scars and look in a glass to see if that unforgiving heat had seared his face, but he didn’t quite dare.

“I had nothing to do with that attempt,” he said. “Nothing at all to do with the death of Eugenie de la Croix. You have my word.”

“And you have mine,” said Raf, “that I
will
find who tried to kill my father. And when I do that person will be arrested, no matter what.” The very flatness of Raf’s words threatened more clearly than any anger could do. “Feel free to pass that on to anyone you think should know…”

Thursday 3rd March

As dawn’s white thread became visible over the Golfe de
Hammamet a call quavered onto the wind from the minaret of Nebeul mosque,
Allahu Akbar
intoned four times, followed by
Ashhadu anna la ilah ill’-Allah
, I testify there is no God besides God. And finally, towards the end, a phrase to distinguish this call from those that came later.
Al-salatu khayr min al-nawn.
Prayer is better than sleep.

Though both of those were a rarity for Raf.

Only now was he beginning to understand, as opposed to know, the difference between various types of Islamic building. A
mosque
was a church, well, it was to Raf. A
marbarat
the tomb of a saint at which believers might pray (a habit discouraged in the Middle East, but popular in North Africa where Berber instincts lightened the stark purity of their conqueror’s interpretation).

A
ribat
was a fortified monastery,
medressa
were schools, somewhere between a tiny university and a religious college,
zaouia
were shrines, often Sufi…

What Raf didn’t understand, or even know, was what value this knowledge had for a man who lacked all belief in God; for whom mosques were works of intricate beauty and calls to prayer haunting echoes of antiquity; but who saw nothing at the centre. Who saw, in fact, no centre at all.

“Can I ask you something?” said Hani, when she’d finished her prayers.

“Of course.” Raf dropped the Bugatti down a gear to overtake an elderly truck loaded with soldiers.

“Who’s Tiri?” She hesitated for a second. “When you left that note. You signed it ‘Tiri.’”

“My fox,” Raf said and Hani nodded.

“What fox?” Murad demanded crossly. He was leaning on Ifritah’s basket, which rested between Hani and him on the fat leather backseat of the Bugatti. Raf wasn’t sure where he’d put his action figure but Ninja Nizam hadn’t appeared once since Hani accused Murad of being childish.

“The fox…” Raf thought about it. “The fox is an identity.”

“Ashraf Bey’s an assassin,” said Hani. “So he needs to be lots of different people… I didn’t know the fox was called Tiri,” she added.

“It’s called lots of things,” said Raf. “And I’m not an assassin.”

“No,” Hani said. “Of course not.”

Beyond Hammamet was a turning for the A1, south towards Sousse and Kairouan. Glancing in his mirror before overtaking the next truck, Raf saw Murad still staring at him. The moment the boy met Raf’s gaze he dropped his own.

They’d had a brief quarrel on the road back from Dar St. Cloud. Anger exploded from the boy as he demanded to know why Raf had failed to arrested the Marquis. In that shouted fury had been everything the twelve-year-old felt for his father; mostly love and fear, plus a primal, night-waking panic at the thought of life without certainty or comfort.

“You should have arrested him.”

“St. Cloud didn’t do it,” Hani had said softly, resting one hand on the boy’s arm. Murad shook her off.

“But Ashraf Bey said…”

“He was bluffing,” explained Hani as she climbed into the car. Her smile faded the moment new fury twisted Murad’s face. This time it was at being excluded from what Raf had known and Hani only suspected. Their visit to Dar St. Cloud had been cage rattling, little more. The Marquis paid no taxes, had tastes that were highly dubious and based himself in a country without a single extradition treaty. He had more to lose from Emir Moncef’s death than almost anyone.

Since learning this, Murad had been almost translucent with silence. Pointedly ignoring Hani and her endless spray of facts about Khayr el Din, better known as the Barbary pirate Barbarossa, and the sack of Tunis by Charles V of Spain, in which seventy thousand men, women and children were slaughtered.

That he’d asked about the fox at all was significant.

“I’m sorry,” Raf said. “One problem is I don’t always know what I’m going to do or how things are about to work out.” He yanked the Bugatti’s thin steering wheel and managed to avoid a cartload of goatskins, untreated ones to judge from the smell. “That makes it difficult to warn people in advance.”

“It’s a children of Lilith thing,” Hani added. Although it was obvious from Murad’s blank stare that this didn’t make it any clearer.

The boy shrugged with all the weight of coming adolescence on his shoulders. “I just was wondering,” said Murad. “You know, back there, what exactly happened?”

Raf opened his mouth to answer but Hani got in first.

“What happened,” she told Murad, “was that Uncle Ashraf put a curse on the Marquis. Children of Lilith can do that.”

Murad’s eyes widened and, without even realizing, he made a sign against the evil eye. And then flicked his glance fearfully from the face of his cousin to the dark-suited stranger in the front. The elder brother no one had bothered to tell him he had.