Arabesk (120 page)

Sand fall was expected. And Murad kept referring to a
chili
, alternating that word with
khamsin
… It had to do with a depression moving into the Gulf of Gebes. One that had kicked the afternoon temperature up to 98°F and threatened to drop sand as far north as Madrid. The local radio station talked about little else.

“Door,” Hani said, looking up from a game of chess. She was winning five games to zero. The only way Murad had been persuaded to play again was her promise that this would be his last for the day and her assurance that he’d soon be good enough to beat her. But then, as Murad pointed out, she’d said that the day before as well.

At Hani’s feet stretched Ifritah. Panting in the heat.

“What?” Raf put down the deeds to Dar Welham.

“Someone’s at the door,” said Hani. “I’d go but it’s probably for you.”

And it was. Apparently Kashif Pasha’s messenger saw nothing odd in presenting an envelope featuring an ersatz version of a European coat of arms, one bearing a Western interpretation of an Othman turban, on a silver salver in the style of Napoleon III, overlaid around the edge with Quranic script in beaten gold, bronze and copper.

“Will there be a reply?”

Having read Kashif’s message, Raf put it carefully in his pocket.

“No,” he said, “I think not.”

The Nubian might have come to the door of Dar Welham barefooted and dressed in a white robe but he drove off in a black four-by-four with smoked windows and roo bars big enough to knock down a buffalo.

“Who was that?” said Hani. She stood on the stairs with Murad behind her. A windup radio was in the boy’s hand.

“Just one of Kashif Pasha’s friends.”

“My brother Kashif doesn’t have friends,” Murad said firmly, then paused, worried that he might have sounded rude. “I mean,” he said more politely, “he has only allies or enemies.” The boy’s voice made no secret of which camp he’d found himself in. “What does the message say?”

“That’s private.”

Two heads turned to face Raf. Hani’s frown now a full-on scowl. “No secrets,” she reminded Raf. “Remember? That’s what you told me when Aunt Nafisa died. Anything I asked you would answer.”

It had been a simple enough promise, made to a crying child who wanted to know why life was so unfair. One that Raf would have liked an adult, any adult, to have made to him. And it was proving impossibly difficult to keep.

“Hani, I’m really sorry…”

“You promised.”

So he had. “It’s from Kashif Pasha,” Raf said.

“But that’s the Emir’s coat of arms,” Murad insisted.

“I know,” said Raf, “but it’s not his message. Kashif and I need to meet.”

“You’re not going to go…” Murad sounded appalled that Raf might even consider it. “Have you listened to the latest news?”

Raf hadn’t.

Apparently C3N had been told by St. Cloud that Ashraf Bey was behind the attack on Emir Moncef. Colonel Abad, that well-known war criminal, was mentioned. As was Raf’s part in helping Abad avoid being brought to justice. The Marquis even managed to suggest that the bey might be behind last autumn’s attacks on the Midas Refinery, jointly owned by St. Cloud and Hamzah Effendi.

“If you go, Kashif will hurt you,” Murad said flatly. “I know him.”

“All the same,” said Raf, “I think I must.” Skimming the note, he ran through words he already knew by heart. The message was short. “It seems Kashif’s captured the missing waiter,” Raf told them both. “He’d like me to be present at the questioning.”

Hani opened her mouth and shut it again. “Something else,” she said finally. “What else?”

“Because of the
current danger
,” said Raf, failing to extract the bleakness from his voice, “my brother has extended his offer of protective custody to include Zara.”

“She’s here?”

“Apparently…”

“So what do you want Murad and me to do?” Hani asked.

“Stay here,” said Raf. “And keep out of trouble. If that’s remotely possible.”

Hani’s look was doubtful.

Friday 11th March

Three hours after Raf left, men in black jellabas locked
off the unnamed alley using Jeeps they swung across both ends, isolating the stretch in between.

Once again the Jeeps had smoked glass, fat roo bars and whip aerials. The man who seemed in charge had dyed hair combed forward like a Roman emperor, a heavy moustache and a black
mubahith
blouse on without insignia of any kind. Only a slight bald patch and the fact his choice of top accentuated his paunch took the edge off an effect that was, Hani had to admit, still quietly threatening.

“You take a look,” she said, handing Murad an old pair of opera glasses. The boy did what she suggested, staring down at the alley entrance.

“Soldiers,” he said.

Hani nodded.

“In disguise,” she said. “Who’s the man?”

Murad took a second look at the
mubahith
with the weird hair. “No one I recognize,” he said, like he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

“Are they from the Emir’s guard?”

“Of course not.” Murad shook his head. “All Eugenie’s troops are women.” He spoke as if Eugenie were still alive. “Those are not women…”

Only fear let Hani restrain herself. Some people shouted when they got afraid, others closed down, went silent. That was her. “Look,” Hani said, “you think they support Kashif Pasha?”

“You heard the radio,” said Murad. “All the soldiers support my brother Kashif.”

“Now there’s a surprise.” Hani sounded like Zara at her most cross. The way the older girl had been those last few days at the madersa before Raf vanished, sharp and snotty but nothing like as cruel as Raf had been with his dark silences and exile inside his own head.

“Kashif,” Murad said. “He won’t hurt you.”

“Yes, he will. And he’ll hurt you. And it won’t be the first time, will it?”

“He’s still my brother.” Murad’s voice was quiet.

“And the Emir is his father,” said Hani flatly. “But he still ordered that attack.” She didn’t know this, of course, but she knew her uncle and it was obvious he thought so.

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t want to,” Hani told him. They were sitting together on the flat roof of Dar Welham, peering over the parapet. Behind them, sheets dried on a line and drifting sand wrote patterns across cracked tiles and gathered into tiny dunes.

Picking herself up, Hani stepped back from the edge. And four floors below, now unseen by Hani or Murad, the man without insignia ordered one of the jellaba-clad men to knock on the door. After that, the soldier tried the door without being told and found it locked. So he hammered again, harder.

Faces appeared from the roofs of houses opposite and disappeared just as rapidly when their owners realized what was happening.

“Open in the name of the NR.”

When this unnaturally loud cry went unanswered, the man tried the handle himself. Finding it still securely locked, Poul Fischer nodded to a young Berber. “Plastique,” he ordered.

The flexible breaching charge the corporal pulled from under his disguise wasn’t strictly plastique. At least not in any sense he understood. It was a short length of three-hundred-grain-an-inch cutting charge with a soft rubber body that could be bent into any shape needed and a sticky foam that glued it to the door and helped reduce the danger of back fragmentation. Correcting a
mubahith
officer, however, was not in the corporal’s career plan.

Fixing one length around the lock, the corporal positioned two more around the hinges, then did top and bottom where bolts might be, just to play safe. The FBC series also came in six-hundred-grain and twelve-hundred-grain densities but for hinges of this age three-hundred-grain was probably already overkill.

“It might be best, sir, if everyone stood back.” Quickly, so he didn’t have to see Poul Fischer’s answering expression, the corporal fixed an electronic match to each charge and began to enter his identity code into a firing box.

“Ready when you are, sir.”

Raf had never explained to Hani how he’d managed to break Zara’s brother out of the basement of a locked house in Kharmous and she’d been careful never to ask. But with her screen, a satellite shot of El Isk and some serious intuition she’d been able to work it out.

Intuition was part inherent and part learnt. The percentages were open to debate. As they always were with anything involving socialization versus heredity. Hani, however, was pretty sure she’d been born with heightened levels.

Hypersensitivity was one description. Hani knew this because she’d done a quiz on a medical Web site. It suggested childhood stress might have made changes to an area of her brain called the
cingulated gyrus
… Or rather, her time with Aunt Nafisa had ensured changes were
not
made: reducing Hani’s ability to filter out life’s raw mixture of competing noise and demands.

Persistent stress-response state
was a term she got fed by the site in Santa Fe. And Hani had all the symptoms; stomach ache and sleepless nights, a tendency to focus on nonverbal clues rather than speech. A preference for animals over humans.

“Ifritah,” Hani said suddenly.

“What about Ifritah?”

“I’ve got to find her…” Hani was heading towards the stairs down into the house before Murad had time to move.

“Wait,” he said, louder than he intended. “Let me see what’s going on.” Putting his head above the parapet Murad watched a man far below glue something to the front door. “I don’t think it’s safe,” he said.

“We can’t leave her behind.” Tears had started in Hani’s eyes and her face was set. Her cheeks pulled back as if battling through a wind tunnel of misery. “She’ll be in danger.”

Murad sighed. “I’ll go,” he said.

The cat wasn’t on the top floor or the floor below. Just to be sure, Murad looked under beds and inside cupboards, fighting with the rickety shutter of a mashrabiya to check that Hani’s kitten hadn’t some how got inside, even though the mashrabiya’s bolts were rusted almost solid and there was no way this was possible.

She wasn’t on the floor below that either, where Raf, Hani and Murad had made camp in a huge room containing two sofas woven from rattan and a drinks cabinet still full of half-empty bottles of liqueur. Old copies of
New Scientist
and
The Ecologist
sat in a magazine rack. Someone had left a paperback facedown and open under a stool so long ago that most of the pages had rotted away or been eaten by beetles, but there was no Ifritah.

“Any sign?” The question came from above.

“No. Not yet.”

Murad was halfway down the last flight of stairs when the door blew in. A pressure wave threw him back so he landed in a ragged heap. One of the steps caught his spine as he landed and it hurt.

The first soldier through the door shot the cat.

Get up
, Murad told himself and was relieved to discover that he could. Taking the steps two at a time, he raced away from the black shadows tumbling through smoke, their weapons at the ready. At the very top of the house, at the foot of the stairs leading to the roof, Murad removed the key from the bottom door and used it to double click the lock from the other side. Then he did the same for the top door, the one that led out onto the roof and took that key as well.

“Ifritah…”

“Not there,” he told Hani. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re bleeding.” It sounded as if she’d only just noticed the fact.

“What?”

Hani touched her nose and Murad touched his own, fingers coming away sticky. “And your ear,” she said. That turned out to be sticky too.

“We’ll be in worse trouble,” Murad said, “if we don’t hide.” Which proved to be easier to say than do, as there was only one exit to the flat roof of the dar and it was already locked.

“Down there,” suggested Hani, pointing over the rear parapet to a dusty garden which obviously belonged to a neighbour. “We can use that.”

Below them, built so that its nearest end joined the back wall of Dar Welham was the tiled roof of a fourth-floor balcony. The drop from where they stood to the tiles was maybe twice Hani’s height.

“Unless you’re afraid?”

Instinctively Murad’s chin went up. “Of course I’m not,” he started to say, then met Hani’s dark eyes and stopped. “Okay,” he said, “I admit it. I’ve been scared ever since we left Tunis.”

“Me too.” Hani reached out to wipe dirt from his face, as if that was just a natural thing to do. Maybe it was, Hani didn’t know and probably wasn’t the person to ask about stuff like that. Until six months ago she’d believed that keeping a toy dog in her room deserved the slaps it invariably earned her, because Ali Din was male and her Aunt Nafisa had rules about such things.

Only now Hani lived with Raf, whose rules were less strict. Which made life easier but doing the right thing more difficult, because most of the time Hani just had to guess what that was…

“Like now.”
Hani said to herself.

“Like now what?” demanded Murad.

“We need to move.”

She nodded to the sloping roof of next door’s mashrabiya. “You first,” she said.

“Wait…”

“No time.”

“But I’m not ready,” Murad protested. And that was when Hani realized that both his ears must be damaged. Someone was trying the handle of the door at the bottom of the roof stairs. A fact that seemed to escaped Murad.

“Do you want Kashif’s men to catch us?”

Sliding over the edge, the boy twisted round until he hung by his fingers, then she heard a clatter below as Murad flailed for a grip to stop himself tumbling over the edge.

Hani’s landing was rather better, although less catlike than she’d have liked; her knees coming up to hit her chest as she met the tiles. Something else to add to the list of bits that hurt.

“This way,” Hani said, dropping to her belly so she could peer over the edge of the mashrabiya. Its original carved screen was stolen and whoever had ripped it out had tacked a rotted tarpaulin in place to hide what they’d done. There was a market for architectural salvage, particularly at the top end. Back in El Isk, Hamzah Effendi had a houseful of the stuff. Hani was about to explain this to Murad but decided to save her words. He looked a bit preoccupied.