Arabesk (122 page)

There was undoubtedly a lesson there if only Raf had the mind for it, because according to Khartoum there was a lesson in everything; in appearance and the reality behind appearance and in the reality behind the first appearance of reality. In Khartoum’s opinion to hunt knowledge was to lose it.

“You seem amused…” Kashif’s voice was cold. “Am I missing something?”

“We all are,” said Raf. “That’s the very essence of being human.”

Two of Major Jalal’s soldiers looked at each other. One of them mouthing to the other and Raf caught the silent word.
Moncef
… His father, that was what they were saying. He was like his father.

Mad.

Even Kashif Pasha nodded. As if willing, for the moment, to admit that the one might be son of the other.

“This missing waiter…” said Raf. And got no further.

“He’s confessed.”

Behind his shades, Raf blinked. “To what?”

“Disguising himself to infiltrate the Domus Aurea with the express intent of killing the Emir.” Kashif’s face burned with anger. Or maybe triumph. “He was working for the French. As an
agent provocateur
in a revolutionary cell that also included the dead Sufi. He’s admitted everything.”

“And you know his confession is true, how?” A reasonable enough comment one would have thought.

“Because he wrote it himself.”
So close to Raf was Kashif Pasha that Raf could identify at least three of the things Kashif had eaten for lunch. “Ask the criminal if you don’t believe me… And then we can shoot him.” A minor tic at the edge of Kashif’s mouth pulled it out of shape. His pupils were large and his gaze direct.

Kashif Pasha meant it.

This was when Raf realized the pasha was serious. He’d summoned Raf to watch the execution of a man Kashif Pasha genuinely believed had tried to kill his father. All because of a throwaway line from Raf about suspecting Kashif. A barb that had dug deep into the pasha’s flesh, dragging him to a point of intensity that owed far more to indignation than fear or guilt. That worried Raf.

Bluster, threats, fake fury, those Raf could handle. But a demand for approval, this expectation that he would immediately withdraw all accusations when faced with evidence… There was a sour note to this that rang like a cracked bell.

If not Kashif, then who… Berlin/the
Thiergarten
? It seemed unlikely.

“Your waiter,” said Raf. “Where is he?”

In reply, Kashif jerked his head towards yet another black Jeep, parked beside the ticket kiosk. Smoked windows, roo bars and a radiator grille like the baleen of a loose-lipped whale. One could only assume the
mubahith
imported them in job lots.

“Get him,” Kashif demanded.

Major Jalal nodded and seconds later, as two guards tossed a naked figure at Raf’s feet his heart sank. He should never, ever have let Chef Edvard register him with Domus Aurea security using someone else’s name.

Hassan stank of fear and bled from a split mouth. His nose was broken, three front teeth were gone and his face was a veritable rainbow of pain. Whip marks scored his heavy shoulders. A dozen cigarette burns speckled his soft belly. There had been nothing subtle about the questioning.

“This is your waiter?”

Major Jalal nodded.

“According to my niece,” said Raf, “the missing waiter was tallish and thin. This man is short and fat.”

“Lady Hana is mistaken.” Major Jalal’s voice was firm. “But then the dining room was lit by chandeliers and somewhat dark so it would be an easy error for a frightened child to make. Besides, Your Excellency has his brother’s word that this is the man.”

“Let me guess,” said Raf. “He protested his innocence for a couple of days, then decided to tell you the truth…”

“Is there a point to this?” Kashif’s voice was hard.

“Of course there’s a point,” said Raf with a sigh.

The three-day rule had been explained to him by two people he admired. One of them, as mother of Seattle’s famous Five Winds Friendship Society had inherited an administration that kept
surgeons
on its payroll. And it had taken using their undoubted skills on two soon-to-retire elder brothers to get that anomaly changed, or so Hu San had said. The other person was Felix.

The rule of three was simple. And in a list of five it came just before the one that said blustering men broke faster than quiet women… No matter how brave or well trained, even a saint was ready to confess to devil worship by the third day; there were no exceptions. Keep death away and rack up the pain and by day three all anybody wanted to know was where to sign.

Chef Edvard’s sous-chef had been no different. Poor sod.

“Hassan,” said Raf and watched as the fat boy raised his head, eyes widening as he saw the man in front of him.

“You’re…”

“Ashraf Bey,” said Raf, kicking Hassan in the stomach. “Well done.” He kicked again and when Hassan finally looked up with imploring eyes, Raf went for the kidneys. It was this blow that knocked Hassan unconscious.

“You know the man?” Kashif’s voice was thoughtful.

“Of course I know him,” Raf said. “I’m Chief of Police. He’s the main witness to the Maison Hafsid killing and on the precinct payroll as an informer. One of my lieutenants was wondering what had happened.”

“You recognized by sight a man who tried to shoot my father…”
Kashif seemed to be trying the sentence for size, considering its usefulness.

On either side of the pasha his guards had gone very still. Maybe it was Kashif’s tone of voice or perhaps he had some signal like a finger tapping against his nose, a shift of his weight or a certain nod of his head. Most people in his position had special signs and ways of giving instructions.

One of them must have said club this impostor to the ground.

“
Well done
,” said the voice. Raf ignored it. He had more important things to do than talk to the fox.

Twisting steadily, Raf pulled against his shackles until he felt one arm dislocate. It hurt no more than many other things in his life and far less than waking after the operation that replaced his kidneys as a child. About as much as a beating he once took in Seattle from a street punk called Wild Boy, back when they both worked for Hu San.

Raf hadn’t seen the blow coming. Hadn’t even felt the pistol butt that brought oblivion, the state to which his life seemed eternally drawn. One minute Raf was standing facing Kashif Pasha, then darkness came.

When Raf woke the first time he was in a waiter’s uniform. The white blindness in his eyes the afterglow of a camera flash; and for a moment, floating on pain and watching the camera burn on the inside of his eyelids, Raf believed he was young again.

And then he knew he wasn’t and hadn’t been for a very long time.

Friday 11th March

Opening the door was easy. Hani just pushed a button
that read
emergency release
and a swirl of blissfully cool air exploded onto Ibn Chabbat Square. To close the door behind her she hit a button marked
shut
… This button was on the inside, obviously enough. And then they were in the coach, examining its hydraulic seats and checking the spiral stairs that led to a glass observation bubble.

“Too obvious,” said Hani.

At the very rear of the coach was a wall of showers and toilets (two of each, divided into male and female). Between these and the seating area farther forward was a short corridor featuring a couple of sliding doors on each side. So the bus went seats/narrow corridor/wall of loos where a back window should be. The sliding doors were marked
stateroom 1, 2, 3 and 4
…

“I don’t get it,” Murad complained, not for the first time.

“Good,” Hani told him. “Stick with that.”

She pushed him through one of the sliding doors, having first flipped up its lock with a penknife, an act of breaking and entering made much easier than she expected by the coachmakers’ fear of litigation, which guaranteed that every door was simplicity itself to open from the outside should the need arise. Which, in Hani’s opinion, it had.

A man’s room, Russian to judge from the phrase book and an open magazine left on the side. “Try the next one,” said Hani and bundled Murad back through the sliding door, relocking it behind her.

A woman, travelling alone. The upper bunk unmade, blankets still folded, the lower one exhibiting neatly turned-back covers and a perfectly straight pillow. Also Soviet. Too neat by half. “We’ll try the other side,” Hani said.

Both bunks in the next cabin had been used. The cover on the bottom one hung neatly, the cover to the top bunk was still crumpled. A Bible in English, translated by someone called St. James. Hani didn’t want to be prejudiced, but…

Actually that could be good.

On a bedside locker, open and facedown, lay a Discovery Channel guide to Ifriqiya, its spine cracked in half a dozen places. A handful of foreign change filled a saucer.

“E pluribus unum…”
From one, many. Or was it, from many, one? Hani’s Latin was too rusty for her to be certain which it was if either. So she put down the coin and picked up a flowery dressing gown draped over a peg on the door.

“Nylon,” she told Murad.

The garment was surprisingly short, albeit still long enough to drag on the carpet when Hani tried it on without sandals. It was the gown’s width that impressed her. She and Murad could have hidden inside the thing three times over.

“This’ll do,” Hani said with the certainty of someone who distrusted thin people even if she was one. Years of living with Aunt Nafisa had seen to that. “We hide here.”

“Hide?”

“Okay, then,” said Hani, settling herself on the floor. “We wait.”

Around dusk, Hani heard the tourists finally clamber aboard and felt the coach settle on its dampers. Or maybe it was springs? Mechanical things weren’t really her area. Computers now… But hard as it was to believe, the
e pluribus unum
couple making this trip were doing so without a single computer, PDA or screen. Unless they’d taken the lot with them and Hani found that hard to believe.

“We’re moving,” said Murad, his expression worried.

“That’s what we want to happen,” Hani told him. She indicated a spot next to her on the carpet and Murad looked doubtful. He was still slightly afraid of her, Hani realized. And of everything else. Beneath that buttoned-down manner her cousin was as raw to the world as she was, maybe more so, because she knew how to adapt while Murad was still learning.

Meanwhile he just looked bemused.

“Uncle Ashraf will be fine,” Hani promised, realizing as soon as she spoke that this was not what worried the boy. She might worry about her uncle but Murad had his own problems, ones unknown to her.

“Do you think getting older makes you weaker?” Murad demanded suddenly.

Hani thought about it. “I thought it made you stronger.”

“That’s what they tell you,” said Murad, “but is it true? I feel like I know less every day. Everything always used to be clear but now…”

“What was clear?” Hani asked.

“Knowing what to do…”

“And were you allowed to do it?”

They sat together until Murad was so desperate for a pee that he could sit still no longer. Hani didn’t tell him she also needed the loo. Some things were still private for girls.

“Use the basin,” Hani said…“Now rinse it out,” she suggested afterwards.

Murad and Hani then had a brief discussion about whether or not to bolt their door from inside. Hani won and the bolt was left open. Darkness arrived long before someone finally slid a key into the lock.

“We have to get them in here,” Hani said.

“What? We’re not going to…”

“No,” said Hani. “I’ve already told you, I just need them to myself for a few minutes. We…” she amended. “We need them.”

“Why?”

“Because we do,” Hani announced firmly and together they crawled into a narrow space previously occupied by a suitcase.

“Who moved that?” The voice was Midwestern American and female, puzzled rather than angry. Hani didn’t care who the voice belonged to, she liked them already. “Carl, Carl…” The admonition was addressed to thin air. It had to be, because only one pair of legs could be seen in the room.

White plastic sandals shuffled over to the wall, the case rose from the floor and then it was being tipped on its side and pushed towards Murad.

He grunted.

That was what they’d agreed on, a simple grunt. Now came the dangerous bit when the cabin’s owner might shout or rush out into the coach and demand help. They’d decided how to handle this too.

Hani whimpered.

“Who’s there?”

The case pulled back, tipped upright.

“Come out,” the woman demanded. “Come out right now.”

Murad crawled from under the bunk and scrambled to his feet. His eyes were lowered and his shoulders slumped. Inside his head he was trying to remember how Hani had suggested he should shuffle his shoes.

“Oh great. A thief.” The woman sounded exasperated. “I suppose you’ve already pocketed all our stuff.” Her glance took in the whole cabin, all five paces of it and found nothing missing. “Maybe not,” she admitted, “but then what are you doing here? And what happened to your face?” She took Murad’s chin in her fingers and turned his head to the light, tutting as she did so. “Someone hit you?”

When the boy stayed silent, Micki Vanhoffer sighed. She was a large, home-loving woman very far from Ohio. Doing what her husband thought she should be doing, taking a break from comfortable cruises around the Caribbean. A month in North Africa was his idea. Well, and her eldest son’s, Carl Junior. An anniversary present supposedly. So here she was on a glorified bus in the middle of a heat wave, in March for heaven’s sakes.

“I’d better tell the driver,” Micki said mostly to herself, reaching for the door handle. “And then we can call your parents.”

“He doesn’t have any,” said Hani, rolling out from under the bunk in a tumble of arms and legs. After scrambling upright, she took Murad’s hand and gripped hard when he tried to pull away. “We’re orphans,” she added quickly. “From an orphanage. A cruel place.”