Arabesk (125 page)

“
I’m
not going to die,” said Raf.

Tuesday 15th March

“Count them,” said the fox. So Raf did. A handful of
mubahith,
teenage girls in khaki jumpsuits, jellaba-clad orderlies and two visiting Berber elders wrapped respectively in lengths of blue and black. Awaiting a day that threatened to be as impossibly hot as the day before.

Eleven in all.

And then there was Raf watching from the chott, flayed by UV that already filtered through scummy cloud to tighten his skin.

Sweat shivering down his spine in anticipation.

He stank of shit and piss and blood, the smell assailing him every time he halted long enough for his own body heat to reach his nostrils. Evidence of his own humanity.

St. John the Baptist. Minus the loincloth.

Now that a road existed between Kibili and El Hamma du Jerid, carefully skirting the edge of the wilderness before slanting off from the chott’s edge to cross at the narrowest point, few people except ’packers and Soviet tourists in fat-tyred UAZ four-by-fours tried to cross the salt lake any other way.

The camel trains were gone, along with the slave markets and spice routes. And while it was true that an annual Sand Yacht Championship was held on the chott, this was only ever attended by Soviets and, in any case, was not due for another three months.

So the khaki-clad teenager sweating out her early shift on the southern perimeter of Camp Moncef watched the arrival of a naked apparition with disbelief. At first she assumed the tiny speck was an animal either lost or abandoned. Dogs escaped from cars, half-dead donkeys were cast loose when the amount they could carry stopped being worth what they cost in feed.

Not yet worried enough to find herself a pair of binoculars, Corporal Habib kept an eye on the approaching animal. But sometime between tucking a cigarette inside her hand because one of Kashif Pasha’s men had suddenly roared up in his open Jeep and saluting the departing sergeant without getting caught, the speck vanished.

“Shit.”

Corporal Habib blinked into the chott’s acid glare, ground the butt of her cigarette underfoot and reached into her pocket for a pair of shades; circumstances demanded it even if wearing them on duty was almost as bad as smoking, being the preserve of officers.

Her shades cut down haze and cancelled out most refraction but the figure was still gone, leaving only early-morning shimmer and diminishing slivers of what had to be surface water left over from the winter rains.

Fifteen minutes later, Corporal Habib was still squinting into the distance when the emptiness beside her suddenly took her feet from under her and followed the corporal down, slamming itself into her rib cage. Bone splintered, on the wrong side; Corporal Habib’s heart kept pounding and by the time she realized her aorta wasn’t pierced and both lungs still drew breath the emptiness sat back on its heels, waiting, with the corporal’s own machine gun to her throat.

Only the camouflage of her jumpsuit had kept Corporal Habib alive. Had her uniform been bottle green, the colour of Kashif’s own guard, or the black of the
mubahith
, she would have been dead. Something that might still happen to judge from the blue eyes that stared down at her, pale as cracked ice.

“Single shot,” said a crow’s voice, raw and bitter. “All you’ll get at this distance is a gas star and no chance to cry for help. You ever seen a gas star?”

The corporal nodded. A
gas star
happened when muzzle flash entered flesh, from guns almost touching you got
burn rings
, and then
powder tattoos
: part of the corporal was certain gas stars only occurred on upper limbs or torso but she kept that to herself. Something about the apparition staring down at her suggested he might have a more intimate knowledge of the phenomenon.

“You want my clothes?” The corporal’s strangled question did exactly what she meant it to, told the apparition she wasn’t about to put up a fight.

“Water,” Raf demanded. Watching as the corporal silently unclipped her flask and held it out. She did a very impressive job of not looking at his nakedness or chains.

He drank.

“And those,” said Raf, “I want these, too.” Lifting the shades off her nose, he nodded to the two spare magazines on her belt. “And those.” The weapon he held in shaking fingers was an old-model MP5i 9mm Heckler & Koch, the one issued with a thirty-round mag.

“Now get up.”

Corporal Habib did what she was told.

Conditioning, Raf told himself, worked every time. He should know.

“Is Kashif Pasha here?”

The corporal nodded, only to freeze when she saw Raf’s scowl. Very slowly, probably unconsciously, she began to shake her head, as if that might change the answer.

“And the Emir?”

A frightened nod. And with it a look that suggested she wanted to say more but wasn’t sure whether to risk it.

“What?” Raf demanded.

“He’s dying. So if you’ve come to kill him, there’s no point.”

“I haven’t,” said Raf. “I wouldn’t… One last question. What’s that over there?”

Corporal Habib never saw the blow that dropped her into a heap. Or realized, until long afterwards, that when Raf went through her ammo pouch he took only her bar of chocolate. Everything else he left…

“Fuck, no.”

Not that.

Jammed into a pocket on the passenger side of an open-top Jeep, Raf found a copy of the previous evening’s
La Presse
, final edition.

He found it shortly after swinging his shackles into the face of the NCO driving, wrapping them around the man’s fat throat, bringing his screams to an abrupt halt. The NCO was still alive but his jaw hung crooked, his moustache was thick with blood and his face sported bruises which would last for a month. His arm was also broken. But some of that was self-inflicted. The NCO had run his Jeep straight into a rock.

Having read the headlines Raf wished he’d just killed him.

“You’re crying,”
said the fox.

“Of course I’m fucking crying.” Talking to the fox avoided thinking and thought was the last thing Raf wanted. He wanted emptiness. The dislocation of mind from body and body from action; not so much cognitive as psychic dissonance, blood music. The sound of glass spheres as they ground against each other.

Behind reality emptiness. Behind emptiness…

This.

“You want me to take it from here?”
asked the fox. If Raf hadn’t known otherwise, he’d have said Tiri was worried. Smart move. Raf watched himself watching the fox, standing naked on a dirt track below Jebel Morra, scanning a headline he already knew.

Kashif Pasha accused of killing half brother and cousin.

A photograph of Murad showed him staring into the lens with childish seriousness. The picture of Hani was an old papp shot, grabbed outside Le Trianon. A fact made obvious by a section of café canopy and writing on the ice-cream glass on the table in front of her.
Lady Hana al-Mansur.

All the picture did for Raf was reinforce how fast Hani had changed in those last few months. In the picture she looked as he still thought of her. Would always think of her. Small and thin, with a wry smile and more imagination than was good for any child.

Rolling the NCO over with his foot, Raf bent to take his pistol and found it attached by lanyard to a leather holster, along with three spare magazines.

“You plan to do this for yourself, don’t you?”
said the fox.

Raf nodded.

Unbuckling the sergeant’s broad belt, Raf ripped it through a handful of trouser loops to free the holster. And once he’d got the belt off, Raf decided to keep it anyway. His only problem being that, even on its tightest setting, the belt threatened to slide over his hips, so he slung it across his right shoulder instead. An action made difficult by the fact his hands were still linked by their length of rusting shackle.

One H&K with 3×30 rounds. One Browning, plus a total of four magazines. That made… Raf ran his eye down the edge of a black metal clip, counting rounds, two at a time. Twelve to each, made forty-eight, add ninety from the submachine gun… How many guards could Kashif Pasha have?

There was only one track into Moncef’s latest camp and at its entrance stood a temporary barrier; one of those striped aluminium poles, counterbalanced by a square weight at the pivot end. A single soldier stood guard, shaded by an open-fronted hut.

Possibly she should have been watching the track but most of her time was taken up wiping perspiration from her face or pulling at the armpits of her uniform where sweat had stained the camouflage almost black.

When she did look up the djinn was almost upon her.

“I’ve got a question,” it said.

Staring in disbelief, uncertain whether to be most shocked by the shackles, the brandished weapons or the apparition’s sheer nakedness, Leila de Loria broke every rule she’d ever been taught and took two steps backwards, ending up against the wall of her hut.

“Eugenie still dead?” the apparition demanded. It stank of battlefields and corpses, words as hot as any
khamsin
flowing across her face.

A shocked nod.

“Major Gide?” Raf dragged Eugenie’s replacement from his memory. Her face and voice, even her weapons becoming visible to the fragment of his mind still interested in those things. “Well?”

“She’s been arrested.”

A bark of laughter greeted these words.

“By Moncef?”

Sergeant de Loria, who at twenty-seven had killed five men (all but the first in battle), dared a glance at this djinn who used the Emir’s name so freely. He was too emaciated, too feral to be human. And yet his elemental fury was hidden behind cheap shades of a kind found in the local market and the sores around his wrists bled lymph.

“Who…”

“Lilith, son of,” said Raf. “Busy failing to make the seven years’ anonymity necessary to become like you.” His words were clear and stark, the meaning behind them less so; but then Sergeant de Loria had never met Hani or had her life told as a fairy tale.

“Who arrested Major Gide?” said the figure. “Answer me…”

A kiss of warm steel convinced the sergeant that this really was happening. She stood helpless in front of an apparition that held an automatic to her head. The apparition was naked, shackled and stank of rotting flesh but the gun was a standard-issue Browning and its knuckle was turning white on the trigger.

“Kashif Pasha or the Emir?”

“Kashif Pasha,” the sergeant said, voice sticking in her throat. “Kashif Pasha arrested Major Gide… The Emir is dying. They say he was poisoned.”

“Who by?” Raf demanded.

“It happened at a feast Kashif Pasha gave in Tunis. There was a waiter…”

Raf stepped around her sentry box and swung up the road barrier as he went through. Allowance for the faint possibility he might have to exit in a hurry.

“Leave it like that,” he told the sergeant over his shoulder.

Leila de Loria looked from the raised barrier to the Browning she’d just wrenched from her own holster. Then she stared at the buttocks of the naked djinn as it stamped its way up the path, a gun in either hand and rusted chain swinging noisily.

Returning her revolver to its holster, the sergeant shrugged. Her mother was from the Nefzaoua and followed the Ibadite branch of the One True Faith. She knew better than to interfere with the games of princes, madmen and djinn. All the same, she thought she’d better see if she could find Major Gide, arrested or not. This was something the major would want to know about.

Arrested or not?
Leila de Loria thought through that bit again and unbuckled her gun for the second time.

“Not,” she decided. “Make that not…”

On his way through the outskirts of Camp Moncef, Raf saw three more of the Emir’s bodyguard. Although not one of the girls seemed to notice him. Serving boys stopped to gape, old women made fists against the evil eye or clutched pendants but the guard kept doing whatever it was they did while Raf stamped passed.

It was Moncef’s camp and they were Moncef’s bodyguard but Eugenie was dead, Major Gide was currently under arrest and their Emir was dying. They all knew the opinion of Kashif Pasha’s mother, Lady Maryam, where Eugenie’s guard were concerned.

Once Raf passed so close that he saw a jumpsuited girl hold her breath against the stink that clung instead of clothing to his body. All the same, her eyes slid over him and when he was gone she tapped a button transmitter attached to her lapel, muttering what sounded like an evocation.

Up ahead two other jumpsuited guards stopped moving towards Raf and turned to walk away.

“You.” Raf grabbed an elderly falconer by the sleeve and let go when hard eyes turned to face him. The man was old, with small tattoos like crude tears on both cheeks, a neat beard gone completely white and teeth so perfect they had to be false. “Show me the Emir’s tent.”

“No,” said the elderly Berber. “That I will not.” Reaching for a curved knife in his belt, the man held it in front of him in fingers that shook with more than age. All the same, he dropped into a fighting crouch. “No one can escape death,” he said. “But I refuse to help you take the Emir.”

“The Emir?”

Raf’s sour smile trickled blood from lips so cracked they’d begun to peel and when he whispered there were no words, just breath. Removing his shades for a moment, Raf tried again, pale eyes locking on the man’s face; the curved blade that shook in front of his naked belly already forgotten.

“I haven’t come for the Emir,” he said. “I want Kashif Pasha.”

“This could be a trick.”

“It isn’t,” said Raf, knowing that really the old man had addressed the question to himself.

Raf would have found Moncef’s tent anyway even without help. It was huge, stood right in the centre of the camp and its ropes were made from palm fibre, something ancient and traditional anyway, unlike the nylon guys holding up the military tents in the distance. The tent was old, rotten in places and heavily patched with black goats’ hair; rugs were spread round its edge to enable the Emir to circumnavigate his tent without once touching sand or gravel.