Arabesk (45 page)

“Out of here,” he told his throat mike and heard an acknowledgment through his earbead. If whatever looked like taking longer than it should, Smugs would work the crowd. Smugs was a house regular, ten years older than Avatar, with half the following. Av tolerated the other guy’s lack of skill and in return Smugs didn’t object to Avatar claiming the decks when fancy took him.

“On the roof,” said the manager as Av unlocked the booth’s rear wall and stepped into a darkened corridor. All shaved skull, pearl stud and shiny black suit, Carlo Amici stood back politely and Avatar sighed. This afternoon the man had regarded Av as a lower form of life, some kid who got overpaid for pushing buttons and spouting crap. Now, suddenly, he’d discovered that Av had a direct line to Hamzah.

There went another good gig.

“I’ll find my own way up,” said Avatar, heading for a steel door.

“You could use the lift…”

“No, this is quicker.” Cooler too, more in keeping, though Avatar didn’t mention that.

The fire escape brought Avatar out on a flat roof that overlooked a darkened square. Over on the far corner of the roof, a small man was lashed to a radio aerial. The aerial was illegal but, equally obviously, no goons from RadioAuthority came by with angle grinders and chopped $15,000 of pirate transmitter into metal spaghetti as happened in other clubs. Next to the naked journalist stood Hamzah Effendi, elegant in Homburg and camel-hair coat.

“Old man.” Avatar stepped out of the darkness.

Hamzah smiled and held out a hand. The big man’s grip was firm but controlled. What he offered was a greeting, not a test of strength.

Avatar was being publicly acknowledged in front of Alex, Carlo Amici and a couple of the doormen. Without wanting to be ungrateful, he did wonder why…

“Okay,” said Hamzah, “I’m here. Who’s this…?”

“Remember the shitweasel I was talking about…” The boy nodded towards the naked man. “His name’s Mike Estelle. He came in earlier, still asking questions. So I figured it might be a good idea if you two actually met. You know, socially…”

“You did this to him?”

“Did what?” Avatar looked at the quivering Englishman who was lashed to the mast by his testicles. There wasn’t a bruise on the man. And the only blood came from where the little shit had chewed out the inside of his own mouth.

“I barely touched him…”

Hamzah smiled. “You,” he said to the man. “Here I am. You want to tell me what this is about?”

A sniffling silence was Hamzah’s only answer. Sniffling silence and frightened eyes that stared back, wide and defenceless. Well, Hamzah had news for the Englishman. Defencelessness didn’t impress him and it certainly didn’t punch any buttons.

“No questions?” Hamzah sighed. “Your choice… Throw him off the roof,” Hamzah ordered in English, turning away.

The rising thud of a bass loop from the floor below mixed neatly with Mike Estelle’s rising scream. And apart from Alex, only Avatar saw the tiny, sideways chop of Hamzah’s hand, which negated the order.

“You hear me?” Hamzah demanded crossly. “Do it now.”

“Sure, Boss. Sorry, Boss.” Alex produced an evil-looking pair of pliers from his pocket. “Let me just snip this wire.”

Between them, Avatar and Alex freed the struggling journalist and dragged him to the edge of the roof. The fall was barely twenty feet but the ground below was concrete.

“He should be dressed,” Avatar said suddenly. “Less suspicious.”

“No,” said Alex, voice casual. “Foreign tourist gets blasted, weirds out and jumps from club roof. Check out the local newsfeed. Happens all the time…

“Yeah, really,” he added, seeing Avatar’s doubtful look. “Besides, no problem, the Boss will tell the police what to decide…” Alex began running the sobbing man backward and forward, like an athlete limbering up for some Olympic event. “Okay,” he said to Avatar. “You ready?”

That was when the
nasrani
shat himself.

Hamzah sighed. “Okay,” he said heavily. “Let’s try it a different way.” He took a fresh Partegas from his pocket and paused as both doormen bounced forward with lighters. Waving them away, Hamzah bit off one end and spat it over the edge. Only then did he nod to the one nearest.

“Last chance,” Hamzah told the journalist. “My name is Hamzah Effendi. I own the company that owns this club. I also own an oil field, the Midas processing plant and a shipping line. All this you can get from any trade directory… So tell me, who sent you and what do they really want to know?”

Sudan

Sergeant Ka turned towards the truth and raised a fist
above his head in formal salute:

I will ascend to heaven

I will raise my throne above the stars

I will sit on the mount of assembly…

Before the silver talisman he wore around his neck became an amulet, it was briefly a bride piece in a dusty city with empty streets and a broken-down bazaar. South of the city lived the Dinka, cattle people, who once roamed the cracked earth between here and the upland forest, where fever trees glow and scrub lies lifeless, until rains come and the underbrush explodes.

Originally, the talisman was recognizable as a Maria Theresa dollar, but the touch of a thousand hands had worn it flat. The coin, however, was never Austrian. It was minted in Stambul, a hundred years after the empress died, at a time when silver dollars were a common currency in the Sahara, Arabia and the Sudan.

Having been taken south as payment for slaves, the coin become a bride price before coming north again, around the neck of a child who stabbed the grandson of the Dinka who originally received it in marriage.

She used a blade because that day’s bullet ration was gone… Later, she swapped the talisman for a bone crucifix taken from a nun; but that was months later, long after the little war started in Abu Simbel. Mostly Ka avoided thinking about the little war and how he became a soldier.

And sometimes he forgot.

Before Ka was a soldier, he was a camel boy, which was an easy job and one he liked. Foreigners came by gleaming barge to the great temple and he and boys like him led them by camel up the thorny slope from the river’s edge to the foot of the cliffs, where great carvings had stood undisturbed for well over three thousand years.

Back then, Ka wore tattered shorts and no top or shoes, because that way the tips were better. Once he’d worn a Pepsi T-shirt and a pair of Nikes that a pink-skinned girl had left behind and hardly any of the foreigners chose him. They rode with the barefooted boys.

He’d have learnt his lesson from this, even without the beating he got from his uncle. Next day, Ka went back to no shirt or shoes. He also began to listen to the guides when they were too busy to notice.

Soon he knew all the best stories about the great king and his wife. He could explain why the four big statues all wore the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, while inside the cliffs, in the darkness of the inner chamber, the king wore only the white crown of Upper Egypt or the red crown of Lower Egypt, depending on whether he was in the northern or southern part of the temple.

And he learnt what interested the foreigners, those people who wasted water as if it was endless. Who washed under flowing showers, shat in unused water and giggled as they tipped full bottles over their heads and let clean water drain away into the dust.

He told them of kings marrying their daughters, brothers sleeping with sisters, mothers with sons. It kept the magic sacred, kept the river flowing and renewed the dark silt that lined the banks and fed the kingdom, but he didn’t explain that. The reasons were never as important to the
nasrani
as the actions themselves.

When Ka told of battles where the king’s army collected testicles to help his scribes count the number of captured, the men would look sick and the bareheaded women either quizzical or appalled. And Ka would smile and look happy when they tipped him, pretending to be surprised. As if he’d spend his whole morning telling them tales just because he loved foreigners.

No one loved the foreigners, not really. Except, maybe, the government because they brought in francs, marks and American dollars. The poor, the
felaheen,
would rather the foreigners didn’t wander unasked into mosques, still wearing their shoes, that they didn’t choke the desert roads with coaches that threw dust into the faces of those walking and, most of all, that they didn’t need endless hotels along the river, because now the areas richest in silt were closed to those who used to sharecrop them and landlords got their money from the tourists instead.

In one month, at the start of the little war, the army beat to death forty-eight people because they came from a distant village where the headman’s son had gunned down five foreign tourists. Forty-eight for five. That was the exchange rate.

The son, Samir, whose name meant one whose conversation in the evening is lively, but who was never heard to say more than two words together, lived away from his father’s village in a brick house on a rocky islet somewhere unimportant between Aswan and Wadi el-Sebua. He was a strange man, educated first at a local school and then at el-Azhar College in Al Qahirah. He left el-Azhar to work for the Société de Géographie d’Egypte, only to leave that in turn a few months later.

After his reappearance near the village, Samir adopted a family of ungainly chicken-sized birds. There was nothing very special about the birds other than the fact that they lived in a reed bed and were entirely purple, except for their stiltlike legs, which were pink. They weren’t even rare.

Before he died under torture, Samir was questioned by a major from the Al Qahirah military police. The local police were happy to do the job themselves but had been ordered to leave the job to an expert. One reason, some suggested, for their lack of action after the dead Samir’s cousins ambushed the major’s car, shot dead his eighteen-year-old driver and cut off the major’s hands, then beat him to death.

By then, the disc of Samir’s questioning was on its way to regional HQ at Aswan for transcription and analysis. It made no sense at all.

Splashing water, that came first. The clank of something, probably an empty bucket hitting a concrete floor. A slap. Another slap.

“I’m asking you again. When did you join the Sword of God?”

“Never. I’m not a member.”

“Then why kill foreign tourists?”

The sound of a ragged sigh. Part pain, part exasperation.

“They shot the gallinule…”

“The tourists?”

“No, the contractors. They cut down the acacia, grubbed up the tamarisk and shot my…”

A thud, leather on flesh.

“NO, WAIT.” The voice is foreign, the accent atrocious. Whoever is wielding the whip, they do what they’re told. Silence follows.

“You want me to believe you shot five tourists because contractors killed a few wading birds?”

“The river doesn’t need another hotel and it doesn’t need more tourists. Besides, the birds were there first.”

“So you are Sword of God.”

“No, I’m an ornithologist…”

That was the start of the little war, which lasted a month. The big war came afterwards and went on for much longer, but Sergeant Ka never quite worked out who the government were fighting. No one important, obviously. And most of the fighting wasn’t in Egypt anyway, it was in Sudan.

The little war, which was what his uncle called it, didn’t seem so little once the tourists stopped coming to Abu Simbel and the soldiers arrived. Inside of forty-eight hours the whole of Ka’s village had been rounded up and marched into the desert. Only a handful of adults survived the first week’s march. Most died of heat or succumbed to the cold at night. Very few made it into the second week to reach the holding pen at El Khaschab.

Ka’s uncle was one of those. With his wife, parents and own son already dead in another place, the man no longer believed in God, only this lack of belief was so shocking that all Ka’s uncle registered was an emptiness as his midday prayers escaped between parched lips and ascended to a silent heaven.

Above him the same cruel sun that turned half-fertile earth to dust and killed the crops in the year Ka was born blistered his skin. A swarm of freshly hatched flies draped his shoulders like a heavy mantle but he hardly noticed them. Just as he failed to notice the watching boy or the white-plumed vultures that hopped and shuffled through the dirt, a handbreath away.

They are excluded by a single question. Should he shoot himself or should he shoot his nephew. With only one bullet remaining, it was impossible to do both…

1st August

Zara got arrested for indecency on the 28th July. The
first Hamzah knew of it was a day later, from a local paper. Front page, single column.

Rebel Daughter Restrained.

Since Hamzah relied on bribes, blackmail and his fearsome reputation to ensure such things never happened, never mind got reported, he was obviously furious: particularly since the shot used in
Iskandryia Today
showed his daughter crop-haired and naked under a tight coat.

It would be fair to say that he was also troubled. The police were paid handsomely to leave anything that might connect to Zara or her friends well alone.

So far as Hamzah was concerned,
leaving alone
meant not arresting his daughter at some illegal/political dance club. And if the Club de Hashishan really was hers, and the police were probably right about that, then that was even more reason for letting things be.

Unfortunately, the offending picture of Zara turned up again, slightly larger in
Iskandryia on Sunday
… This was the paper that his daughter had just tossed in the bin, before stamping out of his marble-and-red sandstone office…

“Well,” said Olga Kaminsky, “you deserved that.” Hamzah saw her smile as she removed Zara’s cup from his desk and wipe away icing sugar with one easy sweep of a linen napkin.