Arabesk (47 page)

Lions were meant to sneak down from the highlands, ridden by white-whiskered monkeys who spoke a real language and lived high on a cliff face, secure from humans. Ka could see neither of these.

Though he could see movement, away to his right, human movement where dry wadis fed from mountains that ran along the distant coast like a spine. Beyond this, a thin strip of towns and small cities separated the spine from more water than Ka could imagine.

RED SEA.

The letters lit across his vision, but he didn’t need to read them because the name was spoken softly into his ears. Which was as well because Ka hadn’t been taught reading, though he could remember anything if he knew it was important. And sometimes he remembered things anyway, just in case they turned out to be useful later.

So he knew, without being told, that the white markings on the bonnets of the 4×4s racing down the dried oueds towards their camp belonged to the government.

They left their fire banked up and burning brightly. Their rucksacks made a huddle under Saul’s old blanket. At ground level it looked like they were still there and sleeping.

Ka led them through the early morning, heading west. Pickets were stationed at regular spots around the camp, but those on guard duty sat talking or smoking kif, which they hid in their hands so that ends stayed hidden from the grown-ups. Who, if they were wise, stayed away. Two nights back a ten-year-old picket had fragged a one-bar, ostensibly for refusing to give the password. Word was, she’d tried to confiscate his cache.

“This way.” Ka slid down a gravel bank to where silver water spread away into forever. Reality was less far than it looked, but far enough. Now was where he learnt if he actually had control over the group or not.

“We have to cross the river,” said Ka, his voice calm. As if asking them to brave the water was a perfectly reasonable request. For a second, he wondered whether to mention the armed trucks racing across the desert on the other side of the camp, each one filled with a dozen heavily armed soldiers.

Saul might want to stay to fight and Ka could live with that. It mattered very little to him what Saul did, or where. But Sarah might stay too, and that mattered much more. Bec, as ever, would do what was the least effort.

“What about crocodiles?” Zac asked.

“There aren’t any,” Ka said firmly.

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

Obviously enough he was lying, because he could see at least three. Loglike flickers that grew brighter the harder he looked.
Crocodilus niloticus,
according to the glasses, five hundred paces away. With luck, the reptiles would remain asleep. Without luck… Well, that applied to everything.

“Come on,” insisted Ka. “Move it. And hold your weapon over your head so water doesn’t go down the barrel.”

“I can’t move it,” said Saul quietly. Sounding, for once, less than certain.

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t swim.”

“Oh…” Ka hadn’t thought of that. “Anybody else?”

“I probably can,” Zac said brightly. He paused, suddenly aware that Ka, Sarah and Bec were staring at him. “I mean I’ve never tried but…”

Bec sucked at her teeth, crossly.

“Sarah?”

She was the only one Ka was really bothered about.

“Of course I can swim. My father was a fisherman.”

“So?” His father had kept camels and Ka hated the animals and they hated him. He never rode when there was an option to walk.

“So I can swim,” said Sarah. “Okay?”

“Well, I can’t.” Saul’s voice was getting angry.

The picture shifted and tightened, an overlay of wavy lines hanging ghost-breath in front of Ka’s eyes. Some spoke of height, being set tight to the edges of scars and cliffs. Others mapped the river. It took Ka a while to realize that these indicated depth, but that was because his attention was on something else.

Sarah volunteered to get the boat.

“Turn your backs,” she demanded, waiting until they had. Beneath her vest and combats she wore nothing except a ragged thong cut high at the hip. A Norwegian nurse had given the thong away, along with the rest of her spare clothes the day before returning to a family farm outside Namsos. The new owner died of a gut shot. Sarah had swapped the thong for a half packet of Cleopatra and an amulet from the person who owned it after that.

“Be back soon…”

Ka heard the slight splash, as they all did: but he was the only one able to watch as Sarah struck out across the dark expanse of water, head bobbing and legs kicking to the side. Except it wasn’t her head he watched but her back and buttocks, flesh thinned by hunger and endless marches that trailed the Ragged Army up and down the river.

Fifteen minutes later, Sarah was on her way back, puffing slightly but happy. Although what the others saw was a boat that glided towards them as if by magic.

“Turn round,” she demanded, scrambling up the bank and into her dusty clothes, ignoring the water that ran down her legs and between her small breasts.

“What’s with you?” Saul demanded.

Ka jumped.

“You’re standing weird…”

“I was listening,” Ka said hastily and regretted it the moment Saul asked him the obvious question.

“To trucks,” said Ka.

Which got their attention. Zac went fly-catcher, mouth hanging open, Bec looked round and even Sarah shot him a sideways glance as she squeezed water from heavy black braids. That was when Ka remembered he wasn’t going to mention the government.

“Blue hats?” Saul’s voice was raw.

“No idea,” said Ka, although he had. There were blue hats, militia and regular government troops. Plus two open trucks full of
nasrani
wearing black uniforms and swirling face paint. “But I don’t plan to hang round to find out.”

“You just going to run away then?”

Ka stepped back. “Which is more important?” he asked Saul. “Staying here or going to turn off the Nile?”

“We can do that later,” Saul protested.

“What if we’re dead?” Ka said. “Who’ll go then?”

The deck of the tiny felucca had been bleached white from a lifetime’s sun, the sky sail was rotten and the sycamore sides were warped. Cracks above the waterline had been ignored but any gaps below were stuffed with rope and crudely gummed over, both inside and out, with dollops of bitumen.

“It looks great,” Ka told Sarah.

Together they launched her boat, then stood back, up to their hips in the wide river as Zac pulled himself up over the side. Bec followed, hooking her dress above wide hips to keep it out of the water. Ka guessed she knew she wasn’t wearing any pants.

7th October

The earlier collective gasps of a city in orgasm were
silent, although the crunch of exploding fireworks still tripped car sirens, providing a counterpoint to the dogs that found themselves tethered for the evening.

October 7 was
Ashura,
tenth day of Muhram and the date of El Iskandryia’s biggest fireworks display. A night when rockets rose so often from parties along the Corniche that they ceased to attract the eye; and only the grandest waterfalls of silver sparks raised even slight interest. At midnight, having fasted for two days, the city turned its attention to feasting.

Cafés spilled out onto pavements, restaurants were overbooked months in advance and only money or influence could get you a late table.

Heading west on Boul Isk, a dining car swayed over rails beaten silver with use and water slopped from a carafe. In a kitchen so small that the evening’s menu was limited to only five dishes, a sous chef dropped his steamer of asparagus…

But all of that was only background. Maxim’s was still the only place to dine at the end of
Ashura
… A single restaurant car with, bizarrely enough, its own liquor licence; crowded out with people who mattered. Which, in Zara bint-Hamzah’s considered opinion, meant monied
and
stuck up, as opposed to her dad, who was just obscenely rich.

As of that morning, Zara’s hair was blue, almost purple; cut extra short, like a stevedore’s, in solidarity with the dock strike in Tunis. Needless to say, the razor cut cost more than any stevedore earned in a week.

It did, however, suit her, now that a month of dieting had given Zara back her cheekbones. And she understood the absurdity of her unstinting support for lost causes. Zara shrugged, then sighed, then shrugged again.

The final shrug was to annoy her mother.

Zara was dressed head to toe in a very grown-up
Atelier Azzedine
creation that revealed almost no flesh while clinging tightly to every curve. The gown had been worked up from a single sketch, then cut and corrected on the body of an appropriate house model. A notoriously slow and expensive way to work.

The honeymoon might not have happened, but Zara still appreciated her father letting her keep his present. Another of his surprises, altogether more unexpected, sat in her Gucci bag. The new Amex was not a top-up job, like the one that held her six-monthly allowance, nor a secondary card drawn against one of her father’s banks. This was different, tied blind into a megainterest account in Zurich. Just how mega only made sense once Zara had called Switzerland, read off the account number and had someone tell her just how many dollars sat with the gnomes.

So she was both beautifully dressed and absolutely terrified. Because what her father had promised her, right after she nearly got murdered that evening in the warehouse, was her own flat… So she no longer had to live at Villa Hamzah.

Instead, he’d kept her at home and given her a one-off, nine-digit payment in US dollars, made to an account in a city where women having capital was obviously not against the law.

And for Zara, the real problem was not that her father had given her so much money, not even that he’d obviously changed his mind about letting her live alone, it was that she could no longer get close enough to him to find out why.

Later,
was all he could say,
when things are sorted out
.

Taking a single caper from a nearby bowl, Zara sucked out the salt and reduced the flower bud to pulp with her tongue. She was reaching for another when a waiter materialized at her shoulder.

“Champagne?”

“Please.” Zara smiled and held up her glass, making someone at a table across the aisle snort with contempt. At the sight of a woman drinking, at the fact she’d lifted her own glass or just because she’d smiled at a waiter? It was hard to know and Zara told herself she didn’t care. So she kept the smile in place and waited until her glass was full, then carefully thanked the man.

There was a Starbucks in New York at the intersection of Morningside and West 123rd, catercorner to Central, where Zara had wasted every weekday evening for nine months waiting tables for basic plus tips rather than call home and admit the allowance she’d asked for wasn’t enough to cover living in Manhattan, not even in a fifth-floor walkup. The day she started being rude to waiters was the day she would shoot herself.

Still smiling, Zara looked across at the other table and raised her glass…

Millions had gone on Maxim’s last refurbishment. Designers from Prague and Dublin had specified chairs that were, apparently, Arts and Crafts, ergonomically corrected to reflect modern requirements of comfort. The floor was smoked glass and the walls pale Burmese silk, taken from lava genetically fixed to excrete gossamer-thin strands of gold. Every painting was original, expertly provenanced. Mostly they were a mix of sombre Klee and Matisse, with the occasional August Macke. All this was the stuff of travel features.

What wasn’t common knowledge was that a substantial proportion of the refurbishment costs went on bombproofing the restaurant car to US Army standards. Hamzah Effendi, however, knew the security specification exactly. Safety Unlimited was a subdivision of Martini & Gattling, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Quitrimala Enterprises.

Around the restaurant, interchangeable notables picked at roast turbot marinated in lime on a bed of cucumber, or prodded sautéed duck liver with fenugreek and Thai chilli. Maxim’s was resolutely uncompromising in its allegiance to traditional fusion.

Personally, Hamzah would rather have been at home eating eggs fried with halumi but, as well as being
Ashura,
tonight was to celebrate Zara’s escape from the clutches of a rogue
Thiergarten
assassin. That had been the idea anyway.

Only Zara sat gazing listlessly out of a window, Rahina was furious about something and their guest, a major who’d practically invited himself, was halfway through a boring description of the luxuries to be found aboard a liner called the SS
Jannah
.

“Do pay attention.”

Hamzah opened his eyes but Zara was the one being scolded. Somehow his wife’s voice got the attention of everybody in the restaurant except her daughter.

“Zara, please pay attention.”

“To what exactly?” She smiled coldly at her mother.

“To what the major is telling you, darling.” The endearment was at odds with the anger in the dumpy woman’s dark eyes.

“And what is the major telling me?” Zara asked, sweetly. She batted her eyelids at the man, who looked away, finally embarrassed. Quite at which of the many embarrassments on offer it was hard to say.

“Well?” Zara asked. When the major pretended not to hear her question, Zara went back to watching the shops go past.

According to the
Guide Michelin,
two Parisian chefs were first responsible for the idea of converting the tram into a moving restaurant. Where other entrepreneurs might have tried to cram in tables, they’d bought two wooden tramcars, linked them together and used the front car as a restaurant and the rear as offices and a kitchen. That had been 120 years before and, with only eight tables ever available, Maxim’s had been booked solid for months ahead ever since.