Arabesk (69 page)

“Because I shouldn’t have left those out for you to find.” He wanted to add,
because this is a world from which I can’t protect you, a world that may get worse
… Instead, he scooped up the child and carried her over to her bedroom window.

Standing there, they looked out at the darkened city. As ever, her legs were bony against his arms, her wrists round his neck as thin as sticks.

“You need fattening up,” said Raf and the next question asked itself. “Where’s Donna?”

“At home.” There was a smile, fleeting and slightly exasperated. “She won’t sleep here,” said Hani. “Apparently someone has to look after the madersa, but really she’s afraid.” Hani indicated her new bedroom, the gesture taking in oil paintings, Chinese vases and a bronze dryad whose verdigrised shoulders and upturned breasts carried a faint sheen of dust.

Hani was right of course. The mansion would have frightened Donna even if it hadn’t belonged to the General.

“So who feeds you while I’m working?” Raf asked.

“Me,” said Hani crossly. “I can cook.”

“And when did you last eat?”

“I’ve had breakfast.” Hani scrambled out of his arms but stayed close. Away from the desk and her pink plastic laptop.

“Today?”

The child looked at him.

“You had breakfast today?”

The eyes opposite suddenly bruised with tears. “Leave me alone, all right… And take your stupid photograph.” She left the room without looking back, slamming the door for good measure.

As always, adults got it wrong. It wasn’t the photograph she’d needed. Hani had wanted the face on the badge.

And besides, all that look-at-me-I’m-hiding-something routine was to stop Uncle Ashraf noticing what she really had in the drawer. The Doré engraving of hell she’d borrowed from his office.

23rd October

Outside on the beach,
Zara’s beach,
October waves
exploded against the headland and draped dark rocks with seaweed. And on the French windows to her father’s study, a stray leaf trapped in a dying spider’s web released its ribbon of rainbow down the glass as gasoline or herbicide slowly leached from its pores.

Zara saw neither because the curtains were firmly drawn. She wore a nightdress, dressing gown and fur slippers. The warmth of those nursery clothes at odds with the arctic cold in her heart.

“Tell me it’s not true…”

She wasn’t meant to shout at her father. She wasn’t even meant to swear either, but the rules were gone, left in a corridor along with her wailing mother and a discarded copy of the
New York Times
… And all her father could do was huddle in his leather chair, a tumbler of whisky beside him and an old-fashioned revolver lying on a weird etching on his lap. The glass was Soviet crystal. Zara didn’t recognize the weapon—revolvers weren’t her thing. Come the revolution, she’d always seen herself using
plastique
.

Shutting her eyes to block out the world, Zara nursed the darkness until she could hold on to it no longer. Needless to say, when she looked again nothing in the study had changed, but then it never used to work for her as a child either.

“So it’s true?” Zara said.

Of course it was
. She could see it in his face. And even the smell of fresh vomit couldn’t hide the whisky fumes. A whole bottle was gone. Enough to reduce him to childish tears without lifting the horror from his eyes.

Top Industrialist Charged with Genocide…

He should have warned her. Before the American papers and the downloads and rolling newsfeeds began, before Trustafarian Ishies with their headsets and cameras started churning the lawns to mud. She could almost feel the hunger out there, calling its questions and tapping at windows, hammering on the big brass knocker and ringing the bell. News was a commodity to the
soi-disant
Free World, not a duty. And the bear-pit growl of its news gatherers could be heard through the study’s double glazing, through windows closed and locked, curtains drawn and shutters bolted.

“Dad, come on…” Dropping to a crouch in front of his chair, Zara rested her forearms on his knees and felt her father flinch. That was all it took to turn anger to tears. Zara began crying then, sorrow rolling down her cheeks. Somewhere she had a tissue, but couldn’t remember which pocket, and it didn’t seem to matter.

They cried in silence together.

She’d taken to asking herself a question a few years back. What was the worst it could be, the secret of her father’s rise from nothing? She’d searched for clues to the answer. Once, aged fifteen, she’d riffled through his desk, using a key taken from his jacket. All she’d found was a small leather case containing pornographic photographs of a young man and two girls even younger… Apart from a wood-handled knife, a handful of Sudanese coins and a bone crucifix, that had been the sum total of her find.

She hadn’t been able to look him in the face for weeks afterwards.

The worst she could say, until recently, was that he kept Western erotica in a drawer in his study. Now he was less than that, a man diminished. Zara was rapidly coming to realize that, just maybe, she’d never actually known who he was, not really. Her father, the industrialist Hamzah Effendi.

He broke the law for a living, she accepted that. Only he broke it less than he used to do and nothing like as much as when he was young. And anyway the free market was a crime in itself. As a good Marxist she did believe that. Of course, he also killed, or had done, at least once…

When she was nine she had overheard two servants discussing this and been proud. The dead man had been bad, obviously. Someone who attacked her father, forcing him to defend himself. It was all so clear in Zara’s head. Only when she tried asking her ma about it she’d been slapped for her pains. By the next morning both her nanny and the maid were gone.

Now nothing she could say to her father would change what was about to happen. PaxForce wanted him to stand trial and, according to the
New York Times,
Iskandryia’s new governor had agreed to hand over Hamzah, subject to agreeing upon a timetable.

What more was there to say?

Plenty
. And such was the shallowness of the Western press that
how
it was said would be as important as
what
was said. Picking up his revolver, weirdshit etching and whisky bottle, Zara slammed Hamzah’s study door behind her and went to get changed. Already she was rewriting elements of her plan.

“Zara…” The voice that met her on the landing was angry and bitter, but then it would be, it belonged to her mother.

“What?” Zara demanded.

It had been a joke among Zara’s friends that they could hear Madame Rahina long before they could see her, such was the clatter of gold from her wrists. Noisy bangles and an almost permanent scowl were Zara’s memories of her mother. Sometimes the gold had been so loud Zara hadn’t been able to hear the slap that followed.

“How could he…?”

“I thought you knew everything there was to know about him,” Zara said, her voice contemptuous. “Wasn’t that what you told everyone? Soul mates. Apart from his endless mistresses, your tranquillizers and the whisky…”

“Zara…”

Zara covered the outraged face with the spread fingers of one hand and pushed. Which was all it took to throw the woman backward. Zara didn’t bother to check how she landed.

Some of the men even had little ladders so they could peer over the heads of other photographers in front. Many wore pale safari suits of the kind carried at airports by ignorant
nasrani
journalists, who expected to land somewhere blisteringly hot. Only now their suits were dark with rain and hung with all the elegance of rags on a line.

“Miss Zara…”

She turned, saw Alex and sighed. The huge Soviet bodyguard stood like a scolded child, head down and fists clenched so hard that veins made freeways along his wrists. An hour earlier, while her father was still drinking himself into a stupor, Alex had been faced with a highly tenacious member of the press, who took bolt cutters to the gates and challenged Alex to shoot him. Without orders, Alex had retreated.

“You took the correct action,” Zara said, for about the third time.

Alex looked doubtful.

“Examine the options,” she said. “You think you should have shot him?” He did too, Zara could see it in his broad face. “Sometimes retreat is necessary,” Zara told Alex carefully. “But now someone must guard the front door. And that must be you.”

Zara watched the cogs whir as Alex glanced from her to the heavy wooden door, then back again. He was nice in his way, but monolithically slow. Still, each according to his talents…

“The door, right.” He nodded agreement and turned away, shoulders straightening.

“Comrade…”

“Yes, Miss Zara…?” He paused, shoulders broad, back straight, a Makarov 9mm bulging under one arm.

She smiled. “Nothing.”

Nothing will come of nothing,
that was a line from a play she was in, back when she went to college in New York… A city of high-rise boxes where the girls around her fucked anything with a pulse and a penis and quality control seemed to be a contradiction in terms. But something always did come from nothing. The universe, for a start. Time itself. All that other shit Raf talked about that one night on the boat, stuff she didn’t understand and guessed he didn’t either, not really…

Zara sighed and went back to working on her plan.

The bell was made from beaten silver and had an ivory handle. Its clapper was a narrow twist of iron that ended with a small ball of soft metal the size of a pea. For as long as Zara could remember, the bell had been used by her mother to summon the nearest maid. Her father thought the bell unnecessary, he just shouted.

“Come on.” Zara rang the bell until the first maid appeared, then kept going until she had every member of staff mustered in the hall. There were seven in total. Five housemaids, a French chef and a Sudanese gardener. A surprisingly small number for a house the size of Villa Hamzah.

“I want coffee,” she told the chef. “A large pot.”

“Of course, Miss Zara.” The little man nodded. “I’ll have Maryam bring it to the back drawing room.”

“No,” said Zara. “You’re missing the point. I want a
lot
of coffee.”

The chef blinked. “How much?” he asked, his voice neutral.

“Jugs of the stuff. Enough for two hundred people. And
semit
…” Zara named the soft sesame-covered pretzels sold everywhere in the city. “Can we do that?”

“Of course I can.”

Zara smiled. The Parisian would be baking all afternoon, mixing dough and waiting anxiously for his yeast to rise. “Make the coffee first,” she suggested. “I’ll take it outside myself.”

That got their attention.

“Ridiculous,” said the chef. “It’ll be far too heavy. Maryam and Lisa can carry it.”

“All right,” said Zara. “We also need as many umbrellas as you can find… Start with my mother’s dressing room,” she suggested, remembering a line of them hanging in a row along the back of a cupboard.

“Oh…and Alex.” She left out her usual
comrade,
not wanting to embarrass the big Russian in front of the others. “Order me a marquee. Something vast, but without sides… We don’t want to overdo it.”

23rd October

The air was warm, the afternoon sun a haze of ultraviolet
through cloud. The heavy rain didn’t bother him. Not like back in Seattle.

“Ashraf Bey…”

Raf kept going, while behind him Hakim took it upon himself to punch the photographer to the ground. Providing the world with another picture.

The new governor’s face already fronted
Time, Paris Match
and
Newsweek
. Cheeks hollow, eyes hard behind dark glasses, hair swept back. It was a face that Raf didn’t recognize, even when he stared hard in the mirror.

As to why a mere handful of journalists clustered around the mansion in Shallalat Gardens… That was easy to answer. The rest were camped out on the lawns at Villa Hamzah, from where talking heads currently reported seriously on nothing very much.

Zara’s offer of coffee and
semit
had been a flash of brilliance, but ordering a marquee and then staying outside to watch while a hundred journalists struggled with poles and wet ropes was beyond genius. And as they struggled, Zara had watched, not offering to help or saying anything, just standing on the lawn of Villa Hamzah, while photographers captured her guarded amusement at the chaos.

When the marquee was finally up and the journalists were out of the rain, Zara had walked into the middle of their group, without a bodyguard, without having to ask anyone to move out of her way. And then she stopped, watching them as they watched her. Meeting their lenses and the bursts of flash without blinking or looking away…

“Where to, Boss?”

Raf came awake in the back of his Bentley.

“Villa Hamzah.” Same as it ever was.

Then Zara had spun in a slow circle, meeting their eyes, one person at a time. At least that’s what they thought; but really she’d been looking for a single logo among dozens.

Raf knew that now without doubt.

The journalists might have thought Zara was there to talk to them, only they were wrong. She’d stopped turning, stopped smiling the moment she saw someone from a local newsfeed. After that, her words had been for Raf alone.

“I am waiting to hear back from the governor. I’m sorry, but until then there is nothing more I can say…”

So now the governor was on his way, through a city that flickered by like the backdrop to some film he vaguely remembered preferring the first time round. The statue of Mehmet V, which once seemed so impressive, now looked tatty and grandiose, more parks than ever looked empty, windows to shops were unlit or shuttered tight with steel grilles: the rococo mansions of the Corniche that once seemed so magnificent behind their wrought-iron gates now looked defeated, held prisoner by their own defences.

We define ourselves by our own limitations.
The fox had said that to him once, in Seattle, shortly before it pointed out that on this basis Raf should be very defined indeed.