Arabesk (7 page)

“English, living in New York.”

Hamzah shrugged as if it was all the same. Which it probably was to him. “I’m told her name is well known…”

“Not unless you’re a fan of the National Geographic channel,” said Raf. “She campaigned for animal equality and worked on documentaries. Remember that film about meerkats?” Hamzah looked blank until Raf put his hands up like paws and swung his head from side to side, as if watching for danger.

Hamzah nodded.

“She did the camera work,” said Raf, clambering out of the water ahead of Hamzah. “Syndicated in six continents. You can still get the screen saver. She took a flat fee of $1,500 and used it to fly down to Brazil to film vampire bats. Remember the baby panda trying to eat bamboo…? The young fox playing in the snow? The white tiger cub with the empty Coke bottle? Well, she did camera on those, too.”

Animal porn, just a different kind. Cuddly images for a cold planet, used to fund the stuff that really interested her, like filming predators. Not that he was bitter or anything. “She did a lot of the work for love,” said Raf, forcing himself to be fair. It had to be for love, because, God knew, there’d been little enough money in it. And it probably wasn’t her fault the only way she could cope with a damaged world was by examining it through a lens or the bottom of a vodka bottle. But then, nor was her life his fault either, whatever she might have said…

“Let’s go back to the steam room.”

Hamzah smiled. “Getting a taste for it, eh?”

Sitting side by side and naked in the boiling mist, both men knew the real interview was beginning. But Lady Nafisa hadn’t made clear to Raf who had final approval. All she’d said was that he shouldn’t commit to any fact that could be checked, that he should keep answers vague and always return a question with a question.

She
might know that Raf had spent years locked in a Seattle jail but there was no reason why Hamzah had to know too.

“You’ve been in America?” The industrialist’s voice was studiedly relaxed, almost urbane. He hardly glanced at an ugly slash of scar tissue above Raf’s right hip and when he did it was fleeting. Raf could have told him about the operation he’d had at five on a kidney but that story was as boring as the month he’d spent wired to machines.

“Were you working over there?”

“Something like that.” Raf stood and stretched, twisting his head to one side like a man with a bad crick in his neck. It fooled neither of them.

“Lady Nafisa mentioned that you were an honorary attaché.”

Did she?
Reluctant to lie outright, Raf retreated into something close to the truth. “To be honest,” he said, “most of my time was spent on a doctorate.”

Behind bars, with limited web access and no on-campus visits.

“Finance?” Hamzah asked, looking suddenly interested.

“No,” said Raf. “Alternative timelines. They’ve very big in the US right now.” That, at least, was true. “It’s a way of understanding what happened by looking at what didn’t but quite easily might have done… You know, say America had actually joined the Third Balkan War…”

“They stayed neutral. So did we.”

“Not the 1966-75 conflict,” said Raf, “The
Third
Balkan, 1914-15. Say Woodrow Wilson hadn’t cut a deal between Berlin and London but had sent in troops on Britain’s side. London might have been victorious. The Kaiser might have been fatally weakened…”

“The Kaiser was always going to win,” Hamzah said flatly. “History is what God writes.”

Raf sighed. “Just imagine,” he said. “The Prussian empire breaks up in 1923, just as the Austro-Hungarians almost did. Might the Ottomans have fallen? What would have happened to Egypt’s Khedive?”

“
The Khedive
…” Hamzah knew better than to accuse a bey of treason. Especially not one who was about to marry his daughter. And no doubt, all this
what if
was merely some sophisticated game played by people without real jobs. But it sounded like treason to him.

Besides, Hamzah knew what
had
happened. Every schoolboy across North Africa knew that Islam had trampled colonialism into the ground. On Suvla plain, the English king’s own servants from Sandringham had been killed to the last man. The slaughter at Gallipoli broke the warmongers’ spirit.

Fatally weakened, the British were driven from Egypt by General Saad Zaghloul. Having stolen Libya in 1911, Italy was forced to give it back six years later, and the French relinquished Tunis.

Fifteen years of smouldering unrest followed. Nationalists, fundamentalists, Bolsheviks…but money from the Arabian oilfields bought them all off in the end. Mosques were built, hospitals erected and schools set up to educate the children of the poor. His grandfather had been one of them. The child of a
felah
who sharecropped a single strip of Nile mud far to the south of Iskandryia and resented bitterly the interference of
effendi
who demanded his child attend class when there was
bersim
to gather and irrigation channels to be kept open with a broad-bladed hoe.

From
felah
to
effendi
in three generations. That was worth something. And Hamzah’s doctorate was in engineering. Which was worth something too. The industrialist nodded to his bodyguard and stood up to go. He had bribes to pay, building contracts to negotiate, a new captain to find for the Iraklion run.

Olga, his PA, would be waiting at the office with a long list of people to see and calls he should make. Most of which he would ignore.

“Where were you an attaché?” The final question was asked from politeness alone. Beys were obviously different and Hamzah made no pretence of seeing any value in the theories expounded by his future son-in-law.

“Seattle,” said Raf.

Hamzah sat down again. This time when his gaze flicked to the slash across Raf’s ribs they stayed there. And when he looked back again there was something in his eyes that looked very like guilt.

One heavy hand came up to rest briefly on Raf’s shoulder. “I had no idea. No one told me.”

Raf said nothing because that was what someone who’d worked unofficially at the Seattle consulate would have said.

“That’s confidential, obviously,” Raf muttered finally. “So please don’t mention it to anyone.”

“But I have to tell…”

“No,” said Raf, looking Hamzah straight in the eyes. “What I did was insignificant. An
honorary
attaché is just someone’s unpaid assistant.”

“And the person you worked for is dead.” It wasn’t a question. Hamzah had watched the official broadcasts. And even if he hadn’t, the bombing of the consulate in Seattle by Sword of God fundamentalists had filled the world’s newsfeeds, swamped the radio stations and briefly turned even pirate TV into rolling 24-hour news channels.

Image after image had been bounced round the planet. Bodies being pulled from the wreckage of a concrete building with heavy balconies. Viewers only knew the consulate once had balconies because CNN researchers had found “before” shots to emphasize the horror of what came after.

One car bomb alone would have caused structural damage. But the consulate had main streets on three of its sides and the delivery trucks had been perfectly synchronized, their drivers in constant communication. The police deduced that the suicide bombers had been in regular radio contact from several charred fragments of circuit-board and the say-so of a thirteen-year-old band scanner, who’d been irritated to find crypted static where he was expecting juicy neighbourhood gossip.

3rd July

The free city was not just built on the rubble of its own
history, it used that rubble in the rebuilding. Greek columns reshaped by Roman artisans now formed part of mosque doorways, having been ripped from an earlier Byzantine church. So, too, the cultures had mixed. Until the rich mix became its own culture.

Berlin thought El Iskandryia barbarous, the White House feared it and Baghdad dismissed the metropolis as decadent and forgotten by God. But
realpolitik
demanded a Mediterranean free port where oil, cotton and particularly information could be traded. And El Isk got the job.

Roman, Byzantine, Coptic, Muslim… If ancient Babylon was the whore, then El Iskandryia had long been the courtesan: though for Islam’s conquering army she was a sister to be brought back into the family. Napoleon called the city five shacks built over a dung heap. Nelson, being British, couldn’t even get the sex right and dismissed the city as a crippled dog. But the insults meant nothing to Isk…

For Isk was hermaphrodite, ageless. A vampire of a city. Venerable and elegant, with a taste for fresh blood—a taste that it kept hidden behind stately boulevards and impeccable manners, in daylight at least. Night-time found the city stretching itself and yawning to reveal ancient fangs. Though the half-smile never left its face and the dark glint never left its eye.

And to assume Isk had a single identity was to misunderstand the Gordian complexity of its personality. The vampire existed parallel to the blonde innocent-eyed victim, the virgin inside the whore. There never had been only one city at any time in El Iskandryia’s history. And for all its ancient glory, there were days when Isk was afraid of its own shadow, of the tarnished side of the mirror it held up to the world.

Days like now, when all that showed inside on Le Trianon’s bar screen was a rerun of that morning’s executions in Riyadh. A Saudi paedophile and a Sudanese found guilty of sorcery, both losing their heads in the flash of a sword blade, then losing them again in slow motion.

Family.

Ashraf al-Mansur, who was doing his best not to think of himself as ZeeZee, rolled the word round his mouth and spat it out. He’d never had one and wasn’t sure why he’d want to start now. As a child, in Zurich, he’d known boys at the Academy with families. Seen the strange effect it had on them. They cried from homesickness at the start of term and then no longer felt at home when they went back for the holidays. Their parents were worse. The kind of people who talked about roots and forgot those were what kept vegetables in the ground.

Besides, Raf didn’t need roots. He came with a 8000-line guarantee that promised his
genetic heritability
would always outweigh
social calibration.
Whatever the fuck that meant.

At first, given the number of zeros after the first number in the price, Raf thought that his mother must really love him… But later, when he looked at her accounts for the year of his birth, he found that ninety-five per cent of the cost of the genetic manipulation had been met by Bayer-Rochelle and the rest she’d written off over five years against tax.

Oh, and the pharmaceutical company had totally funded her next three expeditions and made a sizeable one-off donation to a pressure group for which she was official photographer. It was around that time she’d stopped campaigning against non-transparent genome research.

On the evening he arrived Lady Nafisa had made clear the payment she intended to collect for digging him out of Huntsville. Though what she talked about was the need for family members to help each other, to accept their responsibilities.

“I don’t have a family,” Raf had said. “I
had
a mother. And when I wanted to talk to her I’d call her agent.”

Lady Nafisa had looked at him. “Your father is my brother-in-law. That makes us family.”

Her brother in law…
“My father was a backpacker,” said Raf. “From Goteborg. My mother didn’t even get his name.” The man had apparently been hired for a week to drive his mother across the Sahel when she was filming the Libyan striped weasel, probably because she was too wasted to steer the vehicle herself.

“No.” Lady Nafisa shook her head. “You must listen to me. The Emir of Tunis is your father.”

“Yeah, right,” said Raf. “That well-known Swede.”

“Blue eyes, white hair, high cheekbones. You’re Berber,” Lady Nafisa told him crossly. “Look it up… And while you’re at it, take a good look at this.” Only Raf didn’t need to take a good look because he’d seen the picture before—the palm trees, the minaret, the man with the drop-pearl earring.

“Your father,” said Lady Nafisa.

Raf wanted to say that she was talking to the wrong man: but then suddenly realised he was the one who’d got it wrong. It wasn’t his responsibilities they were discussing—or not just his—it was her responsibilities to him. An odd and uncomfortable thought.

“I knew he had a brat by an American,” Lady Nafisa said. “And that he paid your mother a small allowance, but he does that for all his bastards, he can afford it. But he also told me you were illegitimate. And he lied.”

She handed Raf a letter.

Beneath the words
Isaac and Sons. Commissioners of Oaths,
a rush of Arabic flowed right to left across expensive paper like tiny waves. Raf could no more read it than fly. “What does it say?” Raf asked, handing it back.

“On 30 April… Pashazade Zari al-Mansur, only son of the Emir of Tunis, married Sally Welham at a private ceremony in an annex of the Great al-Zaytuna Mosque,” Lady Nafisa recited from memory. “She was his third wife. He divorced her five days later.”

“My mother was already married.”

Lady Nafisa made no pretence of scanning the paper. “My informant says not… Your real name is Ashraf al-Mansur. Under Ottoman law you hold the rank of
bey,
which entitles you to a senior post in the Public Service.” She glanced up. “We’ll talk about that later. You have
carte blanche
anywhere in Ottoman North Africa from Tunis to Stambul and you have diplomatic immunity everywhere else in the world, for any crime except murder…”

Raf pushed his empty coffee cup aside and prepared to stand, but the moment he began to ease back his chair a waiter materialized at his side and shifted it for him. Seconds later the
patron
himself appeared.

“Will we be seeing Your Excellency soon?”

“Monday morning, I would imagine,” said Raf and the small man smiled.

“I’ll reserve your table.” He glanced at the English-language newspaper Ashraf had downloaded from a stall. “And I’ll have a copy of
The Alexandrian
waiting…”