Arabesk (88 page)

Raf’s biggest problem before he got buried alive was that no one had told him how far his authority went as the new Chief of Police for Tunis, so he’d decided to assume it went as far as he wanted; which was how he’d ended up…

“Like this, really.”

Raf wasn’t too worried about talking to an animal that didn’t exist. For a start he had a number of hallucinogens infecting his bloodstream, from an acid/ketamine mix to a particularly virulent grade of skunk. And besides, he knew Tiri was just an illusion.

They’d been through this. It was sorted out.

According to Tiri a thousand camels once fell through the crust of Ifriqiya’s great salt lake, lashed to each other in a baggage train. With the beasts went their cargo of dates, the master of the caravanserai and those who led the animals. Only one man survived, a slave who was driven into the desert for lying. His untrustworthy testimony had been that nothing existed below the ground over which they’d walked but void. What he’d thought was endlessly real was no more solid than the skin of a drum or the shell of an egg sucked dry by a snake.

“So you see,”
said the fox,
“things are…”

“…Never what they seem.” Raf punched one fist through earth to reach air. “So you keep telling me.”

Later, when he had dry-vomited fear from his belly, wiped dirt and tears from his face and come to terms with the fact that a surprisingly small hole in the ground near his feet represented victory over death, Ashraf Bey came to a deeper realization.

He stank.

There was no doubt about it. Rancid sweat and the smell of excrement rose like heat from his body. And with it came the stink of the grave. A sour, lingering foulness that varnished his nakedness, clogging the inside of his nostrils and infesting even the shafts of his blond hair.

Maybe it was this smell that drew the ghosts or perhaps the drugs in his blood cleared Raf’s eyes to let him glimpse inside the egg. Whatever, when he set out across Chott el Jerid the ghosts went with him. Strangers who looked vaguely familiar. Some man he’d seen in a queue. A Chinese boy, both too vague and strange to coalesce. Lady Jalila he recognized. Elegant in her sand-coloured silk jacket stretched across ample breasts. Eyes made up, lips perfect, neck broken… She started to say something, then went, her words and ghost ripped apart in a gust of night wind.

Then the fat man came.

Which was, Raf realized, probably inevitable. Of all the people he’d killed it was Felix Abrinsky who mattered the most.

“You okay, blondie?”

Raf put one step doggedly in front of the other. Shaded his eyes from the sight and tried to pretend he wasn’t crying. “What do you think?” he said.

“You know how it goes,” said Felix. “These days I don’t have much of a brain for thinking.” And with that he limped away, dragging the foot that had been shattered half a year before, along with most of his skull, in a bomb blast meant for the man he’d just been walking beside.

Tuesday 1st February

“Out of my way.” Major Jalal jabbed his elbow into the
kidney of one photographer and shouldered another into the gutter, watching as frozen slush filled the man’s scruffy shoes. Ten paces at most separated the limo from the door of the casino but five photographers barred the way. Well, three now.

“Chill,” his boss said with a broad smile. The major wasn’t sure if that was an order or if His Excellency was commenting on New York’s weather. So Jalal kept his reply to a nod, which covered both bases.

“Prince…”

“Over here…”

His Excellency Kashif Pasha was used to catcalls and noise from
nasrani
paparazzi, who whistled at him like he was someone’s dog. It was the only thing he hated about coming to New York.

“Look this way.”

Kashif Pasha made the mistake of doing just that and found himself staring into the smirking face of Charlie Vanhie, a WASP reporter he’d had the misfortune to meet at least three times before.

“Tell us about your plan to throw a dinner to celebrate your parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary…”

Having made the mistake of looking at Charlie Vanhie, the pasha then compounded his error by actually speaking to the man. “Forty-fifth,” he corrected, “it will be their forty-fifth.”

“What makes you think the Emir will turn up?”

Kashif Pasha stared at the man.

“Given that he won’t even be in the same room as your mother. What was it he called her…?”

Major Jalal began to move towards the speaker but His Excellency held up one hand. “Leave it,” he told the major. “Let me handle this.”

Around the time Kashif Pasha stood on a snow-covered sidewalk in Manhattan, bathed in the light of a flashgun, a small girl sat at a cheap plastic laptop. She was preparing to answer a long list of EQ questions, most of them multiple choice.

Draped around the girl’s neck was a grey kitten worn like a collar. Actually, Ifritah was almost six months old but she still behaved like a kitten so that was how the girl thought of her.

Lady Hana al-Mansur
, wrote the girl in a box marked name. Then she deleted it and typed
Hani
instead. There was also a box for her age but this was more problematic since no one was quite sure. She chose
10
, because either she was about to become ten, or she was ten already, in which case she’d be eleven in less than a week.

In the box marked nationality Hani wrote
Ottoman
and when the software rejected this she wrote it again. So then the computer offered her a long list of alternatives which she rejected, finally compromising on
Other
.

The room where Hani sat was in a house five thousand five hundred and seven miles from New York. In El Iskandryia. A city on the left-hand edge of the Nile Delta. Right at the top where the delta jutted out into the Mediterranean.

The madersa looked in on itself in that way many North African houses do. It was old and near decrepit in places. With a grand entrance onto Rue Sherrif at the front and an unmarked door that led out to an alley at the rear.

Guarding this door was a porter named Khartoum, because the city of Khartoum was where he came from and he’d refused to reveal any other. He smoked cigars backwards, with the lit end inside his mouth and had given Hani a tiny silver hand on a thread of cotton to help her do well in the tests.

This impressed Hani greatly and it went, almost without saying, that Hani would rather have had Khartoum with her than the cat but her uncle, the bey, had forbidden it. Not crossly. Just firmly. Because the box containing the test stated that all computers were to be off-line and no other people were to be in the room when the test was taken.

First off was an easy question about being caught in a plane crash. With her plane going down would she: 1) scribble her will on the back of an envelope; 2) offer her help to the pilot; 3) continue to read a magazine?

The answer was obviously continue to read since, a) she’d never learned to fly and so offering help was pointless and, b) she was unlikely to be carrying an envelope, had she had anything to leave anybody which she didn’t…

Next question was about her
father/stepfather/legal other
. Since Hani had never met the first, lacked the second and was uncertain if her Uncle Ashraf counted as the third, she ignored it, as she did two more questions about her family.

Then there was a section on
school friends
, which Hani didn’t even bother to read. The final bit was the simplest… Five hundred faces on a flat screen, each expressing anger or joy, happiness, boredom, sadness or pain.

Her job was to name that emotion. The section started at a crawl and for the first twenty or so faces Hani thought this was as fast as the software could go, but as impatience set in and Hani started hammering at the keys, her screen became a blur and soon the small girl was selecting answers so fast her computer had all its fans running.

She got every expression right except for five benchmark indicators where the picture was of her. Even so, according to the EQ software, Hani’s was the highest score ever recorded for that section, certainly within the time.

The IQ test that followed was infinitely more difficult. So difficult in fact that Hani ran out of time on her very first question. Which was the odd animal out—a sheep, a hen, a dog or a shark? Above each choice was the small photograph, just in case she’d forgotten what the animals looked like.

As answers went, the shark seemed much too obvious. Especially given this was an intelligence test and identifying the first three as air-breathing and the shark as a cartilaginous water dweller took no intelligence at all.

So what else could it be? Sheep were actually domesticated goats. At least Hani was pretty sure they were. Hens had also been domesticated, as had dogs, which were really domesticated wolves. So the answer could be shark but for a less obvious reason, because humanity had no history of domesticating sharks.

But what if that was still too obvious?

In the end she chose the sheep over the hen, dog and shark because it was a herbivore and all the others ate meat. Although, in the case of the hen, Hani suspected that the bird was actually omnivorous. This seemed the mostly likely of the nineteen possible answers she jotted onto a piece of scrap paper.

“So what went wrong?” her uncle asked later, when he finally tracked Hani down to the madersa’s roof where the girl sat oblivious to a cold glowering sky.

“With what?”

“Your second test. You only did one question and even then…” His voice trailed away.

“It wasn’t the sheep?”

The thin man with the shades, goatee beard and drop-pearl earring shook his head.

“Which one was it?” Hani demanded.

“The shark.”

“Because it’s not domesticated?”

Ashraf al-Mansur, known also as Ashraf Bey, put his face in his hands and for a moment looked almost ill. He had a niece half the city thought was retarded. A mistress who wasn’t his mistress because they’d never actually fucked. And his own life… Raf stopped, considering that point.

He’d recently resigned his job, the madersa cost more to run than he had coming in and yet, between them, Hani and Zara were worth millions. He was being chased for debts while living in a house with two of North Africa’s wealthiest people, either of whom would give him the money, if only he’d stop refusing to consider it. As Zara said, getting that to make sense was like trying to fasten jeans with a zip one side and buttonholes the other.

Hani sat her test again next morning. This time on the flat roof of the al-Mansur madersa. And she did exactly what her uncle suggested, which was give the most obvious answer to everything. It took her less than fifteen minutes to achieve a score higher than the software could handle.

Tuesday 1st February

Everything about Manhattan was white, from the sidewalk
beneath Major Jalal’s boots to the static in his Sony earbead that told the major his boss was off-line again. White streets, white cars, white noise—one way or another snow was responsible for the lot. Well, maybe not the white noise.

Five hours earlier, the windchill along Fifth Avenue had been enough to make grown men cry but now the wind was gone, snow fluttered down between the Knox building and Lane Bryant like feathers from a ruptured pillow and the avenue ahead of him was as empty as the major’s crocodile-skin wallet.

While his boss sat snug in Casino 30/54 losing sums of money the major could barely imagine, Major Jalal had been down to Mount Olive trying to bribe his way into the private room of Charlie Vanhie, the Boston photographer currently being wired for a broken jaw.

The contents of his wallet had gone to the pocket of a porter who took the lot and never came back. And then, when the major gave up in disgust, six sour-faced paparazzi appeared out of nowhere to grab frantic shots of him leaving the hospital, in the mistaken belief that the quietly dressed, moustachioed
aide-de-camp
was his Armani-clad, elegantly bearded boss. The major just hoped His Excellency was having a better night of it.

Unfortunately, Kashif Pasha wasn’t.

Although the casino was in New York and His Excellency came from Ifriqiya, the roulette wheel at which he played originated in Paris. This ensured it had only one nonpaying number rather than the zero
and
double zero found on US tables. It was French because Kashif Pasha placed bets so high he could dictate the choice of wheel, thus limiting the edge allowed to the house. But for all this Kashif Pasha was still losing. (A situation drearily familiar to his aged mother, the Lady Maryam, his father and his bankers.)

“Excellency…”

Looking up, Kashif Pasha was in time to see an apologetic croupier lean forward and rake ten scarlet chips from the grid. So busy had he been listening to the dying clatter of the ivory ball that he’d forgotten to check on which number it landed. To Kashif’s ear that unmistakable, addictive clicking was pitched somewhere between an old man’s death rattle and the tapping of an infestation of wood beetle.

Both of which reminded him of home.

“You there.” Kashif Pasha tried to snap his fingers and winced, making do with a quick wave of his injured hand. The effect was identical. A young black woman in a short deerskin skirt hurried forward, a box of cigars open on her silver tray. Her legs were bare, her breasts laced into a tan waistcoat that otherwise gaped down the front. A badge shaped like a feather announced her as Michelle.

“Sir…” The waitress waited for the well-dressed foreigner to select a Monte Cristo and take the matches she offered. Something Kashif Pasha did without appearing to notice the bitten nails of his own hands, which spoke of long nights and too little sleep.

Embossed on the matchbox was a tomahawk. The casino’s designer had no idea if Mohawk Indians actually fought with hand axes or, indeed, if any Native Americans had ever used such weapons, but tomahawk sounded like Mohawk and 30 West 54th Street was Mohawk land.