Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (29 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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“For the record,” she said wearily, “I don’t think the faulty steering killed Fairfax. If I did, Eric, it would almost be a relief. That’s not what I think. I can’t prove what I think, but what would be the point? I tried to talk to you before, but you wouldn’t listen. You’re too thick to take in what I tell you, aren’t you? You’re too thick and too terrified.”

Andrew took the receiver out of her hand. She turned away, collapsed into her chair, not listening anymore. Eric’s voice ran on for a while. Then Andrew said, “Okay. Yes, I think she’ll insist on that. Call me when you find out where. Goodbye.”

He put the phone down. “Well, I’ll never work for Turadup again. After that outburst.”

“You do understand, don’t you? We can’t trace his movements, or know if he was taken away by force, unless we know whether he packed his things up. If he didn’t—then it was sudden. Or he didn’t even go back to the hotel. We do need to find them.”

Andrew sounded weary, resigned; much as Eric had, before she antagonized him. “If you can take away a man, sweetie, you can take away his suitcase. If you can abduct a businessman, you can abduct his spare drip-dry suit.”

Frances didn’t reply. She felt too tired to think about it anymore. Life is not like detective stories. There is a wider scope for interpretation. The answers to all the questions that beset you are not in facts, which are the greatest illusion of all, but in your own heart, in your own habits, in your limitations, in your fear. She sees the vehicle spin out of control; she sees the panic-stricken driver. Then she sees, alternatively, the felon, the corpse, the car door swung open, the body slithering down the embankment: then she sees, in either case, the skid, the slide, the smashed bone, the spilled petrol, the sand, the sun, the sickening flux of human blood … the story is what you make it. In either case, the young man is dead.

She said to Andrew, “I don’t know, but I feel you are arguing against yourself.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps I am,” he said without emotion. “You have always been better than me at getting hold of the unthinkable.”

“Can’t we go now? Do we have to stay till July?”

He considered. “I think it would be better to do everything calmly. Make our agreed exit. Don’t you?”

Perhaps that was Fairfax’s mistake. His exit had not been agreed. She remembered what Mrs. Parsons had said, months ago, on their first trip to the souk: “It isn’t the roads in town that are dangerous, it’s the roads out.”

Very soon Daphne Parsons was on the telephone. “Imagine,” she said, “what a peculiar thing to do, to take off like that! He planned to leave the car—my car—at the airport! Just dump it there! Of course, I did think when I met him, what a very strange young
man. He did seem to be rather … erratic. Is that the word I want? Frances dear, you must be terribly upset. I know you had him over for supper, and you must feel that you got to know him a little. I hope it doesn’t make your medical condition any worse?”

Then it was Rickie Zussman who called: with statistics. “Carla said you sounded rattled when she spoke to you. She says you’re trying to make something of it. Believe me, Frannie, this is just the way it goes. You shouldn’t see any malfeasance here. One in six accidents in the Kingdom involve fatalities. Though Christ knows,” he added, “I feel sorry for the guy.”

Then it was Eric again. “Andrew thought you would want to see the body, Frances, and I don’t suppose it is in my power to keep you away. Someone has to identify it, and we have been trying to find out where it was taken. We have been given various pieces of information, all of them inconsistent, and none of them necessarily accurate.”

“But someone must know.”

“I agree.”

“There is no chance, is there …” She could not continue.

“That it’s some kind of mistake? I think that would be too much to hope for. But I know you don’t believe what you’re told, Frances. I know you won’t take my word for anything.”

She checked the time. They arranged to meet; they would bring their own car, and Eric would collect Hasan, to interpret for them. It would be a long evening, Eric said, even if their first efforts were crowned with success.

She wandered about the flat, dazed, sticky; the air-conditioners did not seem to be working properly. She felt desperately hungry now, weak with hunger, and yet she felt that it would be almost indecent to sit down and eat. At some point she washed, and changed her clothes to go out.

After sunset prayers the young Saudi men go out to visit restaurants and meet up with their friends; they divert themselves at funfairs, which they call Luna Parks. Tonight the neon-lit spokes of the
Great Wheels shone between the walls of the mosques. The city had taken on its nightmare life: a green moon, a vitiating heat.

They drove: the freeways, the highways, the roads off the map; the unknown quarters, the alien districts, streets and buildings they had never seen before. Eyes on the road, hour after hour, breathing in the dust and the diesel fumes, their clothes sticking to their flesh, their throats clogged with apprehension, and their minds still numb with shock. Between the concrete pillars of the overpasses, darkness blossomed into darkness, each manmade wilderness as empty of association as the surface of the moon. And their every second thought was of mortality; you could die here, your figure fleeing before the screaming cars, running till you dropped and expiring without a sound, like the sacrificial victims who are buried in bridges. Then you would haunt the freeways, your dead compass swinging, searching for home; until the city expanded, by its usual laws, and they built over your ghost.

Hasan argued with the porters at hospital gates. Eric Parsons stood by their car, in the evening’s stupefying heat, and wrung his hands; she had never seen anyone do it before. “I need papers,” he said. “I need signatures. I need death certificates. I need copies for the airline. I need copies for the Embassy.” He spun slowly on his heel, beseeching. “Tell the man, Hasan. Convey it to him somehow. Tell him I have it from the police that the body is here.”

“He says,” Hasan reported, “not this hospital, Mr. Eric.”

“Will nobody help us? Has nobody any sense? I have formalities to complete. Have you told him that?”

Now it was ten o’clock, and the evening lay behind them, an ordeal by which they would be marked. “When I get out of here in July,” Andrew whispered to her, “I’m not coming back.”

She looked sideways at him; thought of Mr. Smith, of his confident approach to the security guards, his visas in his hand. “Hush,” she said. She nodded toward Eric, who circled aimlessly in the dust, a few yards from their parked car. “We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Here comes Hasan again. He looks as if he has something to tell us.”

Andrew got out of the car. Hasan said, “I think we have found the place. But we cannot go in.”

“Why not?”

“He says the man who has the key is praying.”

“What, at this time?”

“You must come tomorrow.”

“But we have been driving for hours,” Eric said. He seemed on the verge of weeping; all his experience had not prepared him for tonight. “Tell him we have a lady with us. Tell him we must identify the body.”

“He says you cannot do it,” Hasan said. “To identify, you need four Muslim men. Christian men will not do.”

“And Christian women?” Frances spoke from the passenger seat. Eric leaned down, to the open window. “I suppose,” he said vengefully, “that now you think he was murdered? I suppose you think this fiasco is part of some conspiracy?”

“No. I know a fiasco when I see one. I’ve been around the world enough.”

Eric wiped his hand across his forehead. “It’s always been the same, whenever an expat has died. Whenever there has been even a suggestion of violence, they just close ranks. The one thing they don’t like is people asking questions. The one thing they don’t like is a body on their hands.” He took out his handkerchief, already soaked with sweat, and dabbed at his face. “They always think we will blame them for something.”

Unwillingly, she felt sorry for him. He had issued all the right warnings, from the beginning, and she had not heeded him. Don’t interfere, don’t speculate; she had done everything he had warned her against. And now an example had been made; but not of her.

Andrew said, “Just try again, Hasan. Tell them we don’t believe the man is praying. Tell them we want to go into the mortuary. Tell them we don’t want to identify, we just want to see. Okay?”

Hasan nodded. He trailed again across the hospital forecourt, and talked to the men behind the barrier. He was back within minutes, hitching at his clothing, patting at the little round skullcap
he wore: his face impassive. “It is true the man is not praying. They are saying that to make you go away.”

“Tell them we won’t go,” Andrew said.

“They say we must go home again and wait until morning. Then they promise the man will come with the key.”

“Ins’allah?”
Frances said.

“Ins’allah,”
Hasan agreed.

“I don’t believe this,” Andrew said.

But he got back into the car. You cannot really argue with hospital porters. They carry guns.

They said goodnight and began the long drive back across the city. The day’s dust coated the rubbish skips, and the municipal greenery, with its raw sewage dressing, that wilted on the center divides. It lay thick on the emerald plastic grass that the restaurants laid out before their doors, the emerald grass that their headlights turned to black.

“What were you going to say to me,” Frances asked, “earlier this evening, before Eric called us the first time? I thought you were going to tell me something?”

Andrew looked at her warily, from the tail of his eye. Road signs swam through their headlights: AL KOURNAICH, JEDDAH CENTRAL, JEDDAH ISLAMIC PORT. STOP! YOU ARE FAST BUT DANGER IS FASTER! “I love you,” he said. “I don’t want you to be frightened. I wish I had never brought you here.”

“That is not what you were going to say.” She turned her head and stared out of her window, into passing cars; realizing, from the response of their occupants, from the winks and nods and leers, that she must have developed the habit of keeping her gaze lowered, of censoring her vision. She said, “Let’s go to the hotel. We might find out something if we persist. Somebody must have seen him leave.”

Andrew did not reply; but he turned the car at the first opportunity. She looked at his face, for his expression of “I shall have no peace till I do this”; but he was not wearing it.

In the foyer of the Sarabia Hotel, a fountain, impossibly blue, tinkled into a marble basin; tropical flowers, made of silk, bloomed in brass tubs. A waiter carried a tray: silver tray, crystal glasses, drinks the color of crushed strawberries. The air was icy and the sweat dried on their skins.

The desk clerk was a small dark round-faced man of some mongrel Near Eastern provenance. He gave them a respectful greeting; or he gave it to Andrew, averting his eyes from Frances with a lofty civility. She put her hands up, scooping her sticky hair from the back of her neck. The clerk’s eyes flickered over her, like some mechanical scanner, noting the slight rise of her breasts, and she saw on his face for an instant a cruel suppressed avidity, a destructive infantine greed. She dropped her eyes.

Andrew put his hands on the reception desk. “May I see the manager?”

She admired him: commanding size, cool voice, overbearing courtesy.

The clerk said, “He is praying.”

“At this time?”

The clerk said, “I regret.”

“Then I should like to see the undermanager.”

The clerk said, smiling, “He is in Kuwait.”

Andrew drew back. He folded his arms. “So who’s running the hotel?”

“Perhaps I can help you?”

And Andrew said, with a fine show of racism, “I doubt it, Ali.”

They looked around the lobby. Laundered
thobes
strolled to and fro, and smoked cigarettes; glass-fronted lifts carried the patrons to their suites, like prophets assumed to heaven. Frances said, “Do you usually talk like that?”

Andrew said, “I want to be Jeff Pollard when I grow up.”

The clerk fussed with some papers and forms; he seemed unwilling to leave them alone. “You have some complaints?” he asked.

“You had a guest, a Mr. Fairfax.”

The clerk looked interested. “Excuse me,” he said, “we have no guest of that name.”

“He isn’t here now.”

“No. He has left.”

“He has a suitcase somewhere. Things that belong to him.”

“You have papers to collect them?”

“We are friends of his.” Andrew corrected himself: “We were friends of his.”

“It is impossible,” the clerk said, “because we have no guest of that name.”