Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (30 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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Andrew ignored this. “Did the police come and take his things away?”
The clerk shrugged. “I did not see them, sir.”
“But if the police had been here you would have heard. You would know all about it.”
“Excuse me, sir, but I think there is a mistake. Perhaps your friend is at some other hotel?”
“No, my friend is dead.”
“Perhaps he is staying at the Nova Park?”
A voice called to them from across the foyer. “Andrew! What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”
Andrew turned sharply. “Raji, it’s you. Come over here, would you?”
Raji slid across the tundra of polished marble, hands outstretched; the light from the chandeliers split and shattered in the diamond of his tiepin. “What, dining out?” he inquired. His eyes passed over her crumpled cotton smock, Andrew’s bush-shirt darkly patched with sweat. “No, I see you are making some inquiry.”
“I want to get hold of the manager. It’s about some things a friend of ours may have left behind.”
Raji took out his wallet. He opened it, and let his plump fingers hover; he selected a note, and handed it to the clerk as if it were a cloakroom ticket. He spoke; the clerk made a little gesture, as if to say “Why did you not ask me before?” He vanished.
“I was trying to avoid that,” Andrew said. “I was trying to employ terror. Here, Raji, let me reimburse you.”
“It is nothing,” Raji said. “Put your money away. It helps, excuse me Frances, if you speak their bloody lingo.”
The manager soon appeared: could he be of any service? His English was impeccable, his mustache clipped, his nails finely manicured; he was the essence of Levantine courtesy, and he kept his eyes from the woman as if she wore an aura of barbed wire. Raji took charge. “The name of your friend?” he asked. Andrew told him. Raji took the manager’s arm and drew him aside.
They held some muttered conversation. A few moments passed. The manager darted a look over his shoulder; he shook his head.
Raji turned back to them. He looked worried. “I understand it is a police matter.”
“Yes. There has been an accident.”
With a little bow in their general direction, the manager melted away.
“My friends,” Raji said, “leave it alone. I advise you from a sincere heart. Once you are embroiled with those fellows then all sorts of misunderstanding may begin to occur.”
“Okay, Raji.” Andrew was downcast. “Thanks. At least they don’t deny all knowledge of him. Did he tell you, have the police been here, and taken his things away?”
“That is possible. But better if you do not press it.”
“We need to know,” Frances said.
Raji looked at her sorrowfully. “My dear Frances, you need not think there is some conspiracy. Because people act as if they have something to hide does not mean that they really do. That is the first thing you must learn about living in the Kingdom. The puzzles are, how shall I put it, more apparent than real.”
“It’s soothing to think so.”
Andrew said, “I feel—Frances feels—that it must be possible to sort out what has really happened.”
“Oh, in a logical world,” Raji said. “But the Kingdom is not a logical world, and besides”—he smiled—“logic is not an ornament for young ladies.”
Frances walked away, and gazed into the fountain’s basin, through the blue rippling water to the mosaic tiles. “Are you meeting someone, Raji?” Andrew asked.
“Yes, I am here to take dinner with my dear friend Zulfikar, he is an old school pal of mine. We have a little notion to open a restaurant of our own. Maybe a rather special one—sherry in your consommé, rum in your chocolate mousse, vin in your
coq
—oh, it must come to Jeddah. Don’t you think?”
“It sounds a bit risky. Are you really going to try it?”
Raji showed his very white teeth. “I am in the business of pushing out the frontiers of the possible. When we are open you will come as my guests, you will enjoy it. There is no profit without risk, you know. At least, that is what my friend and I were told, when we were at business school in Miami.”
They went back out to their car. Its trapped air was stifling; they moved into the stream of evening traffic. “It will be cooler when we get going,” Andrew said. But they had hardly moved a hundred yards from the hotel entrance when a snarl-up and a traffic policeman brought them to a halt. “We should have stayed and had a drink,” Andrew said. “Lowered the tone a bit.”
The drivers around them put their fists on their car horns. Frances put her head out of the window to try to see the cause of the delay. A pickup truck was slewed across the intersection ahead, one side bashed in; a curtained limousine disgorged a Saudi gentleman with a pointed, hennaed beard, and a long-suffering expression. Three young Filipino men in jeans and white T-shirts stood mutely by the truck, and a traffic policeman, gun on hip, ripped their documents out of their hands.
“I hope they’re carrying plenty of ready cash,” Andrew said. “Or we’ll be here all night.”
They were in a lineup of cars, five abreast; she turned her head, and said, “Look, that’s Abdul Nasr.”
Andrew looked. “So it is. That’s not his own car he’s driving.”
“I haven’t seen him for weeks.”
Andrew had returned his attention to the scene ahead; she returned
hers to the next car, and their neighbor’s bronze unyielding profile. Abdul Nasr took one hand from the wheel and fitted a cigarette between his lips. The man in the passenger seat leaned across and lit it for him. She caught a momentary glimpse of his face, and she knew him at once, even though she had seen him greasy and bareheaded, and he now wore an immaculate white
ghutra.
She remembered his lugubrious features, and the blank expression in his eyes when she had tried to deter him from knocking on the door of the empty flat. What was it the landlord had said? “I want you to know this Egyptian.”
The backseat of the car also had an occupant; a woman, veiled, and so far shrunken into the dark velour upholstery that until she moved Frances had hardly registered her existence. As the Egyptian subsided into the passenger seat, hidden by Abdul Nasr, the woman hitched herself forward in the seat, as if to speak; she put a hand to her face, holding a square of something white, and for just a second, she raised her veil. How provident she was, on this stifling evening, thunder hanging in the air; Frances envied her for a moment, feeling the cold sting of the cologne tissue against burning skin. As the black cloth fell back into place, she recognized the woman; it was Yasmin.
She said nothing; she did not know what to say. Her mind revolved the possibilities. They drove; the policeman waved them on.
On Mecca Road, still miles from home, they were stopped at a roadblock; but their documents were not checked. Another policeman pressed his face to the windscreen, and then withdrew it. His colleagues flung up the boots of the cars ahead. “What are they looking for?”
“Drugs,” Andrew said. “Or weapons. Maybe a nice consignment of Kalashnikovs up from the Yemen?”
She said fearfully, “Who wants them?”
“Me,” Andrew said. “I could use some violence.”
They drove; behind them, the heart-churning cacophony of sirens, trailing across the bridges and the junctions and the highways in the sky.
 
 
When they got into the flat the phone was ringing. She picked it up. It was Eric. “You finally made it home,” he said.
“Yes, we got stopped at a roadblock. The police are everywhere. It was like this at Christmas, remember?”
Eric grunted. “More on that later. First of all, would you tell Andrew to get down to the site by seven o’clock tomorrow? Jeff says the Indians are having one of their mutinies. They’ve got a list of hard questions about their baggage allowances and they want to put them to a high authority.”
“I think Andrew hoped he might catch up on his sleep.”
“Look, we have a contract to fulfill. It won’t help anybody if work comes to a halt.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him.”
“I’m going to the airport first thing. I have to talk to the airline about sending the body home.”
“What body? We haven’t got a body yet.”
“We’ll find it. Meet me at the hospital at ten o’clock. Oh, and one more thing.” What she heard in Eric’s voice, what she realized she had been hearing, was not his usual monotone urbanity, not even the night’s deep fatigue: but a sort of numbness, like shell shock. “There’s a strong rumor that someone tried to kill your next-door neighbor a couple of hours ago. There’s been a shooting at the Sarabia Hotel. So do me a favor. Keep your heads down. Just remember that whatever happens it’s got nothing to do with you.”
Next morning dawn did not arrive. The dust, in a dirty brown cloud, blotted out the early sun; bowed figures, subfusc and gagged, groped their way down Ghazzah Street beyond the wall. “I will be back soon,” Andrew promised her. “I must drop by at the site and then I’ll get hold of Eric and we’ll go back to the hospital.” He kissed her. She huddled into the doorway. He coughed as he made his way to the car, the dust peppering his face.
At nine o’clock yesterday’s wind began to blow, out of yesterday’s yellow sky, and plastered the mountain ranges against the windows. It did not blow the dust away; there was an endless supply of it, a continent of dust. She looked out and watched it shifting, banking up. The street cats swarmed over the wall, looking for shelter, and dragged themselves before the glass. She watched them: scared cats, starving, alive with vermin, their faces battered, their broken limbs set crooked, their fur eaten away. She felt she could no longer live with doing nothing for these cats. Slow tears leaked out of her eyes.
When the telephone rang she almost did not answer it. But it might be Eric, with a message about the hospital; or Andrew, to say the Indians had delayed him. It was Daphne Parsons.
“Yes?” Frances said. “What did you want?”
Daphne sounded hurt. “Only to tell you the news. You’ve heard about Raji?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I know Eric phoned you, but more’s come out since then. Apparently he was having dinner at the Sarabia Hotel with some bigwig, a major in the security forces, and as they were leaving, as they were on the steps, somebody took a shot at him out of a car.”
“And?”
“They got the major. He was hit in the shoulder, he’s going to be all right. Raji wasn’t hurt, but I bet it shook him up a bit. Don’t you know anything about it? I thought you would know. Shall I come over there?”
“How do you know they were aiming at Raji? Maybe it was this major they were after.” She put the question; it was idle, academic. Perhaps it was not the time for it, but she felt almost entertained.
“Well, I’m not entirely sure.” Daphne had taken offense. “I’m only giving you the story as it was told to me. Perhaps there’s more to it. Perhaps it’s just the fact that Raji has so many enemies. It’s what he stands for, isn’t it?”
“And what do you think he stands for?”
“Oh,” Daphne said vaguely, “progress, all that.”
There was a low, distant rumble of thunder, as she put the phone down on Daphne. Yesterday’s newspaper had exhorted Muslims
all over the Kingdom to join the
Isteska,
or rain-prayer; the King himself recommended it. Soon those prayers will be answered. She let herself out and crossed the hall.
There was no answer when she rang Yasmin’s doorbell, but then she had not expected it. She rang again; she put her finger on the buzzer and left it there. There seemed no occasion for politeness anymore.
After a moment or two, Shams opened the door. Her head and shoulders were swathed in a dark cloth, and her face itself looked dark and strained. Unsmiling, she held the door open only so far as she needed; her eyes passed over Frances, and then she spoke. “Gone away,” she said. “Everybody gone. Finished.”
 
 
When the phone rang again it was Rickie Zussman. “You heard about your neighbor? Jesus, Frannie, what a week for you! This guy they shot was some kind of arms dealer or something, he might have been from Iraq, and Raji was doing some go-between business. Or at least, they’ve found an arms cache somewhere, I don’t know. They say this guy was shot in the stomach, that he’s in intensive care. Raji was lucky, eh?”
 
 
And then Jeff Pollard: “Did you hear about Raji? They say some pro-Iranian group took a shot at him while he was out with some business crony. They say they’ve been after him for months, waiting for an opportunity. Did you ever see anybody hanging around the flats? Anyway, they missed Raji and got the other guy. They say he was dead on arrival.”
 
 
In daylight, she could see that the hospital was some kind of government institution; a collection of long low huts, widely spaced, within a perimeter fence. The gateman raised the barrier for them, and they parked the car in a featureless compound, marked out by low concrete blocks. Eric was there already, sitting in his car, with
Hasan in the passenger seat and his windows wound up tightly to keep out the dust. It swirled and hissed about his ankles as he got out to meet them, a nest of corroding serpents shaped by the hot wind.
He took her arm, oddly formal, hesitant. “Frances? Did you sleep well?”
“I don’t want to talk about Raji,” she said. “Let’s just do this first.”
“Well,” Eric said, “there’s no connection, is there? Yes, you’re quite right, let’s do this. But you know about the wife, don’t you? Raji’s wife? I’ll tell you later.”
Andrew said, “Did you go to the airport? How did you get on?”
“Oh, it will be okay, the airline will fix it,” Eric said vaguely. His eyes seemed unfocused. “They’ve done it before. People have accidents. But do you know, Andrew,” he shook his head, “I never thought I should land in the middle of a situation like this. When I have been so careful. When everyone has been so careful. When Turadup’s reputation has always stood so high.”
“Fairfax was careless,” Frances said. “Dying like that. He could jeopardize the contract, couldn’t he?”
“Don’t jump on me,” Eric said. He seemed almost cowed. The morning had changed him. “I know you’re not a fool, Frances. I never thought you were.” He took out his handkerchief, crisp and folded; dabbed at his lip, as if he might find blood there. “I just thought that you were rather—pressed upon by your environment, if I can put it like that. I thought from the beginning that you were one of those people who should never have come here.”
“Yes, I know. You accused me of exercising my imagination, didn’t you? Are you trying to tell me that I have been right about something?”
“Come on,” Andrew said. “Let’s not waste time.”
In the tiny office of the man in charge of the mortuary, there were four or five hangers-on whose function was uncertain; perhaps they were his cousins, or merely his cronies. Eric and Andrew seemed to take it for granted that these men should be there, leaning on the walls, reading the newspapers, smoking and chattering.
They stood in the doorway, keeping Frances blocked from view with their shoulders, and waiting for some attention to come their way.
It was a while before the man in charge extricated himself, came out from behind his untidy desk, and held some conversation with Hasan. He was desultory, and scratched his head, and he seemed to say, though she could not follow any of his Arabic, that he did not know if what they wanted could be done. Then at last it seemed that Hasan uttered certain unspecified threats, which he indicated came from the
khawwadjihs,
and which he only translated; and at this the little man, who was jaundiced and paunchy, became agitated, and gave vent to a stream of invective, and a series of operatic gestures; his cronies put down their newspapers, and stood up straighter around the walls, and looked vaguely interested and alert. Hasan said, “He tells you this body cannot be released until he has the paperwork. He tells you he has been brought two bodies this morning and that is enough. But,” Hasan added surprisingly, “he says he can do what you ask.”
They followed him out of his office, and through a corridor. Two hospital trolleys were parked at an angle, their wheels askew, and on them were bundled the two burdensome corpses to which the man had referred: white sheets covered them entirely, knotted casually above their heads. They turned into a long cold room that was itself like a corridor, with walls of steel, and a blue-burning striplight overhead. The man made a fussy gesture, to hurry them on; then briefly slid open the mortuary drawer, and showed them Fairfax’s dead face. There was no error, no mistake in identity, and for all the inexpert eye could tell, he had died just as the police had given out. The head seemed twisted on the spinal column, the face was clamped, jaundiced, marked by a trickle of black blood; the expression was meaningless.
They went outside. A security guard with a rifle lounged against Eric’s car, and as they came toward it he shifted unwillingly, his eyes moving above the bandanna he wore. “It is a quarantine hospital,” Hasan explained. “That is why the guards. The man says he will fix
up the body to send it to its home, he says he is the best for doing that in the whole of the Kingdom.”
“So that is what he was doing,” Frances said. “Boasting.”
She thought of the two corpses in their knotted sheets. She had passed them with scarcely a look; they were not her affair. She felt cold, and strange, and speechless, and removed from what was happening about her. Once again Eric put his hand on her arm; perhaps he wondered if she might faint, or hoped she might, or do something else to discredit herself. But no, he was trying to get her attention; and she realized that he had been talking to Andrew, that he had begun some narration whose beginning she would never hear. “ … with so much going on,” Eric said, “we will never sort out the facts from the rumors, even if it were our affair, and I only tell you because you are the neighbors, you are in some sense caught up in it.”
“Is Yasmin dead?” she said.
Eric turned to her, surprised. “Oh, no, thank God, nothing like that. Didn’t you hear me, weren’t you listening? She tried to leave the country. They stopped her at the airport. I was there this morning and I saw it with my own eyes, that’s how I know, and Hasan here, he caught the drift … She had a ticket for Amman, but they think she was trying to pick up a connection from there to Tehran. The security men weren’t happy, she—well, obviously she didn’t have permission to travel from her husband. And the next thing was the police turned up, and took her away.”
“With your own eyes,” Frances said. “You saw it with your own eyes. Some people’s eyes are better than others, aren’t they? They have higher status. They believe what they see.”
She leaned against their car, under the scrutiny of the armed guard, and she felt the slow heat move in the metal at her back, like a sulky fire. I shall never see Yasmin again, she thought. The woman’s end was part of the woman’s world; information was received at second hand, by courtesy, through the mouth of one of the city’s male keepers. “Did you know her?” she said. “I mean, did you recognize her?”
“Yes. They pulled off her veil.”
“And then what happened?”
“They took her away.”
“I wish I had been there.” Frances raised a hand and pushed her hair from her forehead. “I wish I had come with you to the airport. Then I would have seen it myself.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
Andrew said softly, “You have no choice.”
“What will happen to her?”
“God knows,” Eric said. “Shouldn’t think we ever will. People disappear in this place, don’t they? I expect they’ll want to keep her until they find out the ramifications of it. I shouldn’t think her government will raise a fuss, if the Saudis tell them that she was mixed up in a plot to kill her husband.” He said, musingly, “Daphne always said that they didn’t get on. Seems a bit extreme, wouldn’t you say? Most of Jeddah would be dead, wouldn’t it, if we all went in for violence against our spouse?”
“I don’t think you quite understand,” Frances said. “It wasn’t personal. Or not only a personal thing. It was a matter of ideals.”
“I don’t see that.”
“He wasn’t just a man, he wasn’t just her husband. It was what he represented.”
Eric said, mystified, not hostile, “Was it some feminist thing?”
“You might say that.”
“Or was it religious?”
“Partly.” She shifted away from the car and straightened up. She took a cotton scarf out of her pocket and slowly shook it out. “My hair is full of dust, I should have done this before.” She folded the scarf into a triangle and flipped it over her head, knotting it firmly at the nape of her neck. Her eyes appeared larger, her features drawn. “Who knows?” she said. “Perhaps she just wanted to kill someone. Perhaps she just wanted to see them bleed.”
Eric looked down at her. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I have to concede it’s quite possible that there have been certain comings and goings at your place. But if the police should come bothering you, of course you know nothing.”
“Yes, I’ve grasped the point. I know the drill.” She thought, if I had been there, if I had gone to the airport with Eric, there would have been nothing I could have done for her. I could not have helped her. Now I have to think of my own life. What she had heard from Eric did not surprise her. The possibilities in the air of Dunroamin—those wraiths of violence and despair—had taken on flesh at last. She would never know more than she knew now; would never know, for instance, the name of the man who had been crated up alive. What had he done? What had he known? Someone—a torturer, perhaps—would find out the whole of it. But what’s one body, more or less? Life is cheap enough. Islam hurries to inter the dead; but the story is not over. Allah has something reserved for corpses, whose nervous system, we must presume, remains intact; predicated on one’s misdeeds in life, it is known to the writers of the religious columns as “torment in the grave.”

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