Florence of Arabia (35 page)

Undignified as it is to
be
blown up
by
your own Camel Royal, M
aliq was more focused on the fact
that his legs—legs that once controlled the fastest race cars i
n the world—now terminated stum
pily above the knees. A team of crack French orthop
edic surgeons had done what they
could, but inasmuch as the legs had landed hundreds of yards apart, and much the worse for wear, there was only so much that could be done.

On a more positive note, the ceremonial silver saddle—used hundreds of years before by the emir Achmed bin Ulala
’
am—had protected the imams vital parts, at least for the most part
.
A team of crack French urologists
announced that Maliq might, in t
ime, be abl
e to sire a successor with some
prosthetic assistance. The royal digestive organs, on the other hand, had undergone great trauma. There would be no more royal feasting on spicy foods, or on any food that required much chewing. Also encouraging was the news that a spleen, though nice to have, is not a necessity medically speaking; meanwhile, some minimal hearing had returned in the emir's remaining ear.

Expressions of sympathy poured in from world leaders, along with assurances of friendship and offers of assistance with the investigation. The United States, whose relations with Matar had deteriorated, volunteered a forensic explosives team, as did Russia,
England,
Italy and, oddly, Bulgaria. The U.S. offer was, of course, coldly spurned; the others were more or less politely declined. It was announced from the palace that Matar itself would conduct the investigation, by which it was understood perfectly that the m
atter would be handled by the W
asabis and the French.

THUS IT
was
that Major Bertrand Matte
oli-
Picquet of the Bureau d'investi
gation Criminel National, found himself picking through the frankly unpleasant remains of the Camel Royal with an ultraviolet spectrometer and uttering the most useful word in the French language:
"Merde
."
"What's the matter, chief?" his assistant said.

Matteoli-Picquet handed him the instrument. The
assistant peered through it. H
is eyes widened.
"Oof."
he said. "What now?"

"Make the report. What else?"

The French technicians swiftly concluded t
heir business so that they
could proceed to the more important matter of lunch.

Twenty yards away, a man wearing the uniform of th
e Matar Department of Public Healt
h—Crime Search Scene was hunche
d over yet more remains of Shem,
including a piece of the ceremonial silver saddle and part of the emir's left shoe. These he diligently placed into a plastic container, which he duly sealed and marked. The French team paid him no attention; nor did the police who had cordoned off the scene. The man was just another technician poking through the appalling detritus.

The French team e-mailed its report—classified
vraiment
secret
(Really
Secret)—up the chain of command. The first slop was the Onzi
eme Bureau, in the person of Delame-Noir. The French spymast
er had immed
iately flown b
ack to Amo-Amas from Kaffa to supervise the investigation.

When his eyes fell upon the word "Exuperine" in the first line of the report. Delame-Noir stopped breathing for several sec
onds. He was an unflappable man,
yet it look a good quarter hour of pacing and sweating and cursing before he was able to compose himself enough to place the necessary call to Paris.

QUEER STREET
IS
the name of Washington. D.C.'s gayest bar. It was not a place that George normally frequented. Bobby had suggested it as a good venue for George to receive cell-phone calls. Bobby's reasoning was that U.S. government agents are reluctant to follow people into gay bars, especially really gay bars, for fear of being pinched.

George looked out the front window and saw the black sedan with two crew cuts inside. Precisely at three minutes past eight, the cell phone rang.

Bobby conveyed the information with the efficiency of his tradecraft. It
took under three minutes. With
all the efficiency of his trade, George memorized it verbatim. He hung up and went to one of the pay phones near the men's room and dialed a number at the
N
ew York Times
Washington bureau belonging to Thomas Lowell.

Thomas Lowell had spent much of his career covering the Middle East for the
Times.
In fact, it was he who had coined the phrase "the
Arab Street." (His first metony
mic term for Arab public opinion was "Sesame Street." but the producers of the children's television program by the same name protested.) Lowell had then tried to coin the term "the Jewish Street." but it had not
caught on. Still, he kept putt
ing it in. and
New York kept taking it out. H
e was currently back in Washington after being expelled from Wasabia. allegedly for having a bottl
e of Scotch in his hotel room: Tr
ue enough, but the expulsion really had come after he wrote a column pointing out that Crown Prince Bahbar had had a Jewish girlfriend while attending the University of Southern California. Inasmuch as
Bahbar w
as currently the deputy minister for anti-Semitism, this did not go down well in Kaffa's Arab Street, though it played rather well in the Jewish Street.

Lowell and George had known each other for years. They were able to converse in fluent Arabic. Lowell was most interested in what George had to say.

FLORENCE
H
AD
BEEN
in a completely dark cell for almost three days with a decomposing body, no food and half a cup of water, now gone. But for discovering that the body wasn't Bobby's, there was little pleasant about her situation. She had rationed the water, which she'd found under the cot in a cup that her jailers had p
robably neglected to remove. H
er thirst raged. Though she was beginning to starve, the thought of food had no app
eal. She kept thinking of the U
golino scene in Dante's
Inferno
—the nobleman imprisoned in a lower with his beloved children, driven finally to cannibalism. Perhaps this was the particular madness toward which her tormentors were attempting to compel her.

She spent the time praying to any god passing overhead. When the terror crept closer, she tried to ward it off by translating every poem she could remember from English into Arabic, then into Italian, then into French and back into English. As the third day drew to a close, she knew that she was beginning to go mad.

It came as a blessing, then, when the door to her cell burst open and a furious guard—gagging at the stench—waded in and pulled her out. She sucked in lungful after lungful of non
-
fetid air as if it were pure oxygen. Two guards dragged her down the corridor. No manacles this lime. Florence prayed—she couldn't help it—that they were taking her to her execution. She fell guilty about asking the Blessed Mother (Florence had been brought up Catholic) to grant this wish.

H
er grandfather had written an unpublished memoir of fighting in North Africa in the 1930s. As part of Mussolini's attempt to style hi
mself as a latter-day Caesar, Il
Duce had sent his army across the Mediterranean to reconquer what had belonged, two thousand years before, to his forebears. Idiotic, to be sure, but all the same the one adventure of her grandfather's life, which up to then had consisted of being a traffic policeman in Florence.

Florence had found the manuscript when she was a young girl and had read it. There was an episode that came to her now. as she was being dragged along these corridors. Her grandfather's unit h
ad been surrounded by Omar Mukht
ar's forces. They faced death or certain capture and God knows what after that. Two of the young soldiers under her grandfather's command put their rifles in each other's mouths and simulta
neously pulled the triggers. H
er grandfather didn't try to stop them. Terrible things were done to captured soldiers, on both sides.

Moments later, an Italian armored column rolled over the hill and dispersed the attackers. Everyone in her grandfather's unit survived except the
two who'd killed themselves. H
e wrote letters to their families saying that the boys had died glorious deaths in the service of the New Rome.

The guards heaved her into a room. She lay on the stone floor, gasping and trembling, her brain a kiln and her throat an oven, praying—no longer guiltily—for death. Surely Our Lady would understand.

A
door opened, footsteps. She felt
arms lifting her onto a chair. And heard a voice speaking Arabic: "Give her something to drink." Another voice said. "No." but then a cup was shoved at her. She grabbed it and drank. She drained it at a gulp.

A voice
barked at her, "I
want the names of the plotters. Or you won't leave this room."

Plotters? What was he talking about? What she did know was that the prospect of not leaving this room was preferable to returning to her cell. She summoned the strength to focus on the man asking her these questions. She looked. Yes, this much mad
e sense, it was Salim bin-Judar,
head of" the royal bodyguard. Next to him was another man. Her eyes were going in and out of focus.
Crisp uniform ... Colonel... Ne
bkir? Yes, that was it, Nebkir, from the Special Prefecture, a purposely obscure branch of the police set up by the British back in the 1920s. Ostensibly part of the Royal Police, only these men reported directly to the British governor. Florence had seen Nebkir once or twice dur
ing her visits to the palace. H
e usually hovered in the background. A curtain man. Forbidding-looking, yet he had always returned Florence's glance with a nod and sometimes even a smile.

Her mind was wandering.
She wasn't thinking clearly. H
er head
was on f
ire. It was coming off. Focus, focus—

"Who .
..
are
...
the
other
...
plotters?"
Salim demanded.

They
were going through the motions, she knew, so they could c
ut off her head. She wanted to s
peed up the process. Anything but being sent back to an airless tomb with a rotting corpse. She saw that bin-Judar was wearing a pistol.

"Why
don't vou." she said quietly, "shove the Koran up yo
ur ass? In your case, it would f
it." There, that should do it.

Salim bin-Judar bolted from his chair and drew his pistol.
Good,
Florence thought. She closed her eyes and waited for the bullet. She heard male voices, loud and arguing.

"Don't you see," a voice said, "she's trying to provoke you."

"Infidel bitch!"

Florence opened her eyes and looked into Nebkir's. H
e was a sturdy, block-laced man with a
pencil mustache and a neat goat
ee. A fastidious man, al peace with the world
, but a killer when required. H
e spoke softly.

"Madame. There has been an attempt on the life of the emir. So you will perhaps understand that we are curious professionally to know what you know:"

Salim bin-Judar murmured to Nebkir that he was giving away too much information. Florence wondered whether all
this was planned. She decided t
o play her own game of counter
-
deception.

"The only plotter," she said, trying to summon what moisture remained in her body, "was Mr. Thibodeaux, the man you killed and put into my cell."

Nebkir said in a not unkind way, "His death, that could not be helped. Pu
tting him in there with you... I
assure you this was not my idea. But madame, I must speak plainly—there are people within these very walls standing ready, eager, even, to perform... unimaginable things upon you." He leaned forward and said with apparent sincerity. "Help me and 1 will try to help you. But 1 must tell you, before Allah, that 1 do not think you will leave this
place
alive."

"Then before Allah." Florence said, "I will tell you that I know nothing of any attempt upon the emir."

"Li
es!" Salim al-Judar exploded, h
e lunged forward with the pistol, Nebkir pulling at him. Salim put the muzzle against Florence's forehead. How pleasantly cool it was to the touch, she thought.
Yes,
she thought,
pull the trigger—pull
the trigger.