The Hidden (31 page)

Alexandre smiles and nods. “We were in hiding.”

“So you tricked them, to get them outside,” I say.

“Yes.”

“And what happened to the night guardsmen when they went to confront these intruders?”

“In the name of our countrymen, they were taken care of,” Alexandre says calmly.

I turn away and sigh with sadness. I hate all this death and destruction. “You must get dressed, Hezba,” Alexandre says.

“Put on these robes and then follow me. We must go. Our caravan will be waiting. My men will want to set off before dawn breaks.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The uninterrupted drone of a car horn sounded outside—Mitwali’s signal that it was time for Nemmat to be driven to the Oxford. Farouk leapt up from the sofa and ran to the window to study the darkening street.

“You must go,” he said.

“Your drink? At least have your whisky while you wait for me to bring him back,” Nemmat said.

Farouk turned to look at her. He noticed the generous masklike smile spread wide over her face, the too-bright eyes, the anxious rise and fall of her breasts under her chador, the mocha-coloured arm and gloved hand outstretched, holding his tumbler of whisky out to him.

In a flash, he saw the fear in her eyes behind the brightness. And he recognised that fear. It was the fear of a street dweller, the daily fear of being consumed by life itself, of having the precarious balance of power tipped by some outside force from self to other. He took the tumbler but did not hold it to his lips.

The sound of splintering glass shattered the silence. Nemmat screamed as the tumbler shards fell to the floor. He stepped forward and grabbed her by the throat. Her eyes strained with panic, and her flawless, dusky complexion flushed red. “You think I don’t know what you were trying to do, Sayyida?”

“What are you talking about, Sayyid?”

Again the car horn sounded, long and forced this time, designed to attract his attention. Suddenly he bent double, a pain rising up through his chest, engulfing him, suffocating him, worse this time, tighter than the spasms of that morning, more excruciating. He started to cough and had to let go of her neck to slam his fist against his chest. And then a more searing pain shuddered through him, as the girl cut through the skin of his arm with her sharp teeth and brought her knee up to his groin. As he doubled over in agony, she made her escape.

He caught a glimpse of her dress vanishing around the front door and managed with difficulty to pull himself up and run after her. Putting one leg in front of the other, his body flaying painfully, he made it down the stairs and saw her disappear into a car that sped off.

But it wasn’t Mitwali’s car. Mitwali got out and stared after Nemmat confusedly. Ali, his brother, appeared. Shouting, Ali crossed the street, wondering what on earth was going on. Then a round of bullets from a machine gun was pumped into both of them. Mitwali and Ali’s blood-splattered bodies fell against the car and slumped to the ground. Farouk knew it had to be the work of Littoni or Security Operations.

He spun around to try to see where the bullets had come from. Women were prostrated on the mud-caked pavement, shielding children, and people were shouting in the streets. He had no time to lose. He jumped into Mitwali’s car to trail Nemmat.

She couldn’t be far ahead, he assured himself, wiping the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his jacket sleeve as he drove. Damn her! Who was she working for? Littoni? Issawi himself? He’d seen the look of cool betrayal in her eyes. She hadn’t been able to conceal it.

He eventually spotted the car ahead and followed them closely through Ezbehieh, al-Qahire, and then on to Giza. When the car pulled around to the forecourt of the Mena House Hotel, he pulled over behind a tree and watched her make her entry like a prima donna. The doorman saluted and fawned over her, then ushered her through the portico to a table in the middle of the dining room. Through the multiple glass doors that led from the entry through the central foyer to the dining area, Farouk watched as Nemmat sat down to join Littoni. His body shuddered with hatred. He reached for his hat and put it on, pulling the brim down low, so that his face was partially hidden. He got out of his car, crossed the street, and went up to the doorman.

He grunted a greeting. “Will you be dining tonight, Sayyid?” the doorman asked.

Farouk shook his head. “No, I need a drink and some privacy to gather my thoughts. Please see to it I am brought a whisky and soda and not disturbed. Tell your boy, I’ll be sitting over there, by the palm, reading the newspaper.”

The door to the dining room was open. Littoni and the girl’s table were not far from the door, and the restaurant was very quiet. He sank down on a leather couch, near the entry to the dining room, picked up a newspaper, and listened carefully.

“You fool of a girl,” Littoni said. “A simple task and you failed miserably.”

“I had to come straight away, Sayyid. Who knows what Farouk might do now?”

“We’ll have to send in our men and get them to finish the job themselves,” Littoni said. “He must be got rid of. No mistakes this time.”

Farouk held his breath behind his newspaper. He heard the clink of a glass being put down on the low table in front of him.
The conversation stopped abruptly. Farouk panicked for a moment. He would leave but didn’t want to do so just yet.

The conversation resumed.

“I need my money, Sayyid,” Nemmat said.

“You did not do as the Group instructed,” Littoni said. “I should kill you myself for that reason alone. You obviously don’t understand the seriousness of what has happened, which is entirely your fault. With Farouk’s body holed up in some remote deadbeat apartment, he wouldn’t have been found for days, if not weeks. Now, he’s out there. Right when the X’s moment of glory is so near. Do you think Farouk is going to sit back and wait and watch? Not only will he be more furious than ever, but he’s still going to try to take Issawi out on his own—ruining all our plans. The police will be brought in. The king’s celebrations will be cancelled. The X will have to regroup and come up with an entirely new plot.”

“But if your men kill Farouk first, the X will be able to stage the coup with no hitches,” Nemmat suggested.

“You know nothing of how these things work,” he said. “Issawi will be waiting at the Oxford for you. But now you’re here and we’ve lost Farouk. We have to find him too before he gets to Issawi. If Issawi is murdered, the king’s men will go into crisis mode and a coup will be impossible. The Ibrahim girl seems to have gotten involved too. My men saw her on Gezira, at Issawi’s HQ, getting out of a car on Sharia Omar Pasha, evidence that she’s in cahoots with Issawi and his cronies, taking over where Ibrahim left off.”

Farouk jumped up, raced out of the lobby to his car, and started off for Sharia Suleyman Pasha at top speed. Aimee. Issawi had Aimee. The thought of it burned through him, and he slammed the steering wheel with his fist, like a man possessed, as he drove. It was a trap, a lure. It had to be. He could not believe that Aimee had
fooled him into thinking she was an innocent when all along she was in league with Issawi.

As the possibility crossed his mind, his heart exploded with panic. He had wanted to go to her house to check whether she was all right. But now? If what Littoni was saying was true, Farouk didn’t know how long he had before the entire network capsized like a doomed ocean liner, before Littoni launched his ill-planned revolution.

The journal of Hezba Iqbal Sultan Hanim al-Shezira,

Beni Suef, September 16, 1919

We set off just before dawn when there is just a smudge of red in the sky. Do I dare believe that I am staring freedom in the face? That I will have a new name, a new country, a new life, free of the torture al-Shezira inflicted upon me? Though I give the impression I have regrets about what I have done—and so I do—I was provoked beyond all reason. And so I should forgive myself. I ride with Alexandre high atop the camel on my little seat, wrapped in the traditional indigo-blue cloth of the Tuaregs. Only my eyes are visible to witness the vast camel train following us.

Our party has grown to include thirty camels, each carrying one, sometimes two men, loaded down with baskets of spices and salt and goods for sale in the desert villages we will pass through. Alexandre has told me that because we are masquerading as the seminomadic Tuaregs, we will arouse no suspicion and we will be far less likely to be stopped by the British patrolling soldiers. I hear him shout instructions to the other men, telling them what will happen when we get to the next village. He tells them to move ahead, and we follow them at some distance to the rear. As I sway with the movement of the huge beast, a wave of nausea washes over me. Desperate for sleep, I close my eyes and surrender to it.
When I awake, the sun is high in the sky, and I’m sure we have been travelling for a long time. The heat beating down through my robes, I stare out at the golden carpet of desert. Behind us, to the south, I gaze upon dunes and mountains and the blinding white light of Africa. My heart throbs painfully at the sight of this landscape that I will soon be leaving behind. A child of the desert, I say over and over to myself. That is what I always was. That is what I will always be, even when I am far, far away.

Up ahead to the north, I see palm trees and the glittering water of an oasis. We arrive at a town and dismount. I am thirsty. I stumble into Alexandre’s arms and ask him for water. He hands me a flask and I drink gratefully. Our caravan is coming in through the trees. Alexandre takes me by the hand and leads me to a grass hut. He greets a woman, who is dressed in brightly coloured robes. Her face is beautiful, her smile warm and generous. She bows and departs. Alexandre lays me down on a comfortable mat on the ground and pulls my robes away from my perspiring face. Though I am thankful for the cool darkness of the hut, I look tiredly into his eyes and ask, “Where are we, Alexandre?”

He squeezes my fingers. Since most of his face is covered by his tribesman headdress, I look into his beautiful kohl-black eyes and can read the message within them, that we are together and that despite everything we must be together, that even when I am in exile he will return to bring me home. “We are at Fayoum,” he says. “Tonight we will be at Kerdassa. I’ve instructed my men to rest here while the sun is at its highest. We will set off again at sunset.”

I let my body relax as he delicately strokes my enflamed cheeks. “I’ll get you some food and tea,” he says, and then he is gone.

Another wave of nausea rides over me. I am ill. This is kismet. I have taken the life of a man and now I will pay. I am sure I will die. But the nausea passes. I study the slivers of light penetrating the roof
made of reeds. Then I curl into a ball and rock myself into a shallow sleep. Some time later, I wake up with a start.

I sit up and pull my tangled robes away from my face. I can hear Alexandre talking, nearby in French to one of his men.

“I will organise the papers when we get to Kerdassa. We need European clothes and French identity papers. There is no time to waste. I’ve heard the British Army has sent out hundreds of its men to raid all the villages within a hundred-mile radius of Cairo and Minya. My men in Cairo have assembled as many revolutionaries as they can to demonstrate and ransack the British establishments, the barracks, the clubs. I am hoping the force needed to counteract these attacks will leave the British Army weak and unable to follow through with its village raids. That will buy us some time.”

“And the girl? Does she know about her father?”

“No and she must not know. She is vulnerable and weak. If she hears of the Nationalist takeover of the sultan’s palace, she will lose the courage to go on. I must get her out of Egypt, before it is too late.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Saiza stood weeping in the upper-floor sitting room of her house. She shouldn’t have let Aimee leave like that. She’d run out of the house hours ago and had not returned. What an awful row. And now night was approaching in a cloud of red and bronze. Her dark, misty eyes drooped sadly. She had lost Ali, her son, and Hezba, her half sister. Now she stood to lose Aimee, her precious niece, if she did not sort out this terrible misunderstanding between them.

She huddled in her blue shawl, chewing over the past in her mind. Of course, Aimee had a right to know about her mother and her father, but how much and when?

Saiza had been waiting for a suitably calm moment to have a conversation about her past with her niece, but the time had never been right. As she mulled over what she would have liked to say, one word came to her over and over again: protection. She had wanted to protect Aimee from shame.

Sayyid Alexandre Anton, Aimee’s father, had disappeared, but there was somebody who might know where he was and how Aimee could find him if she wanted to.

She came up with a course of action. She would write her niece a letter explaining why she had kept things hidden. Then she would go to Aimee’s home and slide it under her door. That way Aimee could absorb the information calmly, in her own time. Saiza started
to feel brighter. There was always a solution. She smiled, blowing her nose. She went to her writing desk, pulled out a cream-coloured sheet of paper, found her pen, and dipped it in the ink bottle. Saiza’s cousin might be able to help untangle the mystery of Aimee’s real father’s whereabouts. If she was lucky, her father would be long dead. In heavy black ink, she wrote down the cousin’s name and address:
Sayyid Gad Mahmoud, 55 Sharia Mustafa Kamil, Shubra.
After adding a few words of love and support, she slipped the paper in a matching envelope, licked it shut, addressed it, put it into her handbag, and went to find Hakim.

At Sharia Suleyman Pasha, she marched purposefully down the narrow haret leading to Aimee’s courtyard garden. She puffed and panted a little up the steep stone stairs, then knocked timidly on the door.

The house was in darkness. Saiza knocked again, then peered through the little window that overlooked the courtyard. She experienced a jolt of panic. Her sixth sense told her something was wrong. She tried the doorknob, but it was locked. She heard running behind her. Was it Aimee? Saiza swung around hopefully, only to see a man at the bottom of the staircase, his hand on the iron railing.