The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (112 page)

“Are you lost?”

“Not yet.” The girl looked around her. “But I will be soon if you don’t help.”

Aziz smiled. “When did you lose him?” He took it for granted that her cousin was male.

Hani looked blank.

“Your cousin,” said the lieutenant.

“He’s not lost,” Hani said. “I just haven’t found him yet.”

Lieutenant Aziz paused. “Okay,” he said. “Your cousin was meeting you from the train…”

Hani shook her head.

“He didn’t expect you to find your own way home?” Aziz looked so shocked that Hani reached out and patted his shoulder without thinking.

“Of course not,” she said. “He doesn’t know I’m coming yet.”

“He doesn’t…?” Runaways were the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Order, which meant he’d be perfectly justified in handing over the child and walking away. Something the lieutenant knew he wouldn’t be doing.

Aziz started again.

“Where does your cousin live?”

“In the Bardo Palace. But he’s going to be at Domus Aurea tonight.”

Hani wasn’t quite certain how to put what happened next but whoever had been smiling out of those eyes was now hidden. All she got was perfect blankness.

“Domus Aurea…” Lieutenant Aziz dragged the address out as if uncertain where it should stop.

“That’s right,” Hani twirled round to show off her outfit. “I’ve come for the party.”

“And your cousin…”

“Kashif Pasha,” Hani said. “Or the Emir, he’s also a cousin.” She put her head to one side as she thought about that some more. “Actually,” she said, “everyone’s a cousin, except Zara…”

The lieutenant commandeered a parked taxi by the simple expedient of telling its driver that his passenger was Emir Moncef’s cousin. And having handed the child to a flustered officer at the gates of the Golden House, Lieutenant Aziz told the taxi to take him home.

CHAPTER 29

Flashback

“So, tell me…” Accompanying the demand came a mild
slap. An aide-memoire, little more. A warning of what might become real. “Why are you really here?”

“To see Prince Moncef.” Sally chewed the inside of her lip, hard enough to tear flesh, then spat the salt taste from her mouth, allowing it to dribble slowly down her chin. “As I already told you. So why not just fuck off and…”

The second slap splashed blood across her cheek, as Sally had known it would. She spat more of the salt onto her chin, readying herself for another blow.

There were rules to this game. Hell, there were whole Web sites devoted to handling how to be questioned. Not that Sally needed Web sites for instruction. She’d been through the mill for real in London, Vienna and Florence. She’d got away without questioning in Madrid and never even been picked up in New York.

In Zurich the police had skipped on questioning and tossed her over the border with a warning that to return would result in a long prison sentence or worse. A leer from a fat uniform as he told her this was intended to indicate what might be worse than several years’ incarceration in Europe’s most boring country.

“Enough,” said a new voice. The light in Sally’s face went out. A moment later fingers grabbed her bottom lip and yanked it down.

“Quite the little professional.”

They’d met before on the ridge overlooking the complex. Only this time Eugenie de la Croix wore black trousers and a white shirt, Jimmy Choo slingbacks and a scarf that did little to hide a waterfall of dark hair. Her beauty was such that Sally almost forgave the fingers pulling at her bleeding lip.

“Where did you learn that little trick… Seattle?”

“I wasn’t in Seattle,” Sally replied from instinct and saw Eugenie grin.

“How about New York?” Although her eyes were amused, Eugenie’s hold on Sally’s lip tightened and there was a realness to her questions lacking until then. Eugenie was not the baby-faced guard she’d replaced. She could, and would, rip apart Sally’s mouth. “Well?”

Sally’s answer was just about comprehensible.

“Really,” said Eugenie, suddenly letting go the lip. “You weren’t in New York either?” She dropped a handful of papers onto a table and stood back so Sally could see. Photocopies of NYPD reports, mostly. Plus a fat file from a detective agency in Kuala Lumpur. There were also a handful of flimsies but what Sally noticed first was a P10, request for arrest, issued by MediPol, the terrorism-clearing group for Southern Europe, the Levant and North Africa.

“Cut off her clothes,” Eugenie ordered the puppy-faced recruit, who blinked. “What?” said Eugenie. “You have a problem with that?”

The recruit shook her head. “No, ma’am.” She glanced between Eugenie and the English girl tied to a camp chair. “Which end do you want me to start?”

The only remotely painful thing to happen after this involved a caustic lip salve and Eugenie’s demand that Sally rinse her mouth out several times with Listerine. What remained of her shorts and the T-shirt she’d been wearing on arrival were removed, along with the contents of her pockets, never to reappear.

Having been washed and shampooed in a canvas bath, Sally was handed a cotton towel and told to dry herself and dress. The robe the young recruit offered Sally was white. The shawl was red, with tassels and geometric patterns. It took Sally a second to realize that she was meant to put it on her head.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Eugenie said, stepping through a curtain that separated the bath from a room beyond. She was holding a gun, but loosely, like some expensive fashion accessory.

“What is?”

“To have Moncef Pasha’s babies…”

The two women looked at each other. Their hard stares holding until it seemed that neither would break the gaze binding them tight. And then Sally nodded.

“He’s been working on…”

“Quite probably,” said Eugenie. “He’s always working on some plan.” Her voice was studiedly dismissive. “Most of them come to nothing. Does your friend know what you intend?”

The woman meant Per, Sally realized. “I doubt it,” she said. Driving straight at the soldiers had been Per’s choice. And if the Swede wanted to be that stupid then, once again, that was also his choice. All Sally wanted to do was meet the pasha and make her offer. Although, looking down at her gown, Sally realized this wish might be redundant. The man was already one giant step ahead of her.

Berlin always insisted the al-Mansurs controlled a network of spies that threaded the cities of the world, corrupting and turning good to bad. Offshore oil provided the means and dogma the driving force. Camps deep in the desert hid training facilities; shown only as occasional smudges against sand in satellite photographs released on
Heute in Berlin,
usually in the run-up to an oil summit.

Sally had always dismissed it as so much propaganda. Now she was no longer sure.

“What will happen to Per?”

Eugenie stopped twirling her Colt. “He’ll be shot,” she said lightly. “Unless Moncef Pasha has a better idea.” Sally found it hard to work out whether or not the woman was joking.

“Why should humanity change?” Sitting next to Sally in the rear seat of a small Soviet attack helicopter, Eugenie was having trouble making herself heard. “Especially given we’re the ones winning…”

“What!”

Eugenie smiled at Sally’s outrage and nodded towards the ground. “Kairouan,” she shouted at the English girl. “Almost there.” They were on their way to Tunis, to an annexe of the great mosque where Moncef Pasha had an iman waiting.

If the Emir’s eldest son wanted this woman, then fine. Equally fine if he wanted access to those precious papers she’d found in New York. But it was as well he’d lacked the time to research her properly. Eugenie had read Sally Welham’s files, copies of the originals. Had her boss understood that Sally was a card-carrying atheist, he’d never have proposed what was to come next.

Static crackled in Eugenie’s headphones. “I have a message.”

“From Moncef?”

For a second Eugenie was irritated. “Who else?” she said. “His message is this, The smaller the lizard the greater its hopes of becoming a crocodile… I hope that means something to you because I doubt it means anything to anyone else.”

Eugenie took a sideways glance at the English girl. Thinner, taller, a little younger than Eugenie had been expecting from the photographs snatched along the way. Trailing Sally had been Eugenie’s idea from the moment she came to Moncef Pasha’s attention. An intrusive foreigner scouring the Net for awkward information.

A blackbird had followed the woman for much of the most recent trip before fading into the background with a change of clothes towards the end.

For a while, early on, Moncef himself had decided that flying a blackbird might work, but even without having met the target Eugenie could have told him otherwise. No one that desperate to become Moncef’s lover would risk being foolish. Which was why Eugenie steadfastly refused to believe a single word of Per’s story about passionate nights spent with this girl.

“You ready?”

Sally adjusted her headscarf and nodded.

“Wait for the blades to stop,” said Eugenie, “then follow me.” Ducking under the doorway, she dropped to a crouch, eyes already scanning La Kasbah for the Zil that would drive them to meet Moncef Pasha.

“I’ll be your interpreter,” Eugenie added. “But for the actual marriage you have to make the responses yourself, in Arabic. They’re very simple and I’ve written them out phonetically on a piece of card.”

CHAPTER 30

Tuesday 1st March

“Quiet,” hissed a black-haired boy sitting next to Hani.
He stared down at his plate, on which a tiny bird sat in the centre of an elaborate matrix of sauce dribbled into the shape of recurring arabesques. So far he had yet to touch his meal.

“Why should I?” Hani demanded, still not bothering to lower her voice. She wanted to know why her Uncle Ashraf was not at Domus Aurea and no one seemed able to tell her. Hani found it hard to believe he hadn’t already achieved what he set out to do. Whatever that was.

It also hadn’t occurred to Hani that her uncle might miss Kashif’s party.

Dressed in a silk kaftan with gold embroidery around the neck and wearing a Rolex several sizes too big, Murad Pasha glanced nervously across to where his half brother sat watching them. “My brother doesn’t approve of noise.”

“And I don’t approve of the pasha,” Hani announced rather too loudly. A grey-haired woman standing with two Soviet guards behind the Emir glanced across to smile. Hani got the feeling she didn’t like Kashif either. “Anyway,” Hani said, “if he prefers silence, why are
they
here?”

A jerk of her chin took in a white-robed group who stood slap-bang in the middle of the cruciform dining room, below an impossibly huge chandelier. Five of them were chanting while a sixth beat time on a goatskin drum.

“These are the Emir’s choice,” Murad Pasha said, as if that should be obvious. “Those are the artists selected by Kashif.” He pointed behind him to a group of
nasrani
over by a far wall, all dressed in black suits and white shirts with black bow ties, like Kashif, in fact. One of them carried a Perspex violin, which he swung loosely by its neck.

“Great,” said Hani. “I can’t wait.”

The boy seemed roughly her age but still half a head shorter, which made him rather small for eleven. He had narrow shoulders and girl’s wrists and might have been good at running, except he looked far too sensible to run anywhere. Everybody else at the top table was talking, but the only time the boy opened his mouth was to answer one of Hani’s questions. The rest of the time his eyes slid past her to watch Kashif, the Emir and Lady Maryam.

“Don’t you want that?” Hani pointed at his quail.

Murad shook his head without bothering to look at her.

“Why not?”

Murad Pasha sighed. “I’m vegetarian,” he said. “I don’t approve of killing animals. And I’m only here under protest.”

“So you don’t mind if my cat has it?”

The area in which they sat had once been a
biat bel kabu
, the living quarters for a corsair and his family. Shaped like a fat, crudely drawn cross, with a long downstroke leading to a courtyard, now glassed over, and the shorter upstroke opening onto a smaller, still-uncovered courtyard where Chef Edvard had set up his kitchens, the cruciform room had sidebars that led nowhere.

In total there were six archways into the dining room. And in the centre, below the chandelier, three tables had been positioned, one high table at which sat Murad Pasha and Hani, Kashif, the Emir and Lady Maryam and two lesser tables, at right angles to the top table.

The Berber musicians occupied the open space between the three and because they always faced the Emir, everyone on the side tables saw the singers only in profile. Behind the Emir stood Eugenie de la Croix, flanked by two guards in jellabas, their striped robes in contrast to the drab uniform of a single major who stood behind Kashif Pasha.

Hani didn’t recognize Eugenie or anyone else and was happily unaware that at least one of the men sitting at a side table had recognized her.

“So who’s the girl?” Senator Malakoff demanded of his elderly neighbour, a Frenchman famous for knowing everything about everyone. His enemies, who were legion, would say this was because St. Cloud traded in souls. His friends, of whom there were fewer, limited themselves to describing the Marquis as the kind of man who never let go a favour or forgave a good deed.

“The al-Mansur brat.”

“But I thought…” His American neighbour looked puzzled. “Aren’t they all al-Mansur?”