The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (66 page)

The taste of Khartoum’s medicine was bitter, somewhere between burned earth and crushed aniseed; but it flowed down Raf’s throat and spread through his veins like creeping light, as the headache he forgot having lifted like burning mist.

“Good,” said Khartoum, and nodded grimly. “Now you eat… I’d bring you something myself but then Hani would be upset.”

“Bagels,” announced Hani. “And I remembered milk for the coffee…” There were three already split bagels, untoasted and minus schmeer piled into a mound on a plate so fine that Raf could see Hani’s fingers through the bone china. The coffee was the colour of dishwater, its cup narrow at the base and wide at the top, so that tiny globules of goat’s milk floated slicklike on the surface.

“This is what they eat in Seattle…” said Hani.

It was a question, Raf realized, not the statement he’d thought it was.

“You’re right,” he said.

“I looked it up,” she explained defensively. “Bagels and milky coffee, it’s traditional.”

Raf nodded.

“And I downloaded you some papers to read with your breakfast.” Hani paused. “I’m not sure you’ll want them,” she added, resting her bagel plate on the side of his bed and taking a huge bundle of papers from under her arm.

They were worse than Raf expected. Monday’s
Die Berliner
dealt with leaked documents suggesting that outgoing governor Koenig Pasha had once taken a five-million-dollar bribe from El Iskandryia’s beleaguered industrialist, Hamzah Effendi. Nowhere was it mentioned that this was for facilitating Raf’s marriage to Zara, the one that didn’t happen.

The word
anarchy
featured heavily in the leader column. Questions were apparently being asked in Geneva, forcing Berlin, however reluctantly, to agree with the position of France and America… El Iskandryia had become a liability.

City in chaos,
he’d read that one already.

Koenig Pasha rushed to New York hospital
… That was new. Raf skimmed Tuesday’s
Times
and grinned. So the old man had got himself out of the country, strapped to a stretcher and wired in to more machines than looked strictly necessary. In the picture his eyes were closed, his face even more sepulchral than usual.

Raf wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to have starved himself for a day or two, just to make it look more convincing.

The General’s arrival at Mount Olive Hospital in New York was as low-key as any arrival that was greeted by a hundred chanting, placard-waving protesters could be. An old man, frail as melting snow, in a borrowed wheelchair, being pushed up a ramp by a young staff nurse.

“Is Koenig Pasha really dying?” Hani asked.

Raf shook his head. “Doubt it,” he said. “I doubt if he’s even really ill.”

“A trick,” she said, smiling. Hani could appreciate that.

Wednesday’s
New York Times, Le Monde, Frankfurter, El Pais, Herald Tribune
… Hani had downloaded the lot and the story they told was the same. The General was ill, El Isk was in chaos, no one knew anything significant about the new governor.

There was, Raf was sorry to say, very little significant to know.

“You had a call from Zara,” said Hani. “And from… Kamila.”

It took Raf a moment to pull the name from memory. Kamila was the young coroner he’d told not to go ahead until he was there. That was what, four days ago?

Hani caught up with Raf after he’d shaved and dressed and was preparing to go tour the city. Although the words
fiddling, Nero
and
burns
came to his mind.

“I need to show you something,” she said.

“Later.”

“No,” Hani insisted. “Now.”

Her fingers grabbed the pocket of his jacket and held fast. One of the guards by the front door looked as if he didn’t know whether to be amused or appalled. A glance at Raf’s face convinced him to be neither.

“What is it?” said Raf with a sigh.

Hani squinted at the guard, then at Raf. “It’s a secret,” she said. “You’d better come with me.” The room she led Raf to smelled of dust and damp, of rotting wall hangings and ancient books going musty on oak shelves. But the data port in the wall by the window was working.

“Should it be able to do this?” asked Raf, watching figures scroll lightning-fast down the screen of a toy computer shaped like a seashell.

Hani shrugged.

“I made some changes,” she said, then went back to her screen. Figure followed figure, ever faster as Hani’s fingers danced over keys, never quite touching.

“Okay,” she said, “here we go.”

They were in Tiny Tina zone, apparently. Occupying an impossibly frilly bedroom constructed from wavy planes and pastel colours. Stuffed toys sat on the fat bed. In one corner of the virtual room sat a pink chest of drawers, decorated with stuck-on pictures of Hani’s cat Ifritah.

Making some kind of pass over her keyboard, Hani popped out one of the drawers and clicked on the emptiness. Instantly the childish bedroom was gone, replaced by thumbnail pix of five wrecked buildings.

“See,” she said, “they’re not
random
at all.”

Lines radiated from thumbnails to various logos, from those logos to offshore shells, back to different logos. All the lines eventually ended in the same place, with one logo, that of Hamzah Enterprises GmB.

“They’ve all been burned,” said Raf.

“And every burned building belongs to Effendi,” stressed Hani. “All five.” She was grinning at her own cleverness.

That was when Raf realized something. Usually his ideas came fast, pulled from memory in a flurry of facts, with the connections ready-made; but this came slowly, like a fish rising to the bait, and it came not formed but uncertain. Becoming certain only when he thought about it.

Over and over again, Hamzah’s refinery had also been attacked and each time the harm was minimal. Highly visible, usually photogenic, but not even close to serious damage. Someone badly wanted the Midas Refinery kept in the news but not broken.

That ruled out the Sword of God, who abhorred Hamzah’s links with St. Cloud. One of the ironies of the Midas Refinery was that Europe saw St. Cloud as the refinery’s acceptable face, while the fundamentalists regarded him as degenerate. And if SoG weren’t really behind the attacks on the refinery, then Raf found it hard to believe they’d bothered to burn Hamzah’s other buildings.

On the way out of the first-floor room, Hani dragged Raf over to a long, fly-specked looking glass. “Are you meant to be dressed like that?” she asked.

Raf took a look and saw a pale man in a high-necked suit, wearing Armani shades and carrying a silver-topped Malacca cane in one hand. A bit thinner than before he iced himself, but otherwise not that different. Swept-back blond hair, neat beard, high cheekbones, drop-pearl earring. He saw the person he expected to see, people mostly did; until the day they looked in the mirror and saw somebody else.

“You’re dressed like the General,” Hani said patiently.

“That’s the plan,” said Raf. “If I dress like the General, then maybe people will treat me like the General.”

“Yeah, right,” said Hani. “They’ll probably try to shoot you.”

CHAPTER 32

22nd October

Next morning, a couple of hours before dawn, Khartoum
woke himself and went to fetch Raf. He waited in silence while the surprised bey sat on the edge of his bed and pulled on a pair of trousers, buttoned his shirt and slid into a black coat.

Sitting to dress was ordained. Something the bey had not understood until Khartoum explained this. Dressing in the pitch-dark was the bey’s own choice.

Khartoum had nodded to a Sudanese guard standing outside Raf’s room on his way in, and when he nodded again on his way out, the guard fell into step behind them. Two more soldiers fell into step at the front door. They were five minutes from the sleeping mansion before Khartoum saw Raf realize that not one of his escort carried a weapon.

South through the sodium of Rue Ptolomies, across Faud Premier’s hard neon and into a darkened alley little wider than a shop doorway, one city giving way to another as Khartoum knew it would. Some people thought it was the
arrondissements
that mattered, because those were what got shown on maps. It was a simple enough mistake to make. The same people divided their lives. This is my job, this is my wife, my friends from the market, my other friends, my family, this is the emptiness that should be occupied by my God.

Life didn’t work like that. It was layered, not separate. Woven together into a hidden script that few knew existed and fewer still ever got to read.

Woodsmoke drifted from mean doorways. There was a whining of sleepy children. A thrown-open wooden shutter swung so hard it bounced off the wall. Someone hawked and spat noisily in a room nearby. The further into the alley they walked, the sourer the air and the more battered the front doors. Until finally beaten-earth walls, stripped of their render by time or rain, framed doorways closed only by blankets.

Beneath Raf’s feet, shattered tarmac scabbed the damp earth like broken skin.

Khartoum was watching him in the near darkness.

“Where are we?” Raf asked.

“Undoubtedly almost here,” said Khartoum and kept walking.

There were others in the darkened alley. Figures slipping from the curtained doorways, their jellabas poor, their faces sunken with hunger. Scars went uncorrected and poor eyesight unimproved. They had the dark skin of those who had migrated from where the rivers met. They were the city’s incomers. The city’s invisibles.

Lacking shoes, history, a voice.

For most of those who joined Khartoum, Raf’s escort were invisible. Although at least one man did hesitate, seeing uniforms lit from an open door. And two or three slunk back into darkness and safety.

A few of the men smiled at Khartoum, most just nodded a simple
marhaba
… One or two, mainly the older ones, gave the
salaam,
right hands sweeping up to touch their heart and then that little finger-flick out from the head. To those alone Khartoum replied formally,
wa ‘alaykum assalam
.

One of the smallest boys reached out to touch Khartoum’s robe and was instantly yanked away by his father. Khartoum appeared not to hear the slap that followed or the muffled protests that followed that. In total there were no more than fifty people, all men and mostly young.

Occasionally, when light spilled out from a high window some of them would stare at Raf when they thought he wouldn’t notice. Mostly they just trudged in silence, until the narrow cut ended, opening onto a gloomy scar of scrubland and railway track.

Away to their right, arc lights bathed the vast neobaroque business that was Misr Station, its exuberance curtailed only by distance and intervening darkness. And somewhere nearby was a truck depot, where a diesel crunched its gears, but other than this, the only sound was of feet shuffling over gravel as the group left the tracks behind to slip through a hole cut in a link fence.

An unbroken line of blank-faced, five-storey tenements faced them across a deserted road, all that separated them from a small
zawiya
built in the courtyard of the tenement opposite. The
zawiya
’s minaret was little more than a squat tower. And Khartoum’s voice, when it echoed from the top, was thin and quavering against the amplified magnificence coming from grander minarets across the waking city.

The small mosque looked out of place but that was just appearance, reality was the other way round. The mosque had been there first. Once, in fact, it had been a Coptic church, home to a famous Gnostic, but that was before the armies of God burst out of the desert, bringing blood, coffee, decent cooking and the truth.

“In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate…”

The
Fatiha
gave way to other prayers, then a Bible story that Raf didn’t recognize from Sunday services at school. One in which Satan was cast out for refusing to bow down before Adam and in which Adam repented of eating the Apple.

Original sin did not exist.

Vicarious atonement was not required.

To find the law, logic had only to be systematically applied to situations not explicitly mentioned in the Holy Quran…
Hadith
and
Ijma’
… Raf pulled the terms from memory and meaning came tumbling after.
Hadith
was a database of oral law, second only to the Book and more important than
Ijma
’, agreed precedents. Together, with logic, they made up the four classical roots of jurisprudence, which all rulers must use…

Hunched on his heels at the back of the crowd, Raf understood instantly why he’d been brought. Why Khartoum was so insistent.

Raf dragged his eyes away from the cracked dome overhead with its constellation of tesserae broken by the tiny darkness of fallen stars. Stained glass filled with morning light at one end of the mosque and below the window was a wooden minbar, a kind of carved pulpit in which Khartoum now stood. To one side was a niche, richly decorated with polychrome marble and painted tiles. At the top of the niche were carved stones of alternate colours, dark red and pale sandstone. It was an ancient technique known as…

Ablaq,
Raf said to himself.

Next to him, a middle-aged man frowned, suddenly recognized Raf as the new governor and looked hurriedly away.

“This is the truth.”

Now Khartoum sat facing the crowd, telling them the story of a famous mystic who challenged a Caliph and was crucified, his ashes thrown into the Tigris. Somehow the tale of al-Hallaj developed into one about a mullah who rode his donkey backward, waving a lighter and a mug of water. When asked why, he announced that it was to ignite heaven and put out the flames of hell.

After that the stories became lighter. The poor mullah and the rich beggar. The night the mullah fell down a well. The time he announced, when presented with a pregnant woman, whose husband had died falling off a cart five years before, that the fault lay with the lazy foetus who’d been sleeping, not the mother. And then, while the men were still thinking about that, the stories ended…