The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (99 page)

“Sally…”

The Arab boy with the scar was tapping her bare knee, which was a new one, except that it seemed he really did want to get her attention.

“What?”

Looking round, Sally realized their train had halted in the middle of nowhere. At least nowhere that looked like anywhere. All she could see from her dusty window was a wide expanse of red earth dotted with bushes of some kind.

“We’ve stopped,” she said.

The boy nodded and one of the nuns suddenly started to fire short, frightened sentences at her in a language Sally definitely didn’t understand. When Sally shrugged, the woman repeated herself louder.

“Any idea what she’s saying?”

He nodded.

“Well,” said Sally. “Are you going to tell me?”

“Sure,” shrugged the boy. “Why not…? She says this train’s been hijacked by bandits who will kill her because of her faith and rape you because you’re not wearing enough clothes.”

“Is that true?”

He shrugged. “Anything’s possible,” he told her. “Not likely, but possible.” The boy looked from Sally to the nuns and back again. “Do you have anything with longer sleeves?”

She did, in her rucksack.

“And anything other than shorts?”

Jeans, if those were any good.

“It’s probably unnecessary,” said the boy, sounding apologetic, “but you might want to change just in case.”

Peeling off her top while simultaneously popping the plastic buckle on her rucksack to extract Atal’s favourite shirt, Sally shook out a Paul Smith she’d borrowed on the Islands and never returned.

Needless to say, Atal had insisted it was a fake.

The shirt was white with thin stripes, made from cotton and had tails old-fashioned enough to cover her modesty as she wriggled out of her shorts and slid into jeans. At school, most Friday nights she used to change back into her uniform in the rear seat of a taxi that would drop her fifty yards from the small gate.

With her rucksack safely shut and back in an overhead rack, Sally turned to find the entire contingent of nuns glaring, not at her this time but at the boy who’d been watching with obvious interest.

“Thank you,” Sally told him.

“My pleasure.” His smile revealed the kind of teeth that travelled third class on a slow train between Tripoli and Tangiers. As ruined as Sally’s own were perfect.

And although her father, ever the unthinking traditionalist, openly admitted to choosing Sally’s mother on looks alone (just as Sally’s mother admitted marrying for security), her mouth’s perfection was down to more than genes. It was the product of three years of night braces, nylon train tracks and restrainers. Every kiss had tasted synthetic. Which maybe explained why there’d been so few.

“You think it’s bandits?” she asked the boy.

“Probably not,” he said, “but better to be safe.” For a moment he looked serious. “Your clothes… Long sleeves are better. And only small girls have bare legs here. Very small,” he added in case she hadn’t understood.

CHAPTER 14

Friday 11th February

“He’ll be back from his mission soon,” said the note.
“Look after yourself, Tiri.”

That was it, nothing more.

And Uncle Ashraf hadn’t even bothered to disguise his handwriting. As for its being a real mission…that seemed unlikely because then he’d have left a better note under her pillow, one that bothered to lie properly. He was running away, from her crossness and Zara’s anger, the noise of the builders and breakfast at Le Trianon and Hani wasn’t at all sure he’d ever come back.

Keying the note into her diary, Hani recorded the time—19:58—and shut down her screen. She was trying fairly hard not to cry and even harder not to mind that Zara was still sitting in the
qaa
with some stupid book while Hani was banished upstairs and Donna had rattled round the kitchen all day, so put out by His Excellency’s unexplained absence that she’d shouted at Hani for bothering her.

Pushing open a box of matches, the long kitchen ones, Hani put flame to her uncle’s message and watched curls of ash crumble into her basin.

Hani kept her diary inside a lion. When the words got too tangled she hacked off whole threads and hid those in other animals. Uncle Ashraf’s arrival in Iskandryia occupied a hippopotamus. Anything to do with Zara got a gazelle, which was being generous. The murder of Hani’s Aunt Nafisa filled a vulture, Egyptian obviously. And since
Neophron percnopterus
had a scrawny neck and nasty little eyes, this was entirely appropriate.

What had happened to her other aunt occupied no space at all, since the General had decreed Lady Jalila’s death a secret, back when General Koenig Pasha was still Governor and Hani wasn’t confident her idea of scrambling text inside picture code was entirely original.

The day-to-day details of life at the al-Mansur madersa got a Barbary lion, one that stared myopically from her screen with an awareness in its pale blue eyes of approaching extinction.

I knew you before you knew me.

I knew you before you lived…

The words were Uncle Ashraf’s own. Well, Hani strongly suspected they weren’t, but he’d been the one to say them on first seeing her lion and no amount of Web searching had pulled up their real owner. Hani wasn’t too sure what they meant but the sentiment sounded sad. And sometimes Hani liked sad but at the moment she was just plain furious. That was why she’d refused to go to noon prayers. She’d have gone with Khartoum to his little mosque, only she was a girl and he was a Sufi, wasn’t he?

So she’d been sent to her room by Zara, which was novel. A waterfall of raw emotion tumbling across the older girl’s face, as sudden fear that Hani might refuse turned to shock that she’d just scolded someone else’s child and ended with anger at being put in that position. Hani was good at reading faces. Growing up with Aunt Nafisa one had to be…

And Hani had been tempted to refuse and probably would have done if it had been her uncle, but that was silly because if Uncle Ashraf had been there Hani wouldn’t have refused to go to prayers and Zara wouldn’t have been upset. So Hani went to keep Zara happy, if that made sense.

The problem with being eleven or ten (or whatever she was actually meant to be) and having a dead mother and two dead aunts was that Zara now felt the need to look after her. Hani had a dead father too, of course, but since she’d never met him that was different.

“Weird…” She tossed the comment over her shoulder. Ifritah glanced up just long enough to make certain that nothing important had been said.

On her way out of the
qaa,
Hani had stopped at the lift, turning back. “He loves you,” she’d shouted louder than she intended. “Even if you don’t love him.” And as she slammed the grille she knew absolutely/for certain that tears already blinded Zara’s eyes.

Highlighting the code for some sad-eyed bush baby, Hani opened the picture with a word-processing package so cheap it failed to correct her grammar. Page after page of scribble filled the buffer and right towards the end, round about where anyone normal would begin hitting page down out of sheer boredom, Hani found her list of clues.

1) Suits still in cupboard.

Ascertaining this was less hard than it sounded given that her uncle’s total collection came to three suits, two pairs of shoes, five shirts and a red tie.

2) Missing jellaba. One of Hamzah’s men working on the garden had complained his jellaba was gone.

That was it…

CHAPTER 15

Monday 14th February

“Isaac and Sons?” The street sweeper repeated Raf’s
question slowly, unsure of its exact meaning. The Isaac he got, this was a foreign version of Isacq which was a common enough name, the rest of it…

He shrugged.

“Máa Saláma.”
Raf said a polite good-bye to the man with the broom and stepped back from the pavement, running his eyes along a row of shop fronts. He was looking for a sign. Something hand-painted onto board to judge from the other signs that hung above darkened windows. Actually he was looking for far more than that.

Ali bin Malik watched the beggar limp away. The stranger’s shoes were those of the very poor. A slab of rubber cut from a tractor tyre and punctured with two loops of twine to fit the whole foot and the largest toe. But even these shoes were better than the striped jellaba he wore. This was torn beneath one arm and stained around the ankles with mud or dried concrete.

“Wait,” Ali called after the beggar and the man stopped. “Ask Ahmed, my uncle.” Pointing along the street he indicated a shadow crouched by a dustcart…

“Es-salám aláykum.”

Ahmed looked up from his spoils.

“Ahmed?”

A brief nod. And then the man remembered his manners and returned the peace.
“Waláykum es-salám.”

“Máhaba,”
Raf said. Hello.

That earned him another nod, less abrupt this time.

“I’m looking for an office,” said Raf, “that’s meant to be on Rue Ali bel Houane.” With a shrug he glanced both ways along the almost deserted street. As if the office might be hiding somewhere in the half dawn. It was maybe six in the morning and Raf could see everything as clearly as if it had been high noon with the sun direct overhead; a lot clearer than most people in Kairouan could have seen even then.

Raf’s eyes liked early morning. When the world came into complete focus. There were times when Raf felt sure his circadian rhythms were reversed. That what his body expected from him was to sleep in the day and wake at night.

Baudelairian delusions of Bohemia
, Zara had called it in one of her crosser moments. Maybe the only moment he’d ever really seen her cross. After she’d come to his room in the haremlek at night and found him dressed, sitting by an open window in the dressing gown of a dead man. He’d tried to explain to her then who he thought he really was. It was an unwise move. After she’d gone, he looked up Baudelaire and Bohemia to confirm what she’d been saying. A verdict he would dispute but understood how she got to where she got. But then that was negative capability all over, an overdeveloped talent for seeing both sides of everything and agreeing with neither.

Putting the time at six was a guess as Raf had left his watch in El Iskandryia. The
fair
call to prayer had been twenty minutes before, however, and the sun was somewhere on the horizon, although buildings prevented Raf from knowing exactly where.

“This office… You know the number?” Ahmed had a smoker’s voice and nicotine stains on the sides of his fingers to match.

“It’s number…?” Casually Raf pulled a packet of
bidi
from the ripped pocket of his jellaba and lit one, dragging deep. As an afterthought he passed the packet to Ahmed and offered Ahmed his cigarette so the street cleaner could light his own.

“Afraid not.” Raf shook his head.

It was a lie, of course. That number became fixed in Raf’s head the first moment he stood in the
qaa
, with steps leading from the courtyard to the madersa’s first floor behind him and Lady Nafisa ahead, angrily pushing a letter in front of his face only to withdraw it and read him extracts, her tone furious and disdainful.

On the 30th April, Pashazade Zari Moncef al-Mansur, only son of the Emir of Tunis, married Sally Welham at a private ceremony in an annexe of the Great al-Zaytuna Mosque. She was his third wife. He divorced her five days later.

He’d had to take her word on that because the only bit he’d been able to read was the letterhead. Isaac & Sons: Commissioner for Oaths, 132 Rue Ali bel Houane, Kairouan, Ifriqiya. The rest was in Arabic, a language he now spoke but was still unable to write or read.

(A fact Raf justified by telling himself that Arabic script had a minimum of six styles, codified in Baghdad by Vizir Ibn Muqla at the beginning of the tenth century. Three used for the Holy Quran and three for official work, administration and correspondence. And out of these had developed other styles, at least one,
shikaste
, decipherable only to a practised reader. Added to which, letters changed shape according to their position in a word.)

“But you know the owner’s name?”

Raf nodded. “It’s a law firm,” he said. “With offices in Kairouan. Isaac and Sons.”

The old man thought about it, shook his head and sat back down on the pavement where a pile of rubbish waited to be sorted into heaps. There were cola cans, empty and sticky, discarded paper, mainly oiled wrappers from the pastry shops lining Rue Ali bel Houane, empty packets of cigarettes, local mostly but one of them, the one with a broken cigarette still inside, an Italian brand of which Raf had never heard.

Ahmed tucked the foreign cigarette behind his ear and went back to sorting out rubbish. All the cans went in one bag, the paper in another. Rags got tied to each other until they looked like a string of drab bunting. “It doesn’t bring much,” Ahmed said, “but it brings a little.”

“Inshá allá,”
Raf said.

“Inshá,”
the street cleaner agreed.

Around them Kairouan was beginning to stir. A small woman with arms as thin as twigs and a birdlike strut bustled onto the pavement from a nearby shop and scowled as soon as she saw Raf. Then she noticed Ahmed sitting on the other side and promptly relaxed. Everyone offered the peace, then said good morning and finally said hello. By the time that was done another shop had begun to open, the metal grille being pulled back from the doorway and an awning being wound down in a screech of rusty metal.