The Hidden (12 page)

Aimee eyes widened. She took a mental photograph of the man, watching him closely as he thrust his face deep into the dancer’s cleavage. Though his party included three other men, Gad Mahmoud was obviously the leader. The men at his table were watching him in awe.

“Are you saying Azi was involved with an underground terrorist organisation?” Aimee said, biting her lip. “That can’t be right. He wasn’t really interested in politics. He was an academic. I never heard him even mention this man Issawi.”

She was lying. Farouk knew that. He could tell from the way her eyes flickered as she spoke. Yet she was so innocent, this girl, so obviously naïve. Farouk continued to study her face, wanting to believe her.

“Where does this woman come into all this?” she whispered.

Farouk put his hand on her arm.

“Stay calm, talk to me, and don’t look over there. Those men are looking this way.”

Gad Mahmoud and his table were twisting around in their seats, scanning the room with smiles on their faces and jokes on their lips, slapping the dancers on the thigh whenever they came within reach.

Just then, the music changed. Flutes and sitars and a loud drumming started up, and then, as the curtains drew back, a high-pitched trill was heard. The audience clapped and screamed in unison. Fatima had arrived. A small, buxom woman in a sequinned bodice and flowing floor-length skirt sashayed onto the stage from the wings, her arms outstretched to her beloved fans. A dwarf with a scarlet fez, waistcoat, and bare tattooed arms joined her on the stage and cried out, “Madame Fatima Said.”

Aimee shrank back. Fatima appeared to be about thirty, with thick jet-black hair that flowed freely down to her hips. She had a sharp chin and high cheekbones, and arched eyebrows over startling shimmering eyes, which glittered in the low light of the club like smouldering coals. Those eyes took in the face of every man in the room, seducing them all simultaneously. As she started to dance, the men cheered and whooped, reaching out for her while the dwarf stood guard at the side of the stage. She thrust her stomach forward in time to the drumming, her arms raised, her eyes sending daggers of desire from under hooded lids, her breasts and belly moving at full-tilt to the music. When she moved off the stage into the crowds, pulling provocatively at her skirt, she devoured the face of each man she saw. Aimee pushed her chair back and pulled at Farouk’s sleeve.

“I’ve seen enough,” she said in a panic. “I want to go.”

He tried to calm her down. If they left now, he told her, they would attract attention. Fatima would pick the man of her choice soon, and take him backstage and upstairs to one of the girls. They could leave then, but not now.

“Sssh,” he said, his arm around Aimee’s shoulders, whispering closely in her ear. “We’ll go soon, I promise.”

As the music got louder, Fatima curled herself up like a snake and reached into the air. Then, feigning a fainting fit, she threw herself into the lap of one of the men, collapsing over him as he roared with laughter. She repeated this routine with several men in the audience, throwing herself into their laps and then bouncing up again before they had time to grab her.

Gradually, her clothes started to disappear. First she pulled at the tie of her skirt and off it came, falling to the floor in a heap to reveal a pair of slim, shapely legs.

A young soldier scooped it off the ground and buried his face in the fabric, inhaling the scent. Slowly, she removed her jewel-studded bodice, sweeping her long hair over her shoulders so that her breasts were perfectly hidden by her thick black tresses. Then she started to remove the small white silk culottes she was wearing, fingering the edges seductively while the men yelped and screamed and clapped.

A man got up from one of the tables and lunged forward, ripping the silk culottes from her. Aimee saw Fatima flash a look of warning at the dwarf, but he nodded at her and the plastered smile returned to her face. She reached for the man, stroked his cheek, and allowed him to undress her further, helping him to pull the remaining fabric from between her thighs. Aimee could not see the man’s face, but the crowds cheered him on and his friends jeered and called out his name.

“Go on, Hawky, give it to her,” they shouted. “Give her one from us too.”

The man turned around triumphantly with Fatima’s culottes raised high in the air, like the flag victorious. His face was scarlet, his
mouth loose, arrogant. He wrapped his arm around Fatima, a large hand over her right breast.

She was naked except for the tiara on her head and a pair of thin spiky heels. The young soldier pulled Fatima close to him, his hands travelling hungrily to places forbidden.

The journal of Hezba Iqbal Sultan Hanim al-Shezira,

Cairo, August 22, 1919

I am counting the days until I see Alexandre. Tonight we celebrate the Prophet’s birthday, the moulid-al-Nabi. Nawal, Bathna, and I decide to partake of a dangerous herb, just for a little fun. Bathna bribes Tindoui to get it for us, and we harem girls like to take it for our amusement. I mix a tiny amount of the powder with water and lemon juice in the palm of my hand and lick it away with my tongue. Bathna and Nawal do the same. After a while the world disappears into a blur. We watch a dancer perform for us in our private parlour. Watching her thrills me. I look up and see Rachid looking at her longingly while he stands guard. Five women, including me, are lying on cushions, watching the girl—a beauty of no more than twelve—as she dances to music that reaches an exotic frenzy. When the dancer finishes, I ask Rachid to come to my room after the midnight raka to talk.

He waits until I finish my religious recitations. I am worried about him. He is wretchedly unhappy and sometimes he tells me that the only thing keeping him from taking his own life is his love of his harem sisters. I know how he feels. I have felt the same way.

I try and remind him that Papa treats him well, so he has less to complain about than he thinks. Nevertheless, I understand him and he understands me.

Tonight we talk well into the night. If our hours together are numbered, we must find happiness together. The warm, dreamy sensation
from the powder, running through my body, stays with me until I fall sleep. When I awake, Rachid has gone and Habrid is standing over me with his arms crossed.

I sit up groggily and stare at him. “What do you want?” I ask him.

“Come with me, Sayyida,” he says, yanking me up by the arm. My robes feel sticky against my skin. I am sure my blood is coming. I feel this strange sensation in my belly, a pulling pain, a sure sign that I am unclean. Habrid should not be in my rooms now. He must not touch me if I am about to get my womanly blood.

“Where are you taking me? What are you doing?” I demand to know.

“I know what you have been doing,” he says, escorting me to the thrashing chamber, commonly known as the Red Room. “I have orders to see you are punished.”

“For what?” I shout at him.

“For cutting short your prayer time and for engaging your servant in conversation while your thoughts should be on your religion. You neither submit to Islam, Hezba, nor do you honour your position as the sultan’s daughter. Your mother heard what was going on from her own spies in the harem. Two sins that are punishable in whatever way your mother sees fit.”

I gape at him and pull away, but he is strong and I am weak. His large hands bruise the flesh on my arms. He pushes me into the Red Room, then nods to one of the lower eunuchs on guard there. Together they rip my gowns from me. I am shivering, naked on the stone floors. There is a lump in my throat and tears of rage behind my eyes as I bend over, covering my head with my hands to wait for the first crack of the stick against my flesh
.

CHAPTER TWELVE

In a secret, darkened room, at the back of the Sultan Hassan Mosque, lit by a single desk lamp, the HQ chiefs of Security Operations, Hilali and Gamal, sat hunched over a pile of telegrams. Their most skilled code-cracker, a young Oxford graduate, James Lambert, sat with them.

Gamal spoke first.

“There are three here that have been sent from a kilim shop in Bab al-Luq to the Café Malta in Garden City on three consecutive days,” he said. “We’re looking for a synchronicity, evidence of a plan, a link that spells out the X’s next move.”

Lambert held a magnifying glass up to his eyes and ran it back and forth over each telegram. While he examined them, Gamal said authoritatively, “Have the Café Malta telephone tapped straight away, Lambert.”

Hilali pointed at the words on the telegram and said, “Can you see the symmetry between the dates?”

Lambert bit his lip. “Carpet order processed. Consignment due in four days. Esteemed thanks sent.”

Gamal leaned over him and read. “Carpet order shipment problems. New order required. Delays expected. Esteemed thanks sent.”

Hilali pointed at the third. “Carpet order problems rectified. On target. Esteemed thanks sent.”

The three men stared at one another.

“The Carpet Seller,” Lambert said, his hand outstretched. “The dossier, please, Gamal.”

Gamal flicked through a pile of cream-coloured folders and dug one out. He opened it and pulled out the contents. It contained newspaper clippings, reports, and fake rubber-stamped identity cards but no photographs.

“Carpet Seller. Code name Thunderbolt, code name Centurion, code name Smith: a man of many disguises and hundreds of aliases. But we don’t know what he looks like. No one has ever managed to take a photograph of him.”

Lambert took off his horn-rimmed glasses, blew on the lenses, retrieved a handkerchief, and wiped them clean. “I’m sure Centurion is probably the code name of three different ringleaders,” he said. “They use the same name to confuse us.”

Hilali picked up the telephone and dialled a number. “I’ll send a message to Ringwood at HQ,” Hilali said. “We have something for him. Tell him to prepare the troops. I think we finally have something we can work on.”

“The Café Malta is a popular hangout with soldiers, isn’t it?” Gamal said.

“We’ve been watching that place for weeks and seen nothing at all,” Lambert said. “It all makes sense. The X move around a lot. They are deliberately evasive. This is the first coding consistency—the use of three linked words—we have seen in a long time. When Lambert here cracks this code, we’ll see we were right.”

Gamal stood up and started pacing around the room. “We don’t have long, Hilali,” he said. “We should put Operation X into action right now.”

“Relax,” Hilali smiled. “We have to have a strategy. Lambert’s report will tell us what we need to know and enable us to target our efforts more intelligently. Then we can draw our networks together. I want Operation X to start at eighteen hundred hours on the night of the celebrations at the palace. If we bide our time, we can round up most of them before there’s any real chance of trouble.”

“You’re quite confident, aren’t you,” Lambert said.

Gamal checked his watch. “There’s a weakness in the chain. Lambert has discovered it. They’re slipping up, using their code too casually, and this proves they’re not invincible. Their stomping ground is the Muski district. All Intelligence reports point to the Café Malta being one of the X’s headquarters. It makes the most sense to start there. In the Muski they can recruit more sector members.”

“We don’t want to alarm any civilians,” Gamal said. “That’s why we must be careful, do our work invisibly. Tell headquarters to send in their plainclothes men to scour the Muski district. Lambert had resumed his work on the telegrams. “Ah,” Lambert said excitedly. Hilali and Gamal abruptly stopped talking and looked over his shoulder.

“Yes. Yes. I was right all along.”

“Well?” the two other men asked impatiently. “What is it?”

Lambert didn’t answer. He kept referring back to his codebook, smiling. He did this for more than five minutes while the two others waited.

“There’s a date here.”

“Well?” Hilali shouted.

“If I’m right, we’re…” Lambert took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair. Each telegram had been placed side by side. His eyes darted euphorically from one telegram to the other.

“What, man?” Gamal was getting impatient.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he gasped. “This is sophisticated, this one. They’ve made these telegrams look so damn innocent, but wait a minute—” Lambert sucked in a breath and screwed up his eyes.

“We’re not out of the woods yet. Every letter has been triple-coded. This will take longer than I thought, but I think we’ve broken through. I think—”

The journal of Hezba Iqbal Sultan Hanim al-Shezira,

Cairo, August 23, 1919

Picture the scene. I wait for the depths of the night to come. I sit here alone in my room on my favourite gold cushions, waiting for Tindoui to fetch me in secret and take me to the stables. I am concealed behind the mashrabiyya in a little alcove. Then I lie down on the floor, on my cushions, my face pressed into the silky fabric. I breathe hard, trying to steady myself. It is very dark, very hot. I am writing by the light of a little candle. The harem is asleep, and I am trembling with excitement. I can hardly hold my pens, and I am sure I will smudge the ink. I want to summon Anisah, to get me a drink of sherbet to calm me, but I am scared to move towards the bell rope. I feel there is someone watching me, someone lurking in the shadows.

I want to get out into the air while I wait for Tindoui to come and get me. Perhaps I should sit on the balcony for a while, but I mustn’t do so for too long because it isn’t proper to be seen out on the balcony in the depths of the night. I swear I will die from this heat. There is no air. I can see Uluk asleep in the old rattan chair in the garden. Little patches of perspiration on his forehead are glimmering in the moonlight. His tunic is stretched tight around his fat waist. He looks so uncomfortable. It has been said that he doesn’t feel safe with Papa away. This is why he sleeps in the garden. He is nervous about the Nationalist rioting in the
streets, and he wants to be able to call the servants to order quickly if needed.