The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (104 page)

This was the cause of his wife’s discontent. Or so it was said. Shibli didn’t know if her son, Kashif Pasha, also believed what the old mullahs told his mother or if His Excellency was just using them as they used him. It was, as he’d once heard Isabeau say, a bitch of a call. What was unquestionably true was that most of the army believed, but then uniforms and absolutes seemed to go together, whether God willed or not.

Flipping open Idries’ flask, Shibli took a long swallow and felt cheap brandy burn his throat on its way down. Seconds later it ignited his stomach, which served him right for forgetting, once again, to eat before leaving his madersa.

He drank to make a point. Whether any of the others had eyes open enough to understand his point was their business. Offering the flask to Raf, he watched the man drain what was left and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He did it without hesitation. Without the slightest thought of refusal.

An officer, Shibli decided, noticing soft fingers and unbroken nails. An officer who broke down a gun like any grunt. One who drank. An officer on the run. Or an infiltrator, an
agent provocateur
willing to break sharia law in the course of his job? A man who would need to be watched while he watched them…

“Who are you really?” Shibli’s question was aimed at Raf but Sajjad got in his reply first.

“A conscript, he said so.”

Which wasn’t what the soldier had said at all, though Shibli let that pass. Taking another glance at the drunken man in the orange jumpsuit, Shibli tried again. “What are you running from?” he asked.

“What have you got,” said Raf.

And fell sideways off his stool.

CHAPTER 20

Flashback

Per gutted supper with a swift cut, turning his knife
sideways to hook out the rat’s intestines, which tumbled onto the coals at his feet. Without pause, he sliced a ring around the neck of his catch and tossed the blade aside to ease his fingers beneath the animal’s skin, peeling it back like a man turning a glove inside out. Only then did he answer the blond girl sitting in the dusk opposite.

“Sure I’m sure…”

“It’s safe to eat?”

Per nodded. “You’d be surprised what’s safe if you cook it properly. You certain this isn’t a rare species?”

Sally was.

When Per first returned with supper wriggling in his hand he’d asked Sally if his catch was rare. Since the rat was obviously still alive at this point Sally had assumed Per was trying to avoid killing something endangered. Now she was beginning to wonder. The small stuff she knew, his hatred of shoes, the fact the first thing he did each morning was retie his hair, and the raw scratch marks across his back were definitely hers: but she still had little idea as yet of what was inside his head. But then it was fair to say that Per had less than no idea of what was in her own.

“Rosemary,” Per said, crumbling leaves under her nose. “And this one’s fresh thyme.”

Sally had watched the snake-hipped Swede build a fire from brushwood, doing everything the way Sally felt it should be done. First he dug a small pit and ringed it with stones collected from the outcrop under which they camped. Raked a wide area around the pit with his fingers as a second move, brushing aside anything that might flare like tinder. And filled the pit with twigs, arranged by thickness as his third move. Spaghetti-thin in the middle, pencil-fat around that and fatter still around the outside and over the top.

The flame came from an old lighter; so old she hadn’t seen that kind before.

“Just petrol,” said Per, noticing her interest. “Works even in a high wind.” He did something vaguely obscene with the chrome circle at the top of the lighter and Sally realized he was jacking it up and down like a metal foreskin. “Belonged to my grandfather,” he said proudly.

“And you still use it?”

“Why not?” said Per. “It still works.”

Sally smiled. He was an odd mix. A carnivorous technopagan who thought modern war inherently immoral but happily believed killing to be a hardwired human reaction, if only on a personal level. As for global politics, genetics and the other stuff that really interested Sally, they hadn’t even begun to go there. The only thing that really fired Per was history and old ruins.

“What are you thinking?” His voice studiedly casual, borderline curious. Something about her obviously fascinated him and Sally had yet to work out what. Leaving aside the obvious.

“That you’re a good fuck…”

Per grinned. “And you’re a good judge of these things?”

“You’re not?”

Still grinning the boy put his lighter to the kindling and they both watched flame catch. An immediate helix of twisted vision ruptured the air between them. There was no smoke to disturb the summer sky, only a spiral of heat haze. Sally was impressed by that.

They could have got off at Gabes but Sally wanted a bank and knew, because she’d already checked, that Coutts & Co. (Tunis) kept a branch where Avenue de Carthage intersected with Avenue de Paris.

So she made Per look after her luggage in a café across the road while she sauntered into one of those grey-stoned colonial mansions with sash windows, bay trees at the door and industrial-strength air-conditioning and banged her chequebook on the counter, which was Italian horsehair marble, obviously enough.

The florid young man who glanced up looked first at Sally’s tatty chequebook and only then at the blond foreigner and Sally was glad it was that way round. The five minutes she’d spent cleaning up in the thin trickle of water extracted from an ablutions hose in the café loo had done little but smear dust across her sunburned face. Dirt still grimed her arms and Sally’s hair was a mess under her scarf. Although Sally had to admit that tying back her hair helped make her look local.

“Madame?”

“Mademoiselle,” Sally corrected without thinking. Mademoiselle it was and mademoiselle was the way it was going to stay. She’d seen the price her mother had to pay for security and that was just too high.

“I’d like to check my account.”

Sally pushed her book to Kaysar Aziz and watched him flick back its cover and discreetly check the laser-stamped photograph embossed on the inside. Equally discreetly, Aziz fanned a dozen of the most recent stubs. The amounts scrawled in a variety of cheap pens got smaller each time.

“If you could just wait here.” He vanished through an oak door to check her balance, something he could have done quicker by flicking alive a flatscreen angled into the countertop. This was discretion apparently.

She knew the answer the moment Kaysar reappeared, long before he had time or need to frame his reply.

“Empty?”

“I’m sorry…”

Sally shrugged. “Not your problem if my father’s a prick.”

His blink was lightning-fast.

“Cancelled,” Sally explained. “Until I come home. He’s been threatening it for months. Now he has… You got a loo round here?”

Aziz looked blank.

“Toilet,” Sally said. “Which way?”

Rinsing her hands to wash off the soap, Sally started on her face and realized, too late, that she was splashing water down her front. The decision made itself. Unwrapping her scarf she shoved it into the pocket of her jeans and pulled her damp T-shirt over her head, revealing bite marks below one breast and a barbed-wire tattoo round her upper left arm. The tattoo was a mistake, an old one. The jury was still out on the navel stud and the gold dumbbell through her left nipple.

The body of an animal, Wu Yung had said, and that was when Sally knew she’d finally outgrown him. The old man meant lean and muscled like a predator but he’d missed the essential truth. What he thought was a compliment was merely a statement of the obvious. And the fact Wu Yung never realized this disappointed her. She was an animal as was he, as were Bozo and Atal, that overprivileged, underchallenged little idiot with his kangaroo-skin shoes.

Homo sapiens.
One point three percent off being a chimpanzee. A species outside evolution and seriously in need of an overhaul.

Sally sighed.

When she’d wrung out as much water from her hair as she could Sally wrapped it still damp in her scarf, splashed cologne onto her breasts from a bottle on a glass shelf above the basin, struggled back into her T-shirt and turned to go. That was when she noticed an elderly Arab woman sitting in an alcove.

Gazes met and held, pale blue and darkest brown and Sally nodded, shrugging off the lack of a nod in return.

To make a point she left her last US dollar in the saucer by the door.

“Well, that went perfectly,” Sally announced as she slumped into the chair opposite Per and reached for her Leica.

“You got your money?”

“Yeah.” Sally picked up the dregs of Per’s espresso and downed it in a single gulp. “Every last penny in my account.”

“What now?” Per asked.

“We go our separate ways I guess.”

“And your way is where?”

“Into the desert.”

Per smiled. “You’ve been practising that,” he said.

“Practising what?” Sally demanded, her puzzlement real.

“That line,” said Per, brushing aside his floppy hair. He put one hand to his pale eyes to shade out a sun already kept at bay by a café umbrella and pretended to peer into the far distance. “Searching for your famous weasel?”

Sally nodded and Per laughed.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “Not even an Englishwoman chases into the desert after a weasel.”

“I do,” said Sally. “Chasing things is how you find them.”

“But they’re not even rare,” Per protested. “I know, I looked them up.” He pulled a battered Nokia from his rucksack and flipped up the number pad to reveal a foldout keyboard and pop-up screen. “So what are you really after?”

“Really?”

Per nodded.

“Lions,” said Sally, smiling at his expression. “Barbary lions. The kind that ate Christians in the Roman circus.”

“What do they look like?”

“Much like this,” Sally said and she pulled a tatty newspaper clipping from the back of her wallet. It showed a lion cub so pale it almost looked grey. “The last known Barbary lion was shot in Morocco eighty years ago.”

“So how are you going to find one?”

“By looking,” Sally said flatly. “There’ve been rumours for years that a pair exist in captivity at a private zoo.”

“Whose?”

Sally smiled. “The Emir’s own,” she said. “Apparently he sees nobody, but I think he might see me. He’s partial to single blondes…” She tapped quote marks either side of the words, stressing the irony.

“You want company?”

Sally was about to point out the contradiction between what she’d just said and his question when she noticed the local newspaper tucked into the side pocket of Per’s rucksack. It was folded open towards the back and she could just about see the small-ad headings from where she sat, not that she needed to. The boxed-out advertisement for Hertz told her all she needed to know.

“You’re going to hire a car?”

“Too expensive,” said Per. “I’ll buy one.”

“This works out cheaper?”

“Depends what I buy. Get a Mahari and it’ll run like clockwork, Soviet clockwork… Four-cylinder, two-stroke, made in Portugal,” he added, seeing Sally’s blank look.

“And that runs like…”

“It was a joke,” he said patiently. “Maharis break down daily but even a child can mend them. What I actually want is a Jeep.” Tossing the paper across, Per said, “Take a look.” He’d ringed three possibles and put lines through two of those. “Too old,” he said, jerking his head towards the first one. “And the other’s too expensive. The last one looks okay though.”

As she expected the price was substantially more than Sally had. “You off to see it now?” she asked hopefully.

“I wish.” Per shook his head. “I called and the first time they can do is ten o’clock tomorrow. Which means finding somewhere for the night.”

“Not a problem,” said Sally. “There were a dozen guesthouses near Gare de Tunis. We can try there.” And so they did, although they ended up with separate rooms because the woman behind the desk refused to rent them a double. She did this through the simple expedient of refusing to understand what Sally and Per were asking for.

One room was under the roof of a narrow four-storey guesthouse that advertised itself as L’Hôtel Carthage, the other on the second floor, up a flight of stairs from the reception area. Both looked onto a narrow side street parked with cars but only the lower one had a shower and loo. Sally chose the roof because her window had a better view. That was what she told Per anyway, in fact the main thing her room had going for it was being a third cheaper than the room Per took.

“You want to go eat?”

“Not really hungry,” said Sally. “Although you could always pick up a bottle of red if you go out.” She watched Per nod and smiled to herself. Now she had a reason to drop by his room later if that was the route she decided to take; it would be, but Sally was planning to spend an hour or two fooling herself first.

CHAPTER 21

Tuesday 22nd February

Empirical evidence proved that sitting quietly in front of
a half-eaten croissant could keep a waiter from Le Trianon at bay for half an hour. The secret was not to run over thirty minutes. Doing so resulted in someone coming to ask if there was a problem with the food.