The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (117 page)

He drove in silence. Letting darkened walls and hedgerows flow around him until the dirt track became a minor road, then something that actually had central lines. Shortly after that came the
périphérique
around Tunis, the city flickering by in a smudge of suburbs as the huge Bugatti burned up the outside lane, lights out and its three passengers shadows held in darkness, like ghosts going on holiday.

One of the cardinal points of the Emir’s work creation programme was that everyone in Ifriqiya should have a job. And if that meant more road sweepers, line painters or ditchdiggers than there were roads then so be it.

What Ifriqiya needed, of course, at least in the opinion of every visiting dignitary, was fewer donkeys and wider roads. Only the land lost to build the roads would, when added together, shave hectare after hectare off the country’s reserve of perfectly good smallholdings. On the Emir’s orders, a survey had been carried out after some commissar with mining interests in Gafsa had complained that trucking phosphate was becoming increasingly uneconomic.

In response to a hint from Moscow that the CCCP might help Tunis fund a programme to build new motorways, the Emir sent them the address of every family who’d lose land and invited Moscow to write to each, explaining why it was necessary.

To the reply that this would be pointless, since most of those would undoubtedly be unable to read, he pointed out that the literacy rate in Ifriqiya was slightly higher than western Russia as a whole, and at least 25 percent above that of Georgia, which was where both the commissar and the Soviet president originated.

The roads remained unwidened, still lined with prickly pear except in the far south, where the ground was too barren to grow even that.

“What are you thinking?” Hani asked, her voice no longer sullen. On her lap the computer balanced on top of Ifritah’s cat basket. Now forgotten.

“About prickly pears,” said Raf.

Hani nodded, as if that was to be expected. “The roads,” she said, “and Moscow’s plan to widen them. It’s mentioned in the official guidebook.”

“Probably,” said Raf. From what he’d just seen, Emir Moncef was quite capable of having it included just to signal his independence from the only country still willing to trade openly with Ifriqiya.

“How do you two do that?” Murad demanded, his tone more interested than aggrieved.

“Do what?” Hani and Raf asked together.

And the answer was he didn’t know. Raf accepted that he’d no more understood what his own mother was thinking than she’d known what hid inside his head. They had remained, from his birth until her death, two strangers separated by common blood and long silences: every glance between them was embarrassed, each hug brief and gratefully cut short. If ever he took her hand she flinched. Every time she touched him he froze.

It was a relationship safe only when conducted at a distance by e-mail or letter. So maybe Zara was right and he really was the last person to be looking after a troubled, hyperintelligent, unquestionably lonely small child.

Alternatively, he was ideal.

“You okay?”

Raf glanced in the mirror and saw Hani watching intently.

“Thought not,” she said. One thin hand came up and gripped his neck, small fingers digging into muscle knots on both sides. “Twist your head,” said Hani.

Raf did and heard bones crunch as something slid back into place. “Donna does it,” she said, “every time I get a headache.”

“You get many headaches?” Murad asked. And Raf realized he had no idea of the answer either.

She looked at Murad. “Since my uncle arrived,” said Hani, “life’s been one long headache.” She smiled as she said it and neither of the other two quite noticed she’d avoided answering Murad’s question.

“Almost there.” Hani’s announcement came just before Raf turned right between two houses and edged his way through a tiny village, headlights still unlit. She’d been collecting old advertising murals and so far she had a
Dr. Pierre
, two
Fernet-Branca (la digestif miraculeux)
, a faded blue
dubo, dubon, dubonnet
and one for underwear by
Rhouyl
, which, if she understood the faded French correctly, was guaranteed to induce health-giving static.

Staring from his window of the still-moving car, Murad tried to focus on the world outside. Just enough moon was filtering through the clouds to bathe the soft slopes of Cap Bon in a ghostly fuzz which was almost, but not quite, light. “How do you know that?” he asked.

Hani shrugged. “I just do.”

Around them were orange groves in blossom, wizened pine trees, the occasional villa set back from the coast and even a wrought-iron bandstand. The spindly confection set down on a promenade overlooked blue-painted fishing boats that bobbed at anchor.

On the wall opposite, another notice, paper this time, reminding everyone that falcons could not be captured for training until the second week of March. The warning was pasted next to an older poster advertising the
festival de l’épervier
, dated from June the previous year. Light from a bakery window lit both and through its glass could be seen an old man in vest and floppy trousers kneading dough…

They ate their brioche from the bag, the pastry still warm enough to make the paper turn translucent down one side. The old man had been polite. Totally unsurprised to be disturbed at 3:00
A.M.
by a man and two children wanting food. And he threw in two tiny tarte tatin for Hani and Murad, smiling and nodding as he shooed the three of them towards the door.

“Work to do,” he explained.

Raf nodded.

What passed for a plan in Raf’s mind the fox would undoubtedly have dismissed as cage circling, the dysfunctional repetition of a narrow range of gestures. Have an idea, repeat it endlessly until all value is wrung from the original… With a sigh, Raf straightened his shoulders and pulled a bell handle.

Welcome to the Andy Warhol school of detective work.

Somewhere inside Dar St. Cloud a Victorian bell tipped sideways far enough to hit a silver clapper and the faintest tremor of that blow whispered back through the wire to reach Raf’s fingers. The bell was an affectation. One made worthless by two small Zeiss cameras that swivelled, cranelike to catch Raf and his companions in their gaze.

Retuning his eyes, Raf shifted through the spectrum. Checking out what he already knew, the three of them were blanket-lit by infrared and targeted at waist height by pinhead lasers. He could see tiny lenses set into the portico walls. Then the door opened and Raf forgot about armaments. Only panic could make the Marquis do something that stupid and this was not a character trait associated with Astophe de St. Cloud, recognized
bâtard
of the French Emperor and a man who’d once offered Raf more money than he could even begin to imagine.

Three percent of the price of North Africa’s biggest oil refinery, plus the same cut on oil fields in the Sudan and various offshore sites. All Raf had needed to do in return was betray Zara’s father. Hamzah Effendi would fall. His share of a refinery that flickered ghosts of flame across the night sky on the edge of El Iskandryia would go up for sale. Enabling St. Cloud to significantly increase his prestige and personal wealth.

Raf had not forgotten that offer any more, he imagined, than St. Cloud had forgiven Raf’s refusal to oblige.

“Tell St. Cloud that Ashraf Bey needs to ask him some questions.”

“Is His Excellency expecting you?” The man who showed them into the hall was Scottish—though he spoke in an Edinburgh accent so clipped it could have come from an English film, the kind where butlers wore frock coats, which, actually, was what he seemed to be wearing.

“What do you think?” Raf replied.

“I’ll see if His Excellency is in.” And with that St. Cloud’s majordomo shuffled off towards an arch outlined in two shades of rose marble, leaving the three of them alone in a hall lit by gas-fired sconces designed to look like candle flame.

“Well, what a pleasant surprise.” The voice was higher than one might have expected given the undoubted gravitas of the man limping his way toward them in gold dressing gown and leather slippers.

“You know why this room is so high?”

“No,” said Raf. “But no doubt you’ll tell me.”

The Marquis laughed. “I had to make a trip,” he said and something in those words raised hairs on the back of Hani’s neck. “So I left my butler in charge… This was years ago,” he added, as if the age of the house wasn’t obvious. “And I told him to tell the
felaheen
when to stop and gave him a height to which to work.”

The old man raised a silver-topped cane and gestured at the nearest wall, where tiny alternating blue and white tiles filled the spaces between evenly spaced double pillars, each of which was topped by a broad capital. The pillars were pink marble, the capitals sandstone.

“You based it on Cordoba,” Hani said.

St. Cloud nodded. “Only my man got so drunk that when I got back, this had happened.” He pointed to a second tier of double pillars above the first. “Not those pillars, obviously, just the height of the wall behind. The workmen expected to be told to stop so they kept on building.” The Marquis shrugged. “Fair enough,” he added, in a tone of voice that made Hani decide on the spot that, where St. Cloud was concerned, fairness was unlikely to come into it.

“What happened to your butler?” asked Murad Pasha, his voice thoughtful.

A smile broke across the face of the Marquis and in it Raf saw pure emptiness. “There was a building accident,” said the Marquis. “Such things happen. Well, they do in North Africa.” Glancing from Hani to Murad, St. Cloud raised his eyebrows. “You should know,” he told Raf, “I’ve been very cross with you—so it was sensible to bring me presents.”

Hani merely blinked, but Murad’s eyes widened and he might have stepped backwards if the girl at his side hadn’t taken his hand, then hastily let it go. Both Hani and Murad suddenly blushing.

“This isn’t a social visit,” Raf said flatly. “And the children stay with me. We’re here so Murad Pasha can meet the man who tried to murder his grandfather.” He turned to the still-flustered boy, almost as if intending to introduce him formally to St. Cloud.

“I did no such…” Outrage froze words in the old man’s throat.

“You are not to leave this house,” announced Raf. “And you will surrender your
carte blanche
to me and the keys to all the cars in your garage.”

“And the helicopter,” Hani whispered. Catching Murad’s eye, she shrugged and explained, surprisingly gently for her, “there’s a helipad on the lawn.”

“Out of the question.” St. Cloud had found his voice. One that Raf could only describe as oozing bile. “I have total diplomatic immunity. God…” The old man shook so hard with fury that for the first time since his visitors had entered Dar St. Cloud he actually need his silver-topped stick. “You can’t just march in here.”

“Actually,” said Raf, “I think you’ll find I can. Because the alternative is that I place you under arrest and call police HQ in Tunis to have a van come out to collect you.” Raf shrugged. “Who knows,” he added, “given your tastes you might enjoy a week in the cells with a child molester. I’m sure you’d have lots to talk about…”

“And if I refuse?”

“Refuse what?” Raf asked. “To be arrested?”

St. Cloud’s nod was stiff. His scowl that of a man who’d faced worse things than two nervous children and the black-suited son of an Emir. “What will your officers do,” said St. Cloud coldly, “manhandle me into a car? They wouldn’t…”

“Dare?” One second Raf was watching St. Cloud, the next he had a pearl-handled Colt pressed hard into the side of the old man’s neck, at an angle guaranteed to remove most of his skull.

No one could remember seeing him move.

“Other people might be afraid of you,” said Raf. “I don’t have that problem.” Pulling back the hammer the way the Sufi had done, he squeezed the trigger so that only his thumb kept the hammer from falling. “You really think you can resist arrest?”

Around the Marquis the hall began to darken as the face in front of him changed unexpectedly/impossibly from human to something positively other.

The old man could taste smoke and feel a flat wall of heat that threatened to sear his papery skin. Every tile beneath his feet was burning. Except that there were no tiles because he was walking over a glowing chasm of red ember and flickering flame, while some unseen thing ripped mouthfuls of flesh from his shoulder.

He knew, without needing to be told, that he was standing over the entrance to hell.

“Well?”

St. Cloud blinked.

The tearing in his flesh dissolved as the pressure against his throat lessened, then almost disappeared.

“Well what?” he asked in a voice little more than a whisper.

“Still feel like resisting arrest?”

Merely blinking was enough to spill tears down cheeks no amount of laser peel had been able to give back their beautiful youth. “No.” St. Cloud shook his head, the slightest movement. All he wanted to do was check his shoulder for scars and look in a glass to see if that unforgiving heat had seared his face, but he didn’t quite dare.

“I had nothing to do with that attempt,” he said. “Nothing at all to do with the death of Eugenie de la Croix. You have my word.”

“And you have mine,” said Raf, “that I
will
find who tried to kill my father. And when I do that person will be arrested, no matter what.” The very flatness of Raf’s words threatened more clearly than any anger could do. “Feel free to pass that on to anyone you think should know…”

CHAPTER 35

Thursday 3rd March

As dawn’s white thread became visible over the Golfe de
Hammamet a call quavered onto the wind from the minaret of Nebeul mosque,
Allahu Akbar
intoned four times, followed by
Ashhadu anna la ilah ill’-Allah
, I testify there is no God besides God. And finally, towards the end, a phrase to distinguish this call from those that came later.
Al-salatu khayr min al-nawn.
Prayer is better than sleep.