The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (119 page)

A doctor at the Imperial Free once suggested Eduardo reduce his coffee intake to one cup a day but Eduardo had barely paused to consider this. The man was a foreigner, newly arrived in the city, and would learn. No one who actually lived in El Isk for longer than a week could have made that suggestion.

Instead, Eduardo had agreed with himself to cut his intake to eight cups a day. This wasn’t always possible, given the nature of his job; but his success or failure gave Eduardo something to talk about to Rose, a mild-natured whore he’d met a few months earlier, when the man sent him to do a job at Maison 52, Pascal Coste.

Rose claimed to be English and, although she had the hips and buttocks of an Egyptian, the smallness of her breasts convinced Eduardo that this might be the truth. As did the half-smoked Ziganov forever hanging from her fingers, its gold band stained with lipstick. In Iskandryia, even licensed whores didn’t smoke in public.

But then women tended not to visit cafés either. Unless it was one of those expensive places around Place Saad Zaghloul like Le Trianon, where ordinary rules seemed not to apply. Money did that, Eduardo had decided. It rewrote the rules. Or perhaps it just remade them into something so complex and discreet that ordinary people like him no longer understood what they were. The man was like that, governed by rules Eduardo took on trust.

Eduardo’s office was above a haberdasher’s at the back of a bus station on Place Zaghloul. The place was a walk-up with winding stairs and a toilet on the half landing, which Eduardo had to share with the shop below. It had a melamine desk, a cheap chair in black plastic that looked almost like leather and a grey metal filing cabinet. Plus a state-of-the-art computer, quite out of keeping with the rest of the furniture.

The computer lived on a side table. Well, it would have been a side table if it hadn’t actually been an old door supported at either end by plinths of crudely mortared bricks. Eduardo, whose work it was, had tried to apologize for its ugliness but the man had waved away Eduardo’s explanation. It seemed Ashraf Bey liked the door/table combination more than he liked anything else in the office.

Sharing Eduardo’s office space were two cockroaches and a colony of ants who dwindled come autumn and, Eduardo imagined, would be back with the spring. He wasn’t sure, not having had the place long enough to find out. The cockroaches remained, however, sharing his desk and living off a diet of sugar that fell from Eduardo’s morning doughnut.

With his first coffee, which he drank just after dawn, Eduardo ordered an almond croissant. He’d adopted the habit after having breakfast one morning with the bey because this was what the bey ate.

“Eduardo?” The voice came hollow with static and thin from being bounced off a satellite too far above El Iskandryia for Eduardo to really comprehend. All the same, he would have known it anywhere.

“Excellency…”

The voice sighed.

Eduardo was meant to call him
boss
on the phone. Even when answering his watch in the office out of sight of everyone else.

“I’m here, boss,” the small man said hurriedly.

“You listening?” The voice on the other end wasn’t cross, just careful.

“Sure, boss. Always… No, I mean it.” Eduardo tried to sound hurt but the man was right, Eduardo hardly ever listened. And when Eduardo did he always had to concentrate extra hard to make sense of what the other person said.

“Yeah, I got it,” Eduardo said finally, when the voice had finished explaining what Eduardo was expected to do. “Well, except for that bit about becoming a policeman…”

Life was a series of comings and goings…

Some philosopher said that, or it might have been Cheb Rai; every time the thought popped into Eduardo’s head he got a tune just out of reach. Three chords leading to a fourth that Eduardo knew would, should he ever remember it, give him the whole.

All the same, whoever said or sang them, the words rang true. People came and went. They walked into one’s life and walked out again with no reason that Eduardo could see, but then he wasn’t very clever. Lots of people had told him that. Smarter people could see the threads that tied together events. And none were smarter than the bey. Eduardo really believed that.

In the cafés people talked of how the trial of the warlord Colonel Abad was tied to a dock strike rolling out across the North African littoral. And how Ashraf al-Mansur, now in Tunis, had gone there to kill the father who’d abandoned him. Others insisted he was there to save the old man’s life. And a few, mostly Bolsheviks, were of the opinion that the Emir was already dead and all al-Mansur wanted was to make sure he got his share of the inheritance.

Eduardo knew different.

Ashraf Bey was trying to find his mother’s original wedding certificate… Sometimes politics were way more complicated than Eduardo could understand.

CHAPTER 38

Friday 4th March

An elegant young woman outside Arrivals was waving
for a taxi. Something Eduardo didn’t need to do since he had a car already waiting. At least, he had a uniformed driver clutching a board with Eduardo’s name on it so Eduardo assumed he had a car as well.

Eduardo almost offered the woman a lift into the centre but when he nodded to her she just scowled. So Eduardo went back to helping Rose navigate her way through a crowd of C3N cameramen waiting for taxis at the front of Tunis Arrivals.

This was what happened if one suddenly lifted the embargo on flights to facilitate the departure of nonessential diplomatic staff. More people turned up than left. He was pretty sure that wasn’t what the UN had in mind.

“We’re here, sir.”

Eduardo liked that last word. It suggested that the driver thought he and Rose looked properly Western, which they were more or less. Soviet tourists would have got
commissar
, not meant obviously but always good for increasing
baksheesh
as tourists called tips, getting wrong both country and language. Anyone local wearing a suit like Eduardo’s would have merited
effendi
, just to be on the safe side.

So that
sir
meant the young driver realized Eduardo was not local and not a Soviet tourist. Unless, of course, the boy called everybody that.

Originally Eduardo had been planning to fly alone and travel first class, the man having said buy any ticket he liked as long as the flight left that afternoon. But when Eduardo realized that premium cost half the price of first he decided Rose should come with him.

So that was what they did. And though Eduardo got the feeling Rose had never flown before, she insisted she’d flown dozens of times to numerous destinations. But then he’d told her exactly the same.

What’s more, she’d enjoyed the flight. Eduardo knew, because he’d been careful to ask. And she looked great. He’d been careful to tell her that too.

The Benz waiting outside Tunis Arrivals was big and black, smarter than Eduardo could ever have expected, with metal pipes coming out of the engine and running down either side of the hood. The pipes had been silver to start with but now they were grey with wide bands of kingfisher blue, like petrol floating on top of a fresh puddle.

Alexandre, who was young and wore the uniform of a Tunis detective (something he suspected his visitors might not yet have realized), walked round to the back door of the Emir’s second-favourite car and held it open.

At a nod from the small man, the woman clambered in and smoothed a black dress covered with red roses down over her pink knees. Leaving her partner still anxiously eyeing their luggage, such as it was.

“My case…”

Ashraf Bey’s original call had told Eduardo to buy a new suit, new shoes, several shirts and a tie. The man had even specified the colour of each: dark blue for the suit, white for the shirts and red for the tie (no stripes). He’d said nothing about buying a case in which to put these things.

“Of course, sir.” Alexandre was apologetic. “I should have realized you’d need your case with you.” He picked up the cardboard box with its cheap handle, wondering at its lightness, and waited for Eduardo to join the woman. Only then did Alexandre put the case in the well of the borrowed car, beside Eduardo’s feet.

“Where to, sir?”

Eduardo thought about it. “What are my options?”

Alexandre tried not to sigh.

Accelerated entry to officer level and descent from an ex-
colon
family that had owned dairy farms in the High Tell guaranteed he got given the shitty jobs by sergeants who grew up in the medina or the nouvelle ville, people he’d outrank within the year and who knew that fact but could never forgive it.

All the same, the fact Alexandre had been warned to handle this job with discretion meant the anxious-looking man in the rear seat had to be somebody important. Exactly why that might be became clear when Alexandre opened his mouth to answer, only to discover that the man sat behind him was already talking, mostly to himself.

“We could start with the Police HQ, I suppose.”

Alexandre nodded.

“Or we could go find the boss…”

To Alexandre that meant his colonel. He got the feeling this man had someone else in mind. “The boss?” Alexandre asked, in a tone he hoped was politely casual.

“Ashraf al-Mansur…”

“You know the bey?”

“He’s my boss.” Eduardo sounded as proud of the fact as he felt, which was very proud indeed.

“And my boss too,” Alexandre said. “Apparently Ashraf Bey is the new Chief of Police.” That was what he’d been told anyway. It was all change at HQ.

“Actually…” Eduardo glanced at Rose and looked embarrassed. “The thing is, you see… I’m the new Chief.” Eduardo tasted the words as he said them and sat up a little straighter in his seat.

And, like a good detective, he noticed the way Alexandre immediately did the same, straightening his shoulders and quickly adjusting his cap. That was when he realized Alexandre was one of his men.

“I’m sorry, Your Excellency. I didn’t know.”

“Why should you?” Eduardo said, feeling expansive. “And you don’t need to call me Excellency, sir is fine… All the same, I have a question for you. An important question.”

Alexandre froze.

“What do you know…?” Eduardo whipped out a leather notebook he’d bought at Iskandryia airport, flipped it open, and watched the opening page come alight. “Let me see, what do you know about a pâtissier called Pascal Boulart? Other than the fact he was stabbed in an alley behind Maison Hafsid and a sous-chef was arrested…”

It turned out Alexandre knew even less than that. He knew the killing all right, he just had no memory of anyone having been arrested by the police. As Alexandre tried to point out, as circumspectly as possible, this might just mean the murderer had been picked up by Kashif Pasha’s men.

Although the military wing of the police was meant to liaise with the civilian branches, this sometimes failed to happen, very occasionally, obviously.

“Find out if they did,” said Eduardo. “And get me files on everyone killed in the massacre at the Domus Aurea.”

“There were only four.” Alexandre regretted the remark as soon as he made it. “I mean, the fifth one got away.”

“Four is enough,” Eduardo said firmly. “Now take me to the hotel.” He needed a shower, as did Rose. And with luck, if the shower was big enough, they could share.

“Hotel…?”

Eduardo nodded.

“You are not staying at a hotel, sir. My orders were to take you wherever you wanted and deliver your luggage to the Dar Ben Abdallah.”

“Dar, maison, hôtel,”
said Eduardo, “it’s all the same, you know.” He turned to Rose. “In French,” he explained, “
hôtel
means big house, like in
Hôtel de Ville
… Isn’t that right?”

Alexandre nodded, not taking his eyes off the road.

On their way into the city all the other traffic moved out of the way. Eduardo was wondering about this until he remembered the flag. He wasn’t sure what the flag on the hood stood for but it looked very official.

CHAPTER 39

Sunday 6th March

Palms shaded yellow earth, so that sunlight sketched patterns
across the banks of a narrow stream, highlighting twigs and dead fronds. The water in the
seguia
was dirty, the grass edging the ditch and the undersides of the palms less bright than Zara expected. Only ungrown dates, tiny and green and still vulnerable to the sand winds, seemed created from a brighter scheme altogether. This was a world of ochres and earth hues. An Impressionist umbrella restricted to the palette of a Klee.

Farther along, half-in/half-out of the stream lay a fallen palm with its trunk ringed like an endlessly extruded pinecone. The crown was gone but, since fronds extended fingerlike from beneath the sand that covered a newly repaired footbridge, the reason was not hard to find.

The coolness of the gardens was in welcome contrast to the last fifty miles across the chott, when the air had been salt and hot, unseasonably so the taxi driver had told her, several times.

“I’m here to collect Lady Hana al-Mansur.”

Zara stood on the edge of Tozeur’s famous grove, home of the translucent
deglet nur
and site of a quarter of a million palms fed by two hundred springs that carried water to the date trees. The only thing to stop her reaching a small palace on the other side of the stream was a single soldier guarding a narrow bridge. The palace had been built by one of the old beys or emirs. It must have been, because only a notable could get away with building a palace on land historically reserved for growing dates.

Over the centuries, gold and slaves had passed through this area, carpets and priceless manuscripts, swords and spices. None of them creating the wealth of the date palms. At its height, a millennium before, a thousand dromedaries a day were said to have left Tozeur, laden with dates and even now many of the town’s inhabitants were
khammes
, sharecroppers who maintained the groves and in return took one-fifth of the harvest as their pay.