The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (123 page)

Secret bags were kept in a vault below the Bardo, that much the archivist knew. Once sealed they could only be opened in the presence of a witness, provided… There’d followed a long list of stipulations to which the young Kashif hadn’t bothered to listen.

Practically dragging the archivist to where the man believed the secret bags were stored, Kashif demanded they both be given entry. With the Emir gone and that wing otherwise empty, the chamberlain had done the obvious; opened the front door and saluted smartly. It had taken Kashif ten minutes to identify the vault and another five to bully someone into unlocking the door. A problem never to arise again after Kashif relieved the porter of his key.

Goatskin, Kashif decided, maybe sheep, nothing too fancy. Cured in a way that was almost intentionally perfunctory and stitched crudely with gut. Impressive signatures covered each bag, mostly from his father and occasionally Eugenie. One from the Soviet ambassador and even one from the Marquis de St. Cloud. Any person wanting to open a bag to examine its contents had to sign the outside before the seal was cut. Some of the newer seals were almost silver, others oxidized down to a dull black.

Kashif was inordinately proud to discover that he had a whole rack to himself. Seven leather bags in total. Starting with the first, Kashif cut its seal and began to read an account of his life that he recognized.

He was surly, bad at games and prone to violence. His unbroken run of goals, his easy knockdowns in boxing and rapid fencing victories owed more to who he was than to any innate physical talent.

His marks suffered an automatic 25 percent inflation. The French mistress he liked most had been paid off after complaining that he’d molested her in a corridor.

The summer Kashif turned seventeen was the year he got his reputation for working hard. He’d appear every morning at the relevant wing of the Bardo, notebook in hand and a nervous young archivist two steps behind. And each evening he’d make his way back to his mother’s dar with another courtier’s life pinned to the board of his memory.

He made friends fast that summer and was given three cars, including his first Porsche and a speedboat he used to take Russian girls water-skiing, until he hit a sunken rock and an attaché’s daughter ended up a casualty. The high point was when he acquired his own villa on Iles de Kirkeah, from an elderly general whose devotion to his childless, long-suffering wife was apparently exceeded only by his devotion to a long string of pretty Moroccan houseboys.

Every bag he chose Kashif dutifully signed, leaving it to the archivist to repack the contents and affix a new seal. The one for his mother was especially interesting. Particularly in relation to a visit made to Gerda Schulte three weeks before she married his father. A surgeon briefly famous for patenting the only medically undetectable, biologically foolproof method of restoring virginity. A technique surprisingly popular among the middle classes of North Africa and the source of her heir’s considerable wealth.

It was a snippet of information Kashif parlayed with his mother into a new apartment in the Bardo, one with its own entrance. His other knowledge Kashif kept close as an enemy, deadly as a friend; using it only as necessary once that first flush of power was gone. Murad wasn’t even born when Kashif discovered the bags and, by the time he was, the bags had gone. Exactly when they vanished Kashif never discovered. He’d gone to Monte Carlo one Monday and come back two years later to find the room empty and repainted, awaiting delivery of an apparently valuable collection of late-nineteenth-century tax returns.

One thing Kashif knew for certain though. No bag had made reference to his father having married again. At least not until that American girl to whom Eugenie introduced him, Murad’s mother. The one who went off a cliff. And the bag that dealt with Moncef’s bastards made no reference to an Ashraf al-Mansur or Ashraf anything else, come to that… Whatever the late Eugenie de la Croix or his father might claim.

“Afternoon,” Raf said to a guard by the side of the path. The man looked at Major Jalal, trying to work out if he was meant to salute Ashraf Bey or not. Just to be safe, he saluted anyway.

Up ahead stood Kashif Pasha, with no one else in sight. At least not obviously; one sniper hid in a clump of palms to Raf’s left.
Phoenix dactylifera
, tree of the Phoenicians with finger-resembling fruit. Raf had Hani to thank for that snippet of information.

Another sniper was behind him. The smell of tobacco as Raf entered the amphitheatre had been too strong not to whisper its warning. That Kashif Pasha felt such protection was necessary almost made Raf feel better.

“Brother.” Raf drawled the word. No greeting and no title, zero hostility either. Let the other man make the running on this. Kashif Pasha was supposed to be a poker player, famous for it apparently…

Raf smiled.

“Feeling happy about something?” asked Kashif.

“Always glad to see you,” Raf said. “You know how it is.”

“No,” said Kashif, “I can’t say I do.”

Raf’s grin was bleak as he adjusted his Armani shades and smelled the hot wind. Sweat, fear, anger and triumph. Beneath the distant tobacco and Kashif’s cologne there was a veritable symphony of olfactory molecules being ripped apart by a breeze that filtered between salt-stunted thorns.

“Oh well,” he said.

They stood in the ruins of a small Roman amphitheatre with fifteen circles of seating cut direct into crumbling pink rock. The central circle was half-buried in dust and a cheap kiosk near the entrance had signs that read
Closed
in seven languages. Its filthy window and padlocked door suggested the site had been shut since autumn.

There was undoubtedly a lesson there if only Raf had the mind for it, because according to Khartoum there was a lesson in everything; in appearance and the reality behind appearance and in the reality behind the first appearance of reality. In Khartoum’s opinion to hunt knowledge was to lose it.

“You seem amused…” Kashif’s voice was cold. “Am I missing something?”

“We all are,” said Raf. “That’s the very essence of being human.”

Two of Major Jalal’s soldiers looked at each other. One of them mouthing to the other and Raf caught the silent word.
Moncef
… His father, that was what they were saying. He was like his father.

Mad.

Even Kashif Pasha nodded. As if willing, for the moment, to admit that the one might be son of the other.

“This missing waiter…” said Raf. And got no further.

“He’s confessed.”

Behind his shades, Raf blinked. “To what?”

“Disguising himself to infiltrate the Domus Aurea with the express intent of killing the Emir.” Kashif’s face burned with anger. Or maybe triumph. “He was working for the French. As an
agent provocateur
in a revolutionary cell that also included the dead Sufi. He’s admitted everything.”

“And you know his confession is true, how?” A reasonable enough comment one would have thought.

“Because he wrote it himself.”
So close to Raf was Kashif Pasha that Raf could identify at least three of the things Kashif had eaten for lunch. “Ask the criminal if you don’t believe me… And then we can shoot him.” A minor tic at the edge of Kashif’s mouth pulled it out of shape. His pupils were large and his gaze direct.

Kashif Pasha meant it.

This was when Raf realized the pasha was serious. He’d summoned Raf to watch the execution of a man Kashif Pasha genuinely believed had tried to kill his father. All because of a throwaway line from Raf about suspecting Kashif. A barb that had dug deep into the pasha’s flesh, dragging him to a point of intensity that owed far more to indignation than fear or guilt. That worried Raf.

Bluster, threats, fake fury, those Raf could handle. But a demand for approval, this expectation that he would immediately withdraw all accusations when faced with evidence… There was a sour note to this that rang like a cracked bell.

If not Kashif, then who… Berlin/the
Thiergarten
? It seemed unlikely.

“Your waiter,” said Raf. “Where is he?”

In reply, Kashif jerked his head towards yet another black Jeep, parked beside the ticket kiosk. Smoked windows, roo bars and a radiator grille like the baleen of a loose-lipped whale. One could only assume the
mubahith
imported them in job lots.

“Get him,” Kashif demanded.

Major Jalal nodded and seconds later, as two guards tossed a naked figure at Raf’s feet his heart sank. He should never, ever have let Chef Edvard register him with Domus Aurea security using someone else’s name.

Hassan stank of fear and bled from a split mouth. His nose was broken, three front teeth were gone and his face was a veritable rainbow of pain. Whip marks scored his heavy shoulders. A dozen cigarette burns speckled his soft belly. There had been nothing subtle about the questioning.

“This is your waiter?”

Major Jalal nodded.

“According to my niece,” said Raf, “the missing waiter was tallish and thin. This man is short and fat.”

“Lady Hana is mistaken.” Major Jalal’s voice was firm. “But then the dining room was lit by chandeliers and somewhat dark so it would be an easy error for a frightened child to make. Besides, Your Excellency has his brother’s word that this is the man.”

“Let me guess,” said Raf. “He protested his innocence for a couple of days, then decided to tell you the truth…”

“Is there a point to this?” Kashif’s voice was hard.

“Of course there’s a point,” said Raf with a sigh.

The three-day rule had been explained to him by two people he admired. One of them, as mother of Seattle’s famous Five Winds Friendship Society had inherited an administration that kept
surgeons
on its payroll. And it had taken using their undoubted skills on two soon-to-retire elder brothers to get that anomaly changed, or so Hu San had said. The other person was Felix.

The rule of three was simple. And in a list of five it came just before the one that said blustering men broke faster than quiet women… No matter how brave or well trained, even a saint was ready to confess to devil worship by the third day; there were no exceptions. Keep death away and rack up the pain and by day three all anybody wanted to know was where to sign.

Chef Edvard’s sous-chef had been no different. Poor sod.

“Hassan,” said Raf and watched as the fat boy raised his head, eyes widening as he saw the man in front of him.

“You’re…”

“Ashraf Bey,” said Raf, kicking Hassan in the stomach. “Well done.” He kicked again and when Hassan finally looked up with imploring eyes, Raf went for the kidneys. It was this blow that knocked Hassan unconscious.

“You know the man?” Kashif’s voice was thoughtful.

“Of course I know him,” Raf said. “I’m Chief of Police. He’s the main witness to the Maison Hafsid killing and on the precinct payroll as an informer. One of my lieutenants was wondering what had happened.”

“You recognized by sight a man who tried to shoot my father…”
Kashif seemed to be trying the sentence for size, considering its usefulness.

On either side of the pasha his guards had gone very still. Maybe it was Kashif’s tone of voice or perhaps he had some signal like a finger tapping against his nose, a shift of his weight or a certain nod of his head. Most people in his position had special signs and ways of giving instructions.

One of them must have said club this impostor to the ground.

“
Well done
,” said the voice. Raf ignored it. He had more important things to do than talk to the fox.

Twisting steadily, Raf pulled against his shackles until he felt one arm dislocate. It hurt no more than many other things in his life and far less than waking after the operation that replaced his kidneys as a child. About as much as a beating he once took in Seattle from a street punk called Wild Boy, back when they both worked for Hu San.

Raf hadn’t seen the blow coming. Hadn’t even felt the pistol butt that brought oblivion, the state to which his life seemed eternally drawn. One minute Raf was standing facing Kashif Pasha, then darkness came.

When Raf woke the first time he was in a waiter’s uniform. The white blindness in his eyes the afterglow of a camera flash; and for a moment, floating on pain and watching the camera burn on the inside of his eyelids, Raf believed he was young again.

And then he knew he wasn’t and hadn’t been for a very long time.

CHAPTER 44

Friday 11th March

Opening the door was easy. Hani just pushed a button
that read
emergency release
and a swirl of blissfully cool air exploded onto Ibn Chabbat Square. To close the door behind her she hit a button marked
shut
… This button was on the inside, obviously enough. And then they were in the coach, examining its hydraulic seats and checking the spiral stairs that led to a glass observation bubble.

“Too obvious,” said Hani.

At the very rear of the coach was a wall of showers and toilets (two of each, divided into male and female). Between these and the seating area farther forward was a short corridor featuring a couple of sliding doors on each side. So the bus went seats/narrow corridor/wall of loos where a back window should be. The sliding doors were marked
stateroom 1, 2, 3 and 4
…

“I don’t get it,” Murad complained, not for the first time.

“Good,” Hani told him. “Stick with that.”

She pushed him through one of the sliding doors, having first flipped up its lock with a penknife, an act of breaking and entering made much easier than she expected by the coachmakers’ fear of litigation, which guaranteed that every door was simplicity itself to open from the outside should the need arise. Which, in Hani’s opinion, it had.

A man’s room, Russian to judge from the phrase book and an open magazine left on the side. “Try the next one,” said Hani and bundled Murad back through the sliding door, relocking it behind her.

A woman, travelling alone. The upper bunk unmade, blankets still folded, the lower one exhibiting neatly turned-back covers and a perfectly straight pillow. Also Soviet. Too neat by half. “We’ll try the other side,” Hani said.