Philip’s relations with women so far had been less than perfect. Philip guessed he knew that, though he didn’t much like it when the honest parts of his brain pointed it out. If sex is a channel through which emotions pour, the locks he had learned to operate primarily admitted anger. The women he found himself dating were the carnivorous kind, from whom one could expect no emotional sustenance: striking, annoying, status conscious, often late, impressed with Philip’s credentials but impossible to talk to, very interested in how they looked, very fond of jewellery, very suitable for fucking.
Allison was different from that. He liked her ability to make the best of things. If Philip had been married to someone like Allison, he might have stayed in the army. She would have charmed the right senior officers’ wives. And understood when he had to be away and couldn’t explain. And been nice to come home to.
So, suppose you lived with a suitable wife like Allison. What did you say at breakfast? What kind of home were you supposed to have? Philip’s mother and father were not a useful example. Philip had no immediate plans, you understand, but it was the kind of information one would like to have.
Philip’s last memories of his mother were of a woman going mad. Which she’d done about the time he was seven, the age of reason. Like if he was going to have a mind, she had to lose hers. He’d come home from school and found her sitting in the tiny kitchen of the mobile home they lived in, staring at the wall. She would not respond when he spoke to her. Eventually his father came home and took her away. It was difficult for Philip thereafter to interpret their frequent moves as anything other than an attempt to escape her. He assumed his father must have that objective, for surely his mother wanted to see her son again.
As he got older he acknowledged to himself that his mother wasn’t going to get well, didn’t want to see him again, couldn’t find them even if they’d left a trail of breadcrumbs, was not something he wanted to talk about. So.
As he got older, Philip’s image of his father never changed. He was an upright, humourless man, who had a way with machines. Or to be more accurate, he understood their point of view. They did not object if you were a perfectionist. People, on the other hand, could be a problem. Especially if they were in positions of authority and they did not meet your standards. Philip eventually decided that no one would meet his father’s standards. Some new form of mathematics was waiting to be invented that would prove him right in all respects on every subject. If in the interim he had to carry his lunch to work in a metal box, and had no friends, that was just an inconvenience, like being wounded early in a firefight, something to be ignored and endured, though without the possibility of a medal. Anyway, at the age of fifty-three, while Philip was being turned into a lieutenant, his father achieved coalescence with a drill press he was repairing. They gave Philip leave to attend the funeral, such as it was. He would have liked to see heroism in his father, but he couldn’t.
Philip supposed that from his own point of view, Ibrahim too had a frustrating father. Only instead of constantly changing employers, he did nothing. What other ruler in the world, having friendly relations with the United States and a potential invader on his border, would refuse advisers? Not to mention tanks. Whereas Ibrahim’s brave and newly elusive regiment travelled in trucks, which even with war paint were soft targets.
Having taught Ibrahim’s army how to hide, Philip knew his next assignment was to show it how to win. Ibrahim had allowed him to figure that out on his own. His Highness was a mixture of innocence and calculation. But that was only reasonable. He was trying to grow up and save his country at the same time.
More memories. Vivid as television, Philip was hitting again and again an unthinking classmate who had taunted him for living in a trailer park. Hitting him in the chest and shoulders and stomach, so as not to knock him out, the boy astonished, defenceless, progressively hurt, Philip bruising his own knuckles on the buttons of the boy’s cardigan sweater – they were fashionable that year at that high school – instructing himself to slow down, reminding himself that “taunt” wasn’t really the word, that it had just been a joke, really, hearing a girl’s voice from the ring of spectators saying, “Stop it, Philip. Stop it.” Stopping abruptly and walking away without saying a word. Crisp fall air on his face and hands. Who had that girl been who knew his name already? She reminded him of Cassandra.
It was nice to imagine coming home to Cassandra, actually. She was out of bounds in a number of ways, but she didn’t get under his skin the way other women did.
When he returned, sometimes, to the new-smelling house he was permitted to rent, he would sit in the kitchen and sorrow would wash over him. Alidar was so empty, it would be full of possibilities. It should be possible to invent oneself anew.
Philip had longed to work for the law firm that employed him from the time he first heard of its existence. He remembered staring at its name at the top of the interview sign-up sheet. The firm had desired Philip for the glamour of his war record. As far as they were concerned, despite making Law Review, he was an exotic. Except Arthur. To be fair, Arthur had never regarded him as suitable, and had said so. But had kept him around, if at a distance, as a matter of contingency planning. Arthur was a Sunni, Philip figured, and by nature in command. Philip himself was a Shia. The best outcome he could hope for was to be found useful, like the ever-commercial Buhara.
The answer to Arthur’s implicit question, of course, was that a lot of shit was about to come down. Philip at least knew that.
21
Allison sat on the hillside, hidden from the houses by a large bush. She had the rifle mounted at her shoulder, with the barrel resting on a branch. She had crawled down from the reverse slope before dawn, found her spot, and reached in through the bush to break off leaves and twigs and create a tunnel to shoot through. She had “zeroed” the rifle – she had a tendency to shoot to the left, which the sights could be adjusted for – and done her reconnaissance the day before. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
Waiting was tricky. She figured she would have several seconds after Sally Valentine came out of the back door. That was plenty of time to press her cheek against the stock of the rifle, look through the telescopic sight, aim, catch the moment between heartbeats when her body would be still, and squeeze the trigger. Plenty of time, that is, if she saw the door start to open. The problem was, staring at a door that doesn’t open is mildly hypnotic. The mind goes off on little excursions of its own. She had to keep reminding herself what she was there for.
Getting away might also be tricky. She would have to get back over the top of the hill, and anyone looking that way would be able to see her. There shouldn’t be anyone looking in that direction. The sun was behind her. It was unlikely anyone in one of the other houses would be staring out of the window into the sun. The better view was to the front, in any case. If some bored wife in one of the other five houses felt like just staring out of a window at – what was it? – nine forty-three in the morning, she would look out the front, down the gentle slope toward the Gulf. Nevertheless, it was a risk. Which was why she was wearing a scarf that covered her blonde hair, and under her chador a loose-fitting print dress such as the plump Lebanese women wore, which covered her arms and had a hem down about her ankles. If someone did see her, what they would see would confirm the rumours that the killer was a woman, but one who had emerged from the broader confusion of Middle Eastern politics, and was pretending to be local.
The material the dress was made of was absolutely characteristic, and actually rather attractive in its garish way. Allison wondered whether it would be possible to have the dress remade, much shorter and much tighter, and wear it to a party. It would be quite amusing, since everyone would recognise its provenance, and her slim figure was so very different from that of the Lebanese women. Amusing, that is, assuming that no one at the party had happened to be looking out of the back window of one of those five houses at the moment Sally Valentine was shot.
An inte
resting thing was that the European community didn’t seem to know anything about the way selected Arabs were being exterminated. Ian, she thought, knew, but he wasn’t talking. Same as he didn’t talk about being queer. Most of the, excuse me, gay individuals you met, and you could meet a lot in New York if you wanted to, eventually told you about their predicament. Even the male ones, who presumably were not looking to you for action. A quite remarkable number of people, in fact, had told her they were gay, or cheating on their husbands, or something notable about their sex lives. Perhaps she looked like she’d be shocked. Perhaps she looked like she’d like being shocked. No, to be honest, she very consciously set out to look like that. She liked having people expose themselves. Like some Bambi walking into the crosshairs. Mostly she worked with a pistol, but she’d always liked the rifle best.
The faggot who’d done her hair on Madison Avenue had spent a whole year marvelling at her innocence. He’d kiss his men friends when they stopped by and she’d get saucer eyed. Piece by piece he’d told her his life story. Keith was his name. From Wisconsin. So one day she’d said, take me to the Village and show me. So they went downtown and she met his friends. And they were polite as could be, though they giggled a lot and thought it was terribly daring to have a Girl Scout in their leather bar. And she waited, the way a hunter knows how, until the topic of tattoos came up, and said as casually as possible that she had one. Which they didn’t believe, and she’d have to prove it, which she couldn’t possibly, it would be too embarrassing. Where was it? She couldn’t even tell them. And they dared her, like kids in a schoolyard. And she said, “I couldn’t show you here, anyway.” So one of them named Justin said, “Sweetie, everything that can be done has been done in this bar, including some things God didn’t think of.”
So she said, “No, I don’t believe it. Here in this booth? You personally saw it?” And Justin said, “I personally did some of it.” So she put her hand over her mouth like a fucking parody. Which they all loved.
So she said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“No, Sweetie,” said Justin, “I do not.” He was one of those faggots who really hated women. His anger was close to the surface.
So she said, “You want to put some money on it?”
And he said, “Sweetie, if you can afford Keith, I can’t afford you.”
So she said, “Think of some penalty, then. Come on, guys.
This is a leather bar, right. Think of some punishment for Justin if I do have a tattoo.”
By this point, of course, it was clear to everyone that she must have a tattoo, but she had Justin in a position where he couldn’t back down, so they all thought up things Justin wouldn’t like, though in fact he might like them quite a lot, during which discussion she caught Keith’s eye and winked at him, which made him blush, which gave her an idea. So she said, “Stop. You guys are too gross. I’ll make it simple. If I have a tattoo, Justin, you will be Keith’s slave from now until tomorrow morning, and I do not want to hear about the details. Deal?”
Justin was mincemeat. So she pulled up her skirt and they all viewed her tattoo with a mixture of admiration and horror, since she wasn’t wearing any underpants. And Keith did her hair for free the rest of the time she lived in New York. Sad, really.
Anyway, Ian, who would not, incidentally, have taken the bet, being very smart and having no taste for humiliation, who had a crush on the king’s Nubian and was embarrassed about it – it was easy to see when Isa came to the restaurant with messages from the king – anyway, Ian clearly knew everything the police knew, and more, probably, since he went to somebody’s party almost every night, but the rest of the non-Arabs were clueless. Which was another reason to leave town: the urge to shock them was growing.
Ian, in fact, knew one hell of a lot, when you put all the pieces together, and evidently not just from the books he lent to Philip. He never, if you watched him carefully, actually drank very much. Or said much that was true. If she were Maloof, she’d have Allison kill him.
Philip had been trying to unravel the threads of religion and tribal allegiance that bound the Gulf together. He’d even tried talking to Bernard from the Telegraph, but cut off the tutorial when the man patronised him. He recited each new discovery to Allison as they ran. Did she know that after the Mongols overran Baghdad in the thirteenth century, Sunni persecution of the Shias intensified? It was sort of like the Germans blaming the Jews for losing the First World War. Yes, she knew that.
Philip should have taken Maloof’s course, though she couldn’t tell him that. Maloof would have taught him that that was all in the past – or was going to be in the past. “I am a post-Westphalian figure,” he had once told her. “I will be the first Arab to go beyond those divisive issues. They will call me the Attaturk of Arabia.”
Maloof didn’t talk that way often, and it meant he was frustrated about something and needed to reassure himself by lecturing. Her job was to be interested.
“‘Post-Westphalian?’”
“Treaty signed in 1648, where the European powers agreed not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs, a category defined to include religion. We Arabs, as you will have observed, are not there yet. But history moves fast when the right person comes along.”
“So it won’t matter whether you’re a Sunni or a Shia?”
“I am both, Allison.” Maloof paused. “I am the future.”
The sun glinted on the Valentines’ back door, and the lady of the house appeared. Allison moved quickly. Aim, relax...At the last moment, she wondered whether she had, actually, adjusted the sights of the rifle, so she moved the crosshairs a little to the right. The bullet shattered the stucco next to Sally Valentine’s head. Allison was scrambling up the hill. She heard the sound of screaming. Not a frightened scream but a determined scream. As she went over the top of the hill she glanced back. La Valentine was pointing at her. Other housewives were coming out of their back doors.
22
Philip could not explain why exploring the desert with Sheik Fawzi made him so happy. But it did. He rode standing up, holding on to the roll bar, and His Excellency drove the jeep. He gave directions and His Excellency obeyed. The whole exercise had a Keystone Cops quality. But most of all, the thing was, Fawzi himself seemed to have a marvellous time.
He took the position that Philip was forcing him to do it – to learn to drive, to drive off the road, to risk his neck, to “waste” his Fridays looking for “pathetic” ruins. But every hour they spent together belied him. He knew a lot about the ruins, actually, could read the archaic inscriptions, could recite the history that had deposited forts in the desert and then abandoned them. He even took Philip to the Great Fort, a ruin twenty-five miles outside the city, about which there was plenty of history and legend, and which foreigners did not normally get to.
Whenever Philip tried to nudge the conversation into the present, however, Fawzi would elude him. “Let us enjoy today,” he would say. “Sufficient unto tomorrow is the annoyance thereof.”
And then he would launch into a story – like the time he showed up at Claridge’s without a reservation – “I had one somewhere else” – and pretended not to speak English, and addressed everyone in slow, careful Arabic “like Colonel Blimp in a headcloth” until they brought a boy out from the kitchen to interpret. “This was soon after it pleased God to quadruple the price of oil the first time, so everyone in a robe was treated like royalty. I winked at the boy and insisted he have lunch with me in my suite. After the meal, I ordered a girl. The waiter was flustered. I called for the manager. The manager was very clear: Claridge’s did not supply girls. ‘How stupid of you,’ I told him – all this is going through the Lebanese kitchen apprentice, you understand – ‘You have a wine cellar, no? You have fine cigars, which by the way, I would like one.’ – the waiter is dispatched – ‘Why would you not have girls?’ After they light my cigar, I say I think I will leave. The manager is so pleased he does not object when I tell him to send my bil
l to the Kuwaiti Embassy. I do not like the English, Cooper. They were rude to me when I was young and Alidar was poor. That is why you are an American.” Pause. “But I never dreamed they would send me such a craaaazy American.” With which statement, he executed an abrupt turn to the right, causing Philip to almost tumble out of the jeep.
A memory flashed into his head of his father swinging him round and round, holding him by his small wrists, until they both fell over in the grass, Philip laughing, his father smiling at him. That must have been before Philip even started kindergarten. He had forgotten about those times.
Philip righted himself and Fawzi was speaking again.
“Would I not have made an excellent terrorist, Cooper?”
“Your Excellency would have succeeded at whatever line of work he chose.”
“Do you think I am a successful prime minister?”
“You have kept the job for a long time.”
“There is no finish line,” said Fawzi.
“Did you make that up?”
“Alas, no. I saw it on a poster distributed by a company that manufactures running shoes. Would you like me better if I had made it up?”
Philip did not respond. He remembered the poster. He did not like the slogan. On the other hand, he liked Fawzi better for having been honest. He couldn’t say that though.
“Do you trust me then?” said Fawzi.
“I have no choice.”
“Yes you do. You can always go home.”
“Do you trust me?” said Philip. He was not sure where this conversation was going.
“I have no choice,” said Fawzi.
For a quarter of an hour both men were silent. Fawzi brought the jeep up onto a road, and increased speed. The breeze was welcome. Philip sat down.
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