Felaheen a-3

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Possibly she should have been watching the track but most of her time was taken up wiping perspiration from her face or pulling at the armpits of her uniform where sweat had stained the camouflage almost black.

  When she did look up the djinn was almost upon her.

  "I've got a question," it said.

  Staring in disbelief, uncertain whether to be most shocked by the shackles, the brandished weapons or the apparition's sheer nakedness, Leila de Loria broke every rule she'd ever been taught and took two steps backwards, ending up against the wall of her hut.

  "Eugenie still dead?" the apparition demanded. It stank of battlefields and corpses, words as hot as any khamsin flowing across her face.

  A shocked nod.

  "Major Gide?" Raf dragged Eugenie's replacement from his memory. Her face and voice, even her weapons becoming visible to the fragment of his mind still interested in those things. "Well?"

  "She's been arrested."

  A bark of laughter greeted these words.

  "By Moncef?"

  Sergeant de Loria, who at twenty-seven had killed five men (all but the first in battle), dared a glance at this djinn who used the Emir's name so freely. He was too emaciated, too feral to be human. And yet his elemental fury was hidden behind cheap shades of a kind found in the local market and the sores around his wrists bled lymph.

  "Who . . ."

  "Lilith, son of," said Raf. "Busy failing to make the seven years' anonymity necessary to become like you." His words were clear and stark, the meaning behind them less so; but then Sergeant de Loria had never met Hani or had her life told as a fairy tale.

  "Who arrested Major Gide?" said the figure. "Answer me . . ."

  A kiss of warm steel convinced the sergeant that this really was happening. She stood helpless in front of an apparition that held an automatic to her head. The apparition was naked, shackled and stank of rotting flesh but the gun was a standard-issue Browning and its knuckle was turning white on the trigger.

  "Kashif Pasha or the Emir?"

  "Kashif Pasha," the sergeant said, voice sticking in her throat. "Kashif Pasha arrested Major Gide . . . The Emir is dying. They say he was poisoned."

  "Who by?" Raf demanded.

  "It happened at a feast Kashif Pasha gave in Tunis. There was a waiter . . ."

  Raf stepped around her sentry box and swung up the road barrier as he went through. Allowance for the faint possibility he might have to exit in a hurry.

  "Leave it like that," he told the sergeant over his shoulder.

  Leila de Loria looked from the raised barrier to the Browning she'd just wrenched from her own holster. Then she stared at the buttocks of the naked djinn as it stamped its way up the path, a gun in either hand and rusted chain swinging noisily.

  Returning her revolver to its holster, the sergeant shrugged. Her mother was from the Nefzaoua and followed the Ibadite branch of the One True Faith. She knew better than to interfere with the games of princes, madmen and djinn. All the same, she thought she'd better see if she could find Major Gide, arrested or not. This was something the major would want to know about.

  Arrested or not? Leila de Loria thought through that bit again and unbuckled her gun for the second time.

  "Not," she decided. "Make that not . . ."

  On his way through the outskirts of Camp Moncef, Raf saw three more of the Emir's bodyguard. Although not one of the girls seemed to notice him. Serving boys stopped to gape, old women made fists against the evil eye or clutched pendants but the guard kept doing whatever it was they did while Raf stamped passed.

  It was Moncef's camp and they were Moncef's bodyguard but Eugenie was dead, Major Gide was currently under arrest and their Emir was dying. They all knew the opinion of Kashif Pasha's mother, Lady Maryam, where Eugenie's guard were concerned.

  Once Raf passed so close that he saw a jumpsuited girl hold her breath against the stink that clung instead of clothing to his body. All the same, her eyes slid over him and when he was gone she tapped a button transmitter attached to her lapel, muttering what sounded like an evocation.

  Up ahead two other jumpsuited guards stopped moving towards Raf and turned to walk away.

  "You." Raf grabbed an elderly falconer by the sleeve and let go when hard eyes turned to face him. The man was old, with small tattoos like crude tears on both cheeks, a neat beard gone completely white and teeth so perfect they had to be false. "Show me the Emir's tent."

  "No," said the elderly Berber. "That I will not." Reaching for a curved knife in his belt, the man held it in front of him in fingers that shook with more than age. All the same, he dropped into a fighting crouch. "No one can escape death," he said. "But I refuse to help you take the Emir."

  "The Emir?"

  Raf's sour smile trickled blood from lips so cracked they'd begun to peel and when he whispered there were no words, just breath. Removing his shades for a moment, Raf tried again, pale eyes locking on the man's face; the curved blade that shook in front of his naked belly already forgotten.

  "I haven't come for the Emir," he said. "I want Kashif Pasha."

  "This could be a trick."

  "It isn't," said Raf, knowing that really the old man had addressed the question to himself.

  Raf would have found Moncef's tent anyway even without help. It was huge, stood right in the centre of the camp and its ropes were made from palm fibre, something ancient and traditional anyway, unlike the nylon guys holding up the military tents in the distance. The tent was old, rotten in places and heavily patched with black goats' hair; rugs were spread round its edge to enable the Emir to circumnavigate his tent without once touching sand or gravel.

  "Wait," said the old man and Raf waited in the shadow of a generator truck. "Don't move from here." When the falconer returned it was with rusty bolt cutters he struggled to use, further lacerating Raf's wrist as he snipped the padlocks fastening the shackles.

  "The entrance is round the other side," said the Berber.

  Raf nodded.

  "There are soldiers," the old man added. And when Raf made no reply he sighed. As if he'd always suspected death was stupid. "Kashif Pasha's soldiers. Two on the door, an officer inside, the small one . . ."

  "Major Jalal . . ."

  The man shrugged.

  "Who else?" demanded Raf and held the old man's gaze. "The more I know," he said, "the fewer I kill. That makes sense, surely . . . ? Lady Maryam?"

  The man spat.

  "Lady Maryam," Raf told him firmly, "was not responsible for the attack at the Domus Aurea."

  "She is Kashif Pasha's mother," said the old man. As if that was crime enough.

  "No one else?"

  "Not really," said the old man, bending to pick up the discarded chain. "Apart from a nasrani television crew . . ."

  CHAPTER 49

  Tuesday 15th March

  "So we now know that the kids are unharmed. The reports of their death undoubtedly NR black propaganda. This is Clair duBois for Television5 . . ."

  Flanked by Hani and Murad, TV5's most famous reporter was talking direct to camera when Raf spun into the huge tent, leaving two dying soldiers in the dust behind him, windpipes crushed.

  One was the corporal who killed Hassan, the other had just gone for a gun.

  "Yeah," said Raf, eyes locked on Major Jalal, "it's us." Behind him stood an impossibly beautiful Japanese boy and a fat man with half his head missing. Although when Clair blinked, looked again, those two were gone.

  "I've brought you a present."

  Over by the door, Major Jalal continued scrambling for his own weapon. A pearl-handled Colt that had belonged to his father. It was elegant and valuable, came with the original buckle-down holster and was an incredibly stupid choice.

  Clair duBois's backup camera was still trying to pull focus when the major finally freed his Colt and the feed went live on a naked man in shades, framed by the tent's doorway, an old-fashioned H&K in one hand and a Browning automatic in the other. Backlit by daylight/filmed without lights f
rom shade. One of the world's worst options.

  "Drop your toy." The words were in French, the whisper dry as dust. A change of angle caught the apparition's gun come up. "One chance," it said. "More than you ever gave Hassan."

  Despite herself, or maybe because Clair duBois was who she was, she glanced at her notebook and made two minor adjustments for sound. One for volume, the other an echo on the apparition's voice, too slight to be noticed by anyone not in the business.

  "Do as he says . . ." The command was soft, sickly sibilant, the words not much louder than those Raf had used; but it carried total authority, a complete awareness of the futility of the situation. "That's an order."

  And there it might have finished, with Raf turning to the Emir, and Major Jalal returning his Colt to its holster if only Kashif Pasha hadn't stepped forward. "This is the assassin," he told his father, voice furious. To his aide-de-camp, he said nothing, just nodded.

  Major Jalal raised his gun, a young girl who was meant to be dead howled out a warning and Raf's head flicked sideways.

  The major died on camera. Wounds pixilated in some countries, not shown at all in England, Sweden and Korea and featured widely everywhere else. Looped, in one case, into ultraslow motion that let the major's brains crawl like sticky rice after Raf's casually fired slug, flowering into a fat cherry blossom that tumbled apart in a mass of bone, jelly and blood. So close to chaos in appearance and so utterly removed in reality.

  Clair duBois screamed.

  As genuine a response as she'd ever made and one, her unkinder critics later claimed, that went a long way towards explaining the clean sweep she made of most of the coming year's press awards.

  As Clair watched, the naked apparition's searching eyes finally found the two children who stood behind her.

  "You," it said to the boy, "are not me." Then it turned to the girl who gripped Murad's hand, her knuckles white with tension.

  "I thought you were dead."

  Picking up a mic, Clair duBois thrust it towards Raf.

  "Who are you?" The mic was totally unnecessary, given the TV5 camera was already wired for sound but it made for a great image. Elegant reporter in lightweight silk suit (black obviously, with Clair duBois it was always black), interviewing a naked, stinking man in shades, carrying a still-smoking gun. "Tell me," she insisted. "The world wants to know."

  "Ashraf al-Mansur," said Raf. "Guardian to Lady Hana and half brother to Murad." He stared at Kashif. "Also to him."

  "I refuse to believe it," said the pasha, "without proof."

  Raf shrugged. "What you believe is unimportant," he said, adjusting the H&K so its first burst would take out several lengths of Kashif's intestines. "I'm arresting you for murder."

  "I don't think so." Kashif's voice was silky. "Given they're obviously still here." He nodded dismissively towards Hani and Murad. "Their death was a lie. I wouldn't be surprised if you spread the rumour yourself."

  Nothing happened. It's a lie.

  Away, to one side of the huge tent, Zara shivered and stepped back until she was pressed against an outer wall, which was still too close.

  Really, nothing happened.

  Shortly after Zara mentioned her uncle to her nanny, the man disappeared. There'd been more shouting, twenty-four hours of plate throwing by her mother. Zara had gone into Al Qahirah hospital for her operation a few days later, delivered personally by Madame Rahina while her father was on business in Sicily. The Monday following, when Zara got home was the only time she ever saw her mother with a black eye.

  "I'm not talking about Murad or Hani," said Raf. "If you'd hurt either in any way, you'd already be dead . . ." So intent was Raf on Kashif Pasha that he missed Hani's wide-eyed shock; missed too a softening in Zara's expression.

  "You had a sixteen-year-old boy tortured," Raf said flatly. "And then gave the order for his death."

  "He was an NR terrorist," Kashif Pasha announced to the camera. Neither of them wanted TV5 there. Neither could afford to be the one to tell Clair duBois to get out. "Who tried to assassinate my father."

  "Crap," said Raf. "By the time your aide-de-camp had finished Hassan would have signed anything." He scowled at the body on the tent floor for as long as it took for the camera to follow his gaze. "How do I know? Because I was the waiter. Acting for Eugenie de la Croix."

  Clair duBois turned so fast that the tiny Aeriospecialle camsat locked on her face went out of focus, something the manufacturers claimed was impossible.

  "The missing waiter I can understand," said Clair duBois, "but how can Your Excellency talk of charging Kashif Pasha with murdering the Emir, when His Highness is not dead?" Even to Clair, her voice sounded childish.

  "If not dead," said Raf, "then dying." Wrapped in his borrowed kaftan and with his face sticky from analgesic barrier cream, Raf looked more ghoul-like than ever. "Ask him."

  "That depends," said Moncef, "on your definition of dead and emir."

  Clair duBois sighed. Kashif was under guard courtesy of one very angry Major Gide, Murad was introducing Hani to the racing camels and Clair had just been handed the opportunity of a lifetime.

  Since this was, so far as Clair knew, the only interview Emir Moncef had ever given she was sure TV5 would forgive her for agreeing to record the interview rather than have it go out live. As for handing over copy approval, they gave that to two-bit actors with only a fraction of the charisma.

  "I'm not sure I understand," she said to Raf. "His Highness has Asiatic flu. I've talked to his doctor." This last was only half-true. She'd talked, briefly, to a Soviet nurse who'd pocketed a 1000F note with rather too much ease before confirming that a long-lasting flu variant was indeed the most likely possibility.

  "Ask," Raf told her.

  She swallowed. "Your Highness . . ."

  The only way Clair duBois could force herself to ask was to pretend someone outside her did the asking. The same way that many years before, as a sixteen-year-old, she'd turned up on the doorstep of a haunted-looking soap actress and forced herself to ask the woman about a miscarriage, vomiting in a flower bed the moment the actress slammed the door in her face, having first called Clair every name under the sun. All the confirmation her editor had needed.

  "You have a question for me?" Moncef's voice dragged Clair back from her memories and shrivelled the snakes knotting inside her stomach. The very fact Emir Moncef prompted her meant he intended to answer.

  Briefly the woman toyed with asking whether he had flu. What Major Gide, as his doctor, had diagnosed. How he was feeling . . . But then she asked the single best question of her career.

  "Are you dying?"

  "It's probably safe to say," said the man, his voice amused, "that we're all dying . . ." He sat up straighter in his bed, rug still tight around him and spoke direct to his interviewer rather than the camera, his hooded eyes never leaving her face. "Except, of course, those already dead. And those who are immortal."

  And then he smiled that smile seen in stills around the world. The one that was either ineffably wise or completely insane. Verdicts differed, with Berlin willing to consider the first and Paris and Washington definite that it was the last.

  "Is that your only question?"

  If the Emir found it odd to be answering questions while blood glazed like sugar icing on a carpet he'd refused to remove, then Moncef didn't let it show, but then . . .

  Clair duBois shrugged, mostly inside her head. Who knew what the Emir found odd?

  "Ask if he's immortal . . ."

  Jumping, Clair looked round. It took her a moment to realize that Antoine, her backup cameraman had activated his throat mic and was hissing the suggestion through her Sony earbead.

  She asked it.

  "No," said the Emir, "not since I ate the mushrooms."

  CHAPTER 50

  Thursday 17th March

  Bells rang from the twin towers of St. Vincent de Paul, that Gothic monstrosity with all its pews removed and a Persian carpet covering the altar. Flags hung fro
m office windows or whipped in the slipstream of car aerials. Drifting on the wind came the stink of cordite, bastard cousin to the endless firecrackers let off all morning, too close to gunfire for the peace of everyone.

  Martial law had been lifted, the act signed by Ashraf Pasha, newly created heir to the Emir. He'd signed the edict on behalf of his father, a man now too weak to hold a pen, even to write his own signature.

  The return to normal law came the day after Raf had questioned his half brother in the presence of their father. This took place in the al Andalus–inspired HQ of Dar el Bey, overlooking Place du Gouvernement.

  Raf sat at a desk with Kashif on the other side; the Emir had a motorized wheelchair and only Major Gide stood.

  It was a very polite questioning. There wasn't a blowtorch in sight and no one in the room, from the Emir to the major, even suggested tying anyone else to a table.

  "The snake," Raf said to Kashif. "That was your first mistake. A simple enquiry could have revealed that all venomous snakes at Tunis Zoo have their poison sacs removed. Only Major Jalal couldn't risk asking that question, could he? So you made an assumption, the Emir got bitten and Ifriqiya got its very own miracle . . ."

  "I know nothing about a snake."

  "Of course you don't. How about the death of two guards, bribed or blackmailed into releasing the snake in the Emir's tent . . . ?"

  "I know nothing about any guards."

  "They got shot," said Raf, "at the banquet you threw for your father. Remember? The one where Eugenie died."

  Kashif was blaming it all on his dead aide-de-camp. In fact, he was horrified to discover some of the things Major Jalal had done in his name.

  "I take it," said the Emir, "that you have proof for this accusation against your brother?" His words were thin and took longer to say than they should, but there was amusement in them and something close to admiration lit his lined and leathery face.

  "If Kashif is my brother . . ."

  Moncef looked at him then. "Meaning?"

  "I just wondered."

  "You are Ashraf al-Mansur," said Moncef, almost firmly. "And I am Emir of Tunis. Your mother was the love of my life." Sad eyes swept the small office, barely noticing Kashif as they passed over Raf, a selection of police files in front of him. One of which contained the results on DNA testing that Raf had yet to mention to anyone.