What indeed?
“Who was in the right?” The question sounded stupid even as Raf asked it; but sometimes questions need to be asked, even stupid ones. And he knew the Sufi’s answer would be honest, no matter that the old man was partisan.
“No one was in the right,” said Khartoum.
“Then who was in the wrong?”
“No one.” Dark eyes regarded Raf, as piercing as those of a hawk. “They were children,” said Khartoum. “Not men, not women . . . You should ask who armed them. Who had an interest in seeing them fight? Or maybe this is a question you too think best left unasked . . .”
CHAPTER 35
22nd October
“Hey you . . .” Hani grabbed Ifritah by the scruff of the neck and pulled so that the cat’s head yanked back and its purr stopped as rapidly as if somebody had flicked a switch. “That’s better,” the girl whispered, hugging the cat to her chest. Immediately the scraggy animal started to purr again.
Hani sighed.
One of her arms ached from cuddling Ifritah, her foot had pins and needles and the narrowness of the window ledge on which she perched had sent her behind to sleep. The long velvet curtain she hid behind was both old and dusty, so half the time Hani had to hold the bridge of her nose just to concentrate on not sneezing because sneezing would ruin everything. Besides, as it was, her own breathing was almost too loud to let her hear what was being said by the cross American woman.
It should have been easy. But something in one of the woman’s pockets was interfering with the tiny microphone Hani had stuck to the bottom of the table. Or maybe the microphone was broken. After all, it came from a Tina Tears whose head she’d cracked open with a paperweight when the plastic proved too tough to cut using a kitchen knife.
Hani knew she shouldn’t be there. Just as she knew she was in trouble if Ashraf found out. And he probably didn’t even want her help. She was a child, as everybody from Zara to Khartoum kept telling her. But she also had an IQ of 160 for real, could do crosswords in French, English and Arabic and had forgotten more about computers than Raf knew, even if she couldn’t see in the dark.
Hani wasn’t meant to know about his night vision or maybe she was meant to have forgotten—but she did know. She knew other things too, dark swirling facts that waited at the edges of her mind, wanting to come to her if only she’d let them.
On the other side of the curtain, the small woman was arguing again. She’d been angry since Raf came back to finish their conversation, only this was worse. She wanted Raf to give up Effendi, that was how she put it . . . Effendi had to be given up, like cigarettes.
Ashraf refused, of course, and Hani hoped he’d go on refusing. She liked Zara, and Effendi was Zara’s father. Hani didn’t like Zara’s mother, but then Zara didn’t like Zara’s mother so the Senator could have her if she wanted.
“I’ll leave the photographs,” the woman said crossly, climbing to her feet. Hani knew that was what she was doing by the creak of a sofa. Footsteps padded across carpet, then stopped. The Senator was turning in the doorway, wanting to say something. Only the threat or retort never came. Instead the woman and her interpreter let themselves out of the governor’s chambers.
That was bad. Khartoum should have been there to let her out. Hani knew this from living with her Aunt Nafisa, notables never opened their own doors. A creak from the other sofa told her that Raf was leaving. After the creak and steps came the slam of a door and then nothing.
“You can go now,” said Hani, yanking open her nearest window to release the struggling cat. With Ifritah gone the room became more silent still. So Hani padded across the silence and picked up one of the famous photographs. The gutted boy was little older than she was, though his skin was darker and his black hair scraped back into a fat ponytail. The two girls in the next photograph were about Hani’s age. One of them was missing her hands.
Looking down, it wasn’t the boy’s face that gripped Hani’s attention but that of the bearded man on the badge pinned to his dirty shirt. Except for a beret and a small cigar clamped between his teeth, the man could have been the nasrani God, the one who got himself killed.
“Abad,” Hani said to herself and picked up the photograph, tucking it down the side of her jeans and smoothing her T-shirt back into place. No one stopped her as she left the chamber or saw her in the corridor outside. All the same, as Raf sometimes said, better safe than sorry when being sorry wasn’t an option.
The girl blanked her screen. “It’s nothing,” she said hurriedly.
Raf glanced from Hani’s face to the photograph she was trying to slide into an open drawer. She had it turned upside down, but he could still see some of the caption.Kordofan, 30th March. Investigators . . .
Inside his head Raf swore.
“You got that from downstairs?”
Hani nodded. “I’m sorry.” There was a haunted look on her face and she’d chewed one corner of her lip until it was raw. What upset Raf most was the way she leant away from him, hunching her shoulders without realizing it, in preparation for the slap that would never come.
“No,” said Raf, stepping back. “My fault. I apologize . . .”
“Why?” the small girl asked suspiciously.
“Because I shouldn’t have left those out for you to find.” He wanted to add, because this is a world from which I can’t protect you, a world that may get worse. Instead, he scooped up the child and carried her over to her bedroom window.
Standing there, they looked out at the darkened city. As ever, her legs were bony against his arms, her wrists round his neck as thin as sticks.
“You need fattening up,” said Raf and the next question asked itself. “Where’s Donna?”
“At home.” There was a smile, fleeting and slightly exasperated. “She won’t sleep here,” said Hani. “Apparently someone has to look after the madersa, but really she’s afraid.” Hani indicated her new bedroom, the gesture taking in oil paintings, Chinese vases and a bronze dryad whose verdigrised shoulders and upturned breasts carried a faint sheen of dust.
Hani was right of course. The mansion would have frightened Donna even if it hadn’t belonged to the General.
“So who feeds you while I’m working?” Raf asked.
“Me,” said Hani crossly. “I can cook.”
“And when did you last eat?”
“I’ve had breakfast.” Hani scrambled out of his arms but stayed close. Away from the desk and her pink plastic laptop.
“Today?”
The child looked at him.
“You had breakfast today?”
The eyes opposite suddenly bruised with tears. “Leave me alone, all right . . . And take your stupid photograph.” She left the room without looking back, slamming the door for good measure.
As always, adults got it wrong. It wasn’t the photograph she’d needed. Hani had wanted the face on the badge.
And besides, all that look-at-me-I’m-hiding-something routine was to stop Uncle Ashraf noticing what she really had in the drawer. The Doré engraving of hell she’d borrowed from his office.
CHAPTER 36
23rd October
Outside on the beach, Zara’s beach, October waves exploded against the headland and draped dark rocks with seaweed. And on the French windows to her father’s study, a stray leaf trapped in a dying spider’s web released its ribbon of rainbow down the glass as gasoline or herbicide slowly leached from its pores.
Zara saw neither because the curtains were firmly drawn. She wore a nightdress, dressing gown and fur slippers. The warmth of those nursery clothes at odds with the arctic cold in her heart.
“Tell me it’s not true . . .”
She wasn’t meant to shout at her father. She wasn’t even meant to swear either, but the rules were gone, left in a corridor along with her wailing mother and a discarded copy of the New York Times. And all her father could do was huddle in his leather chair, a tumbler of whisky beside him and an old-fashioned revolver lying on a weird etching on his lap.
The glass was Soviet crystal. Zara didn’t recognize the weapon—revolvers weren’t her thing. Come the revolution, she’d always seen herself using plastique.
Shutting her eyes to block out the world, Zara nursed the darkness until she could hold on to it no longer. Needless to say, when she looked again nothing in the study had changed, but then it never used to work for her as a child either.
“So it’s true?” Zara said.
Of course it was. She could see it in his face. And even the smell of fresh vomit couldn’t hide the whisky fumes. A whole bottle was gone. Enough to reduce him to childish tears without lifting the horror from his eyes.
Top Industrialist Charged with Genocide . . .
He should have warned her. Before the American papers and the downloads and rolling newsfeeds began, before Trustafarian Ishies with their headsets and cameras started churning the lawns to mud. She could almost feel the hunger out there, calling its questions and tapping at windows, hammering on the big brass knocker and ringing the bell. News was a commodity to the soi-disant Free World, not a duty. And the bear-pit growl of its news gatherers could be heard through the study’s double glazing, through windows closed and locked, curtains drawn and shutters bolted.
“Dad, come on . . .” Dropping to a crouch in front of his chair, Zara rested her forearms on his knees and felt her father flinch. That was all it took to turn anger to tears. Zara began crying then, sorrow rolling down her cheeks. Somewhere she had a tissue, but couldn’t remember which pocket, and it didn’t seem to matter.
They cried in silence together.
She’d taken to asking herself a question a few years back. What was the worst it could be, the secret of her father’s rise from nothing? She’d searched for clues to the answer. Once, aged fifteen, she’d riffled through his desk, using a key taken from his jacket. All she’d found was a small leather case containing pornographic photographs of a young man and two girls even younger . . . Apart from a wood-handled knife, a handful of Sudanese coins and a bone crucifix, that had been the sum total of her find.
She hadn’t been able to look him in the face for weeks afterwards.
The worst she could say, until recently, was that he kept Western erotica in a drawer in his study. Now he was less than that, a man diminished. Zara was rapidly coming to realize that, just maybe, she’d never actually known who he was, not really. Her father, the industrialist Hamzah Effendi.
He broke the law for a living, she accepted that. Only he broke it less than he used to do and nothing like as much as when he was young. And anyway the free market was a crime in itself. As a good Marxist she did believe that. Of course, he also killed, or had done, at least once . . .
When she was nine she had overheard two servants discussing this and been proud. The dead man had been bad, obviously. Someone who attacked her father, forcing him to defend himself. It was all so clear in Zara’s head. Only when she tried asking her ma about it she’d been slapped for her pains. By the next morning both her nanny and the maid were gone.
Now nothing she could say to her father would change what was about to happen. PaxForce wanted him to stand trial and, according to the New York Times, Iskandryia’s new governor had agreed to hand over Hamzah, subject to agreeing upon a timetable.
What more was there to say?
Plenty. And such was the shallowness of the Western press that how it was said would be as important as what was said. Picking up his revolver, weirdshit etching and whisky bottle, Zara slammed Hamzah’s study door behind her and went to get changed. Already she was rewriting elements of her plan.
“Zara . . .” The voice that met her on the landing was angry and bitter, but then it would be, it belonged to her mother.
“What?” Zara demanded.
It had been a joke among Zara’s friends that they could hear Madame Rahina long before they could see her, such was the clatter of gold from her wrists. Noisy bangles and an almost permanent scowl were Zara’s memories of her mother. Sometimes the gold had been so loud Zara hadn’t been able to hear the slap that followed.
“How could he . . . ?”
“I thought you knew everything there was to know about him,” Zara said, her voice contemptuous. “Wasn’t that what you told everyone? Soul mates. Apart from his endless mistresses, your tranquillizers and the whisky . . .”
“Zara . . .”
Zara covered the outraged face with the spread fingers of one hand and pushed. Which was all it took to throw the woman backward. Zara didn’t bother to check how she landed.
Some of the men even had little ladders so they could peer over the heads of other photographers in front. Many wore pale safari suits of the kind carried at airports by ignorant nasrani journalists, who expected to land somewhere blisteringly hot. Only now their suits were dark with rain and hung with all the elegance of rags on a line.
“Miss Zara . . .”
She turned, saw Alex and sighed. The huge Soviet bodyguard stood like a scolded child, head down and fists clenched so hard that veins made freeways along his wrists. An hour earlier, while her father was still drinking himself into a stupor, Alex had been faced with a highly tenacious member of the press, who took bolt cutters to the gates and challenged Alex to shoot him. Without orders, Alex had retreated.
“You took the correct action,” Zara said, for about the third time.
Alex looked doubtful.
“Examine the options,” she said. “You think you should have shot him?” He did too, Zara could see it in his broad face. “Sometimes retreat is necessary,” Zara told Alex carefully. “But now someone must guard the front door. And that must be you.”
Zara watched the cogs whir as Alex glanced from her to the heavy wooden door, then back again. He was nice in his way, but monolithically slow. Still, each according to his talents . . .
“The door, right.” He nodded agreement and turned away, shoulders straightening.
“Comrade . . .”
“Yes, Miss Zara . . . ?” He paused, shoulders broad, back straight, a Makarov 9mm bulging under one arm.
She smiled. “Nothing.”
Nothing will come of nothing, that was a line from a play she was in, back when she went to college in New York . . . A city of high-rise boxes where the girls around her fucked anything with a pulse and a penis and quality control seemed to be a contradiction in terms. But something always did come from nothing. The universe, for a start. Time itself. All that other shit Raf talked about that one night on the boat, stuff she didn’t understand and guessed he didn’t either, not really . . .
Zara sighed and went back to working on her plan.
The bell was made from beaten silver and had an ivory handle. Its clapper was a narrow twist of iron that ended with a small ball of soft metal the size of a pea. For as long as Zara could remember, the bell had been used by her mother to summon the nearest maid. Her father thought the bell unnecessary, he just shouted.
“Come on.” Zara rang the bell until the first maid appeared, then kept going until she had every member of staff mustered in the hall. There were seven in total. Five housemaids, a French chef and a Sudanese gardener. A surprisingly small number for a house the size of Villa Hamzah.
“I want coffee,” she told the chef. “A large pot.”
“Of course, Miss Zara.” The little man nodded. “I’ll have Maryam bring it to the back drawing room.”
“No,” said Zara. “You’re missing the point. I want a lot of coffee.”
The chef blinked. “How much?” he asked, his voice neutral.
“Jugs of the stuff. Enough for two hundred people. And semit. . .” Zara named the soft sesame-covered pretzels sold everywhere in the city. “Can we do that?”
“Of course I can.”
Zara smiled. The Parisian would be baking all afternoon, mixing dough and waiting anxiously for his yeast to rise. “Make the coffee first,” she suggested. “I’ll take it outside myself.”
That got their attention.
“Ridiculous,” said the chef. “It’ll be far too heavy. Maryam and Lisa can carry it.”
“All right,” said Zara. “We also need as many umbrellas as you can find . . . Start with my mother’s dressing room,” she suggested, remembering a line of them hanging in a row along the back of a cupboard.
“Oh . . . and Alex.” She left out her usual comrade, not wanting to embarrass the big Russian in front of the others. “Order me a marquee. Something vast, but without sides . . . We don’t want to overdo it.”
CHAPTER 37
23rd October
The air was warm, the afternoon sun a haze of ultraviolet through cloud. The heavy rain didn’t bother him. Not like back in Seattle.
“Ashraf Bey . . .”
Raf kept going, while behind him Hakim took it upon himself to punch the photographer to the ground. Providing the world with another picture.
The new governor’s face already fronted Time,Paris Match and Newsweek. Cheeks hollow, eyes hard behind dark glasses, hair swept back. It was a face that Raf didn’t recognize, even when he stared hard in the mirror.
As to why a mere handful of journalists clustered around the mansion in Shallalat Gardens . . . That was easy to answer. The rest were camped out on the lawns at Villa Hamzah, from where talking heads currently reported seriously on nothing very much.
Zara’s offer of coffee and semit had been a flash of brilliance, but ordering a marquee and then staying outside to watch while a hundred journalists struggled with poles and wet ropes was beyond genius. And as they struggled, Zara had watched, not offering to help or saying anything, just standing on the lawn of Villa Hamzah, while photographers captured her guarded amusement at the chaos.
When the marquee was finally up and the journalists were out of the rain, Zara had walked into the middle of their group, without a bodyguard, without having to ask anyone to move out of her way. And then she stopped, watching them as they watched her. Meeting their lenses and the bursts of flash without blinking or looking away . . .
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