Effendi

CHAPTER 30 19th October

Avatar slid his finger under the flap and ripped.

He wasn’t sure what he anticipated from the envelope addressed to his sister on the cabin’s dressing table . . . Not a love letter from the Khedive, because even the Khedive wasn’t that stupid. Maybe an invitation to something aboard the SS Jannah that Zara would now miss.

Which would worry her no more than it would worry Avatar, so long as the Khedive didn’t expect him to attend instead. It was bad enough that Zara had suggested that Avatar take her place aboard.

And she was wrong to try to remake him; to force on him the opportunities she felt he needed. Avatar belonged where he belonged, he knew that. And he was much too proud of what he’d learnt in his fourteen years to change.

Shaking the contents of the envelope out onto his cabin’s pink bedspread, Avatar’s eyes widened. Whatever else he’d expected Zara to be sent, an engraving of a naked, full-breasted woman bent backward, scuttling across the dirt on limbs that turned to those of a spider was not on his list. On the back in elegant copperplate pen was the word Judecca. Beneath this, Welcome to limbo.

Nothing else whatsoever.

With a shrug, Avatar screwed up the envelope and tossed it out of a porthole, watching the wind that caught his crumpled offering and kept it for a few seconds from the embrace of the waves.

Maybe he should do the same with the naked spider? Avatar had dismissed the possibility before he’d finished thinking it. He was going to send the pervy engraving to Zara. As her just reward for getting Hamzah to agree he should take her place.

Avatar sighed heavily and wished he was somewhere else. The palm in the corner of his cabin was hideous. The size of a child and planted in a Chinese container that was painted with a ridiculous number of waterfalls and colts kicking their heels on a mountainside.

Pot or palm by itself would have been bad enough, but together they constituted an insult. It was all Avatar could do not to tip the plant, pot and all, after the envelope into the Mediterranean below.

Avatar was pretty sure Zara would have loathed the palm, not to mention the cabin’s kitsch Victorian screen plastered with pictures of children cut from old magazines; both of which had been meant for Zara, because this was to have been her cabin. And Avatar had been assured, by a very shocked steward, that everything in the suite had been selected personally by the Khedive himself.

If so, the Khedive had even less idea of what made his sister tick than Avatar imagined. And that included sending her a naked spider.

Avatar looked round his cabin for a scanner, realized there wasn’t one and took a lift down to the bleached-blond retro of the SS Jannah ’s business suite. After he’d got over his shock at being told everything was free to a guest of the Khedive, he found and made do with a fax.