Effendi

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 . . .

“Where to, Boss?”

Raf came awake in the back of his Bentley.

“Villa Hamzah.” Same as it ever was.

Then Zara had spun in a slow circle, meeting their eyes, one person at a time. At least that’s what they thought; but really she’d been looking for a single logo among dozens.

Raf knew that now without doubt.

The journalists might have thought Zara was there to talk to them, only they were wrong. She’d stopped turning, stopped smiling the moment she saw someone from a local newsfeed. After that, her words had been for Raf alone.

“I am waiting to hear back from the governor. I’m sorry, but until then there is nothing more I can say . . .”

So now the governor was on his way, through a city that flickered by like the backdrop to some film he vaguely remembered preferring the first time round. The statue of Mehmet V, which once seemed so impressive, now looked tatty and grandiose, more parks than ever looked empty, windows to shops were unlit or shuttered tight with steel grilles: the rococo mansions of the Corniche that once seemed so magnificent behind their wrought-iron gates now looked defeated, held prisoner by their own defences.

We define ourselves by our own limitations. The fox had said that to him once, in Seattle, shortly before it pointed out that on this basis Raf should be very defined indeed.

But am I? Raf wanted to ask, only the voice in his head refused to answer and the voice in his heart that Khartoum talked about was missing, absent without leave. So maybe he was just the sum of his parts, few though those were. A face that looked like someone else, a fake identity and a job he hadn’t asked for . . .

“Ahmed, do you know who you are?”

The bigger of his two gun-toting bodyguards turned his head, while the driver and Hakim kept staring straight on: watching the Corniche unravel through the car’s ancient windscreen. “Do I what, Boss?”

“You know who you are?”

Ahmed nodded.

“You ever think you might be somebody else . . . ?”

Raf saw the answer written in the other man’s puzzled frown. “Doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “Just forget it.”

There was silence in the Bentley after that as the driver concentrated on the road and Hakim and Ahmed eyeballed the sidewalk and beach respectively, their fingers never leaving the triggers of their H&K5s.

“Your Excellency . . .” It was the driver. “Five and counting.”

Koenig Pasha was the one who’d originally demanded five minutes advance warning of when he was due to arrive. And there was a hierarchy of address too. Apparently Ahmed and Hakim got to call him Boss, while the driver was required to be more formal. It was a city of rules, from opaque to transparent. Every city was.

Opening his eyes, Raf sat up and watched the coast become familiar. That café, a swimming hut on stilts, then the beach where . . . a galaxy of stars had skimmed across bare shoulders to be swallowed into darkness between perfect breasts. The hunger brought on by the memory corroded what was left of his pride.

He was no use to Zara as he was, that much Raf understood. No use to anyone; not even himself. Certainly not to the city or to Hani, which was what he mostly cared about these days.

And that meant it was time to change.

“We’re here, Boss.”

They were too, passing through heavy wrought-iron gates that had been yanked open and pushed back. Lawns that had been immaculate the last time Raf saw them were crude scars of dark earth, trampled to mud by the same journalists who now rushed the huge Bentley. Already photographers were scuffling for the best shot as a ’copter overhead suddenly dropped height, its specially adapted gun pod swinging a long lens in Raf’s direction.

“Take it down,” Raf ordered.

Ahmed looked doubtful but wound down his side window and started to unsling his machine gun all at the same time. Instantly the camera crews moved closer, unleashing a firestorm of flashguns and shouted questions.

“Not like that,” Raf said as he slapped down the gun. “Get on the wire and ground that piece of shit.”

“Sure thing,” said Ahmed, tapping his throat mike. “What do I tell them, Boss?”

“Tell them that, as of now, airspace over El Iskandryia is a no-fly zone. No overflights, nothing. Tell the pilot if he’s not landed in one minute we’ll blast him out of the sky. Final warning.”

“No overflights . . . What about the airport?”

“Close it.”

The flash and arc lights didn’t bother Raf, he just recalibrated his vision and kept walking towards the blank-eyed cameras. Reptiles was what the General called Ishies, that and other things. Watching them watch him reminded Raf of his mother’s early films; not the cuddly shit she shot for money, the tooth-and-claw stuff that made her name. He couldn’t remember their titles now, but all those films had blood in them. Red blood on white snow. Zhivago shots, she called them, she was big on those.

“Governor . . .” A thin woman thrust a microphone in his direction and a dozen shouted questions cancelled each other out, leaving only babble.

Raf waited. And when one photographer came in too close, Raf just stared until the man took a step backward.

“Ashraf Bey . . .”

“Excellency . . .”

The shouts kept coming until everyone finally realized that Raf still hadn’t said a word. And then came silence. It stretched out, distorted by the crowd’s expectation and broken only by the rhythmic thud of a grounded Sikorsky chopping to a halt on the Corniche behind him. He milked the silence, because that was exactly what the General would have done: and at the point their expectation was about to curdle into anger, Raf pointed at random to three people near the front, snapping out the order . . .

“One, two, three . . . Okay, your name, your station, then the question.”

As it turned out, number one was a good choice. She was American, on staff, not a freelancer, and represented C3N, biggest of the news channels. Or so Raf gathered from the gabble with which Helen Giles introduced herself.

“Excellence . . . Will you agree to hand over Hamad Quitrimala?” She managed to trip over both Raf’s honorific and Hamzah’s name.

“So that he can be tried in America and jailed?”

She nodded.

“Why would I do that?” Raf asked, his voice clear but cool.

“But PaxForce . . .”

“Are you saying we don’t have courts in El Iskandryia?”

That got another babble of questions, which ended the moment Raf chopped at the air for silence. He was beginning to enjoy this, Raf realized with something approaching shock.

“Well?”

The woman’s worry lines deepened.

“If Hamzah is to be tried,” said Raf, “he’ll be tried here in Iskandryia. And if the evidence goes against him, he will be found guilty . . . and shot.”

Raf walked through their shocked silence, while behind him Ahmed and Hakim ported their H&K5s and glared at anyone who got too close. As they approached the villa’s heavy front door it swung back and Raf found himself staring at the girl he should have married.

Flashguns firestormed.

“Excellency.” Zara stepped back to let him pass through into the hall.

“Zara . . .”

“Yes, Your Excellency?” She stood ramrod straight, chin up. Only the rawness that rimmed her grey eyes spoke of privately spilt tears. And one look into their cold depths was enough to tell him that the tears had been dried by hatred.

“Feeding them was a good idea.”

She said nothing in reply. Just waited, unmoving, for Raf to announce why he was there. Except that they both knew he was there because she’d said she wanted to talk to him—and now it seemed she didn’t.

“I’ll go,” said Raf and turned for the door, Hakim and Ahmed falling into position behind him. It was strange how quickly one could become used to having a shadow.

“Do you really intend to . . . ?”

“Intend to what?” Raf asked, one hand on the door handle. He knew exactly what Zara was asking but he made her ask it all the same.

“Execute him . . .”

Not if I can help it, but somehow that didn’t seem the appropriate thing to say.

“If they extradite him,” said Raf, “you’ll never get your father back. You know that, don’t you?”

“At least they won’t kill him . . .”

“No,” Raf said, “they’ll just lock him up until he dies. Surround him with guards twenty-four/seven. Dismantle Hamzah Enterprises and break up the Midas Refinery to pay for court costs and reparations. You think that’s what he wants? Your father knew this was coming . . .”

“I’d worked that out,” said Zara, tears starting up in her eyes. “That’s why he wanted you to marry me.”

Raf nodded.

“The Khedive,” her voice was a whisper, “that meal.”

“He was trying to protect you in the only way he knew how,” said Raf, his smile rueful. “He even tried sending you back to America, he told me you refused . . .”

Her shoulders beneath his fingers were bony and she wore a scent he didn’t recognize and undoubtedly wouldn’t have been able to afford, had he wanted to buy her some more. And up close, with her arms tight round his neck and her face buried wetly in his shoulder, Raf could tell that Zara wasn’t wearing a bra. It was a shit time to notice something like that, but where Zara was concerned he always seemed to notice things like that at the wrong time. Like right then was a really lousy time to realize that he loved her.

Raf pushed Zara away, very slowly, until they stood a handbreadth apart, facing each other, their eyes locked. There was something she wanted to say.

“Anything you want,” said Zara. “I’ll give you anything you want, if you can save him.”