“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 . . .
“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 . . .