Personally, Hamzah would rather have been at home eating eggs fried with halumi but, as well as being Ashura, tonight was to celebrate Zara’s escape from the clutches of a rogue Thiergarten assassin. That had been the idea anyway.
Only Zara sat gazing listlessly out of a window, Rahina was furious about something and their guest, a major who’d practically invited himself, was halfway through a boring description of the luxuries to be found aboard a liner called the SS Jannah.
“Do pay attention.”
Hamzah opened his eyes but Zara was the one being scolded. Somehow his wife’s voice got the attention of everybody in the restaurant except her daughter.
“Zara, please pay attention.”
“To what exactly?” She smiled coldly at her mother.
“To what the major is telling you, darling.” The endearment was at odds with the anger in the dumpy woman’s dark eyes.
“And what is the major telling me?” Zara asked, sweetly. She batted her eyelids at the man, who looked away, finally embarrassed. Quite at which of the many embarrassments on offer it was hard to say.
“Well?” Zara asked. When the major pretended not to hear her question, Zara went back to watching the shops go past.
According to the Guide Michelin, two Parisian chefs were first responsible for the idea of converting the tram into a moving restaurant. Where other entrepreneurs might have tried to cram in tables, they’d bought two wooden tramcars, linked them together and used the front car as a restaurant and the rear as offices and a kitchen. That had been 120 years before and, with only eight tables ever available, Maxim’s had been booked solid for months ahead ever since.
“Just how did you get a reservation?” Zara asked suddenly.
The next table stopped talking. Maybe they were interested or maybe she’d just interrupted their idiot conversation; Zara didn’t know and really didn’t care.
“I mean,” she said bitterly, “you couldn’t know I was going to be rescued by Ashraf Bey, could you? And it wasn’t like you knew he was going to turn out innocent.”
“I never believed that Raf . . .” began Madame Rahina.
Zara snorted.
Ignoring the look of outrage on her mother’s face, Zara turned to her father. “The table,” she reminded him, just in case he’d forgotten.
“I never,” repeated her mother loudly, “I never . . .” But she didn’t get to finish that sentence either.
“You did,” said Zara. “You told me execution was too good for him and that you knew, just as soon as you saw him, that he was an evil . . .”
“I got a list of everyone who had a table booked,” said Hamzah flatly, his voice cutting through the blossoming quarrel. Zara bet he pulled that trick at business meetings, not that he’d need to do it often. Most people he met owed him their living. “Then I called them up in turn and made one of them an offer.”
“Which one?” The major’s French carried a Cairene intonation that went with his hawklike nose and high cheekbones. His skin was as honeyed as her own was dark, and skilful tailoring on his dress uniform showed off his elegant figure. Zara reckoned she might even like him, if only he’d lighten up a bit.
“I mean,” he said, “how did you choose?”
Hamzah laughed. “Oh, that was easy. I told each one that I had every intention of eating here tonight and offered a token sum for his table to the one who sounded most horrified.”
Despite herself, Zara smiled, though it was obvious that the major was startled by the joke Hamzah made against himself. Which begged a big question, why was he really here? When she’d first walked into Maxim’s and seen his name on a place card, Zara was sure he’d be her new suitor. Some wellborn, near-bankrupt staff officer her mother had found to make her respectable . . . As if anything could make her respectable in Iskandryia’s eyes after Raf had publicly jilted her.
Her father’s money in return for social cachet. Class for cash, that was the deal Raf was offered. And it almost worked. Would have done in fact, if Raf’s now-dead aunt and her own decidedly undead mother had had anything to do with it. Only thing was, Raf had other ideas.
“Well,” said Zara, “you got the table. So when do we actually get to eat?”
“There’s plenty of time,” Hamzah said calmly.
“Really?” Zara looked at her watch. “Maybe my Rotary’s fast.” She tapped the side, shrugged and went back to staring out of the tram. So what if she was behaving badly? She’d said the meal was a bad idea when he first suggested it and repeated herself when her father announced he’d booked a table. Nothing had happened since to make her change her mind.
The ornate offices of Thomas Cook and the Olympia building slid past, Café Athinios and the stuccoed Palais de Justice following after. Place Zaghloul let her look out over a dusty square to the dark sea beyond, until the view was cut off by a bus station. They were still headed west, one block back from the Corniche.
Coming next was the tomb of the unknown warrior, where tramps slept against marble walls, tattered booths sold sticky almonds and foreign tourists walked hand in hand, seeing only beauty. Beyond that, the Corniche curved north towards the brooding weight of Fort Qaitbey.
Another road would herd the tram along the top of the promontory to Ras el-Tin, then steer south towards Maritime Station and the start of the old dockyards.
Seen on a map, the jutting promontory looked like a fat apple core. But the district’s rocklike solidity was an illusion. Once, the area had been mostly underwater. Then a causeway joined an island to the shore. Eventually the causeway had been thickened, then thickened again with rubble until finally El Anfushi was created, with its narrow streets and weird, inward-looking Turko-Arabic houses. Houses that must be . . .
“Why couldn’t you just invite Hani by herself?” Zara demanded suddenly. Hani might be nine but she could still date a building just by looking at it.
“Well?” Zara asked crossly.
“Perhaps she was the one who didn’t want to come.” Madame Rahina’s words were brittle. Her anger at Raf’s snub not quite offset by the pleasure she got from blaming Zara.
“You asked her?”
“No, of course I didn’t ask her. You don’t ask children. She was included on the invitation to Ashraf Bey.”
Terrific. Zara’s glance slid to the empty chairs. Place names still showed who should have sat in them, though the maître d’ had insisted on whisking away the table silver when he realized that Hamzah’s missing guests were likely to remain that way.
“You didn’t really expect him, did you?” Hamzah asked his daughter gently. There was no anger in his voice, no accusation. Just the acceptance of basic facts. Chief among them was that the last time Ashraf drove out to Villa Hamzah, she’d flatly refused to see him. Actually, Raf hadn’t driven himself at all, Avatar was the one behind the wheel and she’d been cross about that too.
Expect him? She expected nothing.
That Av was missing was a given, Zara knew that. Her father only ever saw the kid if he knew her mother was busy elsewhere. And even that was a recent development, poor little bastard. Which was what Av was. In a city where polygamy was normal, to be illegitimate was by definition to be poor, one of the unwanted.
“Here,” said the major as he handed her a linen napkin, spotless and uncreased, “you might want this . . .”
Zara looked at him blankly.
“You’re crying,” he said.
She was too, which might explain the soft edges to the streets outside.
CHAPTER 10
7th October
The girl at the window was unmistakable as the restaurant car trundled by. Her desolation so real that Raf could almost taste it through glass.