“What now?”
“His Excellency Ashraf al-Mansur . . .” St. Cloud’s majordomo was careful not to look at his master. Not seeing things he shouldn’t see formed a substantial part of his duties. “He demands admittance.” The small Scot spoke the word with such relish that the Marquis looked up and almost blew his carefully constructed, syncopated rhythm.
Luckily the object of his interest kept moving, eyes fixed into the far distance. Drugs, familiarity or fear had emptied the adolescent’s smooth face of anything except boredom and an instinct for absolute obedience.
“Show him in.”
“Sir?”
“Show in al-Mansur.”
The majordomo bowed and withdrew, walking backward from the chamber.
“The Marquis will see you now.” He gestured politely towards a large door and the unacceptability of what lay beyond. “You may find him . . .” The majordomo hesitated. “A little distracted.”
Raf entered without knocking. Unlike the tiled, fountained and pillared Moorish fantasy that was Dar St. Cloud, the Marquis’ villa overlooking Cap Bon in Tunisia, the drawing room of his house at Aboukir could have been transported wholesale from Paris.
Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche hung in pride of place on the far wall. An adolescent Cupid chastely kissing the brow of a blonde girl who stared wide-eyed straight at the door where Raf stood, her hands folded neatly below naked breasts. A Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars hung beside it, a huge canvas edged in heavy gilt, with the frame so massive that it almost touched both ceiling and floor. And on other walls, endless young nymphs gazed innocent-eyed at lean shepherd boys, oblivious to their own seminakedness.
A Napoleon III sideboard was positioned directly beneath the Gérard, its top a single slab of horsehair marble cut from a quarry outside Milan. Along the top were ranged naked glass figures, mostly Lalique, and two decanters.
“Pour yourself a small drink.” The Marquis spoke without looking up or releasing the figure still sitting on his lap (what with the shaved skull and baggy shirt, it was impossible to tell if St. Cloud’s companion was male or female). “This won’t take long.”
“It might,” said Raf, “if we’re going to cover who had Kamil Quitrimala kidnapped, why three tourists were butchered to order, a casino burned and the pipeline to a refinery cut. And that’s before we . . .”
“Out,” said St. Cloud crossly. And the adolescent to whom he spoke disappeared in a flurry of coltlike legs and a flash of thin buttocks. The oversized shirt was St. Cloud’s own, Raf realized; its use a badge of ownership or fondness received, perhaps both.
“Gang warfare for the casino and kidnapping . . . Psychopaths for the murders, variously dead, I believe. And I assume the Sword of God was behind the refinery, just as it was behind those outrageous EMP bombs.” The Marquis gave a smile.
“You assume wrong.”
St. Cloud looked at him.
“What,” said Raf, “do you know about the Osmanli Accord?”
“Less than nothing.” St. Cloud’s voice was firm. “I never bother myself with politics.”
“So it would shock you to discover that, behind the scenes, Berlin needs French agreement to retain its spheres of influence . . . As does Moscow?”
The Marquis snorted. “The idea that Berlin would ask anything of Paris is as unbelievable as . . .”
“The idea that someone French might demand a price of Berlin,” Raf said smoothly. “Well, while you’re at it, imagine that breaking Hamzah was the only result to matter in our little local crisis.”
“Hamzah Effendi?” St. Cloud shook his head. “Surely not . . .”
Raf nodded. “Imagine everything else was just so much means to an end. So the question I have to ask is, Who would want to damage Hamzah?”
“Who indeed . . .” said St. Cloud. “I suspect we’ll never know. Always assuming there was somebody.” He stood up from his elegant Louis XVIII chair, casually slipped himself back inside his trousers and made for the sideboard.
“Are you sure . . . ?” His hand hovered above a brandy balloon.
“Absolutely,” said Raf. “Beyond doubt.”
“Your choice . . .”
St. Cloud poured himself a generous measure of Courvoisier and swilled it round the balloon, bending close to inhale the heavy fumes. “Of course,” he added as an apparent afterthought, “even if this were all true . . . It doesn’t change the fact that Hamzah is guilty as hell. And there’s always the future ownership of that refinery to consider . . .”
“Plus the Midas oil fields in central Sudan and certain Mediterranean offshore sites.”
“Quite,” said St. Cloud. “Now, should a senior official find himself in a position to facilitate the transfer of Hamzah’s part of those holdings . . . After they’ve been legally forfeited by Hamzah, obviously. Then any country intent on consolidating its interests would undoubtedly be very generous.”
“Generous?”
“A commission is usual in these cases.”
“Five percent?”
St. Cloud looked shocked. “One or two. Three at the absolute maximum.”
“And what would three percent come to?”
The Marquis told him.
Raf decided to take that drink after all.
CHAPTER 56
1st November
The trial proper began two days after Raf’s visit to the house at Aboukir. On the morning of 5th Safar 1472, a day that Raf thought of as Monday 1st November . . .
Within the first hour, Zara reached the inescapable conclusion that the man whose bed she’d twice shared was about to destroy her father. So now she sat at a long desk at the front of the temporary court and shuffled papers, while atrocity after atrocity unravelled itself on-screen.
Atrocity was the word Raf used to describe what the judges were seeing. It wasn’t a term to which Zara felt she could object.
Hani, however, sat at the back. And although the steady swing of her legs, which earlier had been flicking backward and forward to scuff the floor, had stopped completely, she resolutely watched one of the screens, her dark eyes darting from horror to horror; though whether to see more or allow herself to take in less was hard to tell.
She shouldn’t have been on board the SS Jannah anyway, which the Khedive had declared Iskandryian soil for the duration of Hamzah’s trial. But Khartoum had been strangely willing to be persuaded that he should accompany her, and the soldiers at the door had done nothing but stare at the cat on her shoulder. As a result, she now sat beside the skeletal Sufi in a makeshift public gallery, watching things she was pretty sure she didn’t want to see.
The picture quality was terrible, the contrast too sharp, and the camera juddered with the reporter’s every step, none of which really mattered. It was what the camera showed that counted. Oh, and spinning numbers near the bottom that gave time, date and an accurate GPS reading.
The ownership of the battleground itself was moot. So the location was translated underneath as “Northeastern Sudan/Southern Egypt (disputed) . . .”
At first, as Raf gestured at the early images, inviting the judges, press and public to watch the evidence being presented, he’d thought the juddering was due to gyroscope malfunction in the original handheld camera, but as the lens panned across another dead boy, fist stuffed into his mouth to prevent himself from crying out, he realized the gyroscope just hadn’t been able to compensate for the photographer’s shock.
Raf pushed a button on his control and the picture froze.
The assignment had both made and destroyed Jean René; turning the man into a living saint and consigning him to forty years of knowing his single most significant work was already behind him.