A thud, leather on flesh.
“NO, WAIT.” The voice is foreign, the accent atrocious. Whoever is wielding the whip, they do what they’re told. Silence follows.
“You want me to believe you shot five tourists because contractors killed a few wading birds?”
“The river doesn’t need another hotel and it doesn’t need more tourists. Besides, the birds were there first.”
“So you are Sword of God.”
“No, I’m an ornithologist . . .”
That was the start of the little war, which lasted a month. The big war came afterwards and went on for much longer, but Sergeant Ka never quite worked out who the government were fighting. No one important, obviously. And most of the fighting wasn’t in Egypt anyway, it was in Sudan.
The little war, which was what his uncle called it, didn’t seem so little once the tourists stopped coming to Abu Simbel and the soldiers arrived. Inside of forty-eight hours the whole of Ka’s village had been rounded up and marched into the desert. Only a handful of adults survived the first week’s march. Most died of heat or succumbed to the cold at night. Very few made it into the second week to reach the holding pen at El Khaschab.
Ka’s uncle was one of those. With his wife, parents and own son already dead in another place, the man no longer believed in God, only this lack of belief was so shocking that all Ka’s uncle registered was an emptiness as his midday prayers escaped between parched lips and ascended to a silent heaven.
Above him the same cruel sun that turned half-fertile earth to dust and killed the crops in the year Ka was born blistered his skin. A swarm of freshly hatched flies draped his shoulders like a heavy mantle but he hardly noticed them. Just as he failed to notice the watching boy or the white-plumed vultures that hopped and shuffled through the dirt, a handbreath away.
They are excluded by a single question. Should he shoot himself or should he shoot his nephew. With only one bullet remaining, it was impossible to do both . . .
CHAPTER 7
1st August
Zara got arrested for indecency on the 28th July. The first Hamzah knew of it was a day later, from a local paper. Front page, single column.
Rebel Daughter Restrained.
Since Hamzah relied on bribes, blackmail and his fearsome reputation to ensure such things never happened, never mind got reported, he was obviously furious: particularly since the shot used in Iskandryia Today showed his daughter crop-haired and naked under a tight coat.
It would be fair to say that he was also troubled. The police were paid handsomely to leave anything that might connect to Zara or her friends well alone.
So far as Hamzah was concerned, leaving alone meant not arresting his daughter at some illegal/political dance club. And if the Club de Hashishan really was hers, and the police were probably right about that, then that was even more reason for letting things be.
Unfortunately, the offending picture of Zara turned up again, slightly larger in Iskandryia on Sunday. This was the paper that his daughter had just tossed in the bin, before stamping out of his marble-and–red sandstone office . . .
“Well,” said Olga Kaminsky, “you deserved that.” Hamzah saw her smile as she removed Zara’s cup from his desk and wipe away icing sugar with one easy sweep of a linen napkin.
Stating the obvious to Hamzah was living dangerously, but he paid Olga to tell him the truth and so Olga did. Besides, he was too shocked to fire her. Which he did about once a month, only to say nothing when she turned up the following day, as if their fight had never taken place.
Another PA might have convinced herself that this was because he prized her opinion, that the unusual leeway he gave her had nothing to do with those half dozen occasions each year when he took her to bed, but he knew Olga lied neither to him nor to herself. All the same, their relationship wasn’t based on anything as simple as sex.
It was her lack of avarice that first captured his imagination. Other mistresses had taken the diamond chains he offered, the Cartier watches, the inevitable mink. Olga took nothing but her salary and returned every gift, opened but unused. She seemed to want nothing from him but his company and, occasionally, his presence in her bed. And it was her bed, a single one with metal frame, because she’d refused his offer of a flat as well.
“Olga, where did I go wrong?” Hamzah’s grin was rueful but admiring. There couldn’t be another daughter in Iskandryia who’d stamp unannounced into her father’s HQ, spin on the spot and slip off her jacket to show her naked back, lash marks and all, when asked why she refused to come home.
But then, daughter and mother had never been close. And it hadn’t helped that Rahina’s only advice to Zara before her abortive engagement to Ashraf Bey was, “Never undress in front of your husband.”
If Hamzah could have stopped the whippings, he would have done so years back; but mothers dealt with daughters and fathers with sons. And his boast that he’d never lifted his hand to Zara lost out to the fact he’d never actually raised his voice to protect her either. Tradition strangled him, Hamzah knew that. Under the silk shirt and Gucci suit he was still a felaheen at heart.
Zara, however, was not a felaheen daughter. Proper schools, two years in New York and a career at the Bibliotheka Iskandryia had seen to that. She was brave, beautiful and smitten with Ashraf Bey, although Hamzah was prepared to bet almost anything she hadn’t let Raf know that.
He understood what drove his daughter. What was even weirder, he actually admired her while knowing full well it was meant to be the other way round.
“Olga, I’ve got a problem . . .”
Her laugh was instinctive. “You’ve got lots of—” Then she stopped. “You mean you’ve got a problem I don’t know about?” Olga paused in the doorway, then quietly came back to where Hamzah sat. She didn’t perch on the edge of his desk or casually grab a chair and straddle it. She waited for Hamzah to nod towards a leather sofa. And when she sat it was elegantly, with her stockinged legs crossed at the ankle.
Hamzah wondered what Olga saw when she looked at him. A filthy capitalist? A self-deluded gangster? A parvenu so desperate for baubles he bought his own title? Or a father unable to safeguard a daughter who refused all protection?
“Okay,” said Olga briskly. “Problems I do know about . . . Your daughter’s been busted by the morales for running an illegal club. She’s in love with some spoilt little princeling who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. There are rumours of a strike at the refinery. And, despite a full and frank talk, someone’s still asking around about your childhood, according to Kamil . . .”
“Avatar,” Hamzah corrected, without even thinking about it. “He calls himself DJ Avatar.”
“Whatever. He could still become a problem . . .”
“No,” said Hamzah. “Ashraf Bey’s a problem. Avatar just wishes he was.”
“You believe the bey’s for real?”
“I know he is,” Hamzah said heavily. “And he’s a trained killer, government issue . . . A bit damaged round the edges but still under guarantee.” The big man laughed. “Well, that was how he described himself.”
“And you actually wanted this man to marry your daughter?”
“I want,” Hamzah corrected her. “More than want, I need this man to marry Zara.”
“I see,” said Olga. “Can I ask why?”
Hamzah shook his head. There were, in his experience, immutable laws about how fathers felt regarding the suitors who sent flowers and elegant cards to their daughters. The first feeling of hatred gave way to one of regret. Third, and finally, came loss as the daughter became a woman. So was it written.