Pashazade

'I'm sorry to turn up unannounced, but I was hoping to see my father.'

Olga Kaminsky nodded. 'He's expecting you.'

The door to her father's office was ebony carved into arabesques and inlaid with leaves of pink or pale blue marble. Olga knocked once and went in without waiting to be invited.

'Miss Zara,' she announced, stopping in front of a huge desk.

Duty done, Olga Kaminsky turned to Zara and smiled. 'How about some coffee? And maybe a croissant ... ?'

'Well,' said Hamzah as the door shut. 'Coffee and croissant — and I'd always been under the impression that Olga didn't approve of you.'

'How could she not approve?' Zara said. 'She hadn't even met me ...'

Hamzah laughed. Neither of them mentioned the fact that Zara hadn't been home for thirty-six hours. Or why. All the same, he saw how carefully his daughter carried herself as she sat back in a large leather chair without being invited.

'Nice place.'

His office was everything Zara expected. Huge, with windows along two walls, the longest looking north over the Corniche and a blue splash of the Mediterranean beyond. The other looked out over the red-brick edifice of St Mark's College, where Hamzah had swept floors when he first arrived in Iskandryia.

A mountain of printouts balanced on one of the leather chairs, while an old Toshiba notepad sat open on the sofa. On the wall behind his desk an out-dated assault rifle balanced on two nails. It was old, rusty, stamped out from cheap, sheet steel. A Kalashnikov AK49. Like the fountain outside the office, Zara had never seen it before.

The whole room was a mess, which didn't surprise her. His study at Glymenapoulo was the only room her mother wasn't allowed to have cleaned. Here, he didn't even have someone to nag him about the mess — unless that was Olga's job.

'Coffee ...' The door opened ahead of the knock and his PA walked in holding a tray. 'Your Excellency ..." Olga served Hamzah his tiny cup of Turkish coffee and beside it she put a plate of rosewater Turkish Delight, studded with almonds. 'And here's yours,' said Olga. Zara got a long cappuccino and a croissant, along with a linen napkin.

As the woman turned to go, Zara realized her father was blushing. For a horrified second she considered that there might be something between Olga and him and then realized that it was the honorific. He'd wanted Your Excellency so badly and now it made him blush. Zara smiled. Her father would get used to effendi, just as he'd got used to living in a villa surrounded by European antiques. And once he was used to it he'd start to enjoy it. That was his way.

'I suppose you've come to tell me you're not coming home?'

'No,' said Zara. 'I've come to ask for your help ... But you're right,' she added, recognizing the truth in what he said. 'I'm not.'

'Do you want to return to your friends in America?'

'No.' Zara shook her head. 'I'm not going to run away. Not even if that's what you want ... This is my city too.'

Hamzah's nod was approving. 'It's not easy, an unmarried woman living alone. You'll need an apartment, a driver. I can supply those.'

'Let's talk about that later,' said Zara, in a voice Hamzah knew meant she would do anything but. 'Right now I want to talk about Ashraf Bey.'

Hamzah thought about mentioning his daughter's face had suddenly gone red and decided against it. The picture of her on the news in that idiotic coat was too clear in his head. Instead, he glanced out of a window, then reached for his cup. The coffee was too hot but he drank it anyway, chasing away its mudlike bitterness with a piece of Turkish delight. 'Eat your croissant,' he said, 'or Olga will be upset

They were negotiating, silently and without words: he knew that. Even in El Iskandryia the gap between what could and what couldn't be said was vast, and Isk was the most relaxed of the Ottoman cities. A free port and a micro-state. The personal fief of its owner the Khedive — unlike Cairo, which the Khedive held in trust for the Sultan in Stambul.

But freedom was relative. And the gap between father, and daughter still wide. In many families it was unbridgeable. The woman he sat opposite knew less about him than he actually knew about her, which was almost nothing.

He feared she'd taken at least one lover while in New York. But the only real thing he knew about her was what she'd told him the night before she flew, when they were talking obliquely about the three months she'd just spent in a Swiss clinic. Which was that she wasn't proud of everything she'd done, but she was ashamed of very little.

'I can give him money,' Hamzah said simply. 'A route out of Iskandryia if that will help. But I can't protect him ...' He wanted to say more, to ask obvious questions, but for Zara the only question that mattered was the one she asked.

'Why do the police insist he killed his aunt?'

'Maybe he did,' said Hamzah, chewing the edges off a cube of Turkish Delight. He smiled sadly when Zara handed him her napkin. 'Have you thought of that?'

'He swears he didn't.'

'And you believe him?'

Zara bit her lip and nodded, not trusting herself to speak —which her father found more worrying than anything else.

'Olga.' He punched a button on his desk. 'Tell legal to call me.' Seconds later a screen beeped and the face of a small bald man squinted out at Hamzah. 'Excellency?' The voice was reedy, the accent cut-glass Cairene.

'Beys,' said Hamzah. 'They have complete carte blanche. I'm right, aren't I ... they can't be arrested?'

The elderly lawyer hesitated. 'Up to a point, Excellency ..."

A small smile lit Hamzah's face and he jerked his chin towards the screen to indicate to Zara that she should listen carefully. 'What are the exceptions?'

Two types of murder — of a mullah or a family member — gross blasphemy before two reputable witnesses, and gross outrage of a minor, witnesses ditto.'

'So Ashraf al-Mansur can be arrested?'

'Given that he murdered his aunt, yes ...'

Hamzah held up his hand to still Zara's protest and she suddenly realized she was out of the screen's line of sight. The lawyer couldn't see her and so didn't know she was there.

Thank you.' Hamzah blanked the screen. 'My first question,' he said to Zara, 'is why do they really want Ashraf al-Mansur? And my second is, who exactly is they ... any ideas?'

He sat back in his chair. 'No? Then I suggest you find out or I suggest your friend does ...'

The meeting was over, Zara realized. And what was more staggering than her father treating her as an adult was him treating her as an equal. She'd asked him a question and he'd given her two relevant questions in reply. Either one of which might be the key. Going to America had been a good move, whatever work friends might say. And returning had been the right move too, whatever Zara might sometimes think herself.

'What do I tell your mother about why you're not coming home?' Hamzah's voice was neutral. But his eyes widened as Zara pulled off her silk scarf, to reveal that she wore no shirt beneath her Dior jacket, and began to undo her jacket's black glass buttons. At the last minute, she turned her back on her father and slid the silk jacket down over her shoulders, revealing the marks.

'Tell her what you like.'

Ten minutes after Zara left her father's office and headed on foot towards the General's mansion, Hani crawled out of her bed, looked round and went to shake Raf. 'Zara's gone,' she said.

'Has she?' Raf sat up, groaned and slid his legs over the edge of the couch. He did his best to sound unconcerned but he needn't have bothered. Hani was too busy pointing at his feet.

'You're wearing shoes,' she said.

Yeah, he was. Both of them fully dressed was one of Zara's conditions for sharing the VSV 's narrow bed, though even being dressed wouldn't make a difference if Hani told someone he and Zara had shared a mattress. Zara was under twenty-one and behaviour likely to corrupt a minor would be the least of it.