Felaheen a-3 Read online

  (The other thing she never forgot to mention was the time Norwegian commandos boarded SS Valhalla outside Spitzbergen and she'd had to hide two rolls of Kodachrome in her vagina and follow it with a tampon. This, she reminded everyone, was the point she converted to digital photography.)

  "You done with that?"

  Raf looked at the olive-skinned woman sat opposite. Given that every single café he'd seen on his short walk through Souk El Katcherine had been filled only with men, her sex made her a rarity.

  "It's obvious," she said, plucking the roach from his fingers. "I'm allowed in because Jean-Marie, my uncle, owns the café. Besides, I'm half-French so I don't know any better."

  Isabeau Boulart had one of those ambiguous faces, angelically innocent from the front but slightly dissolute in profile. A gap separated her front teeth and she had a gold nose stud. Her chin was strong, her lower lip narrower than the upper as if top and bottom didn't quite meet or match. Her figure looked good, though, neat breasts pushing at a cotton top slightly too short to cover the soft curve of her tummy.

  "Finished staring?"

  Raf smiled blissfully and across the room Sajjad laughed. "Prime kif," he said. "Idries imports it himself. Guaranteed to take away your senses . . ."

  "Yeah," said the woman, "if you have any to start with."

  Idries was the boy in check shirt and jeans who'd handed Raf the roach. Somehow, in a way Raf hadn't yet worked out, Sajjad was waiting for Idries' agreement on something. And Raf was still just about awake enough to know it concerned him.

  "Where are you originally from?" Idries' voice was casual, unthreatening. Which was enough to make Raf try to clear his thoughts.

  "I'm, well . . ."

  "You can tell us," said Isabeau. It was hard to work out whether or not she was being sarcastic.

  "I don't know," Raf admitted finally. "I've never known the answer to that question," he added, when Isabeau raised her eyebrows. "People ask and my mind goes empty." It would have been easier to give them the name of the village he'd told the soldier but that had gone out of his head.

  "What was your father's name?" Idries demanded.

  "He doesn't know his father," said Sajjad flatly. "And I saw him half kill a member of the mubahith. He's one of us."

  The fat boy in the Italian suit kept hogging the sheesa and Shibli went on quietly sipping his hot mint tea from a small glass, but the others were listening and watching, weighing up his words.

  Waiting.

  The kif had done its job if that was to flood Raf's brain with delta-9-tetrhydrocannabinol and make him reveal the truth. Something he'd be happy to do if only he could recognize it.

  "Where did your train come from?" asked Isabeau.

  This Raf could handle.

  "Ben Guerdane." He named a two-horse town on the Jeffara plain in the shadow of Jebel Dahar, maybe twenty klicks from the border with Tripolitana. Originally the fox's plan, such as it was, had been to bus the distance from Ben Guerdane to Kairouan, then take another to Tunis, but the night bus had already gone so Raf caught a local train instead, buying his ticket at one window, booking his cracked wooden seat at a second and confirming the ticket he'd just bought at a third. The entire cost of his ticket and seat reservation was less than a cappuccino at Le Trianon.

  "That's true," Sajjad nodded. "I saw it come in."

  "Where were you standing?" Hassan demanded.

  "In the café overlooking the concourse. The one with the balcony."

  A place with a façade that could have been lifted straight from the Marais in Paris and probably was. All green tiles and glass. As well as a whole sprawl of red-roofed suburbs, the French had managed to build a cathedral, an Art Nouveau theatre, an opera house and the Gare de Tunis by the time the Emir's great-grandfather threw them out of his city.

  Raf was glad he could remember that.

  "No other way onto the platform?" Shibli asked.

  Sajjad shook his head firmly.

  "Okay," said Shibli, "so we assume he got off that train. Let's deal with the next point." He nodded to Idries and told the boy to pass Raf the leather bag Sajjad had lent to him.

  "Open it," he said. So Raf did and pulled out the submachine gun. Someone, probably Sajjad, had slotted the magazine back into place and without thinking Raf broke it down again. Separating clip from chassis.

  "How did you get this?"

  Raf told his story for a third time. Sajjad having been both the first and the second time.

  "Didn't you realize there would be mubahith and soldiers?" Shibli looked more puzzled than anything else.

  No, Raf could honestly say the thought never occurred to him. Police yes, in North Africa the police were everywhere, but soldiers questioning every felah, khamme and Berber clansman to climb from a local train . . . ? That was something else again.

  "Okay," said Shibli, putting down his tea glass. "Let's take this from the top . . ." He smiled and for a split second it was possible to see the man he'd been. Someone whose hunger for meaning had taken him through all life had to offer and out into a stark stillness beyond.

  "Do you want to keep the gun?"

  Raf shook his head.

  "Good . . ." The Shibli held out his hand, looking puzzled when Raf made no attempt to hand over the HK.

  "Fingerprints," Raf explained apologetically. Without really thinking about it, Raf freed a catch on the side and dropped to his knees, field-stripping the HK on the dirty floor in front of him. When the weapon was reduced to barrel, breech, stock and chassis, Raf reached behind him and took a tiny bowl of olive oil from Isabeau's plate without even asking.

  Ripping a strip from the leg of his borrowed SBCF jumpsuit he soaked it in oil and wiped over the parts in front of him. As an afterthought Raf flipped the bullets from their magazine and reloaded them, having first made sure each was clean.

  Thirty seconds later the gun was whole and the room was in silence. Most of the expressions when Raf looked up were unreadable.

  "You originally travelled from Egypt?"

  Raf looked surprised.

  "The jellaba you wore," said Shibli, "Sajjad said the pattern was Egyptian."

  "Not mine," Raf said.

  "Meaning what?"

  "I needed some clothes so I stole them."

  "And what were you wearing when you stole someone else's jellaba?"

  Raf thought back to his black Italian suit, white cotton shirt and red tie, the shades, his black shoes and the gold cuff links Hamzah Effendi gave him for something he once did.

  "Uniform," said Raf finally. "I was wearing uniform."

  In Tunis, as in many cities along the North African littoral, salafi, those who followed al-Salaf al-Salih, the venerable forefathers talked about war as if it were always within or between religions, but those with eyes open knew it was between poverty and wealth. Yet Shibli found it hard to blame them. Soviet kids in particular came to the city on holiday, UN sanctions or not, bringing their currency and worse behaviour. Object lessons in the fact that despite the words of the saints, humility and virtue did not automatically bring material reward.

  And it was hard to explain to those with nothing, that compared to the rest of Europe the 'packers and Soviet kids with their jeans and weird jackets were as poor as most Ifriqiyans were in relation to the Soviets.

  Only those whose eyes were open could see these things.

  "Who has marc?" Shibli's question was so blunt that Idries mistimed his draw on the sheesha and collapsed into a fit of coughing; one that lasted longer than strictly necessary as he tried to work out the right answer. In the end, Idries did what he usually did when faced with one of the Sufi's questions. Told the truth without knowing if that was the right thing to do or not.

  "I have a small flask . . ."

  Shibli held out his hand.

  Spirits were prohibited in Tunis by tradition not law. Those who wanted to drink marc or armagnac could go to a café or visit the bar of a big hotel. The Emir's reasoning was sim
ple. Those who wanted to drink could while those who knew spirits to be evil didn't need his law to tell them this. Besides, the Soviets all drank heavily. In his own way the Emir was a very pragmatic man.

  This was the cause of his wife's discontent. Or so it was said. Shibli didn't know if her son, Kashif Pasha, also believed what the old mullahs told his mother or if His Excellency was just using them as they used him. It was, as he'd once heard Isabeau say, a bitch of a call. What was unquestionably true was that most of the army believed, but then uniforms and absolutes seemed to go together, whether God willed or not.

  Flipping open Idries' flask, Shibli took a long swallow and felt cheap brandy burn his throat on its way down. Seconds later it ignited his stomach, which served him right for forgetting, once again, to eat before leaving his madersa.

  He drank to make a point. Whether any of the others had eyes open enough to understand his point was their business. Offering the flask to Raf, he watched the man drain what was left and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He did it without hesitation. Without the slightest thought of refusal.

  An officer, Shibli decided, noticing soft fingers and unbroken nails. An officer who broke down a gun like any grunt. One who drank. An officer on the run. Or an infiltrator, an agent provocateur willing to break sharia law in the course of his job? A man who would need to be watched while he watched them . . .

  "Who are you really?" Shibli's question was aimed at Raf but Sajjad got in his reply first.

  "A conscript, he said so."

  Which wasn't what the soldier had said at all, though Shibli let that pass. Taking another glance at the drunken man in the orange jumpsuit, Shibli tried again. "What are you running from?" he asked.

  "What have you got," said Raf.

  And fell sideways off his stool.

  CHAPTER 20

  Flashback

  Per gutted supper with a swift cut, turning his knife sideways to hook out the rat's intestines, which tumbled onto the coals at his feet. Without pause, he sliced a ring around the neck of his catch and tossed the blade aside to ease his fingers beneath the animal's skin, peeling it back like a man turning a glove inside out. Only then did he answer the blond girl sitting in the dusk opposite.

  "Sure I'm sure . . ."

  "It's safe to eat?"

  Per nodded. "You'd be surprised what's safe if you cook it properly. You certain this isn't a rare species?"

  Sally was.

  When Per first returned with supper wriggling in his hand he'd asked Sally if his catch was rare. Since the rat was obviously still alive at this point Sally had assumed Per was trying to avoid killing something endangered. Now she was beginning to wonder. The small stuff she knew, his hatred of shoes, the fact the first thing he did each morning was retie his hair, and the raw scratch marks across his back were definitely hers: but she still had little idea as yet of what was inside his head. But then it was fair to say that Per had less than no idea of what was in her own.

  "Rosemary," Per said, crumbling leaves under her nose. "And this one's fresh thyme."

  Sally had watched the snake-hipped Swede build a fire from brushwood, doing everything the way Sally felt it should be done. First he dug a small pit and ringed it with stones collected from the outcrop under which they camped. Raked a wide area around the pit with his fingers as a second move, brushing aside anything that might flare like tinder. And filled the pit with twigs, arranged by thickness as his third move. Spaghetti-thin in the middle, pencil-fat around that and fatter still around the outside and over the top.

  The flame came from an old lighter; so old she hadn't seen that kind before.

  "Just petrol," said Per, noticing her interest. "Works even in a high wind." He did something vaguely obscene with the chrome circle at the top of the lighter and Sally realized he was jacking it up and down like a metal foreskin. "Belonged to my grandfather," he said proudly.

  "And you still use it?"

  "Why not?" said Per. "It still works."

  Sally smiled. He was an odd mix. A carnivorous technopagan who thought modern war inherently immoral but happily believed killing to be a hardwired human reaction, if only on a personal level. As for global politics, genetics and the other stuff that really interested Sally, they hadn't even begun to go there. The only thing that really fired Per was history and old ruins.

  "What are you thinking?" His voice studiedly casual, borderline curious. Something about her obviously fascinated him and Sally had yet to work out what. Leaving aside the obvious.

  "That you're a good fuck . . ."

  Per grinned. "And you're a good judge of these things?"

  "You're not?"

  Still grinning the boy put his lighter to the kindling and they both watched flame catch. An immediate helix of twisted vision ruptured the air between them. There was no smoke to disturb the summer sky, only a spiral of heat haze. Sally was impressed by that.

  They could have got off at Gabes but Sally wanted a bank and knew, because she'd already checked, that Coutts & Co. (Tunis) kept a branch where Avenue de Carthage intersected with Avenue de Paris.

  So she made Per look after her luggage in a café across the road while she sauntered into one of those grey-stoned colonial mansions with sash windows, bay trees at the door and industrial-strength air-conditioning and banged her chequebook on the counter, which was Italian horsehair marble, obviously enough.

  The florid young man who glanced up looked first at Sally's tatty chequebook and only then at the blond foreigner and Sally was glad it was that way round. The five minutes she'd spent cleaning up in the thin trickle of water extracted from an ablutions hose in the café loo had done little but smear dust across her sunburned face. Dirt still grimed her arms and Sally's hair was a mess under her scarf. Although Sally had to admit that tying back her hair helped make her look local.

  "Madame?"

  "Mademoiselle," Sally corrected without thinking. Mademoiselle it was and mademoiselle was the way it was going to stay. She'd seen the price her mother had to pay for security and that was just too high.

  "I'd like to check my account."

  Sally pushed her book to Kaysar Aziz and watched him flick back its cover and discreetly check the laser-stamped photograph embossed on the inside. Equally discreetly, Aziz fanned a dozen of the most recent stubs. The amounts scrawled in a variety of cheap pens got smaller each time.

  "If you could just wait here." He vanished through an oak door to check her balance, something he could have done quicker by flicking alive a flatscreen angled into the countertop. This was discretion apparently.

  She knew the answer the moment Kaysar reappeared, long before he had time or need to frame his reply.

  "Empty?"

  "I'm sorry . . ."

  Sally shrugged. "Not your problem if my father's a prick."

  His blink was lightning-fast.

  "Cancelled," Sally explained. "Until I come home. He's been threatening it for months. Now he has . . . You got a loo round here?"

  Aziz looked blank.

  "Toilet," Sally said. "Which way?"

  Rinsing her hands to wash off the soap, Sally started on her face and realized, too late, that she was splashing water down her front. The decision made itself. Unwrapping her scarf she shoved it into the pocket of her jeans and pulled her damp T-shirt over her head, revealing bite marks below one breast and a barbed-wire tattoo round her upper left arm. The tattoo was a mistake, an old one. The jury was still out on the navel stud and the gold dumbbell through her left nipple.

  The body of an animal, Wu Yung had said, and that was when Sally knew she'd finally outgrown him. The old man meant lean and muscled like a predator but he'd missed the essential truth. What he thought was a compliment was merely a statement of the obvious. And the fact Wu Yung never realized this disappointed her. She was an animal as was he, as were Bozo and Atal, that overprivileged, underchallenged little idiot with his kangaroo-skin shoes.

  Homo sapiens. One point three perc
ent off being a chimpanzee. A species outside evolution and seriously in need of an overhaul.

  Sally sighed.

  When she'd wrung out as much water from her hair as she could Sally wrapped it still damp in her scarf, splashed cologne onto her breasts from a bottle on a glass shelf above the basin, struggled back into her T-shirt and turned to go. That was when she noticed an elderly Arab woman sitting in an alcove.

  Gazes met and held, pale blue and darkest brown and Sally nodded, shrugging off the lack of a nod in return.

  To make a point she left her last US dollar in the saucer by the door.

  "Well, that went perfectly," Sally announced as she slumped into the chair opposite Per and reached for her Leica.

  "You got your money?"

  "Yeah." Sally picked up the dregs of Per's espresso and downed it in a single gulp. "Every last penny in my account."

  "What now?" Per asked.

  "We go our separate ways I guess."

  "And your way is where?"

  "Into the desert."

  Per smiled. "You've been practising that," he said.

  "Practising what?" Sally demanded, her puzzlement real.

  "That line," said Per, brushing aside his floppy hair. He put one hand to his pale eyes to shade out a sun already kept at bay by a café umbrella and pretended to peer into the far distance. "Searching for your famous weasel?"

  Sally nodded and Per laughed.

  "I don't believe you," he said. "Not even an Englishwoman chases into the desert after a weasel."

  "I do," said Sally. "Chasing things is how you find them."

  "But they're not even rare," Per protested. "I know, I looked them up." He pulled a battered Nokia from his rucksack and flipped up the number pad to reveal a foldout keyboard and pop-up screen. "So what are you really after?"

  "Really?"

  Per nodded.