Effendi

CHAPTER 39 24th October

“And then?” Raf asked, glancing at a low coffee table. A small police-issue recorder sat in the middle, green light lit and numbers counting down what time was left. They were seated in an elegant club room usually reserved for senior officers. The club room was on the third floor of Champollion Precinct, next door to the general canteen. It had a fountain, leather chairs and bombproof windows.

The General, of course, would have put Hamzah in the cells. Raf had decided to do things differently.

“Then?” Hamzah thought about it. “I walked down the slope towards the first half-track.”

“You were looking for survivors?”

“No,” Hamzah shook his head, “I was after water. And then.”

“Then what . . . ?”

Hamzah let himself remember. “The Red Cross came . . .” He nodded towards Hakim, who stood at Raf’s shoulder. “Any chance of someone finding a drink?”

“Check the evidence cupboards,” Raf told his bodyguard. “Whisky if we’ve got any.”

What Hakim found was Spanish brandy, confiscated from an illegal club at Maritime Station, and Raf let Hamzah pour himself a drink, a heavy slug of the Carlos V mixed with Canada Dry.

Instead of drinking it straight down, Hamzah sat in his chair and stared into the glass, watching bubbles break for the surface. He looked, despite his age, exactly like Hani when she watched static on her screen. Intent on imposing meaning onto chaos. Maybe, thought Raf, everyone is trying to find a world behind the world. As if that world might somehow make more sense or, at the very least, be more real . . .

“Tell me about when the Red Cross arrived . . .”

“I was searching among the bodies for Sarah.”

Raf looked at him.

“We changed sides now and then,” Hamzah explained. “We all knew soldiers who’d been raped or mutilated after a battle, but if you could get through that . . .” He picked up his glass and drank from it. “If you could do that. If you were one of the ones left alive at the end . . . Colonel Abad said the field hospital where I left Sarah had been overrun. So I thought . . .”

“Did you find her?”

“No. Though I thought I had. You know, her skin was . . .” Hamzah opened the collar of his shirt to reveal skin the colour of old leather. “Darker than this . . . Purple like the night. Bitter like chocolate. It shone.”

He was crying, slow tears that trickled down jowly cheeks and vanished into stubble. There was no self-pity in his eyes and precious little guilt or fear of what might come next, just grief.

“I thought I would recognize her,” said Hamzah. “But I didn’t, I couldn’t. Some of the bodies were faceless and broken, but it wasn’t that. In the end there were just too many for me to search. When the Red Cross landed their first helicopter I was pulling a Dinka girl from under a pile.”

“What did they say?”

“To me? They said nothing. But then, they didn’t know I spoke their language. To each other . . . ? A thin woman turned to a small man and said, At least one of them survived.”

Hamzah finished his drink in a single gulp and banged down his glass.

“They gave me vitamins, an injection against retrovirus and water in a silver pouch with a thin straw that stopped me drinking it too fast. After that, they photographed me, took my fingerprints, swabbed my mouth for a DNA sample and airlifted me to an American aircraft carrier off Massaua. They gave me a Gap T-shirt, black Levi’s and a pair of silver Nikes. All donations from a charity appeal. They offered to replace my radio and cracked dark glasses, but I said I still liked them. Maybe I should have given them up . . .”

Hamzah shrugged.

“Only, I didn’t, because that wasn’t what Colonel Abad wanted.”

“What the Colonel wanted?” Raf raised his eyebrows. “What happened to Colonel Abad . . . ?”

“Koenig Pasha stole him.”

That was the point Raf turned off the police-issue recorder, thought about his options for all of thirty seconds and hitDELETE /ALL/CONFIRM.

It took another brandy and the rest of that Sunday morning for Raf to get from Hamzah a collection of facts that the drink-sodden industrialist thought obvious. Chief among them was that the Arab-speaking, Ottoman-appointed liaison officer aboard the USS Richmond had been a certain Major Koenig Bey.

So impressed was he by the boy’s tragedy that he insisted on finding a children’s home for the boy and personally escorting him to El Iskandryia, cracked radio, spectacles and all.

“And Sarah,” asked Raf, “you ever find out what happened to her?”

“Oh yes,” said Hamzah. “She died.”

“You eventually traced her records then?”

“No,” said Hamzah. “But her daughter found me . . .” he added bleakly. “Avatar’s mother.”

“I thought Avatar was your son?” Raf said, sounding genuinely puzzled.

Hamzah nodded. “That too.”