Effendi

CHAPTER 23 14th October

“Hey.” Hani sounded so cross that Ifritah’s ears flicked back and Hani had to stroke the cat to get her purring again. “I was watching that . . .”

“Sorry,” said Raf, clicking his fingers to change channels. “I need to see what other people are saying about what’s happening . . .”

“Happening where?”

“Here.”

Hani raised her eyebrows but stayed put as Raf banged down his briefcase and turned his attention back to the screen. Heute in Berlin had nothing and neither did the US feeds, but that wasn’t surprising; both countries were notoriously insular. And Iskandryia’s own Ferdie Abdullah was concentrating on a second arson attack on a nightclub opposite Misr Station.

Raf found what he wanted on Paris—la Ronde, which segued straight from a snippet on the Prince Imperial’s first term at St. Andrews to a moderately gloating roundup of problems to be raised when representatives of the Kaiser and the Sublime Porte finally held separate meetings with a US arbitrator, to discuss renewing the Osmanli Accord, the treaty that defined spheres of economic influence in North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans.

Berlin wanted the spheres expanded, as did Moscow. Paris was reserving its position. US Senator Elizabeth Elsing was on record as saying she thought spheres of influence were undemocratic. The French anchorman smirked when he reported this.

“Boring,” announced Hani, so Raf told the screen to find another cartoon and soon a bug-eyed, yellow whatsit was bumbling round being kind to small animals. And while the whatsit ran rescue missions or fried scary monsters with its awesome magic power, Raf boned a leg of lamb, cubed the meat and braised it in a heavy pan.

“What are you making?” Hani asked in the ad break.

“ Hunkar begendi, kind of . . .”

“Sultan’s delight.” Having just discovered McDonald’s, Hani’s tastes had telescoped. Anything that failed to come between two bits of bun with reconstituted french fries didn’t count.

For the sauce that gave its name to the dish, Raf needed to puncture tiny holes in four aubergines so they wouldn’t burst when he grilled them in Donna’s gas oven until their skins went black and blistered.

“You want to do this?” Raf picked up a fork and nodded to the uncooked aubergine.

Hani shook her head. So Raf punched holes in the purple skin instead.

“What is happening?” Hani asked. She was back with Ferdie Abdullah, who was running through the main headlines. Behind him a minor oil pipe bled crude onto gravel and hot sand while a huge billboard readingMIDAS REFINERY blazed like an advertisement for chaos. Before setting it on fire, the arsonists had taken time to stencil a row of red fists along the bottom of the sign.

Against a background of flames, impossibly young soldiers loaded two trespassing Ishies into a police van. With their faces hidden by goggles and belts studded with drives and umbrella modems, the freelance newshounds stumbled towards confinement like vintage astronauts traversing some monochrome lunar plain.

The masks were all affectation. A decent digital lens could be mounted onto the side of ordinary glasses and still be so small as to be almost invisible. As for the drives, anything bigger than a packet of Cleopatra was either outdated, third-world cheap or intentionally obvious.

On-screen, Ferdie Abdullah was explaining that, according to Iskandryia’s bright new Chief of Detectives, the apparently random, wide-ranging attacks of the previous week were connected after all, having been carried out by the Sword of God. Which was the first Raf had heard of it.

“I never said that . . .”

“What?”

“I never said the attacks weren’t random.”

“No?” Hani looked up from stroking Ifritah. “What does random mean?”

“Not related.”

Scooping the grilled aubergines out of their skins with a fork, Raf put the pulp to one side while he got butter from the fridge. Then all he needed was to add flour to the molten butter and beat hard as milk went into the mixture.

“So they are related?”

Raf stopped looking for a skillet. “I don’t know,” he said.

Hani sighed.

After he’d added mashed aubergine to his roux, Raf ground in a twist of pepper, a twist of sea salt and sprinkled on a handful of grated cheese. The lamb went onto the middle of an already warmed serving plate, with the aubergine sauce swirled in an elegant circle round the outside.

“You hungry?”

Hani shook her head.

“No, me neither.” Raf passed the serving dish to Hani. “See if Khartoum wants this, then I’ll buy you a burger . . .”

“For you,” Hani announced from the doorway of the porter’s quarters at the rear of the madersa’s covered garden.

“For us?” Khartoum glanced up from his game of Go as did his opponent, the owner of a small stall in Rue Cif, which ran along the back of the madersa. “You made this?” Khartoum looked surprised. Also disbelieving.

“No, Uncle Ashraf made it.”

“His Excellency . . .” the stall holder looked surprised. “The bey cooks?”

Hani smiled at the man whose knee-length coat and white cap announced he’d made the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca. “His Excellency does a lot of strange things,” she said shortly and backed out of the room. If either man thought it strange that the child had a flea-bitten cat slung round her neck like a collar, they didn’t mention it.

“You’ll be fine,” promised Raf when Hani hesitated in the madersa’s ornate marble hall. For reasons neither Khartoum nor Donna could properly explain, her late Aunt Nafisa had felt it necessary to keep the child indoors. Which meant the funeral of her aunt was the first time Hani had ever left the house.

“Of course I will,” Hani said and yanked open the front door. She smiled as she took Raf’s hand, though her nails dug hard into his palm as they stepped from the quiet of the madersa into the noise of Rue Sherif.

Raf dug back and Hani’s grin turned vulpine. When they reached the corner she was still grinning and still trying to dig her nails through his skin. They both knew she was only half-joking . . .

That night, the fox came as clouds blocked off the stars and the sky moved closer to the earth, imposing an obvious but impressive boundary, like that loss of focus at the edge of a dream or the distant strangeness of the world beyond an aquarium as seen by some captive angelfish.

And as all this occurred, outside of the world outside the al-Mansur madersa, Raf sat on the edge of Hani’s narrow bed and watched the small child sleep, badly . . . She mewled half words and broken sentences that matched the fluttering behind her closed eyes. Panic glued strips of damp hair to her forehead and every so often she’d roll her shoulders as if fighting her way through a crowd. Raf watched and waited in what should have been darkness and would have been were he anyone else. At no point did he allow himself or the fox to sleep.