Felaheen

CHAPTER 32 Wednesday 2nd March

On the dirt track a group of hunters struggled with a dead boar. They had its carcass lashed to a pole and slung between two of their party. A third man had a Ruger across his back and carried the rifles of the first two, one slung under each arm. Behind those three walked two more men, rifles ported across their broad chests.

Gravel crunched beneath their boots and each wore a loden coat with broad belt, tweed plus fours and long woollen socks.

Every last one of them watched the Bugatti Royale grind past. All their guns had telescopic sights and featured extended magazines that came only as an (expensive) optional extra. The man at the back had two dead rabbits hanging from his belt.

"Season ends in about three weeks," said Hani. She waved to the hunters, who stared back, eyes hard. The Bugatti, one of only seven ever made, had been climbing for the last five minutes towards a distant farmhouse that kept vanishing behind the hill. The track over which it rattled was rough, edged with thorn and a few bare oaks unwilling to accept that spring was due.

"There it is . . ."

Thick walls washed white under a roof of red pantiles. Windows kept small to protect the inside from winter winds. Protecting the glass were oak shutters, their wood stripped bare by winter frost and summer heat. A hunting lodge really, built by a wine shipper from Cahors. It could have been lifted wholesale from the Lot valley and set down amid the pines and oaks of Ifriqiya's rugged north coast.

Its original owner was long dead. His marble tomb was decaying in a colonial churchyard where a pubescent angel stood guard over his final resting place, her downcast eyes at odds with the plumpness of her body and the thinness of her robes. Now she waited, rendered wingless by vandals, an atrocity victim waiting for eternity.

Claude Bouteloup began his life as a peasant farmer and ended it a baron, gold having dug deep enough to discover a previously overlooked family title. The walls of his old home remained lined with heads taken from the boar he'd shot in the Northern Tell. An implausible spread of horns over the main door stood memory to his plan to reintroduce aurochs, a few of which still roamed the hills, but fewer by the year.

All this Hani read out to Murad and Raf as her uncle yanked the Bugatti's fourteen-foot wheelbase round a tight bend in the dirt road while trying to ignore a drop that fell away to a white, storm-fed river far below.

"Put the book down," Raf told her. "Before you make yourself feel sick."

"Too late," said Hani. She flicked backwards for a few pages, then flicked forward. "This guide doesn't say who owns it now," she complained, skim-reading the entry again.

"It wouldn't," said Raf.

The first clue that this wasn't just another hunting lodge came at the gates. These looked normal until Raf got close enough to see otherwise. Tiny cameras tracked his arrival, watching from stone gateposts where they were bolted discreetly between the open claws of granite eagles.

Micromesh, fine enough to be virtually invisible, lined the far side of the gate's flowing wrought iron. Its heavy, old-fashioned lock was electronic. Cracking paint covered hinges that Raf was willing to bet conformed to some exacting military standard he didn't even know existed.

"You step out of the car," said Murad. "And then someone opens the gates if they like the look of you . . . I've been here before," he added, without glancing up from his toy Ninja Nizam. Hani and he had spent from Tunis to Bizerte arguing about whether or not action figures were childish.

Hani kept on saying they were. Until finally Murad announced that as Hani did nothing but play with a stupid cat, her opinion didn't count.

"Ifritah's not a toy."

"Did I say she was?"

After that came blessed silence, from Bizerte to just past Cap Serrat, where Raf turned the Bugatti off the crumbling blacktop onto something that barely qualified as track. The Ettore-Bugatti-built coupé Napoleon had been a present from the Prince Imperial in Paris to the Emir's grandfather and, until Raf claimed it, had been garaged in a mews at the back of the Bardo Palace.

No one had dared to stop Raf from commandeering the 275bhp, 12.8-litre monster. But then, from the chamberlain who ran the nearly empty palace to the uniformed sailor who first saw a blond notable in shades and black Armani suit striding towards its main door, no one had known how to treat Ashraf al-Mansur at all.

Finding a new suit had been as easy as kicking in the window of a boutique opposite Ibn Khaldoun's statue in Place de la Victoire, about three hundred paces from Bab el Bahar. By then, dawn's call to prayer had come and gone and only isolated trucks still circled the medina like flies disappointed by the quality of their meal. The boutique was very elegant, with a wide range of supposedly embargoed Western goods, but it should have spent more on security.

On his way out Raf met a handful of other looters on their way in. They liked his suit too. In fact they liked it so much he went back to point out the appropriate rack. And it was only after he left the second time that he put on the shades he'd taken to match, casually ditching his cheap contacts into a storm drain.

An hour's walk from Ibn Khaldoun's statue had taken him to the edge of the Bardo. A complex of original buildings with rambling faux al Andalus additions, the Bardo featured palaces built on palaces, the bedrooms of one situated over the reception rooms of another until the different parts ran together into one impossible mess.

No one had ever cataloged its contents. Records even differed as to the number of rooms. And each attempt at rationalization made matters worse. Although it was widely agreed among architectural historians that the rebuilding of 1882, during which medieval mashrabiyas were replaced with sash windows along one whole side, was undoubtedly a low point.

All the same, the Bardo complex still counted as the most recognized façade in North Africa. One result of an old etching featuring in the opening credits of A Thousand Flowers, a long-running, widely syndicated Turkish soap based in the nineteenth-century harem of Ahmed Bey, where a thousand concubines languished under the guard of five eunuchs, played by bald Sudanese women.

No men were ever seen. And although some flower would occasionally be plucked from her languid divan and sent through the Door, she would return an episode later, usually in a state of unspecified bliss, distraught or just more worldly-wise.

Gossip, treachery and friendship, the plot ran regular as celestial tram lines. Its avid following the by-product of the originator's desire to draw her cast from a dozen nationalities, as Ifriqiya's beys had filled their harems with a variety of Egyptians, Turks and Southern Europeans, mostly captured slaves.

Various bearded Jesuits were sent, both in reality and in the soap. And indeed, in reality one such missionary spent three years camped in a wing of the Bardo Palace waiting for an audience that never actually came; despite an invitation from a bey devoted to the memory of his nasrani mother.

Now the Bardo was home to the world's largest collection of Carthaginian mosaics, an unquantifiable number of bad Victorian paintings and Kashif Pasha, his retinue and his mother. (With only Kashif's direct appeal to the Emir ensuring that Lady Maryam and he were allocated different sections of the crumbling complex.)

No flag flew from the mast over the main gate when Raf arrived, which meant no adult member of the al-Mansur family was currently at home.

"We're closed." The young sailor guarding the gate held his rifle slung across his chest, the way those on guard always did. His face was set. And only his eyes revealed uncertainty.

Raf halted, smiled . . . Made a minute adjustment to his maroon Versace tie. "Good morning," he said. "I'd like to see your commander."

Sailor and notable stared at one another. Although all the sailor saw was himself reflected in the blankness of Raf's new shades.

"Now," Raf added, his voice polite but firm. He'd once watched his school doctor use just that mixture of courtesy and menace on Raf's Swiss headmaster.

"I don't have a commander."

Raf sighed. "Then get whoever you do have," he suggested.

Leaving his post, the boy vanished through a small door cut into one of two double doors behind him. Endless heavy nails had been hammered into both to form repetitive patterns which, to Raf's eye, looked out of place against the delicacy of the pink marble columns supporting the arch into which the doors were set.

With a shrug, Raf stepped through the arch after him and found himself in a courtyard.

"You left the door open," Raf pointed out, when the returning guard opened his mouth to complain. Behind the boy Raf saw a grey-haired man in blue uniform raise his eyes to heaven.

"Morning, Chief," Raf said.

The elderly Petty Officer nodded. And in that nod was everything he felt about using untrained conscripts as guards and about notables who turned up at dawn, expecting to be shown round the Bardo.

"The palace is shut, Excellency."

"I know." Raf knew nothing of the sort, but that wasn't really the point. Straightening up, he adjusted his cuffs almost without thinking. "I'm Ashraf al-Mansur," he said, "the Emir's middle son. I've been asked to investigate last night's attack on my father."

"Attack?"

Raf didn't bother to reply.

"So it was . . ." The NCO's voice faltered.

"I think you'd better introduce me to your commander," Raf said and stepped farther into a courtyard overlooked by fifty sashed windows and a dozen balconies. The European kind.

He looked around him. "My father here?"

The old man shook his head.

"Lady Maryam?"

Another shake and a quick suck of yellowing teeth.

"Okay," said Raf. "How about Kashif Pasha?"

The NCO opened his mouth, then shut it again. Had the pasha been in residence then, as well as having the al-Mansur flag flying, that gate would have been guarded by Kashif's own soldiers instead of raw recruits. As it was, Kashif's men were rumoured to be busy, making wide-ranging arrests.

The one person Raf did find was Hani, although he found Ifritah first, scooping the grey kitten up from a tiled floor and tossing it over his shoulders like a stole.

"Hey," shouted a young girl who slid through a door and kick stopped, leaving a smear of burned leather on the marble under her heel. "That's my . . ."

She took a look at the man facing her.

"Oh," she said crossly, "you're back."

"No," said Raf, "I've been here for days. You're the one who's just arrived."

"I was here yesterday," Hani said. "You can ask him." She pointed to a door through which a young boy appeared. He was dressed in a blazer and had a striped tie quite as smart as the one Raf wore.

"Murad al-Mansur?" said Raf and watched the boy glance round before nodding. They both knew what was missing from the picture. "Where's your bodyguard?" Raf asked.

"Kashif Pasha doesn't think I need one."

"Because no assassin would want to kill a child?" Raf's voice made it obvious what he thought of that.

"That wasn't what I said." Shrewd eyes watched the newcomer. "Or what he meant."

"Murad's my cousin," Hani announced.

"And this is my niece," said Raf, nodding to Hani. "I do apologize."

The boy looked between them. "Then you're . . . ?"

"Ashraf Bey," said Raf. "Your half brother, her uncle and the new Chief of Police."

At the bey's side the NCO froze, his reflex reptilian. Almost as if stillness could put a wall up around his thoughts. All it did was draw Raf's attention.

"You," Raf said to the man. "Tell me what you've heard . . ."

"Heard, Your Excellency?"

"Outside, you said, So it was. . . The question is, so it was what?"

"The Army of the Naked," said the man, his voice hesitant. "My chief said they'd carried out an attack."

"That's a lie," Murad Pasha said. And blushed when the NCO gazed at him in surprise. "I've got a radio," he explained hurriedly. "A Radiotechnika Atlas. The kind that gets all the stations . . . A birthday present from the Soviet ambassador," Murad added, as if owning a radio needed explanation. "The AN absolutely deny having anything to do with the attack."

"They have a radio station?" Hani asked.

"A pirate station," Murad stressed. "Which changes frequency every night. You have to look for it."

Hani nodded. "Zara's brother has a pirate station," she said. "But Avatar only has to change every week."

"Whose's Zara?"

"My uncle's mistress," said Hani, then stared in bewilderment at the elderly NCO who suddenly broke into a coughing fit.

"The AN want to overthrow the government," Murad said. "But they didn't try to kill my father." A tremble in his voice was the first sign Raf had sensed that the boy was not nearly as composed as he wanted to appear.

"I thought you said you were in the government?" Hani sounded puzzled.

"Minister for Education," Murad agreed. "Also for archaeology. Kashif's everything else apart from bioscience and technology. The Emir kept those for himself."

"Did you see the attack?" Raf demanded.

Murad nodded. "We were there," he said. "I was invited and Hani invited herself. We sat next to Kashif Pasha as it happened."

"When what happened?" Raf asked.

"Someone tried to shoot the Emir," said Hani. "Eugenie died saving him. And two guards, a Sufi and a musician. Now everyone's arguing about . . ."

"Who tried?"

Hani paused. She'd got older without him noticing, Raf realized. More confident. A little bit taller. He tried to remember back to that age and couldn't.

"Well," said Murad, "there was this waiter."

"You can't go in there." The birdlike woman was out of her seat before Raf got halfway to the door of Kashif Pasha's inner office.

"Tell me about it," Raf said tiredly. People telling him where he couldn't go was getting to be something of a refrain. He kept walking and the woman dropped her hand, as if she'd somehow just scalded her fingers on the cloth of his sleeve.

Used to wielding power but resigned to it always belonging to someone else, the woman fell back on formality. "Can I ask if you have an appointment?"

"I don't need one," said Raf. "Police business." He pulled a leather cardholder from his pocket and flipped it open, flashing an identity card he'd taken off Kashif's unconscious soldier. It was shut again before her eyes even had time to focus.

"Well, he's not here." The woman's hair beneath her scarf was thinning and deep lines slashed down both sides of a thin mouth. The world had not been kind to her. "So you'll still have to come back."

"Even better," said Raf, hand already turning an enamel door knob. "That gives me a chance to search his office."

"You can't . . ."

"What's your name?" Raf asked her.

"Leila el-Hasan. I'm the pasha's private secretary."

"Get yourself another job then," Raf told her, not unkindly, and shut Kashif's door behind him, shooting its bolt.

The décor could go either way. High Arabesque, which got called Moorish in guidebooks, or ersatz European, which usually meant oak panels, dark furniture and oil paintings. Those were the default options when it came to North African government buildings. There was a third alternative, of course. Seattle Blond was what you got if you fed old Scandinavian through late-period Edo, but pale kelims and steam-shaped ash was never going to be Kashif Pasha's thing.

What Raf found was High Arabesque. An office centred around an alabaster fountain so massive that this bit of the Bardo had to be last century despite the obvious antiquity of the horseshoe arch surrounding its door. No floor underpinned with anything but steel could have supported that weight. Beyond the fountain began carpets, large and probably priceless; obscured by a faded leather ottoman and a couple of wing chairs. And against the farthest wall, beneath a window so vast it needed sandstone pillars down the middle to support it, stood an office desk, notable only for its ordinariness.

Raf read the subtext in a single glance. Look at the magnificence imposed upon me by birth. Notice how modest my own expectations. Contrast the two and be aware of my modernity. And it must work, because half of Europe regarded Kashif Pasha as Ifriqiya's up-and-coming saviour.

The only thing missing from the room was a portrait of the Emir and it didn't take a man of Raf's talents to read that. Although he read the subtext below the subtext, that suggested that while Kashif was ambitious he lacked advisers to help him plan his moves with subtlety.

But then lack of subtlety was never a problem when dealing with Paris, Washington or Berlin. Particularly Berlin.

None of Kashif's desk drawers were locked. Which either said look how open I am, or else, so great is my power no locks are needed to protect my privacy. Alternatively it might have been because there was nothing in the desk of the slightest significance.

No state papers or smoking gun. Not even a bottle of Jim Beam or a Hustler imported under diplomatic seal. Mind you, Raf had expected little less. He'd visited Kashif's office for one reason only: to rattle a few bars and see what tried to bite.

And to judge from the hammering at the door he was about to find out.

Opening the door was one option; letting whoever was on the other side smash apart original ninth-century panels was another.

"Wait," Raf ordered, voice hard.

On the other side of the antique door the hammering ceased.

Raf took his time to walk across the office, but then, given the size of Kashif Pasha's room, this was not unreasonable.

"Right," said Raf, slipping back the bolt. "It's open."

Two men in bottle-green uniforms came tumbling into the room. They had heavy moustaches, light stubble and hard glares. One glance at the glowering pasha behind them showed where that look originated.

"Up against the wall," the thinner of the two barked. "Now."

Raf shook his head. "You can go," he told the man. "Take your fat friend and shut the door. I want to talk to my brother." That got their attention. Got the attention of Kashif Pasha as well.

Ashraf Bey stepped forward and held out his hand. "This won't take long," he told Kashif Pasha. "I need to ask a few questions about last night's shooting."

"You need . . ." Despite himself, Kashif Pasha's eyes slid to the chelengk recently pinned to Raf's lapel. Such exalted signs of Stambul's favour were rare. Given only to victors in battle and those who had rendered personal service to the Ottoman throne.

"Who are you?"

"Ashraf al-Mansur," said Raf, letting his hand drop. "Acting on behalf of the Emir." Which was almost true. He'd been asked to act by Eugenie, who'd led him to believe that this was the Emir's suggestion. Close enough to count. He shrugged. "I thought you'd like to be first," said Raf. "Before I track down your guests."

"That won't be necessary," said Kashif Pasha crossly. "Everyone who should be has already been pulled in for questioning. My men were arresting people all last night."

"Everyone who should be . . . ?" Raf raised his eyebrows.

Kashif Pasha's nod was abrupt. Furious.

"So you've questioned the Marquis de St. Cloud?"

"Don't be ridiculous." Kashif's fingers were knotted into fists. Although Raf doubted if the man even realized that. "The Marquis is a personal friend."

"How about Senator Malakoff? Ambassador Radek?" Raf was enjoying himself. "Or are you carefully ignoring anyone important . . ."

A crowd had gathered in the outer office and through the door he could see Kashif Pasha's secretary, her face twisting with anxiety as a man in a grey suit attempted to comfort her. Behind them hovered a handful of clerks.

This was exactly what Raf had needed most, an audience.

"So," said Raf, "why haven't you questioned the Marquis?"

"What are you suggesting?" Kashif Pasha stepped in close, like someone facing down an enemy but Raf knew different. Once, longer ago than he remembered, a Rasta on remand in the same jail as him had explained about clinches. They were where weak fighters hid when seeking protection, nothing more.

"I don't know," said Raf. "Why don't you tell me."

CHAPTER 33 Wednesday 2nd March

"Why did Kashif's soldiers walk you to the car?" There was something in Murad's voice that said he'd been mulling over this question for most of the trip. Which he had. He'd been trying to decide if asking it would be rude.

"No idea," said Raf and pulled the borrowed Bugatti into a parking space in front of the farmhouse and cut the engine.

Behind him Hani snorted but Raf ignored her. He was too busy watching Murad in the rearview mirror. Everything from eye colour to skin hue was different. The boy had narrower shoulders than Raf. A softer face. And thick dark hair instead of the fine ash blond that made Raf so visible. But there was something lost in his face, the same closed-down expression and the boy even chewed his lip in the same way.

Only Raf's squint was missing. His habitual reaction to trying to see without shades. Those had come later, after the second round of operations in Zurich. Besides, the dark glasses were meant to be a temporary fix, Raf could remember being told that.

"You okay?" he asked the boy.

"Sure." Murad shrugged. "Why not?" And in a way Murad was telling the truth. For a twelve-year-old who'd recently seen four people murdered he was doing fine, especially as one of them was a woman he'd known all his life. Opening the Bugatti door, Murad stepped out onto gravel. It was the only way he could avoid more questions . . .

"You know," Raf told Fleur Gide, stepping through the front door, "my brother thinks Berlin turned that Sufi."

"Berlin, Your Highness?" Major Gide looked genuinely shocked. "I assumed it was Washington or Paris."

She'd been the one to take the decision to let the Bugatti through the gate. A responsibility that fell to her as Eugenie's temporary replacement. Fleur Gide was as ambitious as the next special forces officer but this was one promotion she would happily have done without.

"Someone turned him, you agree?" said Raf. "And you don't have to call me Highness. I'm an Excellency at the most. If that . . ."

The newly promoted officer nodded doubtfully.

"Word on the street has the Sufi working for Kashif Pasha," Raf said. "Only that's wrong. Well, it is according to my brother."

Mentioning that the nearest he'd got to checking the word on the street was listening in while Murad Pasha scanned a dozen pirate stations seemed inappropriate. A twelve-year-old princeling lacked something as an information source when dealing with Ifriqiya's new head of intelligence, temporary or not.

Rough flagstones covered a hall that made do without carpets. On the walls, sporting prints showed stags at bay and scenes from a duck shoot. There was a fireplace, carved from granite and featuring an ornate coat of arms with two of the quarterings themselves showing quarterings. Above the mantel hung a simple mirror while flames danced in the hearth below, filling the ground floor of Eugenie's old house with the scent of burning pinecones.

A thickset, bejewelled woman stood in front of Raf and refused even to glance at the prints on the walls. Only a boar's head mounted onto a mahogany shield with the date 1908 engraved onto an ornate silver label below drew any reaction. Lady Maryam shuddered every time she accidentally turned in that direction.

"I came because duty demanded it," Lady Maryam said heavily. And Raf knew he was being warned not to judge her by the objects to be found in the house.

"Sometimes," said Raf, "that's all you can do."

He'd heard the other version. The one where Major Gide bundled the Emir into a car to get him to safety. Only to have Lady Maryam clamber in the other side and refuse to budge. What upset Major Gide most was her certain knowledge that Eugenie would have had no hesitation about dragging the sullen overweight princess from the car and leaving her in the courtyard. And that was before factoring in the Emir's fury that she'd allowed Lady Maryam to travel with them while leaving Murad, his favourite son, behind.

"Wait here," said Lady Maryam, "while I see if my husband is awake."

Tracking her footsteps across flagstones, Raf followed them up a flight of stairs and across bare boards. The knock at a distant door was surprisingly gentle.

A creak of hinges died when the door shut, leaving Raf with a waterfall of near silences, none of them significant because they were not what Raf listened for. Below the clatter of dishes on a work surface and the small-arms pop of water pipes stretching, he heard the rustle of wind through a pine tree beyond the window. The wings of an owl. Slow and methodical. And under this the claws of a rat scurrying across the gravel at the front of the farmhouse where Major Gide's guards patrolled creaking gates. Falling through silences, one at a time. Hyperreal . . .

"Uncle Ashraf!"

Ashraf Bey came awake to find himself watched by Hani, Murad and Lady Maryam. There was one other person present. A thin man with swept-back grey hair and blue eyes above a hawk nose that had once been broken. A day's worth of white stubble only heightened the hollowness of his cheeks. And he leant heavily on a stick. All the same, there was a ferocious intensity to his gaze; as if he burned with fever or was some celestial body in its final stage of immolation.

"So you're Sally's child . . ." The Emir's smile was sad. "You know," he said, "she told me you died. And then you turn up all those years later in El Iskandryia. I wouldn't have believed it without seeing you."

The hand that shook Raf's own was hot, dry like paper, the bones beneath the age-bruised skin weak as twigs. Even the slight grip Raf gave was enough to make the old man wince. There'd been a dozen things Raf had always wanted to say to his father and none of them seemed appropriate.

What the man opposite felt, Raf found hard to tell.

"Don't you want to talk to each other?" Hani demanded.

"It can wait," said the Emir. "What are a few minutes after this long?"

When the old man walked, it was slowly, leaning heavily on his stick. And at every change of level Murad Pasha positioned himself at the Emir's side so the old man could reach out and steady himself. A fact Lady Maryam obviously hated, to judge from the sourness of her expression.

Although that could also have been down to the Emir's refusal to admit she even existed. She might as well have been a trophy mounted on the wall since she obviously created in him the disquiet that the boar's head seemed to inspire in her.

The farmhouse had been built into the hill, with its back only slightly higher than the front. This meant that the room into which they finally passed had earth reaching two-thirds of the way up its outside walls; good for warmth in winter and useful in other ways too.

"Don't tell me," Raf said, "the place was like this when Eugenie found it."

Emir Moncef smiled.

"She made a few adjustments," he admitted. "Mostly involving chicken wire and concrete. Well, loosely . . ." Which was true. If chicken wire included military-grade titanium mesh and reinforced polyfoam walls could be described as concrete.

"How much of the farmhouse is actually left?"

"Ask Major Gide," he said and clapped his hands.

It seemed the answer was virtually nothing. Apart, that was, from the original eagle gateposts, the granite fireplace and the flagstones in the hall. All walls, internal and external, conformed to Moscow's best standards for blast resistance. Steel-cored doors hid beneath veneers of oak. Screamer wire looped the immediate forest at ankle height. A Molniya spysat hovered high overhead, streaming live data to combat software stashed in the cellar. The fat pantiles on the roof featured thermal feedback to keep the surface at ground ambient, day and night. Even the glass in the windows, double-glazed and shatterproof, vibrated at a random pitch to confuse anyone hidden outside with a parabolic mic.

All of it was black tek. All of it shipped in contravention of numerous UN resolutions banning the sales to Ifriqiya of weapons-grade technology.

"Those hunters," said Raf.

"Georgian Spetsnaz."

"What about the boar?" Hani demanded.

"Fake," interrupted the Emir. "Eugenie de la Croix's idea." He nodded to Hani and smiled at Murad, who just looked at him, eyes wide, then glanced between the Emir and Raf and scowled.

"You think we look alike," Moncef said. It wasn't a question.

The small, dark-eyed boy nodded but Hani just shook her head.

"No," she told the Emir, "you look way older."

"It's flu," Lady Maryam said when Raf finally asked.

"You're sure?"

"Of course, I'm sure." Lady Maryam's voice was sharp.

"How do you know?" Raf demanded. He'd already seen the whole farmhouse and apart from two large rooms upstairs, one used by the Emir, with another on the ground floor now claimed by Lady Maryam, meaning Major Gide had to share the dorm with her troops, that was it. Apart from the hall, kitchen and cellar. The Spetsnaz slept at a house in the village. One of the major's jumpsuited teenagers did the cooking. There was no one else and nothing that looked like a surgery. As it was, Raf and the others were going to have to make their way back to Tunis that night because anything else presented too much of a risk.

"Major Gide is also his doctor," Lady Maryam said shortly. "I'm surprised you didn't know that."

They were back in the hall by the fire. The darkness outside was such that stars bled diamonds across black velvet through the one window left uncurtained. The longer he stayed, the jumpier Lady Maryam became, her politeness becoming ever more brittle by the minute. She'd already added Murad to the list of things at which she was unable to look, banishing Hani and her cousin to the kitchen.

"I should go," Raf said.

"Yes," agreed Lady Maryam and as she clapped her hands a wattle of flesh on her wrist quivered. She was old, Raf realized. The way the Emir was old. Made older by bitterness and four decades of marital exile. All she had on her side was that her son had been born first.

"I'll have someone fetch the children," Lady Maryam said.

Raf nodded. "That would be kind," he replied, knowing that kindness had nothing to do with it. "But first I need to ask the Emir some questions . . . That's why I'm here," Raf said, when the woman looked at him blankly. Turning for the stairs, he was irritated to hear Lady Maryam's heavy steps following behind.

"I need to see him alone."

"He's my husband," said Lady Maryam.

And my father, apparently, Raf said. But he said it under his breath.

The huge room was hot and dark. The smell of vomit obvious. A glass of water stood on a table beside a hardly touched bowl of couscous. Most of what had been eaten splattered the floorboards beside the bed.

Within the round belly of a wood-burning stove flames flickered. On a mattress, leaning back against his pillows lay the old man, his pillowcases tallowed with sweat. A window that shouldn't have been open was. So it was just as well that Lady Maryam remained outside, kept from entering by a shout that reduced her husband to a coughing fit.

"She keeps cooking me food," the Emir said tiredly when his breath was back. He smiled at Raf's surprise. "Don't worry," he added. "I make her eat a spoonful of everything first. She's only here to look after me because she knows how much I hate it."

It was Raf's turn to smile.

"So tell me," said the Emir, "before we talk about things that matter. What did you do to get her wretched son so upset? I've had Kashif on the line swearing undying loyalty and warning me not to trust you." The Emir sounded amused. "What did you do, besides tell him you were now Chief of Police? Which, I have to say, was news to me . . ."

"I didn't say that at all," said Raf. "Merely that I was investigating the attack. And I suggested, obliquely, that he might have hired the Sufi."

"Do you think he did?"

"That depends," said Raf, glancing round the room until his gaze reached an angular chair made from pine and painted in a brown so deep it looked black, "on who else would like to see you dead."

"Paris, Washington, Berlin. Half the mullahs in Kairouan. That woman outside. And then there's you . . . Feel free to sit," he added as if he thought Raf was angling for permission rather than working out exactly what worried him about the Emir's room.

"Why would I want you dead?"

Moncef's only answer was to glance at a ring resting between a revolver and a copy of the Quran. The ring was gold, set with bloodstone and a swirl of script; the tughra engraved into its surface was that found on every fifty-dinar coin for more than forty years.

The gun was a Colt .38 with pearl grips.

"There's more to ruling than owning a ring," Raf said.

"Not much," said the Emir, his laugh a foxlike bark, carrying more pain than amusement. "Especially if you have the other two as well. You don't really like me, do you?"

"Probably more than your wife does," Raf said sourly. "She tells me this is the first time she's ever visited . . ."

"First and last," said the Emir. "This house was bought for Eugenie. Government money but her name on the deeds. She was many things, that woman. Only one of them my chief of intelligence." Unashamed tears were in his eyes. Or maybe just unnoticed.

"You were lovers?" Raf said. It was barely half a question.

"That's one way of describing it."

"She said you weren't."

He smiled sadly. "Eugenie kept her life in compartments," he said. "Jobs that people knew about. Those they didn't. Her personal life was one of the smallest. Maybe the least visited. Sometimes Gene needed to forget what she kept there . . . You see," he explained, "sleeping with me was probably the only unprofessional thing Gene ever did in her life. And all I did was get her killed . . ."

The Emir gestured to the table beside his bed where the ring lay between the book and the gun. "Make your choice," he said, "and learn to live with it. That's all any of us can do."

A glow from the wood-burning stove gave the Emir's face the look of a fallen angel, broken and beautiful; haunting in its promise and cruel beyond imagining. Behind the words was a desolation so deep it went beyond Raf's ability to understand. And in that moment he finally believed something his mother once said, which in itself was unusual.

His father was certifiably insane. She'd been holding a vodka when she said this. Her anger filtered through a freebase crash and the bottom of a Bohemian shot glass. Somehow they'd moved from filming Arabian wildcats as they learned to hunt, her latest project, to Raf's father, the man she refused to talk about. Of course, back then Raf thought she'd been talking about the Swedish hitchhiker.

"Why come now?" the Emir said into Raf's silence. "When you wouldn't come before?"

"I was busy."

"Having your garden rebuilt with someone else's money . . . Going to a job you didn't do . . . What changed?" asked the Emir, his eyes watching from within the red shadows of the stove. The very fact he hadn't asked why Raf wore shades in a room that sweltered in near darkness told Raf that Eugenie's original suggestion was right and he had been wrong. Whatever had been done to Raf, his mother had not made those choices alone.

"What changed . . ." The answer died on Raf's lips. The snide, the furious and the easy comebacks all wiped by the obvious. "I did," said Raf.

CHAPTER 34 Thursday 3rd March

Dr. Pierre smirked from the side of a barn, his mouth supercilious above the fading remains of a silk cravat. A lifetime of rain had worn his luxurious sideburns to a ghost of their former glory. A jagged scar split his chin where a builder had repaired cracked brickwork with no thought for the advertising mural beneath.

He was advertising pâté dentifrice. As used in Paris.

"Where are we going now?"

"Cap Bon," said Raf. "To question the Marquis de St. Cloud."

It said much for Murad's cool that he didn't ask why his half brother had the Bugatti's headlights switched off. Recalibrating his eyes, Raf glanced in the mirror and saw Murad lit by screen glare from Hani's pink plastic laptop.

"Can you turn the screen down . . . ?"

"Why?" Her voice was petulant. As if she still hadn't quite forgiven him for one or more of the many things for which he still needed her forgiveness.

"Because too much light makes driving difficult."

"If I must," said Hani and flicked off her laptop. Adjusting the screen was much too easy an option.

Raf didn't tell Hani his other reason. That somewhere above them would be a UN spysat capable of tracking their journey from the farmhouse to Cap Bon. If they were lucky, that was. If they were unlucky, then the satellite had probably just captured every one of Hani's keystrokes.

He drove in silence. Letting darkened walls and hedgerows flow around him until the dirt track became a minor road, then something that actually had central lines. Shortly after that came the périphérique around Tunis, the city flickering by in a smudge of suburbs as the huge Bugatti burned up the outside lane, lights out and its three passengers shadows held in darkness, like ghosts going on holiday.

One of the cardinal points of the Emir's work creation programme was that everyone in Ifriqiya should have a job. And if that meant more road sweepers, line painters or ditchdiggers than there were roads then so be it.

What Ifriqiya needed, of course, at least in the opinion of every visiting dignitary, was fewer donkeys and wider roads. Only the land lost to build the roads would, when added together, shave hectare after hectare off the country's reserve of perfectly good smallholdings. On the Emir's orders, a survey had been carried out after some commissar with mining interests in Gafsa had complained that trucking phosphate was becoming increasingly uneconomic.

In response to a hint from Moscow that the CCCP might help Tunis fund a programme to build new motorways, the Emir sent them the address of every family who'd lose land and invited Moscow to write to each, explaining why it was necessary.

To the reply that this would be pointless, since most of those would undoubtedly be unable to read, he pointed out that the literacy rate in Ifriqiya was slightly higher than western Russia as a whole, and at least 25 percent above that of Georgia, which was where both the commissar and the Soviet president originated.

The roads remained unwidened, still lined with prickly pear except in the far south, where the ground was too barren to grow even that.

"What are you thinking?" Hani asked, her voice no longer sullen. On her lap the computer balanced on top of Ifritah's cat basket. Now forgotten.

"About prickly pears," said Raf.

Hani nodded, as if that was to be expected. "The roads," she said, "and Moscow's plan to widen them. It's mentioned in the official guidebook."

"Probably," said Raf. From what he'd just seen, Emir Moncef was quite capable of having it included just to signal his independence from the only country still willing to trade openly with Ifriqiya.

"How do you two do that?" Murad demanded, his tone more interested than aggrieved.

"Do what?" Hani and Raf asked together.

And the answer was he didn't know. Raf accepted that he'd no more understood what his own mother was thinking than she'd known what hid inside his head. They had remained, from his birth until her death, two strangers separated by common blood and long silences: every glance between them was embarrassed, each hug brief and gratefully cut short. If ever he took her hand she flinched. Every time she touched him he froze.

It was a relationship safe only when conducted at a distance by e-mail or letter. So maybe Zara was right and he really was the last person to be looking after a troubled, hyperintelligent, unquestionably lonely small child.

Alternatively, he was ideal.

"You okay?"

Raf glanced in the mirror and saw Hani watching intently.

"Thought not," she said. One thin hand came up and gripped his neck, small fingers digging into muscle knots on both sides. "Twist your head," said Hani.

Raf did and heard bones crunch as something slid back into place. "Donna does it," she said, "every time I get a headache."

"You get many headaches?" Murad asked. And Raf realized he had no idea of the answer either.

She looked at Murad. "Since my uncle arrived," said Hani, "life's been one long headache." She smiled as she said it and neither of the other two quite noticed she'd avoided answering Murad's question.

"Almost there." Hani's announcement came just before Raf turned right between two houses and edged his way through a tiny village, headlights still unlit. She'd been collecting old advertising murals and so far she had a Dr. Pierre, two Fernet-Branca (la digestif miraculeux), a faded blue dubo, dubon, dubonnet and one for underwear by Rhouyl, which, if she understood the faded French correctly, was guaranteed to induce health-giving static.

Staring from his window of the still-moving car, Murad tried to focus on the world outside. Just enough moon was filtering through the clouds to bathe the soft slopes of Cap Bon in a ghostly fuzz which was almost, but not quite, light. "How do you know that?" he asked.

Hani shrugged. "I just do."

Around them were orange groves in blossom, wizened pine trees, the occasional villa set back from the coast and even a wrought-iron bandstand. The spindly confection set down on a promenade overlooked blue-painted fishing boats that bobbed at anchor.

On the wall opposite, another notice, paper this time, reminding everyone that falcons could not be captured for training until the second week of March. The warning was pasted next to an older poster advertising the festival de l'épervier, dated from June the previous year. Light from a bakery window lit both and through its glass could be seen an old man in vest and floppy trousers kneading dough . . .

They ate their brioche from the bag, the pastry still warm enough to make the paper turn translucent down one side. The old man had been polite. Totally unsurprised to be disturbed at 3:00A .M. by a man and two children wanting food. And he threw in two tiny tarte tatin for Hani and Murad, smiling and nodding as he shooed the three of them towards the door.

"Work to do," he explained.

Raf nodded.

What passed for a plan in Raf's mind the fox would undoubtedly have dismissed as cage circling, the dysfunctional repetition of a narrow range of gestures. Have an idea, repeat it endlessly until all value is wrung from the original . . . With a sigh, Raf straightened his shoulders and pulled a bell handle.

Welcome to the Andy Warhol school of detective work.

Somewhere inside Dar St. Cloud a Victorian bell tipped sideways far enough to hit a silver clapper and the faintest tremor of that blow whispered back through the wire to reach Raf's fingers. The bell was an affectation. One made worthless by two small Zeiss cameras that swivelled, cranelike to catch Raf and his companions in their gaze.

Retuning his eyes, Raf shifted through the spectrum. Checking out what he already knew, the three of them were blanket-lit by infrared and targeted at waist height by pinhead lasers. He could see tiny lenses set into the portico walls. Then the door opened and Raf forgot about armaments. Only panic could make the Marquis do something that stupid and this was not a character trait associated with Astophe de St. Cloud, recognized bâtard of the French Emperor and a man who'd once offered Raf more money than he could even begin to imagine.

Three percent of the price of North Africa's biggest oil refinery, plus the same cut on oil fields in the Sudan and various offshore sites. All Raf had needed to do in return was betray Zara's father. Hamzah Effendi would fall. His share of a refinery that flickered ghosts of flame across the night sky on the edge of El Iskandryia would go up for sale. Enabling St. Cloud to significantly increase his prestige and personal wealth.

Raf had not forgotten that offer any more, he imagined, than St. Cloud had forgiven Raf's refusal to oblige.

"Tell St. Cloud that Ashraf Bey needs to ask him some questions."

"Is His Excellency expecting you?" The man who showed them into the hall was Scottish–though he spoke in an Edinburgh accent so clipped it could have come from an English film, the kind where butlers wore frock coats, which, actually, was what he seemed to be wearing.

"What do you think?" Raf replied.

"I'll see if His Excellency is in." And with that St. Cloud's majordomo shuffled off towards an arch outlined in two shades of rose marble, leaving the three of them alone in a hall lit by gas-fired sconces designed to look like candle flame.

"Well, what a pleasant surprise." The voice was higher than one might have expected given the undoubted gravitas of the man limping his way toward them in gold dressing gown and leather slippers.

"You know why this room is so high?"

"No," said Raf. "But no doubt you'll tell me."

The Marquis laughed. "I had to make a trip," he said and something in those words raised hairs on the back of Hani's neck. "So I left my butler in charge . . . This was years ago," he added, as if the age of the house wasn't obvious. "And I told him to tell the felaheen when to stop and gave him a height to which to work."

The old man raised a silver-topped cane and gestured at the nearest wall, where tiny alternating blue and white tiles filled the spaces between evenly spaced double pillars, each of which was topped by a broad capital. The pillars were pink marble, the capitals sandstone.

"You based it on Cordoba," Hani said.

St. Cloud nodded. "Only my man got so drunk that when I got back, this had happened." He pointed to a second tier of double pillars above the first. "Not those pillars, obviously, just the height of the wall behind. The workmen expected to be told to stop so they kept on building." The Marquis shrugged. "Fair enough," he added, in a tone of voice that made Hani decide on the spot that, where St. Cloud was concerned, fairness was unlikely to come into it.

"What happened to your butler?" asked Murad Pasha, his voice thoughtful.

A smile broke across the face of the Marquis and in it Raf saw pure emptiness. "There was a building accident," said the Marquis. "Such things happen. Well, they do in North Africa." Glancing from Hani to Murad, St. Cloud raised his eyebrows. "You should know," he told Raf, "I've been very cross with you–so it was sensible to bring me presents."

Hani merely blinked, but Murad's eyes widened and he might have stepped backwards if the girl at his side hadn't taken his hand, then hastily let it go. Both Hani and Murad suddenly blushing.

"This isn't a social visit," Raf said flatly. "And the children stay with me. We're here so Murad Pasha can meet the man who tried to murder his grandfather." He turned to the still-flustered boy, almost as if intending to introduce him formally to St. Cloud.

"I did no such . . ." Outrage froze words in the old man's throat.

"You are not to leave this house," announced Raf. "And you will surrender your carte blanche to me and the keys to all the cars in your garage."

"And the helicopter," Hani whispered. Catching Murad's eye, she shrugged and explained, surprisingly gently for her, "there's a helipad on the lawn."

"Out of the question." St. Cloud had found his voice. One that Raf could only describe as oozing bile. "I have total diplomatic immunity. God . . ." The old man shook so hard with fury that for the first time since his visitors had entered Dar St. Cloud he actually need his silver-topped stick. "You can't just march in here."

"Actually," said Raf, "I think you'll find I can. Because the alternative is that I place you under arrest and call police HQ in Tunis to have a van come out to collect you." Raf shrugged. "Who knows," he added, "given your tastes you might enjoy a week in the cells with a child molester. I'm sure you'd have lots to talk about . . ."

"And if I refuse?"

"Refuse what?" Raf asked. "To be arrested?"

St. Cloud's nod was stiff. His scowl that of a man who'd faced worse things than two nervous children and the black-suited son of an Emir. "What will your officers do," said St. Cloud coldly, "manhandle me into a car? They wouldn't . . ."

"Dare?" One second Raf was watching St. Cloud, the next he had a pearl-handled Colt pressed hard into the side of the old man's neck, at an angle guaranteed to remove most of his skull.

No one could remember seeing him move.

"Other people might be afraid of you," said Raf. "I don't have that problem." Pulling back the hammer the way the Sufi had done, he squeezed the trigger so that only his thumb kept the hammer from falling. "You really think you can resist arrest?"

Around the Marquis the hall began to darken as the face in front of him changed unexpectedly/impossibly from human to something positively other.

The old man could taste smoke and feel a flat wall of heat that threatened to sear his papery skin. Every tile beneath his feet was burning. Except that there were no tiles because he was walking over a glowing chasm of red ember and flickering flame, while some unseen thing ripped mouthfuls of flesh from his shoulder.

He knew, without needing to be told, that he was standing over the entrance to hell.

"Well?"

St. Cloud blinked.

The tearing in his flesh dissolved as the pressure against his throat lessened, then almost disappeared.

"Well what?" he asked in a voice little more than a whisper.

"Still feel like resisting arrest?"

Merely blinking was enough to spill tears down cheeks no amount of laser peel had been able to give back their beautiful youth. "No." St. Cloud shook his head, the slightest movement. All he wanted to do was check his shoulder for scars and look in a glass to see if that unforgiving heat had seared his face, but he didn't quite dare.

"I had nothing to do with that attempt," he said. "Nothing at all to do with the death of Eugenie de la Croix. You have my word."

"And you have mine," said Raf, "that I will find who tried to kill my father. And when I do that person will be arrested, no matter what." The very flatness of Raf's words threatened more clearly than any anger could do. "Feel free to pass that on to anyone you think should know . . ."

CHAPTER 35 Thursday 3rd March

As dawn's white thread became visible over the Golfe de Hammamet a call quavered onto the wind from the minaret of Nebeul mosque, Allahu Akbar intoned four times, followed by Ashhadu anna la ilah ill'-Allah, I testify there is no God besides God. And finally, towards the end, a phrase to distinguish this call from those that came later. Al-salatu khayr min al-nawn. Prayer is better than sleep.

Though both of those were a rarity for Raf.

Only now was he beginning to understand, as opposed to know, the difference between various types of Islamic building. A mosque was a church, well, it was to Raf. A marbarat the tomb of a saint at which believers might pray (a habit discouraged in the Middle East, but popular in North Africa where Berber instincts lightened the stark purity of their conqueror's interpretation).

A ribat was a fortified monastery, medressa were schools, somewhere between a tiny university and a religious college, zaouia were shrines, often Sufi . . .

What Raf didn't understand, or even know, was what value this knowledge had for a man who lacked all belief in God; for whom mosques were works of intricate beauty and calls to prayer haunting echoes of antiquity; but who saw nothing at the centre. Who saw, in fact, no centre at all.

"Can I ask you something?" said Hani, when she'd finished her prayers.

"Of course." Raf dropped the Bugatti down a gear to overtake an elderly truck loaded with soldiers.

"Who's Tiri?" She hesitated for a second. "When you left that note. You signed it ‘Tiri.'"

"My fox," Raf said and Hani nodded.

"What fox?" Murad demanded crossly. He was leaning on Ifritah's basket, which rested between Hani and him on the fat leather backseat of the Bugatti. Raf wasn't sure where he'd put his action figure but Ninja Nizam hadn't appeared once since Hani accused Murad of being childish.

"The fox . . ." Raf thought about it. "The fox is an identity."

"Ashraf Bey's an assassin," said Hani. "So he needs to be lots of different people . . . I didn't know the fox was called Tiri," she added.

"It's called lots of things," said Raf. "And I'm not an assassin."

"No," Hani said. "Of course not."

Beyond Hammamet was a turning for the A1, south towards Sousse and Kairouan. Glancing in his mirror before overtaking the next truck, Raf saw Murad still staring at him. The moment the boy met Raf's gaze he dropped his own.

They'd had a brief quarrel on the road back from Dar St. Cloud. Anger exploded from the boy as he demanded to know why Raf had failed to arrested the Marquis. In that shouted fury had been everything the twelve-year-old felt for his father; mostly love and fear, plus a primal, night-waking panic at the thought of life without certainty or comfort.

"You should have arrested him."

"St. Cloud didn't do it," Hani had said softly, resting one hand on the boy's arm. Murad shook her off.

"But Ashraf Bey said . . ."

"He was bluffing," explained Hani as she climbed into the car. Her smile faded the moment new fury twisted Murad's face. This time it was at being excluded from what Raf had known and Hani only suspected. Their visit to Dar St. Cloud had been cage rattling, little more. The Marquis paid no taxes, had tastes that were highly dubious and based himself in a country without a single extradition treaty. He had more to lose from Emir Moncef's death than almost anyone.

Since learning this, Murad had been almost translucent with silence. Pointedly ignoring Hani and her endless spray of facts about Khayr el Din, better known as the Barbary pirate Barbarossa, and the sack of Tunis by Charles V of Spain, in which seventy thousand men, women and children were slaughtered.

That he'd asked about the fox at all was significant.

"I'm sorry," Raf said. "One problem is I don't always know what I'm going to do or how things are about to work out." He yanked the Bugatti's thin steering wheel and managed to avoid a cartload of goatskins, untreated ones to judge from the smell. "That makes it difficult to warn people in advance."

"It's a children of Lilith thing," Hani added. Although it was obvious from Murad's blank stare that this didn't make it any clearer.

The boy shrugged with all the weight of coming adolescence on his shoulders. "I just was wondering," said Murad. "You know, back there, what exactly happened?"

Raf opened his mouth to answer but Hani got in first.

"What happened," she told Murad, "was that Uncle Ashraf put a curse on the Marquis. Children of Lilith can do that."

Murad's eyes widened and, without even realizing, he made a sign against the evil eye. And then flicked his glance fearfully from the face of his cousin to the dark-suited stranger in the front. The elder brother no one had bothered to tell him he had.

"Do you believe in magic?" Raf asked.

Murad nodded, fiercely.

"You shouldn't," Raf told him, "it doesn't exist. There are no djinn. If you hear something go creep in the night and it's not a burglar then it's a cat . . . Everything can be explained," he added, before Hani had time to protest. "Even those things that can't."

"How do you explain things that can't be explained?" Murad demanded doubtfully.

"By admitting we don't yet have an explanation."

The boy thought about that for as long as it took Raf to drop back a gear and overtake three trucks, leaving soldiers radiating outrage as he roared by in the half dark, lights still off.

"So what happened with the Marquis?" said Murad. He spoke slowly, listening to his own words as he said them. Raf could remember another boy like that. A boy who tasted each word as it was said. Who survived in dark places because his words, wielded viciously, could do more damage than the fists of other boys.

Which left Raf wondering whose fists Murad had been avoiding. Or if he'd learnt to think before he spoke for other reasons.

"I put a gun to his throat," said Raf. "That's usually enough to make anyone afraid."

The boy nodded uncertainly. "But he's St. Cloud," Murad said, obviously unable to think of another way to put it. "Even my brother Kashif Pasha is scared of him."

"Kashif is scared of Uncle Ashraf," Hani pointed out. "Anyone with any sense is. He works for the Sublime Porte."

"No, I don't . . ."

"Then why wear the chelengk?" Hani asked triumphantly.

He thought about what she'd said before that. "Are you?" he asked.

"Afraid of you? Of course I am," Hani said. "Every time you do whatever you did back there."

Raf sighed. "Did you notice a mark left on his neck afterwards from the muzzle of the gun? And my hand on the back of his neck?"

Hani nodded.

"I cut off his blood supply. Oxygen starvation combined with panic. It made an ancient part of St. Cloud's brain kick in, nothing else."

"That was it?" said Murad.

"Sure," Raf said. "Simple oxygen starvation." He avoided mentioning the flames still dancing djinnlike across the inside of his eyes or the rawness that tightened his face like the aftereffects of searing heat.

CHAPTER 36 Thursday 3rd March

"Wait in the car," Raf told them when they finally reached Kairouan. "I'll get some breakfast."

"Crêpe," suggested Murad, "with jam and cream cheese."

"I don't think so," Hani said. "Does it look like that kind of place?" She wound down her window and sniffed, inhaling the cafés, street stalls and rotisseries. "Get some briek," she told Raf. "And Coke, if you can find any."

A dozen signs for local colas swung in the breeze. All variations on a theme of red and blue. None had names Hani recognized. This whole country was less like El Iskandryia than she'd first imagined.

"I'll see what I can do," Raf promised.

Watching her uncle stride away, Hani waited until he was lost in the crowd. His black coat swallowed by the burnous and jellabas of those around him. "Okay," she said, turning to Murad, "I'm going shopping. You wait in the car."

Murad Pasha stared at her.

Hani eased open her door and checked that the road was clear before beginning to slide herself out.

"I'm coming with you."

"No," Hani said hastily. "Someone has to stay with the car," she insisted, "and you're the boy . . ."

"So?"

Wide eyes watched him, apparently shocked. "I'm a girl," said Hani. "Surely you don't expect me to stand guard over the car all by myself in a strange city?"

Murad settled back. His eyes already scanning the shop fronts. "Don't be long," he said.

The first chemist Hani entered was full of old men who stared as if she'd walked in from another planet. So, muttering an apology, she gave an elegant bow, which she hoped would muddle them even further. The second catered to Soviet tourists. Hani knew this because a poster in the window had pack shots of painkillers and cough mixture above simple descriptions written in five languages, three of which Hani could read.

Catering to Soviet tourists was entirely different to there being any. Hani realized this as soon as she pushed her way through the shop's bead curtain and found the place empty, apart, that was, from an old man with what looked like the inward stare of a mystic or kif smoker. Although, it turned out to be neither because when Hani got closer, she realized his eyes were milky with cataracts.

"Saháh de-kháyr," she said politely.

"Saháh de-kháyr," he replied, then added, "Es-salám aláykum."

So Hani had to start all over, replying and to you peace, before rewishing him good day. Formalities complete, she stopped, unsure how to continue. She could see what she thought she needed on a shelf behind the counter, low down and almost out of sight.

The man waited while Hani opened and shut her mouth so often she was in danger of turning into one of Zara's promised carp.

"Telephone?" she muttered finally.

Absolute silence greeted this request.

Pulling a note from her pocket, Hani held it out to the old man. The note was American, a five-dollar bill.

The man called something over his shoulder and a young woman appeared, hastily wrapping her scarf around her head. Only to relax slightly when she discovered her customer was a child.

"Telephone?" Hani repeated.

Taking the bill from the man's hands she held it up to the light and slipped it quickly into her dress pocket. Man and woman had a hasty conversation, so fast and so low that overhearing was impossible. Whatever the content, they seemed to reach a conclusion.

"No telephone," said the woman. "Not here. But I take you . . ." She gestured towards the rear and Hani realized that she was meant to follow. For about fifty paces she fought her way down a busy back alley, then the woman steered her towards a small door set in a crumbling wall.

"Through here," she said, as she pushed Hani ahead of her, shouting "Hamid!" as they came out into a small courtyard.

A second yell produced a head peering from an upstairs window. Another burst of conversation followed in what Hani finally realized was chelha, the original dialect of Kairouan's Berber inhabitants.

"Where do you want to call?" asked the woman, tossing Hani's answer up to the boy, then stopping for his reply.

"El Iskandryia we can do," she agreed, "but it will cost more than five dollars . . ."

Reluctantly Hani peeled another note from the roll in her dress pocket and palmed it into a small square before making a pretence of searching her remaining pockets, muttering crossly all the while.

"My last one," she said.

The cell phone was a Siemens. Unquestionably illegal in a country where all cell phones had to be registered with the police.

"Two minutes," said the woman, "call me when you're done." And she vanished into the house to give the foreign girl some privacy. The boy remained sitting on a stone bench next to the courtyard entrance just to make sure Hani didn't suddenly disappear with his phone.

Hani could just imagine it. Donna stood in the kitchen surrounded by pans, trying to ignore the buzz of the coms screen, Zara out shopping and Khartoum lost in thought or rereading tales of the Ineffable Mullah Nasrudin, all of which he already knew by heart.

She sighed.

The message Hani left was simple. She was in Kairouan with her uncle. On her way to Tozeur. There was nothing to worry about.

"Where have you been?" Murad demanded when Hani finally got back.

"Getting these," said Hani, handing him a cardboard dish of makrouth, lozenge-shaped sweetmeats filled with date paste. She dropped a cheap paper napkin next to his knee and clambered up into the huge Bugatti. The rest of the napkins she stuffed into a side pocket. She let Murad eat the sweetmeats because, unfortunately, even after her walk her tummy still had cramps.

CHAPTER 37 Thursday 3rd March

Second coffee. That was how Eduardo counted his days. First coffee, second coffee, third coffee . . .

The first always found Eduardo listening to IskTV. While others watched the newsfeed avid for every close-up, Eduardo listened carefully as he doodled hats and moustaches onto pictures in Iskandryia Today or filled in the Os in every headline.

The Emir of Tunis had been taken into protective custody following the declaration of martial law in Ifriqiya. The story was in his paper as well as on-screen. Iskandryia Today treated this as news while IskTV assumed it was background, leading with a different story. One that had His Excellency Kashif Pasha, the Emir's eldest son, swearing that his father was alive, safe and would remain that way. Apparently Kashif Pasha swore this on his life.

What IskTV found interesting was the fact that this promise was relayed on Kashif's behalf by a half brother, Ashraf al-Mansur, who personally visited the Mosque de trois ports in Kairouan to pass the message to the head of the Assiou Brotherhood.

The head of the brotherhood had, as requested, released Kashif Pasha's promise to the world.

So Eduardo wasn't surprised to receive a scrambled call just after second coffee. Although it took him a moment to remember that he needed to connect an optic from the silver Seiko he wore to the computer on his desk. That was what the man had told him to do, plug in as soon as Eduardo heard the hiss and never try to make a connection using infrared. Which was fine, because Eduardo wouldn't have known where to start.

A doctor at the Imperial Free once suggested Eduardo reduce his coffee intake to one cup a day but Eduardo had barely paused to consider this. The man was a foreigner, newly arrived in the city, and would learn. No one who actually lived in El Isk for longer than a week could have made that suggestion.

Instead, Eduardo had agreed with himself to cut his intake to eight cups a day. This wasn't always possible, given the nature of his job; but his success or failure gave Eduardo something to talk about to Rose, a mild-natured whore he'd met a few months earlier, when the man sent him to do a job at Maison 52, Pascal Coste.

Rose claimed to be English and, although she had the hips and buttocks of an Egyptian, the smallness of her breasts convinced Eduardo that this might be the truth. As did the half-smoked Ziganov forever hanging from her fingers, its gold band stained with lipstick. In Iskandryia, even licensed whores didn't smoke in public.

But then women tended not to visit cafés either. Unless it was one of those expensive places around Place Saad Zaghloul like Le Trianon, where ordinary rules seemed not to apply. Money did that, Eduardo had decided. It rewrote the rules. Or perhaps it just remade them into something so complex and discreet that ordinary people like him no longer understood what they were. The man was like that, governed by rules Eduardo took on trust.

Eduardo's office was above a haberdasher's at the back of a bus station on Place Zaghloul. The place was a walk-up with winding stairs and a toilet on the half landing, which Eduardo had to share with the shop below. It had a melamine desk, a cheap chair in black plastic that looked almost like leather and a grey metal filing cabinet. Plus a state-of-the-art computer, quite out of keeping with the rest of the furniture.

The computer lived on a side table. Well, it would have been a side table if it hadn't actually been an old door supported at either end by plinths of crudely mortared bricks. Eduardo, whose work it was, had tried to apologize for its ugliness but the man had waved away Eduardo's explanation. It seemed Ashraf Bey liked the door/table combination more than he liked anything else in the office.

Sharing Eduardo's office space were two cockroaches and a colony of ants who dwindled come autumn and, Eduardo imagined, would be back with the spring. He wasn't sure, not having had the place long enough to find out. The cockroaches remained, however, sharing his desk and living off a diet of sugar that fell from Eduardo's morning doughnut.

With his first coffee, which he drank just after dawn, Eduardo ordered an almond croissant. He'd adopted the habit after having breakfast one morning with the bey because this was what the bey ate.

"Eduardo?" The voice came hollow with static and thin from being bounced off a satellite too far above El Iskandryia for Eduardo to really comprehend. All the same, he would have known it anywhere.

"Excellency . . ."

The voice sighed.

Eduardo was meant to call him boss on the phone. Even when answering his watch in the office out of sight of everyone else.

"I'm here, boss," the small man said hurriedly.

"You listening?" The voice on the other end wasn't cross, just careful.

"Sure, boss. Always . . . No, I mean it." Eduardo tried to sound hurt but the man was right, Eduardo hardly ever listened. And when Eduardo did he always had to concentrate extra hard to make sense of what the other person said.

"Yeah, I got it," Eduardo said finally, when the voice had finished explaining what Eduardo was expected to do. "Well, except for that bit about becoming a policeman . . ."

Life was a series of comings and goings . . .

Some philosopher said that, or it might have been Cheb Rai; every time the thought popped into Eduardo's head he got a tune just out of reach. Three chords leading to a fourth that Eduardo knew would, should he ever remember it, give him the whole.

All the same, whoever said or sang them, the words rang true. People came and went. They walked into one's life and walked out again with no reason that Eduardo could see, but then he wasn't very clever. Lots of people had told him that. Smarter people could see the threads that tied together events. And none were smarter than the bey. Eduardo really believed that.

In the cafés people talked of how the trial of the warlord Colonel Abad was tied to a dock strike rolling out across the North African littoral. And how Ashraf al-Mansur, now in Tunis, had gone there to kill the father who'd abandoned him. Others insisted he was there to save the old man's life. And a few, mostly Bolsheviks, were of the opinion that the Emir was already dead and all al-Mansur wanted was to make sure he got his share of the inheritence.

Eduardo knew different.

Ashraf Bey was trying to find his mother's original wedding certificate . . . Sometimes politics were way more complicated than Eduardo could understand.

CHAPTER 38 Friday 4th March

An elegant young woman outside Arrivals was waving for a taxi. Something Eduardo didn't need to do since he had a car already waiting. At least, he had a uniformed driver clutching a board with Eduardo's name on it so Eduardo assumed he had a car as well.

Eduardo almost offered the woman a lift into the centre but when he nodded to her she just scowled. So Eduardo went back to helping Rose navigate her way through a crowd of C3N cameramen waiting for taxis at the front of Tunis Arrivals.

This was what happened if one suddenly lifted the embargo on flights to facilitate the departure of nonessential diplomatic staff. More people turned up than left. He was pretty sure that wasn't what the UN had in mind.

"We're here, sir."

Eduardo liked that last word. It suggested that the driver thought he and Rose looked properly Western, which they were more or less. Soviet tourists would have got commissar, not meant obviously but always good for increasing baksheesh as tourists called tips, getting wrong both country and language. Anyone local wearing a suit like Eduardo's would have merited effendi, just to be on the safe side.

So that sir meant the young driver realized Eduardo was not local and not a Soviet tourist. Unless, of course, the boy called everybody that.

Originally Eduardo had been planning to fly alone and travel first class, the man having said buy any ticket he liked as long as the flight left that afternoon. But when Eduardo realized that premium cost half the price of first he decided Rose should come with him.

So that was what they did. And though Eduardo got the feeling Rose had never flown before, she insisted she'd flown dozens of times to numerous destinations. But then he'd told her exactly the same.

What's more, she'd enjoyed the flight. Eduardo knew, because he'd been careful to ask. And she looked great. He'd been careful to tell her that too.

The Benz waiting outside Tunis Arrivals was big and black, smarter than Eduardo could ever have expected, with metal pipes coming out of the engine and running down either side of the hood. The pipes had been silver to start with but now they were grey with wide bands of kingfisher blue, like petrol floating on top of a fresh puddle.

Alexandre, who was young and wore the uniform of a Tunis detective (something he suspected his visitors might not yet have realized), walked round to the back door of the Emir's second-favourite car and held it open.

At a nod from the small man, the woman clambered in and smoothed a black dress covered with red roses down over her pink knees. Leaving her partner still anxiously eyeing their luggage, such as it was.

"My case . . ."

Ashraf Bey's original call had told Eduardo to buy a new suit, new shoes, several shirts and a tie. The man had even specified the colour of each: dark blue for the suit, white for the shirts and red for the tie (no stripes). He'd said nothing about buying a case in which to put these things.

"Of course, sir." Alexandre was apologetic. "I should have realized you'd need your case with you." He picked up the cardboard box with its cheap handle, wondering at its lightness, and waited for Eduardo to join the woman. Only then did Alexandre put the case in the well of the borrowed car, beside Eduardo's feet.

"Where to, sir?"

Eduardo thought about it. "What are my options?"

Alexandre tried not to sigh.

Accelerated entry to officer level and descent from an ex- colon family that had owned dairy farms in the High Tell guaranteed he got given the shitty jobs by sergeants who grew up in the medina or the nouvelle ville, people he'd outrank within the year and who knew that fact but could never forgive it.

All the same, the fact Alexandre had been warned to handle this job with discretion meant the anxious-looking man in the rear seat had to be somebody important. Exactly why that might be became clear when Alexandre opened his mouth to answer, only to discover that the man sat behind him was already talking, mostly to himself.

"We could start with the Police HQ, I suppose."

Alexandre nodded.

"Or we could go find the boss . . ."

To Alexandre that meant his colonel. He got the feeling this man had someone else in mind. "The boss?" Alexandre asked, in a tone he hoped was politely casual.

"Ashraf al-Mansur . . ."

"You know the bey?"

"He's my boss." Eduardo sounded as proud of the fact as he felt, which was very proud indeed.

"And my boss too," Alexandre said. "Apparently Ashraf Bey is the new Chief of Police." That was what he'd been told anyway. It was all change at HQ.

"Actually . . ." Eduardo glanced at Rose and looked embarrassed. "The thing is, you see . . . I'm the new Chief." Eduardo tasted the words as he said them and sat up a little straighter in his seat.

And, like a good detective, he noticed the way Alexandre immediately did the same, straightening his shoulders and quickly adjusting his cap. That was when he realized Alexandre was one of his men.

"I'm sorry, Your Excellency. I didn't know."

"Why should you?" Eduardo said, feeling expansive. "And you don't need to call me Excellency, sir is fine . . . All the same, I have a question for you. An important question."

Alexandre froze.

"What do you know . . . ?" Eduardo whipped out a leather notebook he'd bought at Iskandryia airport, flipped it open, and watched the opening page come alight. "Let me see, what do you know about a pâtissier called Pascal Boulart? Other than the fact he was stabbed in an alley behind Maison Hafsid and a sous-chef was arrested . . ."

It turned out Alexandre knew even less than that. He knew the killing all right, he just had no memory of anyone having been arrested by the police. As Alexandre tried to point out, as circumspectly as possible, this might just mean the murderer had been picked up by Kashif Pasha's men.

Although the military wing of the police was meant to liaise with the civilian branches, this sometimes failed to happen, very occasionally, obviously.

"Find out if they did," said Eduardo. "And get me files on everyone killed in the massacre at the Domus Aurea."

"There were only four." Alexandre regretted the remark as soon as he made it. "I mean, the fifth one got away."

"Four is enough," Eduardo said firmly. "Now take me to the hotel." He needed a shower, as did Rose. And with luck, if the shower was big enough, they could share.

"Hotel . . . ?"

Eduardo nodded.

"You are not staying at a hotel, sir. My orders were to take you wherever you wanted and deliver your luggage to the Dar Ben Abdallah."

"Dar, maison, hôtel," said Eduardo, "it's all the same, you know." He turned to Rose. "In French," he explained, "hôtel means big house, like in Hôtel de Ville. Isn't that right?"

Alexandre nodded, not taking his eyes off the road.

On their way into the city all the other traffic moved out of the way. Eduardo was wondering about this until he remembered the flag. He wasn't sure what the flag on the hood stood for but it looked very official.

CHAPTER 39 Sunday 6th March

Palms shaded yellow earth, so that sunlight sketched patterns across the banks of a narrow stream, highlighting twigs and dead fronds. The water in the seguia was dirty, the grass edging the ditch and the undersides of the palms less bright than Zara expected. Only ungrown dates, tiny and green and still vulnerable to the sand winds, seemed created from a brighter scheme altogether. This was a world of ochres and earth hues. An Impressionist umbrella restricted to the palette of a Klee.

Farther along, half-in/half-out of the stream lay a fallen palm with its trunk ringed like an endlessly extruded pinecone. The crown was gone but, since fronds extended fingerlike from beneath the sand that covered a newly repaired footbridge, the reason was not hard to find.

The coolness of the gardens was in welcome contrast to the last fifty miles across the chott, when the air had been salt and hot, unseasonably so the taxi driver had told her, several times.

"I'm here to collect Lady Hana al-Mansur."

Zara stood on the edge of Tozeur's famous grove, home of the translucent deglet nur and site of a quarter of a million palms fed by two hundred springs that carried water to the date trees. The only thing to stop her reaching a small palace on the other side of the stream was a single soldier guarding a narrow bridge. The palace had been built by one of the old beys or emirs. It must have been, because only a notable could get away with building a palace on land historically reserved for growing dates.

Over the centuries, gold and slaves had passed through this area, carpets and priceless manuscripts, swords and spices. None of them creating the wealth of the date palms. At its height, a millennium before, a thousand dromedaries a day were said to have left Tozeur, laden with dates and even now many of the town's inhabitants were khammes, sharecroppers who maintained the groves and in return took one-fifth of the harvest as their pay.

Behind Zara in an airport taxi sat a driver, looking in disbelief at a pile of notes on his lap. She'd paid him what was on the meter, Tunis to Tozeur, having brushed away his offer to negotiate.

In fact, the man could honestly say she'd hardly glanced at the meter their entire trip, most of which she'd spent watching distant green fields turn to sahal before becoming moonlike around the phosphate town of Gafsa. A place of which a wise man once said, "Its water is blood, its air poison, you may live there a hundred years without making one true friend . . ."

"She is here?" Zara said, frowning at the guard. "Hani al-Mansur?"

The soldier to whom Zara spoke was thickset, with cropped hair more salt than pepper. He'd been having one of those weeks.

"I'm not sure, my lady . . ." The man made a show of unclipping a radio from his belt, wondering as he did so, why the young woman's face suddenly tightened. "I'll make a call."

"Zara Quitrimala," Zara said, "Ms. Zara Quitrimala." The way she said it made her name begin with a hiss. "And you don't use honorifics when talking to me. I'm perfectly ordinary."

The look the guard gave her begged leave to differ.

Moncef Hauara was unmarried which was rare for a middle-aged man in Tozeur, unmarried and about to retire from active duty. Living with his mother, a woman who'd spent her life repairing clothes for notables, he recognized both shot silk and the French way of cutting on the bias. Although, if asked, he'd have said the jet buttons were what he noticed. Most manufacturers used black plastic while a few of the flashier labels chose machine-cut obsidian. Only Dior and Chanel still used buttons hand-carved from Italian jet, the way they'd always done.

He knew, the way he knew a storm was brewing, exactly how long it would have taken someone to sew that jacket. How long it took to double-stitch the hems and edge each buttonhole. There were a dozen differing grades of silk, variable in their wear and lasting qualities as well as their ease of cutting and ability to hold dye.

There was nothing ordinary about that dress or the cut. And Corporal Hauara doubted strongly that there was anything remotely ordinary about the woman who wore it. At least not in any sense that a soon-to-retire soldier who still lived with his mother would understand.

"Yes, sir. I'll do that."

The corporal clicked off his radio and promptly dialled a fresh number. Sweat was beginning to show beneath his arms. A short conversation followed, of which Zara heard only one half.

"A young lady."

"Zara Quitrimala."

"Quitrimala."

"Yes, sir. Quite possibly."

"Yes, sir. I'll ask."

"Forgive me," said the guard, "but Major Jalal would like to know if Hana al-Mansur is expecting you? Also, why you think she is here . . ."

For someone so determined Zara did a good imitation of not having foreseen that question. "My father's . . ."

Corporal Hauara knew who her father was. At least he did now.

"He's guardian to . . ." Stumbling over the sense as much as the words, Zara tried to work out exactly what her father was to Hani, other than extremely fond. A fact replete with problems for someone whose own childhood memories were of a loud, occasionally threatening figure; a version of himself Hamzah Effendi seemed to have left behind.

"She told me she'd be here," said Zara finally, waving a piece of headed paper, signed by her father and the Khedive of El Iskandryia. This announced that they were the child's trustees and Zara acted with full authority. It slid over the fact they were trustees only where the child's money was concerned. Zara's furious request to her father that he let her go save Hani from imminent civil war had seen to that.

As for the Khedive, Zara had no doubts that he countersigned Hamzah's letter because she had tears in her eyes when she asked.

"What time does curfew begin?" Zara demanded.

Corporal Hauara looked at her. "Curfew?"

"It was on C3N. What time do Kashif Pasha's troops lock down the streets at night . . ."

"There is no curfew," the guard said carefully. "At least not in Tozeur. Perhaps in Tunis." He wanted to add something else, but the years had taught him to swallow such thoughts. That was the secret of surviving. To stay silent while seeming to do nothing but talk.

The small anteroom into which Zara was shown looked vast, largely because all four walls were mirror. Each mirror was framed within an elaborate double arch, each arch supported on stick-thin pillars topped by gilded capitals that displayed endless repetitions of a simplified, stylized acanthus.

It was in the worst possible taste.

The left-hand arch of one wall hid a door. Zara thought she knew which mirror it was but had a feeling that, if she so wished, it would be easy to forget. Forgetting about her reflection was more difficult.

An intense, neatly dressed Arab woman with scraped-back hair, still not yet out of her teens and with perfect, almost American teeth. Thinner than she used to be if not as slim as she wanted. Unmarriageable, way richer than could be justified and very much alone. Zara swept tears out of her eyes with a furious hand, only to wince as a thousand doubles made the identical movement.

First Raf had gone, then Hani. So she was here to take Hani back, while there was still time. As for Raf . . .

"My lady."

"I'm not . . ." She turned to where a man in major's uniform stood by the open door, his sudden appearance and the opening of the door having rendered the room small again.

"His Highness is busy welcoming his mother, Lady Maryam. So he sends his apologies. When this is done, His Highness requires a word."

"About what?" Zara demanded. Only too aware that her eyes were red.

Major Jalal shrugged. "I'm only Kashif Pasha's aide-de-camp," he said modestly. "But these are difficult times so I imagine His Highness is worried for your safety."

CHAPTER 40 Tuesday 8th March

"Okay, let's try that again."

Eduardo spun the knife in his hand and tossed it at a door scarred by more cuts than it was possible to count. At least, impossible to count without taking the offending object off its hinges, having the thing carried to Police HQ and getting someone to shoot it, resize the photographs and cross off the cuts one at a time.

A lifetime's worth of staff at Maison Hafsid had stood in a short corridor outside the cellar kitchens and honed their throwing skills or taken out their frustration on that cupboard door.

"You know what's really interesting?" Eduardo said.

No one answered, but then that wasn't surprising. He'd recognized them all. Not the names and not even the faces, but the types. Loners and misfits. The usual scum found working in kitchens. And they'd recognized him. As one of them.

Besides, the knife he threw was the one found plunged into the heart of Pascal Boulart. In the alley behind Maison Hafsid.

"What's really interesting is that the killer left no fingerprints on his blade . . ." There were, in fact, dozens of fingerprints on the blade, but all of them belonged to the coroner, his assistant or members of the police who'd processed the knife later, when it was being bagged for evidence.

"Why do you think that is?" Eduardo asked.

A boy shrugged.

"Because he wore gloves?" The man who spoke was tall and dark-faced, his hair grey with age. A heavy bruise ripened over one high cheek and his mouth was split. According to a report recently filed by Kashif Pasha's mubahith, Chef Edvard could be a difficult and sometimes violent man. So far there had been nothing to suggest that either of those statements was true.

"Gloves? Possibly," Eduardo admitted. "But then there are none of the victim's fingerprints on the blade either. Which is very odd, because Pascal was stabbed five times . . ." He paused and was disappointed to realize they didn't all immediately see the implication. "Have you ever been stabbed?"

Only Chef Edvard nodded.

"Show me your hands," Eduardo demanded.

There were faded slash marks across one palm and a long cicatrix that vanished beneath his sleeve. In return Eduardo showed the chef his own hands with their wounds from days Eduardo did his best not to remember.

"There were no defensive cuts on the hands of Pascal Boulart. His fingerprints were missing from both blade and handle. Do you know what this suggests to me?"

Ripping the knife from battered wood, Eduardo walked ten paces to the far end of the corridor and threw again. Another bull's-eye. Straight into the middle of the door, where it joined a hundred other cuts.

Behind him, where the corridor gave way to the kitchens, someone clapped, probably mockingly but maybe for real. That was Eduardo's tenth throw and the tenth time he'd put the knife in the door exactly where he wanted it.

A misspent childhood had its uses.

"You try." He pointed to the boy who'd been clapping. A thin youth with a rash on his chin hidden beneath what looked like blusher. "Come on . . ."

Reluctantly Idries stepped forward. Well aware that he had no choice.

The first thing Eduardo had done on entering the cellar was flash his shield. This was gold, maybe real gold, in a crocodile-skin case with a top that flipped up, like one of those little vidphones. It had been left for him at Police HQ, in his office, along with a matte black .45 paraOrdnance and a scribble pad of notes covered with Ashraf Bey's writing.

Eduardo hadn't even known he had an office until a fat man with sweat stains under his arms, a man who wouldn't meet his eye, silently offered him the key. Concerned with trying to make sense of His Excellency's terrible writing, it took Eduardo until the next morning to realize his scowling deputy with the striped shirts and perspiration problem was the old Chief.

In the end, unable to translate Ashraf Bey's notes into any language he understood, Eduardo stored them for safety in the top drawer of his new desk and turned to the files he'd asked Alexandre to bring him. Sometimes in life it was just easier to start over.

And he was right; the files were much more interesting.

"Find me the man with stripy shirts," Eduardo demanded. He had a box on his desk that let him talk to a serious-looking woman in the office outside without having to get up and open the door.

"You wanted me?"

Eduardo indicated a seat without looking up from his files. "You used to run this place?"

The man's nod was sullen. Although he added, "Yes, sir," when Eduardo raised his head from a folder.

"You can have it back once I'm done," Eduardo said. "I don't imagine I'll be staying. In fact"–he stared at the unhappy man–"assume you have total autonomy in everything except the Maison Hafsid case, but first find me . . ." Eduardo glanced down at a crime report. "Ahmed, cousin of Idries, who worked at the Maison Hafsid."

At first Chef Edvard felt sure Eduardo was there to shut down his restaurant. Given the disaster at Domus Aurea and the fact he'd put an Egyptian deserter on the staff list as Hassan, because that was the only way to get the man through security clearance, Chef Edvard could hardly have been surprised if this was true.

Mind you, if the mubahith had even suspected that second fact he'd already be dead. Chef Edvard's position, held to under questioning, was that he'd assumed the thin-faced blond waiter was just another undercover police officer providing protection.

Neither he nor his staff had ever seen the man before.

"Throw it," Eduardo told the boy.

"What about prints?" Idries glanced back at the others, looking for support. At least that's what Eduardo assumed he was looking for.

"I don't want to trick you," Eduardo said. "I just want to see you throw the knife." Pulling a pair of cheap evidence gloves from his suit pocket, he tossed them across. "Wear these."

The boy threw as expertly as Eduardo had expected. Without even bothering to heft the knife to find its balance.

"Now you," he told a girl hovering silently near the back.

She struggled with the gloves, finally throwing with the latex fingers only half over her own so they flopped like a coxcomb. The knife bounced off the door.

"Try again," said Eduardo as he handed Isabeau the knife and a clean tissue, something Rose insisted he carry. "Get rid of the gloves," he said, "then wipe down blade and handle when you've finished. I don't mind."

She stared at him.

"Throw," said Eduardo.

Without the gloves to hamper her, Isabeau put the blade straight into the door.

"I don't understand," Chef Edvard said into the silence that followed the thud of the blade. "Are you saying Ahmed flung this knife at my pastry cook? That was how Pascal was killed?"

"Of course not," said Eduardo. His tone of voice made it clear he'd never heard anything quite so ridiculous. "Wipe the blade," Eduardo told the girl, "and give it to someone else."

They all threw after that. Taking the handkerchief and carefully wiping clean the knife before passing it to the next person. Even Chef Edvard, his throw little more than a dismissive flick of the wrist that buried the blade in the door at throat height.

"Right," said Eduardo. "Only two more questions and we're done." Plucking the blade from the door one final time, he wiped it on his own shirt and dropped it back into its evidence bag. The stain on its steel blade was rust not blood and its edge was blunt. The only thing this knife had ever been good for was throwing at a door.

"Where's the fat boy?"

Eduardo had read the files, seen the photographs and memorized the names. But just to be safe he'd had the serious-faced assistant at his office type out a list of everyone working at Maison Hafsid and then he'd read them off at the beginning, like doing a roll call at school. He knew who was missing. Ahmed, obviously. Also Hassan.

"Gone," Chef Edvard said flatly.

"Where?" Eduardo demanded.

"We don't know. He just didn't show up today. And he missed his shift at Café Antonio last Friday."

"Let me know if he appears," said Eduardo. "Okay, final question. Where exactly in the alley was Pascal Boulart's body found? I want each of you to show me in turn."

Back at his office desk, a plate of droits de Fatima lifted from Maison Hafsid already reduced to a blizzard of pastry flakes, the new Chief of Police drew up his own list of clues, using a fountain pen he'd found in the drawer.

Blunt knife, broken handle, rusty blade; no fingerprints; damaged door; empty corridor; clean steps. A body that changed position. And finally, most bizarrely, one misplaced murderer.

Eduardo drew circles around each and joined them together as he'd once seen Ashraf Bey do, but because his clues were written in a list one under the other, the links just sank, like lead weights on a fishing line. So Eduardo wrote his clues out again, arranging them in a circle and joining them with new lines. And then, because it looked so good, he wrote it out a third time, folding one copy to put in his pocket and leaving the other on his desk for everyone else to see.

It was only when Eduardo reached the end of the street, still surreptitiously brushing flakes from his pastry-stained fingers that he realized his detective work would go unappreciated. He was the boss. The only person remotely likely to go near his desk was Marie, who stood up every time he came into her outer office. She seemed far too nervous to take such liberties.

He'd just have to show his clues to Rose instead. Then he'd tell her the answer, maybe. Licking his fingers, Eduardo wiped them afresh on his trousers and went to buy Rose some chocolates. Somehow eating always made him hungry.

CHAPTER 41 Friday 11th March

"Your Excellency."

Given that someone had stolen all three door knockers, the barefoot Nubian in the white silk robe had little option but to hammer ever louder on the door of Dar Welham. As a method of attracting Ashraf Bey's attention it proved surprisingly unsuccessful, all but the final knocks being drowned out by the thud of ancient and unserviced fans inside.

Until he made his stop at Kairouan the previous week, Raf hadn't even realized he owned a house in Tozeur, let alone one in the oldest district; but the tall dar with its ochre, geometrically laid brickwork and dark interior had been a wedding present from the Emir to his mother, apparently.

Un présent de mariage.

Isaac & Sons' files were dust-buried on the shelves of their deserted walk-up when Raf and three uniformed officers cut the padlock on the rear and kicked in a door at the top of the stairs.

All it took was Raf presenting himself at Kairouan's Police HQ and demanding the loan of three good officers, bolt cutters and a hydraulic battering ram, one of the small handheld versions. His name alone had been enough to turn his wish list into reality. The officers were uniformed, respectful and obviously experienced. And the really terrifying thing, at least the thing that Raf found really terrifying was that at no point did anyone ask him for any form of identity.

He went looking for a wedding certificate and came back with copies of a deed of ownership, which did just as well. The date he wanted was at the top. While his mother's signature and that of Moncef were at the bottom. Fifty years earlier, on the day after they were married, Moncef had presented his mother with a house in Tozeur and another in Tunis. Fifty years . . .

Lady Nafisa, his aunt, had known this because it was for her that the copies were made by notario Ibrahim ibn Ishaq. Thanking the police officers, Raf had taken one copy of the deed and ordered the men to remove all other documents from the office and have them shredded, then burned. He made the most senior officer repeat that order, all documents, all shredded, all burned.

When Raf left to find Hani, Murad and the Bugatti, the officer was already radioing for backup while the other two had begun to arrange the files into dusty piles on the floor.

Dar Welham, his new house, stood behind the main road from the Palm Groves to Zaouia Ishmailia, on the right, halfway down an alley too old and narrow to merit a name. One side of his street had already been partly rebuilt using traditional yellow brick. Raf's side remained a mess of crumbling façades and locked doorways, with most of the houses obviously empty. Almost all of the triple door knockers, which allowed long-gone inhabitants to know if the person calling was a man, woman or child, had been stolen. As had a number of the old iron locks and the door handles themselves.

The private courtyard of Dar Welham still stank of cat's piss and sewage, although Raf had slopped it down at least three times and tipped buckets of rusty water through the open grilles of the drains. Hani and Murad had concentrated on the inside of the dar, sweeping floors and scrubbing at mineral deposits that had leached up through the floor tiles.

That the dar had electricity to drive its fans at all was a miracle. One involved twisted flex glued direct to rough walls and fed through a large hole into next door's cellar, where Raf jammed open the trip switch of a junction box with half a clothespin. Air-conditioning would obviously have helped. Although being somewhere other than Tozeur at the start of a khamsin wind might have been better.

Sand fall was expected. And Murad kept referring to a chili, alternating that word with khamsin. It had to do with a depression moving into the Gulf of Gebes. One that had kicked the afternoon temperature up to 98°F and threatened to drop sand as far north as Madrid. The local radio station talked about little else.

"Door," Hani said, looking up from a game of chess. She was winning five games to zero. The only way Murad had been persuaded to play again was her promise that this would be his last for the day and her assurance that he'd soon be good enough to beat her. But then, as Murad pointed out, she'd said that the day before as well.

At Hani's feet stretched Ifritah. Panting in the heat.

"What?" Raf put down the deeds to Dar Welham.

"Someone's at the door," said Hani. "I'd go but it's probably for you."

And it was. Apparently Kashif Pasha's messenger saw nothing odd in presenting an envelope featuring an ersatz version of a European coat of arms, one bearing a Western interpretation of an Othman turban, on a silver salver in the style of Napoleon III, overlaid around the edge with Quranic script in beaten gold, bronze and copper.

"Will there be a reply?"

Having read Kashif's message, Raf put it carefully in his pocket.

"No," he said, "I think not."

The Nubian might have come to the door of Dar Welham barefooted and dressed in a white robe but he drove off in a black four-by-four with smoked windows and roo bars big enough to knock down a buffalo.

"Who was that?" said Hani. She stood on the stairs with Murad behind her. A windup radio was in the boy's hand.

"Just one of Kashif Pasha's friends."

"My brother Kashif doesn't have friends," Murad said firmly, then paused, worried that he might have sounded rude. "I mean," he said more politely, "he has only allies or enemies." The boy's voice made no secret of which camp he'd found himself in. "What does the message say?"

"That's private."

Two heads turned to face Raf. Hani's frown now a full-on scowl. "No secrets," she reminded Raf. "Remember? That's what you told me when Aunt Nafisa died. Anything I asked you would answer."

It had been a simple enough promise, made to a crying child who wanted to know why life was so unfair. One that Raf would have liked an adult, any adult, to have made to him. And it was proving impossibly difficult to keep.

"Hani, I'm really sorry . . ."

"You promised."

So he had. "It's from Kashif Pasha," Raf said.

"But that's the Emir's coat of arms," Murad insisted.

"I know," said Raf, "but it's not his message. Kashif and I need to meet."

"You're not going to go . . ." Murad sounded appalled that Raf might even consider it. "Have you listened to the latest news?"

Raf hadn't.

Apparently C3N had been told by St. Cloud that Ashraf Bey was behind the attack on Emir Moncef. Colonel Abad, that well-known war criminal, was mentioned. As was Raf's part in helping Abad avoid being brought to justice. The Marquis even managed to suggest that the bey might be behind last autumn's attacks on the Midas Refinery, jointly owned by St. Cloud and Hamzah Effendi.

"If you go, Kashif will hurt you," Murad said flatly. "I know him."

"All the same," said Raf, "I think I must." Skimming the note, he ran through words he already knew by heart. The message was short. "It seems Kashif's captured the missing waiter," Raf told them both. "He'd like me to be present at the questioning."

Hani opened her mouth and shut it again. "Something else," she said finally. "What else?"

"Because of the current danger," said Raf, failing to extract the bleakness from his voice, "my brother has extended his offer of protective custody to include Zara."

"She's here?"

"Apparently . . ."

"So what do you want Murad and me to do?" Hani asked.

"Stay here," said Raf. "And keep out of trouble. If that's remotely possible."

Hani's look was doubtful.

CHAPTER 42 Friday 11th March

Three hours after Raf left, men in black jellabas locked off the unnamed alley using Jeeps they swung across both ends, isolating the stretch in between.

Once again the Jeeps had smoked glass, fat roo bars and whip aerials. The man who seemed in charge had dyed hair combed forward like a Roman emperor, a heavy moustache and a black mubahith blouse on without insignia of any kind. Only a slight bald patch and the fact his choice of top accentuated his paunch took the edge off an effect that was, Hani had to admit, still quietly threatening.

"You take a look," she said, handing Murad an old pair of opera glasses. The boy did what she suggested, staring down at the alley entrance.

"Soldiers," he said.

Hani nodded.

"In disguise," she said. "Who's the man?"

Murad took a second look at the mubahith with the weird hair. "No one I recognize," he said, like he wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

"Are they from the Emir's guard?"

"Of course not." Murad shook his head. "All Eugenie's troops are women." He spoke as if Eugenie were still alive. "Those are not women . . ."

Only fear let Hani restrain herself. Some people shouted when they got afraid, others closed down, went silent. That was her. "Look," Hani said, "you think they support Kashif Pasha?"

"You heard the radio," said Murad. "All the soldiers support my brother Kashif."

"Now there's a surprise." Hani sounded like Zara at her most cross. The way the older girl had been those last few days at the madersa before Raf vanished, sharp and snotty but nothing like as cruel as Raf had been with his dark silences and exile inside his own head.

"Kashif," Murad said. "He won't hurt you."

"Yes, he will. And he'll hurt you. And it won't be the first time, will it?"

"He's still my brother." Murad's voice was quiet.

"And the Emir is his father," said Hani flatly. "But he still ordered that attack." She didn't know this, of course, but she knew her uncle and it was obvious he thought so.

"I don't believe it."

"You don't want to," Hani told him. They were sitting together on the flat roof of Dar Welham, peering over the parapet. Behind them, sheets dried on a line and drifting sand wrote patterns across cracked tiles and gathered into tiny dunes.

Picking herself up, Hani stepped back from the edge. And four floors below, now unseen by Hani or Murad, the man without insignia ordered one of the jellaba-clad men to knock on the door. After that, the soldier tried the door without being told and found it locked. So he hammered again, harder.

Faces appeared from the roofs of houses opposite and disappeared just as rapidly when their owners realized what was happening.

"Open in the name of the NR."

When this unnaturally loud cry went unanswered, the man tried the handle himself. Finding it still securely locked, Poul Fischer nodded to a young Berber. "Plastique," he ordered.

The flexible breaching charge the corporal pulled from under his disguise wasn't strictly plastique. At least not in any sense he understood. It was a short length of three-hundred-grain-an-inch cutting charge with a soft rubber body that could be bent into any shape needed and a sticky foam that glued it to the door and helped reduce the danger of back fragmentation. Correcting a mubahith officer, however, was not in the corporal's career plan.

Fixing one length around the lock, the corporal positioned two more around the hinges, then did top and bottom where bolts might be, just to play safe. The FBC series also came in six-hundred-grain and twelve-hundred-grain densities but for hinges of this age three-hundred-grain was probably already overkill.

"It might be best, sir, if everyone stood back." Quickly, so he didn't have to see Poul Fischer's answering expression, the corporal fixed an electronic match to each charge and began to enter his identity code into a firing box.

"Ready when you are, sir."

Raf had never explained to Hani how he'd managed to break Zara's brother out of the basement of a locked house in Kharmous and she'd been careful never to ask. But with her screen, a satellite shot of El Isk and some serious intuition she'd been able to work it out.

Intuition was part inherent and part learnt. The percentages were open to debate. As they always were with anything involving socialization versus heredity. Hani, however, was pretty sure she'd been born with heightened levels.

Hypersensitivity was one description. Hani knew this because she'd done a quiz on a medical Web site. It suggested childhood stress might have made changes to an area of her brain called the cingulated gyrus. Or rather, her time with Aunt Nafisa had ensured changes were not made: reducing Hani's ability to filter out life's raw mixture of competing noise and demands.

Persistent stress-response state was a term she got fed by the site in Santa Fe. And Hani had all the symptoms; stomach ache and sleepless nights, a tendency to focus on nonverbal clues rather than speech. A preference for animals over humans.

"Ifritah," Hani said suddenly.

"What about Ifritah?"

"I've got to find her . . ." Hani was heading towards the stairs down into the house before Murad had time to move.

"Wait," he said, louder than he intended. "Let me see what's going on." Putting his head above the parapet Murad watched a man far below glue something to the front door. "I don't think it's safe," he said.

"We can't leave her behind." Tears had started in Hani's eyes and her face was set. Her cheeks pulled back as if battling through a wind tunnel of misery. "She'll be in danger."

Murad sighed. "I'll go," he said.

The cat wasn't on the top floor or the floor below. Just to be sure, Murad looked under beds and inside cupboards, fighting with the rickety shutter of a mashrabiya to check that Hani's kitten hadn't some how got inside, even though the mashrabiya's bolts were rusted almost solid and there was no way this was possible.

She wasn't on the floor below that either, where Raf, Hani and Murad had made camp in a huge room containing two sofas woven from rattan and a drinks cabinet still full of half-empty bottles of liqueur. Old copies of New Scientist and The Ecologist sat in a magazine rack. Someone had left a paperback facedown and open under a stool so long ago that most of the pages had rotted away or been eaten by beetles, but there was no Ifritah.

"Any sign?" The question came from above.

"No. Not yet."

Murad was halfway down the last flight of stairs when the door blew in. A pressure wave threw him back so he landed in a ragged heap. One of the steps caught his spine as he landed and it hurt.

The first soldier through the door shot the cat.

Get up, Murad told himself and was relieved to discover that he could. Taking the steps two at a time, he raced away from the black shadows tumbling through smoke, their weapons at the ready. At the very top of the house, at the foot of the stairs leading to the roof, Murad removed the key from the bottom door and used it to double click the lock from the other side. Then he did the same for the top door, the one that led out onto the roof and took that key as well.

"Ifritah . . ."

"Not there," he told Hani. "I'm sorry."

"You're bleeding." It sounded as if she'd only just noticed the fact.

"What?"

Hani touched her nose and Murad touched his own, fingers coming away sticky. "And your ear," she said. That turned out to be sticky too.

"We'll be in worse trouble," Murad said, "if we don't hide." Which proved to be easier to say than do, as there was only one exit to the flat roof of the dar and it was already locked.

"Down there," suggested Hani, pointing over the rear parapet to a dusty garden which obviously belonged to a neighbour. "We can use that."

Below them, built so that its nearest end joined the back wall of Dar Welham was the tiled roof of a fourth-floor balcony. The drop from where they stood to the tiles was maybe twice Hani's height.

"Unless you're afraid?"

Instinctively Murad's chin went up. "Of course I'm not," he started to say, then met Hani's dark eyes and stopped. "Okay," he said, "I admit it. I've been scared ever since we left Tunis."

"Me too." Hani reached out to wipe dirt from his face, as if that was just a natural thing to do. Maybe it was, Hani didn't know and probably wasn't the person to ask about stuff like that. Until six months ago she'd believed that keeping a toy dog in her room deserved the slaps it invariably earned her, because Ali Din was male and her Aunt Nafisa had rules about such things.

Only now Hani lived with Raf, whose rules were less strict. Which made life easier but doing the right thing more difficult, because most of the time Hani just had to guess what that was . . .

"Like now." Hani said to herself.

"Like now what?" demanded Murad.

"We need to move."

She nodded to the sloping roof of next door's mashrabiya. "You first," she said.

"Wait . . ."

"No time."

"But I'm not ready," Murad protested. And that was when Hani realized that both his ears must be damaged. Someone was trying the handle of the door at the bottom of the roof stairs. A fact that seemed to escaped Murad.

"Do you want Kashif's men to catch us?"

Sliding over the edge, the boy twisted round until he hung by his fingers, then she heard a clatter below as Murad flailed for a grip to stop himself tumbling over the edge.

Hani's landing was rather better, although less catlike than she'd have liked; her knees coming up to hit her chest as she met the tiles. Something else to add to the list of bits that hurt.

"This way," Hani said, dropping to her belly so she could peer over the edge of the mashrabiya. Its original carved screen was stolen and whoever had ripped it out had tacked a rotted tarpaulin in place to hide what they'd done. There was a market for architectural salvage, particularly at the top end. Back in El Isk, Hamzah Effendi had a houseful of the stuff. Hani was about to explain this to Murad but decided to save her words. He looked a bit preoccupied.

"I'll go," Hani said. "You went first last time."

The difficult bit turned out to be lowering herself over the edge, what with tiles scraping against knees, legs and tummy until the pull of gravity left her hanging. And that was before Hani edged rapidly along the drop looking for a tear she'd seen in the tarpaulin. Swinging once for luck, Hani flipped through the gap to land inside the mashrabiya.

It was all she could do not to miaow.

"Now you," Hani hissed, ripping aside some of the rotted canvas. "That should make it easier."

She saw his shoes first, scuffed oxfords followed rapidly by socks, turn-ups from his flannel trousers and then the length of his body up to the waist. She thought for a second Murad was about to freeze but he kept coming until he hung, eyes shut high above the courtyard.

"Do it," Hani said.

So Murad swung once, jackknifing like a gymnast and when he landed it was on his toes.

"That was okay," Hani admitted and Murad almost smiled. Together they refixed the rotten canvas as best they could. Hanging the tarpaulin from the holes that Hani had made when she ripped some of it down.

The empty house had two exits, a main one onto an alley and a small door, cupboardlike, that opened into a cul-de-sac so tight it was little more than the gap between two barely separate walls, one obviously much newer than the other. They chose the narrow way and finally exited on a street called Rue des Jardins, walking quickly with their heads down until they passed through a car park behind a hotel.

Walking slowly would have made more sense. Only neither one quite had the nerve so they hurried instead, trying hard not to run. And when they finally reached the market on Rue Ibn Chabbat, Hani made Murad stop in the shadow of a lorry.

"Let me," she said. Her handkerchief was unused and still held creases from where it had been ironed by Donna. Just looking at it made Hani want to cry. Licking a corner, she steadied Murad's chin with one hand and wiped crusted blood from the side of his mouth with the other. When she tried to wash blood from his left ear Murad began to cry as well.

"We are running away, right?" Murad asked, once his face was clean again.

"Not exactly," said Hani. She smiled at the boy's exasperated expression. "We're staying out of trouble . . ."

It was Murad who first saw the bus. And Hani who pointed out that the vehicle was actually a coach. A brief argument about the difference then followed before Murad eventually bowed to Hani's insistence that coaches had smoked-glass windows, air-conditioning and their own loos.

This one even had onboard newsfeed, computer games and four private cabins. A fact advertised in large gold letters along both sides. Right below a line that read Haute Travel: Tripoli and above the URL for a site few locals could get, because Web connections without licence were banned by law in Ifriqiya. Not to mention most other parts of North Africa.

"We need a disguise," said Hani.

Murad stared at her.

"Think about it," said Hani. "Those soldiers were after Murad Pasha and Lady Hana al-Mansur." That Hani admitted her own first name was unusual in itself.

"If they are actually after us," Murad said. He'd been thinking about that.

"Who else would they be after?"

"Ashraf Bey?"

"They waited until he was gone," Hani said firmly. She turned to Murad, face serious. "You're certain they were Kashif's men?"

"I'm sure," said Murad.

"Even though they said they were the Army of the Naked?"

"Yes," Murad said. "That's why I'm sure."

"Okay," said Hani. Peeling $5 from her roll she gave it to Murad. "You got this as a tip from an American journalist," she told the boy.

"Why?"

Hani sighed. "It doesn't matter . . . For showing her the way. For fetching her a glass of water. Make it up."

"What do you want me to get?" Murad demanded.

He bought a white T-shirt, made in Morocco, size XXL and a pair of plastic sandals with sputnik in red across the strap. Murad also bought a Dynamo's hat, which he wrecked by ripping off the brim so that from the front it looked like a skullcap.

"What did you buy that for?" Hani asked.

"The cap?"

"No silly, that . . ." She pointed at the T-shirt still draped over his arm.

"Watch," said Murad and stripped off his soiled Aertex shirt and scrunched it into a ball. Slipping the new shirt over his head, Murad turned his back on Hani and unbuttoned his trousers, stepping out of those as well. With a T-shirt down around his knees, his socks gone and cheap sandals Murad looked like most other kids in the market, his new shirt making do for a robe.

When he turned back Hani was pointedly staring into the distance.

"Your turn," said Murad.

CHAPTER 43 Friday 11th March

"You came," said Major Jalal, as if he'd been waiting hours for Raf to appear. Hawk eyes glittered above a sharp nose and heavy moustache. And the smile that accompanied his comment hovered on the edge of contempt.

"How could I refuse my brother?" Raf said lightly. A single glance was enough to swallow the scene: Major Jalal in full uniform, a lieutenant and, standing behind him, the inevitable black Jeep.

Two soldiers stood by the Jeep trying to look casual.

"Well, now you're here," said Major Jalal, "where would Your Excellency like to sit, front or the back . . . ?"

"Zara?" Raf asked, not moving.

"Your mistress is safe," Major Jalal assured him. "And you can see her soon. But, before that, I've got orders to take you to Kashif Pasha. He would like a word."

Raf smiled. "You know how it is," he said. "Family comes first."

"I understand that's one of the things His Highness wants to talk about." Major Jalal's voice was dry. "The fact you seem to believe he's your brother."

Kashif hadn't always been manipulative. So people said. Mostly those who'd never met him. As a small boy he'd been loved and loving, open and happy to consider the feelings of others. That was how Kashif Pasha's official biography reported it anyway.

One day, maybe thirty years ago when he was first made a general, so sometime around seventeen, Kashif had demanded sight of his early school reports. Harrying some minor archivist into finding the file and doing whatever was necessary to get it released.

This was during one of Emir Moncef's periodic bouts of madness. With the man camped out under a summer sky somewhere south of Wadi al B'ir, speaking to no one and sleeping between two of Eugenie's troop for warmth. Wearing nothing, apparently. Although the girls were allowed to retain their pants. It was all extremely adolescent.

Of course, only Lady Maryam dared call it madness. Everybody else spoke of the Emir's retreats and his need to remain in touch with the land. But it was madness all the same. A howling depression that had Moncef claiming (literally) to be someone else. At these times only Eugenie could help. Wherever she was and whatever she might be doing, Eugenie stopped doing it and came, elegant and stern-faced. He was quieter after her visits. Sometimes for months and once for the period of a whole year.

The school Kashif attended was at the rear of the Bardo Palace next to a mosque. School and mosque were not connected. It was, however, reasonable to assume they were and many people did, both in Tunis and abroad. There were eighteen and a half pupils in Kashif's class, this being the national average. And his year was taught the national syllabus, which included French, gymnastics, mathematics and poetry. The half pupil was achieved by allowing one boy to attend every other lesson.

If one left out the fact the other seventeen and a half pupils in Kashif's class were either his cousins or chosen from the sons of government ministers, then Bardo High was a typical local school of the kind found all over Ifriqiya. What most news reports forgot to mention was that Kashif's school had only one class, his own. The school opened when he reached five and shut when he reached fifteen; there never was a year below Kashif or a year above. The pupil to staff ratio was two to one.

His reports had been as exemplary as his marks. Each master describing a warm and outgoing child. A boy who'd unquestionably have had a great future ahead of him irrespective of birth.

Having reread these, Kashif Pasha demanded the real reports–on the basis that these must exist. A request which sent the already nervous archivist into near-terminal decline. Faced with arranging the forbidden, the archivist tried to explain to Kashif about secret bags, inadvertently offering the seventeen-year-old boy a whole new source of information and income.

Secret bags were kept in a vault below the Bardo, that much the archivist knew. Once sealed they could only be opened in the presence of a witness, provided . . . There'd followed a long list of stipulations to which the young Kashif hadn't bothered to listen.

Practically dragging the archivist to where the man believed the secret bags were stored, Kashif demanded they both be given entry. With the Emir gone and that wing otherwise empty, the chamberlain had done the obvious; opened the front door and saluted smartly. It had taken Kashif ten minutes to identify the vault and another five to bully someone into unlocking the door. A problem never to arise again after Kashif relieved the porter of his key.

Goatskin, Kashif decided, maybe sheep, nothing too fancy. Cured in a way that was almost intentionally perfunctory and stitched crudely with gut. Impressive signatures covered each bag, mostly from his father and occasionally Eugenie. One from the Soviet ambassador and even one from the Marquis de St. Cloud. Any person wanting to open a bag to examine its contents had to sign the outside before the seal was cut. Some of the newer seals were almost silver, others oxidized down to a dull black.

Kashif was inordinately proud to discover that he had a whole rack to himself. Seven leather bags in total. Starting with the first, Kashif cut its seal and began to read an account of his life that he recognized.

He was surly, bad at games and prone to violence. His unbroken run of goals, his easy knockdowns in boxing and rapid fencing victories owed more to who he was than to any innate physical talent.

His marks suffered an automatic 25 percent inflation. The French mistress he liked most had been paid off after complaining that he'd molested her in a corridor.

The summer Kashif turned seventeen was the year he got his reputation for working hard. He'd appear every morning at the relevant wing of the Bardo, notebook in hand and a nervous young archivist two steps behind. And each evening he'd make his way back to his mother's dar with another courtier's life pinned to the board of his memory.

He made friends fast that summer and was given three cars, including his first Porsche and a speedboat he used to take Russian girls water-skiing, until he hit a sunken rock and an attaché's daughter ended up a casualty. The high point was when he acquired his own villa on Iles de Kirkeah, from an elderly general whose devotion to his childless, long-suffering wife was apparently exceeded only by his devotion to a long string of pretty Moroccan houseboys.

Every bag he chose Kashif dutifully signed, leaving it to the archivist to repack the contents and affix a new seal. The one for his mother was especially interesting. Particularly in relation to a visit made to Gerda Schulte three weeks before she married his father. A surgeon briefly famous for patenting the only medically undetectable, biologically foolproof method of restoring virginity. A technique surprisingly popular among the middle classes of North Africa and the source of her heir's considerable wealth.

It was a snippet of information Kashif parlayed with his mother into a new apartment in the Bardo, one with its own entrance. His other knowledge Kashif kept close as an enemy, deadly as a friend; using it only as necessary once that first flush of power was gone. Murad wasn't even born when Kashif discovered the bags and, by the time he was, the bags had gone. Exactly when they vanished Kashif never discovered. He'd gone to Monte Carlo one Monday and come back two years later to find the room empty and repainted, awaiting delivery of an apparently valuable collection of late-nineteenth-century tax returns.

One thing Kashif knew for certain though. No bag had made reference to his father having married again. At least not until that American girl to whom Eugenie introduced him, Murad's mother. The one who went off a cliff. And the bag that dealt with Moncef's bastards made no reference to an Ashraf al-Mansur or Ashraf anything else, come to that . . . Whatever the late Eugenie de la Croix or his father might claim.

"Afternoon," Raf said to a guard by the side of the path. The man looked at Major Jalal, trying to work out if he was meant to salute Ashraf Bey or not. Just to be safe, he saluted anyway.

Up ahead stood Kashif Pasha, with no one else in sight. At least not obviously; one sniper hid in a clump of palms to Raf's left. Phoenix dactylifera, tree of the Phoenicians with finger-resembling fruit. Raf had Hani to thank for that snippet of information.

Another sniper was behind him. The smell of tobacco as Raf entered the amphitheatre had been too strong not to whisper its warning. That Kashif Pasha felt such protection was necessary almost made Raf feel better.

"Brother." Raf drawled the word. No greeting and no title, zero hostility either. Let the other man make the running on this. Kashif Pasha was supposed to be a poker player, famous for it apparently . . .

Raf smiled.

"Feeling happy about something?" asked Kashif.

"Always glad to see you," Raf said. "You know how it is."

"No," said Kashif, "I can't say I do."

Raf's grin was bleak as he adjusted his Armani shades and smelled the hot wind. Sweat, fear, anger and triumph. Beneath the distant tobacco and Kashif's cologne there was a veritable symphony of olfactory molecules being ripped apart by a breeze that filtered between salt-stunted thorns.

"Oh well," he said.

They stood in the ruins of a small Roman amphitheatre with fifteen circles of seating cut direct into crumbling pink rock. The central circle was half-buried in dust and a cheap kiosk near the entrance had signs that read Closed in seven languages. Its filthy window and padlocked door suggested the site had been shut since autumn.

There was undoubtedly a lesson there if only Raf had the mind for it, because according to Khartoum there was a lesson in everything; in appearance and the reality behind appearance and in the reality behind the first appearance of reality. In Khartoum's opinion to hunt knowledge was to lose it.

"You seem amused . . ." Kashif's voice was cold. "Am I missing something?"

"We all are," said Raf. "That's the very essence of being human."

Two of Major Jalal's soldiers looked at each other. One of them mouthing to the other and Raf caught the silent word. Moncef. . . His father, that was what they were saying. He was like his father.

Mad.

Even Kashif Pasha nodded. As if willing, for the moment, to admit that the one might be son of the other.

"This missing waiter . . ." said Raf. And got no further.

"He's confessed."

Behind his shades, Raf blinked. "To what?"

"Disguising himself to infiltrate the Domus Aurea with the express intent of killing the Emir." Kashif's face burned with anger. Or maybe triumph. "He was working for the French. As an agent provocateur in a revolutionary cell that also included the dead Sufi. He's admitted everything."

"And you know his confession is true, how?" A reasonable enough comment one would have thought.

"Because he wrote it himself." So close to Raf was Kashif Pasha that Raf could identify at least three of the things Kashif had eaten for lunch. "Ask the criminal if you don't believe me . . . And then we can shoot him." A minor tic at the edge of Kashif's mouth pulled it out of shape. His pupils were large and his gaze direct.

Kashif Pasha meant it.

This was when Raf realized the pasha was serious. He'd summoned Raf to watch the execution of a man Kashif Pasha genuinely believed had tried to kill his father. All because of a throwaway line from Raf about suspecting Kashif. A barb that had dug deep into the pasha's flesh, dragging him to a point of intensity that owed far more to indignation than fear or guilt. That worried Raf.

Bluster, threats, fake fury, those Raf could handle. But a demand for approval, this expectation that he would immediately withdraw all accusations when faced with evidence . . . There was a sour note to this that rang like a cracked bell.

If not Kashif, then who . . . Berlin/the Thiergarten? It seemed unlikely.

"Your waiter," said Raf. "Where is he?"

In reply, Kashif jerked his head towards yet another black Jeep, parked beside the ticket kiosk. Smoked windows, roo bars and a radiator grille like the baleen of a loose-lipped whale. One could only assume the mubahith imported them in job lots.

"Get him," Kashif demanded.

Major Jalal nodded and seconds later, as two guards tossed a naked figure at Raf's feet his heart sank. He should never, ever have let Chef Edvard register him with Domus Aurea security using someone else's name.

Hassan stank of fear and bled from a split mouth. His nose was broken, three front teeth were gone and his face was a veritable rainbow of pain. Whip marks scored his heavy shoulders. A dozen cigarette burns speckled his soft belly. There had been nothing subtle about the questioning.

"This is your waiter?"

Major Jalal nodded.

"According to my niece," said Raf, "the missing waiter was tallish and thin. This man is short and fat."

"Lady Hana is mistaken." Major Jalal's voice was firm. "But then the dining room was lit by chandeliers and somewhat dark so it would be an easy error for a frightened child to make. Besides, Your Excellency has his brother's word that this is the man."

"Let me guess," said Raf. "He protested his innocence for a couple of days, then decided to tell you the truth . . ."

"Is there a point to this?" Kashif's voice was hard.

"Of course there's a point," said Raf with a sigh.

The three-day rule had been explained to him by two people he admired. One of them, as mother of Seattle's famous Five Winds Friendship Society had inherited an administration that kept surgeons on its payroll. And it had taken using their undoubted skills on two soon-to-retire elder brothers to get that anomaly changed, or so Hu San had said. The other person was Felix.

The rule of three was simple. And in a list of five it came just before the one that said blustering men broke faster than quiet women . . . No matter how brave or well trained, even a saint was ready to confess to devil worship by the third day; there were no exceptions. Keep death away and rack up the pain and by day three all anybody wanted to know was where to sign.

Chef Edvard's sous-chef had been no different. Poor sod.

"Hassan," said Raf and watched as the fat boy raised his head, eyes widening as he saw the man in front of him.

"You're . . ."

"Ashraf Bey," said Raf, kicking Hassan in the stomach. "Well done." He kicked again and when Hassan finally looked up with imploring eyes, Raf went for the kidneys. It was this blow that knocked Hassan unconscious.

"You know the man?" Kashif's voice was thoughtful.

"Of course I know him," Raf said. "I'm Chief of Police. He's the main witness to the Maison Hafsid killing and on the precinct payroll as an informer. One of my lieutenants was wondering what had happened."

"You recognized by sight a man who tried to shoot my father . . ." Kashif seemed to be trying the sentence for size, considering its usefulness.

On either side of the pasha his guards had gone very still. Maybe it was Kashif's tone of voice or perhaps he had some signal like a finger tapping against his nose, a shift of his weight or a certain nod of his head. Most people in his position had special signs and ways of giving instructions.

One of them must have said club this impostor to the ground.

"Well done," said the voice. Raf ignored it. He had more important things to do than talk to the fox.

Twisting steadily, Raf pulled against his shackles until he felt one arm dislocate. It hurt no more than many other things in his life and far less than waking after the operation that replaced his kidneys as a child. About as much as a beating he once took in Seattle from a street punk called Wild Boy, back when they both worked for Hu San.

Raf hadn't seen the blow coming. Hadn't even felt the pistol butt that brought oblivion, the state to which his life seemed eternally drawn. One minute Raf was standing facing Kashif Pasha, then darkness came.

When Raf woke the first time he was in a waiter's uniform. The white blindness in his eyes the afterglow of a camera flash; and for a moment, floating on pain and watching the camera burn on the inside of his eyelids, Raf believed he was young again.

And then he knew he wasn't and hadn't been for a very long time.

CHAPTER 44 Friday 11th March

Opening the door was easy. Hani just pushed a button that read emergency release and a swirl of blissfully cool air exploded onto Ibn Chabbat Square. To close the door behind her she hit a button marked shut. This button was on the inside, obviously enough. And then they were in the coach, examining its hydraulic seats and checking the spiral stairs that led to a glass observation bubble.

"Too obvious," said Hani.

At the very rear of the coach was a wall of showers and toilets (two of each, divided into male and female). Between these and the seating area farther forward was a short corridor featuring a couple of sliding doors on each side. So the bus went seats/narrow corridor/wall of loos where a back window should be. The sliding doors were marked stateroom 1, 2, 3 and 4 . . .

"I don't get it," Murad complained, not for the first time.

"Good," Hani told him. "Stick with that."

She pushed him through one of the sliding doors, having first flipped up its lock with a penknife, an act of breaking and entering made much easier than she expected by the coachmakers' fear of litigation, which guaranteed that every door was simplicity itself to open from the outside should the need arise. Which, in Hani's opinion, it had.

A man's room, Russian to judge from the phrase book and an open magazine left on the side. "Try the next one," said Hani and bundled Murad back through the sliding door, relocking it behind her.

A woman, travelling alone. The upper bunk unmade, blankets still folded, the lower one exhibiting neatly turned-back covers and a perfectly straight pillow. Also Soviet. Too neat by half. "We'll try the other side," Hani said.

Both bunks in the next cabin had been used. The cover on the bottom one hung neatly, the cover to the top bunk was still crumpled. A Bible in English, translated by someone called St. James. Hani didn't want to be prejudiced, but . . .

Actually that could be good.

On a bedside locker, open and facedown, lay a Discovery Channel guide to Ifriqiya, its spine cracked in half a dozen places. A handful of foreign change filled a saucer.

"E pluribus unum . . ." From one, many. Or was it, from many, one? Hani's Latin was too rusty for her to be certain which it was if either. So she put down the coin and picked up a flowery dressing gown draped over a peg on the door.

"Nylon," she told Murad.

The garment was surprisingly short, albeit still long enough to drag on the carpet when Hani tried it on without sandals. It was the gown's width that impressed her. She and Murad could have hidden inside the thing three times over.

"This'll do," Hani said with the certainty of someone who distrusted thin people even if she was one. Years of living with Aunt Nafisa had seen to that. "We hide here."

"Hide?"

"Okay, then," said Hani, settling herself on the floor. "We wait."

Around dusk, Hani heard the tourists finally clamber aboard and felt the coach settle on its dampers. Or maybe it was springs? Mechanical things weren't really her area. Computers now . . . But hard as it was to believe, the e pluribus unum couple making this trip were doing so without a single computer, PDA or screen. Unless they'd taken the lot with them and Hani found that hard to believe.

"We're moving," said Murad, his expression worried.

"That's what we want to happen," Hani told him. She indicated a spot next to her on the carpet and Murad looked doubtful. He was still slightly afraid of her, Hani realized. And of everything else. Beneath that buttoned-down manner her cousin was as raw to the world as she was, maybe more so, because she knew how to adapt while Murad was still learning.

Meanwhile he just looked bemused.

"Uncle Ashraf will be fine," Hani promised, realizing as soon as she spoke that this was not what worried the boy. She might worry about her uncle but Murad had his own problems, ones unknown to her.

"Do you think getting older makes you weaker?" Murad demanded suddenly.

Hani thought about it. "I thought it made you stronger."

"That's what they tell you," said Murad, "but is it true? I feel like I know less every day. Everything always used to be clear but now . . ."

"What was clear?" Hani asked.

"Knowing what to do . . ."

"And were you allowed to do it?"

They sat together until Murad was so desperate for a pee that he could sit still no longer. Hani didn't tell him she also needed the loo. Some things were still private for girls.

"Use the basin," Hani said . . . "Now rinse it out," she suggested afterwards.

Murad and Hani then had a brief discussion about whether or not to bolt their door from inside. Hani won and the bolt was left open. Darkness arrived long before someone finally slid a key into the lock.

"We have to get them in here," Hani said.

"What? We're not going to . . ."

"No," said Hani. "I've already told you, I just need them to myself for a few minutes. We . . ." she amended. "We need them."

"Why?"

"Because we do," Hani announced firmly and together they crawled into a narrow space previously occupied by a suitcase.

"Who moved that?" The voice was Midwestern American and female, puzzled rather than angry. Hani didn't care who the voice belonged to, she liked them already. "Carl, Carl . . ." The admonition was addressed to thin air. It had to be, because only one pair of legs could be seen in the room.

White plastic sandals shuffled over to the wall, the case rose from the floor and then it was being tipped on its side and pushed towards Murad.

He grunted.

That was what they'd agreed on, a simple grunt. Now came the dangerous bit when the cabin's owner might shout or rush out into the coach and demand help. They'd decided how to handle this too.

Hani whimpered.

"Who's there?"

The case pulled back, tipped upright.

"Come out," the woman demanded. "Come out right now."

Murad crawled from under the bunk and scrambled to his feet. His eyes were lowered and his shoulders slumped. Inside his head he was trying to remember how Hani had suggested he should shuffle his shoes.

"Oh great. A thief." The woman sounded exasperated. "I suppose you've already pocketed all our stuff." Her glance took in the whole cabin, all five paces of it and found nothing missing. "Maybe not," she admitted, "but then what are you doing here? And what happened to your face?" She took Murad's chin in her fingers and turned his head to the light, tutting as she did so. "Someone hit you?"

When the boy stayed silent, Micki Vanhoffer sighed. She was a large, home-loving woman very far from Ohio. Doing what her husband thought she should be doing, taking a break from comfortable cruises around the Caribbean. A month in North Africa was his idea. Well, and her eldest son's, Carl Junior. An anniversary present supposedly. So here she was on a glorified bus in the middle of a heat wave, in March for heaven's sakes.

"I'd better tell the driver," Micki said mostly to herself, reaching for the door handle. "And then we can call your parents."

"He doesn't have any," said Hani, rolling out from under the bunk in a tumble of arms and legs. After scrambling upright, she took Murad's hand and gripped hard when he tried to pull away. "We're orphans," she added quickly. "From an orphanage. A cruel place."

Huge black eyes looked up at Micki Vanhoffer from beneath a rather dirty scarf. Eyes that swam so deep with tears they appeared larger than was humanly possible. Below those eyes jutted a nose too prominent to fit any Western idea of beauty and under this a mouth that positively quivered with anguish.

"You speak English . . ." Micki meant it as a statement rather than a question, but her words were inflected, rising towards the end so Hani found herself answering.

"Yes," Hani said. "I learnt it from tourists. When I was working in a café with my mother."

Micki looked puzzled. "I thought you said you lived in an orphanage?"

"This was before my mother died," Hani said firmly. "When I was little."

"When you were . . ." The large woman looked at the small girl and sighed. "Things like this never happen on cruises," she said. "I'll get Carl Senior down from the bubble. You wait here."

"You say he's your brother . . ."

Hani looked at Murad, then nodded. "My brother," she agreed. "Unfortunately he's not very bright."

The man asking Hani questions was big in a different way. His shoulders so broad that they seemed to stretch against his very skin. On his T-shirt was a simple fish made from a single line that curled back over itself at the tail; Hani had a feeling she'd seen the sign before.

"You have the fish."

The man nodded. "You know what it means?"

Hani nodded. "Of course I know," she said. "Everyone knows."

"Carl . . ." The word was a warning. "I know you want to do good in this heathen place but remember what our brochure said about preaching."

"I'm not preaching," said the man. "She mentioned it first." He dropped to a crouch in front of Hani. "What's this about an orphanage?" The words were soft, unlike his eyes, which were pale, watchful and just a touch angry. Mentioning his shirt had obviously been a bad move.

"We're running away," said Hani.

"I can see that."

"From an orphanage."

"What's its name? Come on," he said when Hani hesitated. "Spit it out."

Hani looked puzzled. "Spit what out?" she said.

"Carl!"

"It's a fair question," Carl Vanhoffer said to his wife. "If she can't instantly name the orphanage, then it probably doesn't exist. And that boy isn't her brother. Not full brother anyway. The skin colours are way different."

"You'll have to excuse Carl Senior," said the woman with a tight smile. "He used to be a police officer. He gets like this sometimes. You should have seen him with Carl Junior when he was growing up . . ."

"That's okay," said Hani. "My uncle used to be a policeman. He gets like that too and your husband's right. We're not really running away from an orphanage."

"Told you," Carl Vanhoffer said. "What are you running away from?"

"Marriage," said Hani and slowly pulled the shawl tight round her face, shrinking inside it. With her hunched shoulders and narrow back she looked frighteningly young. "And you're right about the other thing too, Muri's not my brother, he's my cousin."

"How old are you?" That was the woman.

Hani thought about it.

"Well?" The man's eyes were less hard than they had been. Slightly mistrustful to be true enough but not out-and-out disbelieving.

"Twelve," said Hani, adding a year to her age. Assuming Khartoum was right and she really had just turned eleven.

"You don't look it."

"Carl!" Again that outrage, almost maternal. Like there were things men couldn't be relied on to understand. Hani glanced at the both of them, the American man and woman. Most husbands and wives she'd met had harder edges to their lives and stricter boundaries. However, Hani had to admit to not having met many.

Hamzah Effendi and Madame Rahina were not a good model. Aunt Jalila and Uncle Mushin even worse. One now dead, the other apparently in a sanatorium. Uncle Ashraf and Zara? They weren't even a couple, not properly.

"It's all to do with food," Hani told the woman. "The less you get to eat the smaller you look . . . A doctor told me," she added, before Carl Senior had a chance to ask her how she knew.

"And the poor get married younger," said the woman.

Hani wasn't convinced this was true because, the way Zara told it, the really poor people in Iskandryia couldn't afford to get married until their twenties, which might be why they got so cross. And that fact probably applied to Ifriqiya as well.

But Hani kept her silence.

Despite what Uncle Ashraf, Zara and everyone else thought, she always had known when to keep her opinions to herself.

"Have you met the boy you're meant to marry?"

"Oh yes." Hani nodded.

"What's he like?" The woman sounded interested. Appalled, but still interested.

"Okay, I guess," said Hani, jerking her narrow chin towards Murad. "As boys go . . ."

"This is him?"

Hani nodded again.

"And he's running away with you?" Carl Senior sounded doubtful.

"Of course," said Hani, "Muri doesn't mind getting married but he doesn't want to leave school."

"Why would he leave school?" It was Micki's turn to look muddled.

"Because he'll need a job for when I have a baby . . ."

"When you . . ." Their voices were so loud that Hani was afraid the Russian in the next cabin might start to wonder what was wrong.

"What exactly are you telling them?" Murad hissed, his Arabic so flawless he could have been reciting poetry at the court of a long-dead caliph. Needless to say Micki and Carl Senior understood not a word.

"That we're running away," said Hani. "Because our parents want us to get married."

"Married?" Murad stood openmouthed in outrage. "You're eleven," he said. "I'm twelve. Fourteen is the earliest a girl can get married in Ifriqiya. Sixteen for boys."

"But they don't know that, do they?" said Hani.

"What are you telling him?" Carl Senior demanded.

"That Muri shouldn't be afraid of you," said Hani. "That you won't hand us over." She was glancing at the man but she was talking to Micki.

CHAPTER 45 Friday 11th–Sunday 13th March

He stank and there was little doubt that he'd just pissed himself again. Liquid his body could ill afford to lose. Raf had also started to think of himself as he and that was never a good sign.

Maybe it was this that allowed the fox to return. Alternatively, Raf had just got bored with trying to hold himself together.

"Now dislocate your other shoulder," ordered the fox.

Raf shook his head. His teeth gritted not from bravery or pain but because he was trying to stop his upper left canine from falling out and keeping his mouth closed was all he could come up with, given both his hands were shackled behind his back and fixed to a wall.

Impossible.

"Not impossible," said the fox, "just painful. Work on the difference." And then Raf stopped letting the different bits of himself talk to each other and started to listen to the sound of a sea that had vanished millions of years before, after the Chott el Jerid finally separated from the Mediterranean to become first an inland sea, then a lake and ultimately the flood-prone salt flats it finally became.

Except that the waves like the voices, came from within him and there was nothing supernatural about them.

What Raf could hear was the sound of his own blood echoing off the stone walls of an azib, a domed shelter built for goats and now his prison. At first the noise had been slight as meltwater over pebbles, growing louder, until now it splashed like a fosse falling into a cool meltwater pool far below. He was listening to what was left of his own life.

"Do it," Raf told himself. "Dislocate."

His first idea after Major Jalal had bolted the heavy azib door was to somersault out of his predicament by rolling forward to hang upside down from his shackled wrists, then twist sideways to land on his feet, facing the wall, with the shackles now in front of him. All he needed to do then was free his wrists and dig himself out.

Two failed attempts had convinced Raf this was impossible. So now he was going with the fox's suggestion, that Raf begin by convincing himself he was really merely testing the strength of the chains shackling him to the wall.

As ever, when facing something unpleasant, the trick was to remove oneself from the pain. A trick he'd previously spent many months unlearning. Although back then he'd been somebody else. Or rather, Bayer-Rochelle had made him somebody else and done a good job of it too; much better than any of his schools had managed.

Removing oneself from pain wasn't a trick everybody could master. For a start, it required a certain working knowledge of the subject, preferably one built up over many years. Unless, of course, it was possible to go for a single cataclysmic thunderburst that shocked the flesh into learning something it never forgot.

Raf didn't know, that wasn't the route he'd taken.

The secret was to be somewhere else. Answering questions other than those asked. While hunting for the fracture behind reality.

Breathe through nose or mouth . . .

Saturday or Sunday . . .

Live or die . . .

"Just one collection of questions after the next, isn't it?" said the fox. "Life I mean. Or what passes for it . . ."

How long he'd been in the azib Raf wasn't sure. Being knocked unconscious did that to you. At least it always did to him. And his back history was punctuated, at significant points, by such bouts of darkness, although often differently induced.

Actually, it was probably more accurate to say his life, back history, call it what one would, was a string of cold darkness punctuated by sharp, occasionally contradictory memories of being awake. What Raf had taken to calling the sickroom conundrum and what the fox insisted on calling Schrödinger's paint pot.

If he went to sleep in a ward that was green and woke in the same room but it was grey, what had changed? Reality, the room or Raf? There was something very primitive about that question. Almost classic. A puzzle replete with a dozen resonances Raf undoubtedly failed to appreciate.

There was, of course, an even more primitive conundrum slumped against the wall opposite, quietly decomposing in note after note of sweet decay. At what point did Hassan cease to be human? And what exactly did death remove from that original mix of 65 percent oxygen, 18 percent carbon, 9.5 percent hydrogen and all those other elements neither Raf nor the fox could be bothered to remember?

Dying seemed simple, decomposing less so, if Hassan was representative. A veritable matrix of influences constraining or facilitating the metamorphosis: beginning with attack by insects, originally flies, then beetles, finally millipedes; amount of clothing intact, in this case none; level of physical trauma, considerable; ambient heat, sweltering . . .

The fox and Raf also agreed on the probability that soil type made some impact.

Felix would have known. Having wiped his finger on the floor of the azib he'd have announced a high saline content was hindering decomposition or saltpetre was causing mummification. Of course, the fat man was quite capable of wiping his finger straight on the body.

When Raf first woke, Hassan had been coming out of rigor, locked muscles slowly relaxing, starting with his eyelids, lower jaw and the soft jowls of his neck. And Raf didn't need voices in his head to tell him this was decomposition of muscle fibre.

By evening the boy's face had turned a weird greenish red, with a veritable tie-dye of corruption brightening his flabby chest and blotching his naked thighs. It was around this time that Hassan began to smell. At least that was what Raf thought then. Now, reassessing, he understood that corruption had barely started.

After the face began to melt, millipedes arrived to eat mites busy feeding on flesh, the blowflies having already gone. And gas-filled blisters began to appear under the skin as liquid leached from anus, nostrils, mouth and ears. In all probability, Raf realized, he was taking more interest than was wise in the intricacies of what was happening. But it was hard to avoid when shackled in a stone azib, five paces from one's very own memento mori.

"Enough with the thinking," said the fox, its voice completely present for the first time in weeks. "You can dislocate your way out of this or stay here and die. Make a choice."

It looked out through Raf's eyes. The bit of him that had never been entirely human.

"You want this to end," it said, "then end it. But ask yourself this . . . How many more times can you afford to die?"

CHAPTER 46 Saturday 12th March

Sometime after the lights went down in the main part of the coach, and those who had couchettes let back their seats, and the loos and showers occupied by tourists preparing for sleep finally emptied, Micki took Hani to the loo, using the width of her hips to shield the child from anyone who might glance round.

Micki was pretty sure everyone was safely dozing. She'd already made three visits, earning herself pitying glances from a middle-aged, pudding-faced Soviet woman in the back row who'd finally fallen asleep with a crumpled copy of the previous day's Pravda on her lap.

"I'll keep guard," Micki told the child, ushering Hani through a door. "Don't worry," she added, when Hani looked anxious, "I'll be here when you come out."

"Micki," Hani's voice was little more than a whisper.

"What now?"

"Um . . ."

The child had the face of an angel. A foreign angel obviously but an angel all the same. Men were going to fall into those dark eyes and never find their way back. Not for years though, Micki told herself hastily. When the girl was properly grown-up.

"What is it?" asked Micki and when Hani still didn't answer, she dropped to her knees the way she used to do when something was worrying Carl Junior. Carl Senior never got the importance of this, although she'd tried to explain it more than once. He always towered over the boy, then wondered why he got frightened.

"You can tell me, honey . . ."

Something fleeting and sad passed over the face of the child as she bent close and whispered in Micki's ear.

"You know," Micki hissed to her husband, when Hani and Murad were safely dozing on the floor, wrapped in separate blankets that they both managed to kick off in their sleep. "She hadn't even heard about Kotex. It was a miracle the child even knew what was happening to her . . . Can you imagine it?"

Carl had less than no interest in imagining any such thing but had long since learnt not to say as much, so he muttered something he hoped sounded suitably shocked and had another go at drifting off to sleep.

"That must be how their parents decide they're ready to marry," Micki announced. "The first time they . . . You know."

That was one you know and a couple more theys than Carl could follow but he didn't mention this either. "Could be," he said and drifted off to sleep, leaving his wife to the comfort of outrage.

"We've got problems," Carl Senior said.

"Nothing we can't fix," Micki insisted hastily, when she saw the anguish in Hani's face. The roadblock was waiting at Dehiba, thirty klicks after the blacktop shrank from two lanes to one. Right before Ifriqiya's border with Tripolitana.

Jebel Dahar's stark red spine with its low fringe of thorn and scrub was mostly behind them and ahead was a sixteen-hour trip to take in the hilltop town of Yafran. A double-page spread in Micki's Insight Guide revealed an area of olive groves and good red soil; while a box-out of traditional Yafrani architecture revealed squat buildings with heavy doors, intricate wrought iron and what looked like plaster helicopters, jets and butterflies fixed to the side of Berber houses.

"Stay in here," Micki told the children. "They'll probably just count us."

Carl Senior stayed silent.

"We could hide under the bed," Hani suggested.

"Good idea," said Carl. "No one would ever think of looking for you there." He grabbed his passport and camera. "I might as well get a shot of the frontier. If they'll allow me," he added crossly, sliding back the door.

"Ignore him," Micki said. "He's nervous."

"About what?"

Micki smiled. "Some people don't like breaking the law. Carl Senior's one of them."

"But you don't mind?" While watching the large woman from the corner of her eye, Hani thought about that. The American was very pink and very big, with wavy blond hair made fat by too much brushing.

"Honey," said Micki, "how do you think Carl Senior and I first met? It was in a lineup. I was standing there and he was the one walking an elderly man down the line."

"What happened?"

Micki shrugged. "Old Amos had bad eyesight. So after the civilians had gone I told Carl Senior he owed me a coffee for my inconvenience. We went on from there."

"You're not Carl Junior's mother, are you?" Hani was surprised she hadn't realized that before. "Not really . . ."

"Honey," Micki looked at her. "You can be one weird kid."

"But I'm telling the truth?"

"Yeah, you are that. He needed looking after and Carl Senior was useless. So he got me." Micki shrugged. "Whatever good that was. Now, you stay here and we'll soon be safely across that border."

"If only," said Hani. She could feel a decision coming on. The kind Uncle Ashraf might make. When in doubt, change the rules. She was pretty sure he'd said that to her sometime or other and if he hadn't then he'd probably meant to . . . Unless it was Hamzah Effendi.

"We're going to hide, all right," said Hani, "right in front of the cameras."

"You're . . ." For the first time since Hani had met her, Micki was lost.

"In front of the cameras." Pulling back the cabin's curtain, Hani nodded to sand-filled barrels blocking off one-half of the narrow road. "That isn't a border post," she told the large woman. "That's a roadblock and those men with guns belong to Kashif Pasha. His half brother," Hani added, taking Murad's hand.

Micki Vanhoffer looked as bemused as she felt.

"This is His Excellency Murad Pasha," said Hani. She took off her scarf and tried to comb out her hair with her fingers. Then she straightened her shoulders and raised her chin. "And I'm Lady Hana al-Mansur. Those soldiers out there have orders to find us."

"To make you marry?"

"No," said Hani. "So Kashif Pasha can have us killed. Although he'll try to blame it on terrorists or my uncle Ashraf . . ." She shrugged away the thought. "You do have a cell phone?" Hani said, pointing to Micki's handbag.

The American woman nodded.

"Good." Hani upended the bag and began to sort through tissues, tampons, a shop load of loose makeup and what Hamzah would called a boasting book, a plastic wallet full of family photographs. The cell phone was near the bottom, switched off.

"What's your code?" asked Hani.

Micki gave her a six-digit number.

"Don't tell me," said Hani, "that's your date of birth . . ." She sighed at Micki's embarrassed nod. "Think about changing it," Hani suggested, fingers flicking through menus. When she reached the option she wanted, Hani punched in a number, remembering to make allowances for international dialling.

Then she took a deep breath.

"This is the truth," Hani said. "I promise you . . . I'm not an orphan," she stopped dead. "Well actually I am," she said, "but I'm not running away from an orphanage. And we're not engaged. But someone is trying to kill me. Well," Hani thought about that one too. "I guess they're really trying to kill Murad."

"It was a lie about the marriage too?" Micki seemed to be one twist behind Hani, understandable really . . . Most of the adults Hani had met hadn't been too bright.

"No one is forcing us to get married," Hani said.

"So you're not going to marry your cousin?"

Hani smiled. "That wasn't what I said at all."

"Micki." The voice came from Carl Senior and, by the sound of things, he was either yelling from outside or standing in the doorway. "They got guns," he said. "And they want everyone out because they intend to search the coach."

"God give me strength," said Micki loud enough to be heard. "Tell them I'm coming." She banged her hip against the door and slammed a tiny drawer. "Just as soon as I get this damn skirt on."

"Take this," Hani said, shovelling everything back into Micki's bag. "As soon as you get across the border turn on the cell phone and it'll remind you that you need to make a call."

"I do?"

"Yes," said Hani, "definitely. Call the number that appears and demand to speak to Effendi."

"What if Mr. Effendi doesn't want to speak to me?"

"He will," promised Hani, wondering if the American realized she'd just agreed to make the call. "And if he doesn't, tell whoever answers that Hani says, If Effendi doesn't come to the phone she'll stop letting him play with her money. . . He keeps investing it in his own companies," Hani added, as if that explained everything.

The words were Hamzah Effendi's guarantee that the message was real. What he did would have nothing to do with money. It would be done for Raf. A debt repaid.

"What do I tell him?" Micki asked anxiously. "When Effendi does come to the phone?"

"Tell him that Murad and Hani have been murdered by Kashif Pasha . . . Tell him to tell everyone he knows." Catching the American woman's appalled expression, Hani held up one hand as the first tears started to trickle down Micki's face, cutting tracks in her heavy makeup.

"It might not happen," Hani said.

CHAPTER 47 Monday 14th March

The call from the minaret came harsh as a crow. Only there was no minaret and when Raf kicked at a shadow it squawked into life and sliced the night in a spread of serrated black blades.

"Very pretty," said Felix, nodding at Raf's shackles. So Raf swung them at him and missed, earning himself a smile. A real fat man grin.

"Ignore him," the fox said. "He's just like all the others."

Tiri was talking about the ghosts who walked out of the salt wilderness towards Raf, their carcasses destroyed, their faces twisted in the final moments of death or smoothed free of all memory.

"I know," said Raf and forced one foot in front of the other, extracting another step from his shaking body. They were dead and so was he. At least that was what it felt like. This razor state between existences, flash-filled with waterfalls of exaltation that appeared one minute to run down his spine, then vanished the next, leaving him spent as an hourglass.

Behind Raf stretched footprints speckled with blood from where he'd slashed his feet on rose petals. Rose de sable, crystallized gypsum. He'd come across a field of the things, stone flowers sharp as knife blades, and had walked through, being too tired to walk around.

Raf thought they grew there naturally. But the fox insisted they'd been dumped as second-grade goods, unsuitable even for tourists like him. It claimed to have been there when the dumping was done.

"I'm not a tourist," said Raf, but the fox had to disagree, informing Raf that he was a tourist in his own life. A hit-and-run recidivist who fixed himself on occasional moments of clarity. Their argument lasted so long that Raf forgot to feel pain and when he next looked around, he'd walked two, maybe three miles without ever seeing anyone he'd killed.

Felix came round twice and looked happier the next time he appeared, face shredded and egg yolk running from one eye but definitely more smiley. "You're fragmenting," he told Raf.

"You can talk." The retort just came and Raf was still wondering how to apologize for his tactlessness when the fat man gave a shrug like he agreed and blew apart in the night wind. Without shades, minus clothes, his hands chained. And now rudeness. The fox was right. Raf was excelling himself.

Sharp edges cut his ankles every time Raf's feet broke through salt to hit one of the many puddles of brine beneath. Smears of what looked like rust threaded the chott's drying surface, marbling its saline whiteness. Blood on snow, his mother's favourite shot. Only the saline sting to tell Raf that what he walked on wasn't ice or snow.

Somewhere up ahead should be a road. A strip of tarmac floating on treated polystyrene blocks, linked together and slung across the chott, Raf seemed to remember that was how it went. Polystyrene blocks so the weight of the road didn't sink it into the chott's soft surface.

Raf couldn't have used the road even if it had been heading north towards Camp Moncef rather than west towards Tozeur. But Raf needed to cross it and until he did, he was, by definition, more than half a day away from killing Kashif Pasha.

"You know what?" said a voice.

Raf didn't.

"You look shit." The drawl was skin-crawlingly familiar, the lips from which it issued tinted with a shade of Shu Uemura too deep to class as ironic. A turned-up collar framed a face sharp enough to break hearts. "Life not treating you too well?"

"I'm fine," snapped Raf.

"Of course you are," said Wild Boy. "Anyone can see that." He touched pale fingers to his brow in a mocking salute, swept dark hair back from his eyes and vanished.

"I don't remember killing Wild Boy," Raf muttered.

"You don't remember much at all, do you?" said the fox. "And what you do remember changes each day. I've never met anyone like it for avoiding the obvious." The animal paused, took a look through Raf's eyes at the night wilderness of the chott and sighed. "What do you think happened to him after you went missing?"

"He came looking for me?"

"And did he find you?" asked the fox.

Raf shook his head.

"Did anyone?"

There wasn't an answer to that. At least not one that made real sense. Although maybe that wasn't surprising given his mind was full of ghosts and memories and things that might have happened but probably didn't or were about to happen, but only . . .

"Only what?" the fox demanded.

But Raf was already asleep. When he woke the walls had changed colour again. His bed was the same but the windows were different, wood not rusting metal. The oak outside was bare where it had been green. Only the firs on the far slopes looked the same. Like lazy smoke frozen in the act of rolling uphill.

"You can sleep again now," someone said.

He'd had days like that at Roslyn. Dozens of them. And before Roslyn, days in a white room with flowered curtains across the window. Steel bars painted in childish reds and greens and blues because some expert decided bright colours made window bars look less intentional. As if the security measures had been put up by accident and no one could be bothered to take them down again.

For maybe a year Raf had believed the bars were there to keep him in. Only towards the end did he realize they existed to keep others out. Evil people, one nurse told him. Misguided protestors. She was Swiss, much younger than he realized and she vanished the morning after he took a bar of chocolate from her. Neither had realized they planned to do double blood tests that day.

One morning, shortly after that, Raf woke feeling stiff and cold with an ache in his ribs and new scars on his wrists. And his mother was sitting in a chair in the far corner of his room. She was crying, which wasn't unusual and carrying primroses, which was . . .

"You look older." He said it without thinking.

When she'd finished drying her eyes she came over and stood by his bed, her fingers reaching out to touch his face. "You don't," she said. The coat she wore was new and her shoes were different, shiny at the toes and unscuffed on the heels. She'd also changed the colour of her hair.

As always, Raf forgot how angry he was about everything and agreed to come home. Although it was difficult to remember where home was at that point. Not New York for the second time, that came later.

He'd been . . . Raf found it impossible to remember how old. Somehow birthdays and candles and parties with presents had always seemed to pass him by.

"That's what this is about?" said the fox. "Massive sulks that Mummy never gave you a proper birthday party?" The voice was sardonic, darker than Raf remembered it having been for years. "You're going to die in the wilderness because no one let you blow candles?"

"I'm not going to die," said Raf.

CHAPTER 48 Tuesday 15th March

"Count them," said the fox. So Raf did. A handful of mubahith, teenage girls in khaki jumpsuits, jellaba-clad orderlies and two visiting Berber elders wrapped respectively in lengths of blue and black. Awaiting a day that threatened to be as impossibly hot as the day before.

Eleven in all.

And then there was Raf watching from the chott, flayed by UV that already filtered through scummy cloud to tighten his skin.

Sweat shivering down his spine in anticipation.

He stank of shit and piss and blood, the smell assailing him every time he halted long enough for his own body heat to reach his nostrils. Evidence of his own humanity.

St. John the Baptist. Minus the loincloth.

Now that a road existed between Kibili and El Hamma du Jerid, carefully skirting the edge of the wilderness before slanting off from the chott's edge to cross at the narrowest point, few people except 'packers and Soviet tourists in fat-tyred UAZ four-by-fours tried to cross the salt lake any other way.

The camel trains were gone, along with the slave markets and spice routes. And while it was true that an annual Sand Yacht Championship was held on the chott, this was only ever attended by Soviets and, in any case, was not due for another three months.

So the khaki-clad teenager sweating out her early shift on the southern perimeter of Camp Moncef watched the arrival of a naked apparition with disbelief. At first she assumed the tiny speck was an animal either lost or abandoned. Dogs escaped from cars, half-dead donkeys were cast loose when the amount they could carry stopped being worth what they cost in feed.

Not yet worried enough to find herself a pair of binoculars, Corporal Habib kept an eye on the approaching animal. But sometime between tucking a cigarette inside her hand because one of Kashif Pasha's men had suddenly roared up in his open Jeep and saluting the departing sergeant without getting caught, the speck vanished.

"Shit."

Corporal Habib blinked into the chott's acid glare, ground the butt of her cigarette underfoot and reached into her pocket for a pair of shades; circumstances demanded it even if wearing them on duty was almost as bad as smoking, being the preserve of officers.

Her shades cut down haze and cancelled out most refraction but the figure was still gone, leaving only early-morning shimmer and diminishing slivers of what had to be surface water left over from the winter rains.

Fifteen minutes later, Corporal Habib was still squinting into the distance when the emptiness beside her suddenly took her feet from under her and followed the corporal down, slamming itself into her rib cage. Bone splintered, on the wrong side; Corporal Habib's heart kept pounding and by the time she realized her aorta wasn't pierced and both lungs still drew breath the emptiness sat back on its heels, waiting, with the corporal's own machine gun to her throat.

Only the camouflage of her jumpsuit had kept Corporal Habib alive. Had her uniform been bottle green, the colour of Kashif's own guard, or the black of the mubahith, she would have been dead. Something that might still happen to judge from the blue eyes that stared down at her, pale as cracked ice.

"Single shot," said a crow's voice, raw and bitter. "All you'll get at this distance is a gas star and no chance to cry for help. You ever seen a gas star?"

The corporal nodded. A gas star happened when muzzle flash entered flesh, from guns almost touching you got burn rings, and then powder tattoos: part of the corporal was certain gas stars only occurred on upper limbs or torso but she kept that to herself. Something about the apparition staring down at her suggested he might have a more intimate knowledge of the phenomenon.

"You want my clothes?" The corporal's strangled question did exactly what she meant it to, told the apparition she wasn't about to put up a fight.

"Water," Raf demanded. Watching as the corporal silently unclipped her flask and held it out. She did a very impressive job of not looking at his nakedness or chains.

He drank.

"And those," said Raf, "I want these, too." Lifting the shades off her nose, he nodded to the two spare magazines on her belt. "And those." The weapon he held in shaking fingers was an old-model MP5i 9mm Heckler & Koch, the one issued with a thirty-round mag.

"Now get up."

Corporal Habib did what she was told.

Conditioning, Raf told himself, worked every time. He should know.

"Is Kashif Pasha here?"

The corporal nodded, only to freeze when she saw Raf's scowl. Very slowly, probably unconsciously, she began to shake her head, as if that might change the answer.

"And the Emir?"

A frightened nod. And with it a look that suggested she wanted to say more but wasn't sure whether to risk it.

"What?" Raf demanded.

"He's dying. So if you've come to kill him, there's no point."

"I haven't," said Raf. "I wouldn't . . . One last question. What's that over there?"

Corporal Habib never saw the blow that dropped her into a heap. Or realized, until long afterwards, that when Raf went through her ammo pouch he took only her bar of chocolate. Everything else he left . . .

"Fuck, no."

Not that.

Jammed into a pocket on the passenger side of an open-top Jeep, Raf found a copy of the previous evening's La Presse, final edition.

He found it shortly after swinging his shackles into the face of the NCO driving, wrapping them around the man's fat throat, bringing his screams to an abrupt halt. The NCO was still alive but his jaw hung crooked, his moustache was thick with blood and his face sported bruises which would last for a month. His arm was also broken. But some of that was self-inflicted. The NCO had run his Jeep straight into a rock.

Having read the headlines Raf wished he'd just killed him.

"You're crying," said the fox.

"Of course I'm fucking crying." Talking to the fox avoided thinking and thought was the last thing Raf wanted. He wanted emptiness. The dislocation of mind from body and body from action; not so much cognitive as psychic dissonance, blood music. The sound of glass spheres as they ground against each other.

Behind reality emptiness. Behind emptiness . . .

This.

"You want me to take it from here?" asked the fox. If Raf hadn't known otherwise, he'd have said Tiri was worried. Smart move. Raf watched himself watching the fox, standing naked on a dirt track below Jebel Morra, scanning a headline he already knew.

Kashif Pasha accused of killing half brother and cousin.

A photograph of Murad showed him staring into the lens with childish seriousness. The picture of Hani was an old papp shot, grabbed outside Le Trianon. A fact made obvious by a section of café canopy and writing on the ice-cream glass on the table in front of her. Lady Hana al-Mansur.

All the picture did for Raf was reinforce how fast Hani had changed in those last few months. In the picture she looked as he still thought of her. Would always think of her. Small and thin, with a wry smile and more imagination than was good for any child.

Rolling the NCO over with his foot, Raf bent to take his pistol and found it attached by lanyard to a leather holster, along with three spare magazines.

"You plan to do this for yourself, don't you?" said the fox.

Raf nodded.

Unbuckling the sergeant's broad belt, Raf ripped it through a handful of trouser loops to free the holster. And once he'd got the belt off, Raf decided to keep it anyway. His only problem being that, even on its tightest setting, the belt threatened to slide over his hips, so he slung it across his right shoulder instead. An action made difficult by the fact his hands were still linked by their length of rusting shackle.

One H&K with 3¥30 rounds. One Browning, plus a total of four magazines. That made . . . Raf ran his eye down the edge of a black metal clip, counting rounds, two at a time. Twelve to each, made forty-eight, add ninety from the submachine gun . . . How many guards could Kashif Pasha have?

There was only one track into Moncef's latest camp and at its entrance stood a temporary barrier; one of those striped aluminium poles, counterbalanced by a square weight at the pivot end. A single soldier stood guard, shaded by an open-fronted hut.

Possibly she should have been watching the track but most of her time was taken up wiping perspiration from her face or pulling at the armpits of her uniform where sweat had stained the camouflage almost black.

When she did look up the djinn was almost upon her.

"I've got a question," it said.

Staring in disbelief, uncertain whether to be most shocked by the shackles, the brandished weapons or the apparition's sheer nakedness, Leila de Loria broke every rule she'd ever been taught and took two steps backwards, ending up against the wall of her hut.

"Eugenie still dead?" the apparition demanded. It stank of battlefields and corpses, words as hot as any khamsin flowing across her face.

A shocked nod.

"Major Gide?" Raf dragged Eugenie's replacement from his memory. Her face and voice, even her weapons becoming visible to the fragment of his mind still interested in those things. "Well?"

"She's been arrested."

A bark of laughter greeted these words.

"By Moncef?"

Sergeant de Loria, who at twenty-seven had killed five men (all but the first in battle), dared a glance at this djinn who used the Emir's name so freely. He was too emaciated, too feral to be human. And yet his elemental fury was hidden behind cheap shades of a kind found in the local market and the sores around his wrists bled lymph.

"Who . . ."

"Lilith, son of," said Raf. "Busy failing to make the seven years' anonymity necessary to become like you." His words were clear and stark, the meaning behind them less so; but then Sergeant de Loria had never met Hani or had her life told as a fairy tale.

"Who arrested Major Gide?" said the figure. "Answer me . . ."

A kiss of warm steel convinced the sergeant that this really was happening. She stood helpless in front of an apparition that held an automatic to her head. The apparition was naked, shackled and stank of rotting flesh but the gun was a standard-issue Browning and its knuckle was turning white on the trigger.

"Kashif Pasha or the Emir?"

"Kashif Pasha," the sergeant said, voice sticking in her throat. "Kashif Pasha arrested Major Gide . . . The Emir is dying. They say he was poisoned."

"Who by?" Raf demanded.

"It happened at a feast Kashif Pasha gave in Tunis. There was a waiter . . ."

Raf stepped around her sentry box and swung up the road barrier as he went through. Allowance for the faint possibility he might have to exit in a hurry.

"Leave it like that," he told the sergeant over his shoulder.

Leila de Loria looked from the raised barrier to the Browning she'd just wrenched from her own holster. Then she stared at the buttocks of the naked djinn as it stamped its way up the path, a gun in either hand and rusted chain swinging noisily.

Returning her revolver to its holster, the sergeant shrugged. Her mother was from the Nefzaoua and followed the Ibadite branch of the One True Faith. She knew better than to interfere with the games of princes, madmen and djinn. All the same, she thought she'd better see if she could find Major Gide, arrested or not. This was something the major would want to know about.

Arrested or not? Leila de Loria thought through that bit again and unbuckled her gun for the second time.

"Not," she decided. "Make that not . . ."

On his way through the outskirts of Camp Moncef, Raf saw three more of the Emir's bodyguard. Although not one of the girls seemed to notice him. Serving boys stopped to gape, old women made fists against the evil eye or clutched pendants but the guard kept doing whatever it was they did while Raf stamped passed.

It was Moncef's camp and they were Moncef's bodyguard but Eugenie was dead, Major Gide was currently under arrest and their Emir was dying. They all knew the opinion of Kashif Pasha's mother, Lady Maryam, where Eugenie's guard were concerned.

Once Raf passed so close that he saw a jumpsuited girl hold her breath against the stink that clung instead of clothing to his body. All the same, her eyes slid over him and when he was gone she tapped a button transmitter attached to her lapel, muttering what sounded like an evocation.

Up ahead two other jumpsuited guards stopped moving towards Raf and turned to walk away.

"You." Raf grabbed an elderly falconer by the sleeve and let go when hard eyes turned to face him. The man was old, with small tattoos like crude tears on both cheeks, a neat beard gone completely white and teeth so perfect they had to be false. "Show me the Emir's tent."

"No," said the elderly Berber. "That I will not." Reaching for a curved knife in his belt, the man held it in front of him in fingers that shook with more than age. All the same, he dropped into a fighting crouch. "No one can escape death," he said. "But I refuse to help you take the Emir."

"The Emir?"

Raf's sour smile trickled blood from lips so cracked they'd begun to peel and when he whispered there were no words, just breath. Removing his shades for a moment, Raf tried again, pale eyes locking on the man's face; the curved blade that shook in front of his naked belly already forgotten.

"I haven't come for the Emir," he said. "I want Kashif Pasha."

"This could be a trick."

"It isn't," said Raf, knowing that really the old man had addressed the question to himself.

Raf would have found Moncef's tent anyway even without help. It was huge, stood right in the centre of the camp and its ropes were made from palm fibre, something ancient and traditional anyway, unlike the nylon guys holding up the military tents in the distance. The tent was old, rotten in places and heavily patched with black goats' hair; rugs were spread round its edge to enable the Emir to circumnavigate his tent without once touching sand or gravel.

"Wait," said the old man and Raf waited in the shadow of a generator truck. "Don't move from here." When the falconer returned it was with rusty bolt cutters he struggled to use, further lacerating Raf's wrist as he snipped the padlocks fastening the shackles.

"The entrance is round the other side," said the Berber.

Raf nodded.

"There are soldiers," the old man added. And when Raf made no reply he sighed. As if he'd always suspected death was stupid. "Kashif Pasha's soldiers. Two on the door, an officer inside, the small one . . ."

"Major Jalal . . ."

The man shrugged.

"Who else?" demanded Raf and held the old man's gaze. "The more I know," he said, "the fewer I kill. That makes sense, surely . . . ? Lady Maryam?"

The man spat.

"Lady Maryam," Raf told him firmly, "was not responsible for the attack at the Domus Aurea."

"She is Kashif Pasha's mother," said the old man. As if that was crime enough.

"No one else?"

"Not really," said the old man, bending to pick up the discarded chain. "Apart from a nasrani television crew . . ."

CHAPTER 49 Tuesday 15th March

"So we now know that the kids are unharmed. The reports of their death undoubtedly NR black propaganda. This is Clair duBois for Television5 . . ."

Flanked by Hani and Murad, TV5's most famous reporter was talking direct to camera when Raf spun into the huge tent, leaving two dying soldiers in the dust behind him, windpipes crushed.

One was the corporal who killed Hassan, the other had just gone for a gun.

"Yeah," said Raf, eyes locked on Major Jalal, "it's us." Behind him stood an impossibly beautiful Japanese boy and a fat man with half his head missing. Although when Clair blinked, looked again, those two were gone.

"I've brought you a present."

Over by the door, Major Jalal continued scrambling for his own weapon. A pearl-handled Colt that had belonged to his father. It was elegant and valuable, came with the original buckle-down holster and was an incredibly stupid choice.

Clair duBois's backup camera was still trying to pull focus when the major finally freed his Colt and the feed went live on a naked man in shades, framed by the tent's doorway, an old-fashioned H&K in one hand and a Browning automatic in the other. Backlit by daylight/filmed without lights from shade. One of the world's worst options.

"Drop your toy." The words were in French, the whisper dry as dust. A change of angle caught the apparition's gun come up. "One chance," it said. "More than you ever gave Hassan."

Despite herself, or maybe because Clair duBois was who she was, she glanced at her notebook and made two minor adjustments for sound. One for volume, the other an echo on the apparition's voice, too slight to be noticed by anyone not in the business.

"Do as he says . . ." The command was soft, sickly sibilant, the words not much louder than those Raf had used; but it carried total authority, a complete awareness of the futility of the situation. "That's an order."

And there it might have finished, with Raf turning to the Emir, and Major Jalal returning his Colt to its holster if only Kashif Pasha hadn't stepped forward. "This is the assassin," he told his father, voice furious. To his aide-de-camp, he said nothing, just nodded.

Major Jalal raised his gun, a young girl who was meant to be dead howled out a warning and Raf's head flicked sideways.

The major died on camera. Wounds pixilated in some countries, not shown at all in England, Sweden and Korea and featured widely everywhere else. Looped, in one case, into ultraslow motion that let the major's brains crawl like sticky rice after Raf's casually fired slug, flowering into a fat cherry blossom that tumbled apart in a mass of bone, jelly and blood. So close to chaos in appearance and so utterly removed in reality.

Clair duBois screamed.

As genuine a response as she'd ever made and one, her unkinder critics later claimed, that went a long way towards explaining the clean sweep she made of most of the coming year's press awards.

As Clair watched, the naked apparition's searching eyes finally found the two children who stood behind her.

"You," it said to the boy, "are not me." Then it turned to the girl who gripped Murad's hand, her knuckles white with tension.

"I thought you were dead."

Picking up a mic, Clair duBois thrust it towards Raf.

"Who are you?" The mic was totally unnecessary, given the TV5 camera was already wired for sound but it made for a great image. Elegant reporter in lightweight silk suit (black obviously, with Clair duBois it was always black), interviewing a naked, stinking man in shades, carrying a still-smoking gun. "Tell me," she insisted. "The world wants to know."

"Ashraf al-Mansur," said Raf. "Guardian to Lady Hana and half brother to Murad." He stared at Kashif. "Also to him."

"I refuse to believe it," said the pasha, "without proof."

Raf shrugged. "What you believe is unimportant," he said, adjusting the H&K so its first burst would take out several lengths of Kashif's intestines. "I'm arresting you for murder."

"I don't think so." Kashif's voice was silky. "Given they're obviously still here." He nodded dismissively towards Hani and Murad. "Their death was a lie. I wouldn't be surprised if you spread the rumour yourself."

Nothing happened. It's a lie.

Away, to one side of the huge tent, Zara shivered and stepped back until she was pressed against an outer wall, which was still too close.

Really, nothing happened.

Shortly after Zara mentioned her uncle to her nanny, the man disappeared. There'd been more shouting, twenty-four hours of plate throwing by her mother. Zara had gone into Al Qahirah hospital for her operation a few days later, delivered personally by Madame Rahina while her father was on business in Sicily. The Monday following, when Zara got home was the only time she ever saw her mother with a black eye.

"I'm not talking about Murad or Hani," said Raf. "If you'd hurt either in any way, you'd already be dead . . ." So intent was Raf on Kashif Pasha that he missed Hani's wide-eyed shock; missed too a softening in Zara's expression.

"You had a sixteen-year-old boy tortured," Raf said flatly. "And then gave the order for his death."

"He was an NR terrorist," Kashif Pasha announced to the camera. Neither of them wanted TV5 there. Neither could afford to be the one to tell Clair duBois to get out. "Who tried to assassinate my father."

"Crap," said Raf. "By the time your aide-de-camp had finished Hassan would have signed anything." He scowled at the body on the tent floor for as long as it took for the camera to follow his gaze. "How do I know? Because I was the waiter. Acting for Eugenie de la Croix."

Clair duBois turned so fast that the tiny Aeriospecialle camsat locked on her face went out of focus, something the manufacturers claimed was impossible.

"The missing waiter I can understand," said Clair duBois, "but how can Your Excellency talk of charging Kashif Pasha with murdering the Emir, when His Highness is not dead?" Even to Clair, her voice sounded childish.

"If not dead," said Raf, "then dying." Wrapped in his borrowed kaftan and with his face sticky from analgesic barrier cream, Raf looked more ghoul-like than ever. "Ask him."

"That depends," said Moncef, "on your definition of dead and emir."

Clair duBois sighed. Kashif was under guard courtesy of one very angry Major Gide, Murad was introducing Hani to the racing camels and Clair had just been handed the opportunity of a lifetime.

Since this was, so far as Clair knew, the only interview Emir Moncef had ever given she was sure TV5 would forgive her for agreeing to record the interview rather than have it go out live. As for handing over copy approval, they gave that to two-bit actors with only a fraction of the charisma.

"I'm not sure I understand," she said to Raf. "His Highness has Asiatic flu. I've talked to his doctor." This last was only half-true. She'd talked, briefly, to a Soviet nurse who'd pocketed a 1000F note with rather too much ease before confirming that a long-lasting flu variant was indeed the most likely possibility.

"Ask," Raf told her.

She swallowed. "Your Highness . . ."

The only way Clair duBois could force herself to ask was to pretend someone outside her did the asking. The same way that many years before, as a sixteen-year-old, she'd turned up on the doorstep of a haunted-looking soap actress and forced herself to ask the woman about a miscarriage, vomiting in a flower bed the moment the actress slammed the door in her face, having first called Clair every name under the sun. All the confirmation her editor had needed.

"You have a question for me?" Moncef's voice dragged Clair back from her memories and shrivelled the snakes knotting inside her stomach. The very fact Emir Moncef prompted her meant he intended to answer.

Briefly the woman toyed with asking whether he had flu. What Major Gide, as his doctor, had diagnosed. How he was feeling . . . But then she asked the single best question of her career.

"Are you dying?"

"It's probably safe to say," said the man, his voice amused, "that we're all dying . . ." He sat up straighter in his bed, rug still tight around him and spoke direct to his interviewer rather than the camera, his hooded eyes never leaving her face. "Except, of course, those already dead. And those who are immortal."

And then he smiled that smile seen in stills around the world. The one that was either ineffably wise or completely insane. Verdicts differed, with Berlin willing to consider the first and Paris and Washington definite that it was the last.

"Is that your only question?"

If the Emir found it odd to be answering questions while blood glazed like sugar icing on a carpet he'd refused to remove, then Moncef didn't let it show, but then . . .

Clair duBois shrugged, mostly inside her head. Who knew what the Emir found odd?

"Ask if he's immortal . . ."

Jumping, Clair looked round. It took her a moment to realize that Antoine, her backup cameraman had activated his throat mic and was hissing the suggestion through her Sony earbead.

She asked it.

"No," said the Emir, "not since I ate the mushrooms."

CHAPTER 50 Thursday 17th March

Bells rang from the twin towers of St. Vincent de Paul, that Gothic monstrosity with all its pews removed and a Persian carpet covering the altar. Flags hung from office windows or whipped in the slipstream of car aerials. Drifting on the wind came the stink of cordite, bastard cousin to the endless firecrackers let off all morning, too close to gunfire for the peace of everyone.

Martial law had been lifted, the act signed by Ashraf Pasha, newly created heir to the Emir. He'd signed the edict on behalf of his father, a man now too weak to hold a pen, even to write his own signature.

The return to normal law came the day after Raf had questioned his half brother in the presence of their father. This took place in the al Andalus–inspired HQ of Dar el Bey, overlooking Place du Gouvernement.

Raf sat at a desk with Kashif on the other side; the Emir had a motorized wheelchair and only Major Gide stood.

It was a very polite questioning. There wasn't a blowtorch in sight and no one in the room, from the Emir to the major, even suggested tying anyone else to a table.

"The snake," Raf said to Kashif. "That was your first mistake. A simple enquiry could have revealed that all venomous snakes at Tunis Zoo have their poison sacs removed. Only Major Jalal couldn't risk asking that question, could he? So you made an assumption, the Emir got bitten and Ifriqiya got its very own miracle . . ."

"I know nothing about a snake."

"Of course you don't. How about the death of two guards, bribed or blackmailed into releasing the snake in the Emir's tent . . . ?"

"I know nothing about any guards."

"They got shot," said Raf, "at the banquet you threw for your father. Remember? The one where Eugenie died."

Kashif was blaming it all on his dead aide-de-camp. In fact, he was horrified to discover some of the things Major Jalal had done in his name.

"I take it," said the Emir, "that you have proof for this accusation against your brother?" His words were thin and took longer to say than they should, but there was amusement in them and something close to admiration lit his lined and leathery face.

"If Kashif is my brother . . ."

Moncef looked at him then. "Meaning?"

"I just wondered."

"You are Ashraf al-Mansur," said Moncef, almost firmly. "And I am Emir of Tunis. Your mother was the love of my life." Sad eyes swept the small office, barely noticing Kashif as they passed over Raf, a selection of police files in front of him. One of which contained the results on DNA testing that Raf had yet to mention to anyone.

When the Emir's gaze finally alighted, it was on the young girl half-perched on an office chair and the boy who gripped her hand, rather tightly. "You have your responsibilities and I have mine."

"Obviously," said Raf. And when the Emir smiled, Raf was waiting with the only question that really mattered. "What do you want done with Kashif Pasha?"

"And if I say kill him . . ."

"Then he dies," said Raf and took a gun from its holster under his arm. Placing it on the desk at which he sat.

"If I say let him go . . . Which is what I'm minded to say?"

Raf paused, all too aware that Hani was watching him, just as Murad watched the Emir, both holding their breath.

"If you say let him go," said Raf, "then that's what happens. But it places this family above the law. And gives victory to everyone who thinks Ifriqiya is corrupt beyond redemption." He added the second consequence as an afterthought. Not quite realizing how much weight it would carry with the Emir.

"So what would you suggest?"

"Let him stand trial . . ."

The Emir nodded and struggled with the control pad of his wheelchair. Waving Murad away, Emir Moncef rolled slowly towards the door and stopped, one hand reaching for the doorknob, his other edging the chair into reverse. "You're right about everything," he told Raf in a voice little more than a whisper, "except for Alex and Nicolai. The decision to have them shot was mine. My only regret is not warning Eugenie, but then"–Moncef shrugged–"she'd only have tried to stop me."

CHAPTER 51 Thursday 17th March

Eduardo sat on the edge of a metal table swinging his feet. Every time his shoe scuffed the floor it produced that unmistakable mouselike squeak of leather against ceramic.

A noise that was driving everybody else in the room insane. And the really great part was that none of them could do a thing about it. He was the most senior officer present at the briefing, a thought so bizarre that Eduardo shut his eyes just to savour it.

"I'm sorry, Boss." Alexandre looked worried. Under the misapprehension his question had been stupid enough to drive the Chief to anger.

"No," said Eduardo, "it's a good point. Just not one I can answer."

This truth elicited a frown from a thickset sergeant at the back. A man with a bald patch, common enough, and a Kashif-like moustache, which now made him something of a rarity in the Tunis PD. It was truly staggering the number of officers who'd decided in the last twenty-four hours to shave off their moustaches, reshape them or else begin to grow a beard.

"Got a problem?" Eduardo asked the man.

"Yeah," a bull neck raised an even heavier chin. "With all due respect, sir, I don't see how a case involving a dead pastry chef can be so secret that the master file has to be shredded in front of two witnesses."

It was obvious from his tone that respect was the last thing the sergeant felt for the small morisco in the leather coat sitting on the old Chief's table.

"I can understand that," said Eduardo, "to you it looks like a simple open-and-shut murder, hardly worth bothering about. To me it had all the marks of a cause célèbre from which Ifriqiya needs to be protected. Maybe that's why I'm kicking my heels up here and you're kicking yours at the back."

Several officers smiled and Eduardo resisted the temptation to take a brief bow. He was in the operations room; a large space of cheap desks and dirty grey chairs, wall charts, holiday rotas and a small kitchen, which might have been slightly too grand a name to describe a corner partitioned off with hessian boards and containing a sink, two ancient kettles and a cheap microwave.

Eduardo had called his officers together to make an announcement and the announcement was simple, the Maison Hafsid case was closed and, for internal security reasons, the files would be shredded and all evidence sealed in sterile bags and remain so for the next hundred years. The reason was actually very simple but Eduardo had explained this only to Rose.

She'd been lying there on a big double bed in their room at the Dar Ben Abdallah. And as she'd rolled over, a frown on her face, Eduardo had smiled as a breast popped out of her dressing gown. He'd almost forgotten what he intended to say, the way he did some mornings when he looked over the foot of the bed and saw Rose, with her back to him in the early dawn, wearing nothing but a G-string and black tights.

"So what happened to Cousin Ahmed?" She'd read the files and knew the names.

"There was no cousin."

"So who did the mubahith arrest?"

"No one," said Eduardo with a satisfied smile. "That's the whole point. No one vanished in police custody. I've had every file checked. Even the ones that don't exist."

"So who killed Isabeau's brother?"

"I think that's got to remain a secret," said Eduardo. It seemed odd to be making those kind of decisions but no one else was available and someone had to . . . Well, Eduardo assumed that was true. His Excellency couldn't have dragged him from El Isk just to unravel who did what, that would be far too simple.

There was unquestionably more to the equation than could at first be seen.

It had taken Eduardo a while to work out the unseen integer but he'd got it the moment he saw the knife supposedly used for the murder. Once, long before, Eduardo had worked in a kitchen, although there was nothing very special about this, everyone worked a kitchen at some time in their lives. At least, everyone Eduardo ever knew.

The first rule of kitchen culture was that no one, repeat no one, touched anyone else's knives. Spit in their face, mock them and, if you must, insult their football team, that was fine, but no one messed with another person's steel.

Knives were sacred. Touch my arse before you touch my knife. Mess with my arse and die. . . Eduardo knew the sayings. Three months grilling merguez in a workingmen's café in Karmous had been enough to guarantee that.

So what was anyone meant to think when presented with a blade that was blunt, bent at the tip and stained? Well, Eduardo couldn't actually say what anyone else might think. To him, however, it suggested no one really owned that knife. And if no one owned it . . .

The more Eduardo thought about it the more he was convinced he was right.

Notes said the mysteriously arrested Ahmed owned the knife when it was obvious that no one owned it or it wouldn't have been such a mess. Someone was lying. Actually, he told Rose, several people were lying.

She'd been dressing when he said this. After she'd undressed at his insistence and gone to take a shower while he lay in bed getting back his breath, Eduardo had returned to his thoughts.

They ate breakfast in a café. Rose choosing coffee and a croissant and Eduardo eating rough flatbread cooked on a clay griddle by a middle-aged woman who sat on a stool by the door. With the unleavened bread he ate slivers of some meat that obviously wasn't pork, with a helping of menakher dates, as befitted a man making the most of being in a different country.

Then he left Rose to her shopping and jumped a cab to the Police HQ without bothering to wait for his official car. A decision made easier by his discovery, right at the start, that naming the Police HQ as his destination was enough to ensure that no driver ever asked him to pay the fare. Their surprise on the few occasions he did offer payment was worth double the handful of change his journey actually cost.

So now he was on a table in the operations room, trying to explain without really doing so that there was no murderer; at least not one who could be arrested by the police. Eduardo knew exactly who killed Pascal Boulart and he was certain (as certain as he ever was about anything), that His Excellency knew too. Why else would he have brought in Eduardo but to tidy up such loose ends?

CHAPTER 52 Saturday 19th March

Isabeau checked her rail ticket and re-counted the notes. No writing appeared anywhere on the envelope and she was willing to bet there'd be no fingerprints either. In her memory, she had it that the small man with the black coat kept his gloves on throughout his entire visit.

She was bathed and dressed, standing on the platform of Gare de Tunis beside a cardboard suitcase that looked like leather until one got close. She wore new shoes and black Levi's, a shirt and a shawl as befitted the cooler weather. Her hair was covered in a waterfall of blue silk; not quite a hijab, not exactly a scarf; something elegantly in between. And though Gare de Tunis was less than a klick south of St. Vincent de Paul and the air was clear enough for sound to travel, Isabeau ignored the bells. Despite the small cross she wore, politics not religion had been her life. All seventeen years of it.

The MediTerre ticket in her pocket was an open one. A month's rail travel anywhere in North Africa and Southern Europe. With the ticket came a student ID, an Ifriqiyan passport and glowing references from Café Antonio. So far as Isabeau could see all of these looked real; except they couldn't be, for a start she'd never passed her baccalaureate and no university would take her.

Isabeau had no illusions about what was happening. She was being bought off, which was, she realized, preferable to being jailed or killed. The small man who'd limped into her life with a simple telephone call had more or less said as much.

All he wanted was a meeting. It seemed not to have occurred to him that Isabeau might refuse and it was only afterwards, once she'd meekly agreed, that Isabeau realized it had never occurred to her either. And no, he didn't need an address.

He seemed scarily knowledgeable on most aspects of her life.

Four o'clock would do. He expected her to meet him in the hallway and to let him in. She would recognize him by . . . His voice had paused at that point. She would recognize him by a copy of that afternoon's Il Giornale di Tunisi, which he would carry under his left arm, folded in three.

And so a small man limped up the tired steps to her apartment block, his black leather coat bigger than it should be, a fedora pushed down over his eyes. The paper he held had a black border round the whole of the front page and was folded to reveal a headline:

L'emiro morto . . .

And below the news a picture of someone Isabeau had been telling herself for at least a day she didn't recognize. Only half of his face was showing because of the way Eduardo had the paper folded, but it was that double worry line like a knife flick that gave him away, where the top of his nose met his eyebrows. They'd thought Ashraf Pasha was mubahith . An infiltrator. And then Domus Aurea happened.

"Mademoiselle Isabeau Boulart?"

Respectably dressed in a blue jersey and denim skirt, sneakers without socks. Her lack of makeup made her seem younger than he expected, but then she was younger. All the same, Eduardo wondered if that look was intentional.

"I'm . . ." Eduardo paused, thought about it. "You don't really need to know my name," he said and glanced round the entrance hall. "Where's the lift?"

Isabeau smiled. "We have stairs," she said. Whoever the man was, he lived somewhere other than Tunis. The only places Isabeau knew with their own lifts were big hotels and those huge stores in nouvelle ville, the ones with canvas awnings over street-front windows and French names.

"Show the way then."

She looked at him and he stared back, indicating the stairs with a slight wave of his hand; nothing impolite, just impatient like a man unused to being kept waiting.

"After you," he said.

Isabeau walked ahead, all five flights, and at the second she stopped worrying about him staring at her bottom and concentrated on climbing, each turn of the stairs widening the gap between them. By the time she reached the third floor's half landing, Isabeau was a whole quarter turn ahead and he'd lost sight of her anyway.

"Can I get you anything?" Isabeau asked when Eduardo reached the door she'd left open.

"Water," he said. And then said nothing for a whole five minutes.

On the street below, workmen were busy stringing green-and-red bunting from one lamppost to another and adjusting crowd barriers under the bored gaze of traffic policemen. One of the many street parties would be held there. Enthusiasm fuelled by Ashraf Pasha's announcement that all the food would be free. Bread and circuses. Eduardo was still trying to work out exactly when His Excellency meant.

"You own this?"

"I rent it from the city," Isabeau said. "My brother also used to live here."

"You have a bedroom?"

"Obviously."

"Show me," Eduardo said.

The sex was perfunctory, almost matter-of-fact. And Eduardo thanked her when it was done. Not daring to show her contempt, Isabeau shrugged, sat up from where she'd been tipped backwards onto her bed and adjusted her denim skirt, smoothing it down over her legs and his smell. She'd known what was coming. Expected it.

For his part, he hadn't bothered to use a condom or remove her shoes.

"Now what?" Isabeau asked.

"We talk . . ." Zipping his fly, Eduardo reached for his notebook and tapped it to make it open. "I know you killed Pascal. That's not the issue."

Eduardo paused, giving the girl an opportunity to deny it but she just looked at him.

"You want to tell me why it happened?"

Isabeau shook her head. "You don't want to know."

"But the others knew? The rest of your group . . . ?"

She spread her hands, neither denying nor agreeing.

"And so when you killed Pascal they covered for you," Eduardo said. "In itself, that is significant. The way I see it." He was proud of that phrase. "You stabbed your brother in the kitchen and had someone help you drag his body up to the alley . . . All those clean stairs," Eduardo explained. "But first you swapped knives. Probably put your own through the industrial washer."

Isabeau smiled.

"So what did you do with the real one?"

"There was no real knife," said Isabeau. "And he died in the corridor outside the chill room. The stab wounds came later. Someone else did those."

"So how did you kill him?"

"With a leg of lamb," she said flatly.

Eduardo looked at her.

"It was frozen."

"Ah . . ." Eduardo thought about the coroner's report. A perfunctory half page with a throwaway line noting the victim had obviously smashed his skull on the cobbles of the alley when falling. "And what happened to the leg of lamb?" asked Eduardo.

"We ate it. One night when a shift was finished. Me, the others, even that Egyptian waiter, the one who looked so very much like . . ."

Eduardo held up his hand, consulted his notebook. "I believe the waiter's dead," he said.

Isabeau nodded. "A bit like my brother."

As she waited for her turbani at Gare de Tunis, the first Fez–Iskandryia express to stop there in thirty years and a sign of the West's sudden faith in the new regime, Isabeau told herself to be realistic. Everything in life had a price, including freedom. And if two perfunctory bouts of unwilling sex with a stranger were it, then there were worse ways to stay out of jail. As well as worse people to have such sex with, much worse.

When he was done questioning, Eduardo had tipped Isabeau onto her back again, pushed up her skirt until it reached her hips and, almost apologetically, grabbed the sides of her new knickers and pulled those down. Unzipping, he'd given himself a few jerks to strengthen his resolve and pushed into her, the toes of his shoes sliding on the tiles . . .

"I'm pregnant," Isabeau said, her words enough to startle Eduardo into stopping midstroke. "Did you know that?"

For a second he almost shook his head but the temptation to be seen to know everything was too great, so he nodded instead. All the same, he retreated to the edge of her bed and tucked himself inside his trousers. A manoeuvre made simple by the fact he never wore underwear. Too much extra washing.

"What do you intend to do about it?"

"About what?"

"The baby?"

"I don't know," Isabeau said, bending forward to retrieve her knickers. "What do you suggest?"

"I suggest a holiday." Dipping his hand inside his coat, Eduardo produced an envelope. "I was going to give you this when I went," he said, looking shamefaced. It contained a fat and tattered wad of Ottoman dollars. Almost no one used Ottoman dollars anymore, except in the suqs and most of those could manage credit cards. Only the very old still insisted on keeping their lives in boxes under the bed.

"Call it severance pay from Maison Hafsid."

At least they were high-denomination notes. Higher than Isabeau had seen before and in one case higher than she knew existed. To this man though, used as he must be to such things, they were probably small change.

"And this," said Eduardo, "is also for you." As the exchange rate stood, the second, far smaller wad of US dollars was worth about twice all the other notes put together. On the black market the dollars were worth maybe five times that.

"You want me to leave," said Isabeau. Although it wasn't until later that she realized she was only putting into words what she already knew.

"Wait, Madame DuPuis . . . You have to wait."

A railway porter glanced round and saw a young police lieutenant in brand-new uniform stride towards a woman about to clamber through the door of a second-class carriage. Alexandre scowled at the porter and the elderly man decided he had business elsewhere.

"Madame Isabeau?"

Isabeau nodded. No one had ever called her madame before. And DuPuis definitely wasn't her surname.

"These are for you," Alexandre said as he handed her an envelope. "The Chief told me to deliver them." Jagged as a tidal pull between rocks, an undercurrent to the young man's politeness suggested he was less than happy to be hand-delivering notes on the morning the old Emir was buried.

"Thank you." Isabeau flashed her sweetest smile and watched Alexandre melt. It wasn't their surliness or even the fact they often seemed to smell that put Isabeau off men, it was the fact they could be so childish, so unbelievably easily led.

"Oh," said Alexandre, "and I'm sorry . . ."

Isabeau raised her eyebrows.

"About . . ." He shuffled his feet, apparently unable to get beyond that word. "About your husband. It was a messy campaign. A just one, obviously, but messy and I'm glad it's over." He clicked his heels and gave her a salute, the smartness of which was utterly at odds with the state of his fingernails, which were bitten to the quick.

Once sitting, with her case pushed into the space behind her seat and a capuchin from a cart that had passed by on the platform outside, Isabeau ripped the flap on her new envelope, then glanced round. The carriage was almost empty despite this being the first turbani de luxe to run for years. Outside, the concourse was crowded, but with people arriving, not departing. Nasrani tourists, Nefzaoua up from Kibili to visit recently remembered family, farmers from the High Tell, pickpockets. Few wanted to leave a city when so much was about to happen.

Twenty-four hours of mourning for the old Emir, then seven days of celebration for the new. Isabeau supposed that made sense if she didn't think about it too hard.

Shaking out her envelope's contents, she saw two rings slide out and clatter across the table, along with something on a dull-metal chain. The small, official-looking booklet which followed landed without a sound and Isabeau wouldn't have known the envelope contained a letter of condolence if habit hadn't made her check inside.

It seemed her husband had died in a police operation, somewhere unspecified, south of Garaa Tebourt while rescuing his superior officer. Isabeau liked that touch. As if any man she married wouldn't frag all the officers and NCOs first opportunity he got, then head off down some wadi for Tripolitana. As if she'd marry any man . . .

They were returning his ring, his police tags and a photograph they'd found in his wallet of her wedding day. The face was Isabeau's although the body belonged to someone else; someone marginally thinner than she'd ever been with less full breasts. The man could have been anyone.

Isabeau was impressed to see they'd had a modern ceremony. She wore white and her husband was in uniform, their priest had a simple jellaba, his beard recently barbered and not at all wild. The room in which they stood was panelled in dark oak and had a photograph of the old Emir on the wall behind. It might have been more useful if someone had thought to write the exact location on the back.

The official-looking leaflet was a pension book made out to Madame DuPuis. At the bottom of the first page a space had been left blank for her signature. A footnote told her she could collect money monthly from any branch of the Imperial Ottoman Bank or arrange to have her widow's pension paid direct by filling in a form on the last page.

As for the letter, this offered Isabeau the condolences of the state, commiserated with her over all she'd lost and hoped that her future from henceforth would be happier. It was signed with an illegible scribble, although the first letter looked like an A . . .

CHAPTER 53 Saturday 26th March

"Well," said Raf, breath jagged and a grin on his face.

"Well what?"

Outside Zara's bedroom window, crowds were already gathering beyond the gates of the Bardo and Raf could hear the growl of early traffic and clattering as impromptu market stalls were erected.

The police would be along later to take them down but trade would continue all day, stalls going up as soon as the old ones were broken down. Food sellers, hawkers of rice-paper rose petals and purveyors of cheap plastic flags, Raf had even seen his face on the side of a balloon.

The woman lying beside him had already made her opinion plain on all of that. As indeed she had on many other things. It had been the kind of discussion that, in later years, would raise smiles and get described, only half-ironically, as full and frank. At the moment they both still felt slightly vulnerable.

"Come on then," Zara demanded. "Well what?"

"Oh, I don't know . . ." Raf wrapped one arm round Zara's shoulders and pulled her on top of him. "How about, Well, what do you plan to do with your day?"

She laughed, kissed him back.

So Raf slid down slightly on the bed and took Zara's nipple in his mouth, sucking comfort from her breast. She watched him as he did so, seeing only the top of his head and feeling his uncertainty.

"Are you all right?"

When Raf didn't answer, Zara stayed where she was and closed her eyes. They had another hour before they needed to leave and if that wasn't long enough then the wretched ceremony could wait.

Last night had been difficult. Difficult and different. Zara so nervous her whole body shook. And Raf . . . ? She took him to her room, something she'd done with no other man and stripped to her thong in front of him, only losing her nerve at the last minute. Having sent him to the bathroom, she killed the light and hid under the covers.

Except that when he came back, all Raf seemed to want to do was lie in the darkness and let the moment wash over him. Something impossible for Zara.

"This is not fair," she'd said suddenly.

And thinking he knew what Zara meant, Raf nodded agreement and in that second's movement shut down his night vision until everything in her room became outlines and shadow.

"It is now."

"No, I mean this."

And he knew then that Zara meant their lying in the dark, so much unspoken between them.

"There's something I need to tell you . . ." Raf said tentatively.

"Let me guess," she said. "I'm not the first. In fact you've fucked your way through an entire phone book of my friends. You have three children, well, that you know about . . . You're only after my millions . . ."

"This is serious," said Raf.

"So was I," Zara answered. And pulled Raf to her and kissed him as her hand slid under his rib cage and then both her hands locked behind his back, so that Raf's full weight rested on her trapped arm.

She felt him go hard.

"You're naked," said Raf, the fingers of his right hand tracing the crease of her buttocks, just to make sure he hadn't got that wrong.

He hadn't known, Zara realized. She'd been safely tucked under a quilt by the time he returned to the room.

There'd been one night, months before, when she'd talked and he'd listened, although she couldn't remember it and he could; but then, if Raf was to be believed, he remembered everything, which was maybe not a good place to be.

"It's important," said Raf, holding her face between his hands. "And it concerns who I am. What I am . . ."

"You're you," said Zara. "That's enough."

"No," said Raf sadly, "it isn't. It's not anything like enough."

Zara wanted to know why, so Raf told her. Or rather he didn't. He told her a fairy story instead. "Once," said Raf, his fingers caressing the side of her face, "there was a son of Lilith . . ."

Raf took it as read that Zara knew Lilith's story. Adam's first wife, mother to vampyres and djinn. A woman expelled from Eden for fucking the snake.

"He was older than he looked because, although his days were as your days, his nights were often longer, one of them so long that fir trees grew and houses were built while he slept. Someone who loved him grew old and stopped loving him, seeing her own life and increasing age reflected in the puzzlement in his eyes every time he woke from the cold sleep . . ."

If Zara thought it was odd that Raf told her a folktale she kept this thought to herself. Remembering stories Hani had told her. Small girl's stories. Of the kind easily dismissed.

"He slept the cold sleep because that was the easiest way not to die. Until one day he awoke and Lilith had died and her friends had forgotten him or no longer cared if he escaped. So he did what sons of Lilith do, moved to a strange country to live undetected as a human for seven years. For if a vampyre or djinn can live undetected for seven years he will become as human."

"So Hani told me," said Zara.

"She did?"

"She's told everybody," Zara said. "It's in a book, the original story. About how a son of Lilith can become as human. But the children will be born sons of Lilith."

"Sons of Lilith, daughters of Lilith," said Raf. "In my case it's called germ line manipulation. Whatever I am my children will become."

"And what are you?"

Raf thought about it. "I'm not sure," he said finally. "I get voices. I see in the dark. There are three extra ribs on either side of my rib cage. My eyes hurt in the daylight. My memory is too distressingly perfect for my mind to manage . . ."

"All of this is your mother's responsibility?"

"Or Emir Moncef's," said Raf, "but it gets messier." He felt the girl go still and shifted gently away from her, giving Zara space. "I've opened the bags . . . Secret files," he added, when he realized she didn't quite understand. "It's like reading the technical specifications for a new type of car. One that might not work."

"What's the worst?"

"Immortality. Or if not immortality, then longevity. How long I don't know but longer than is now normal."

"You knew this when you refused to marry me?"

"Some of it," said Raf. He stopped himself. "More than some," he said but the anger was directed at himself. "What I wasn't told as a child I overheard. It's relatively easy to code for heightened hearing. Less easy to understand the implications if one's own hearing is normal and the subject is three rooms away."

"I'm sorry," Zara said. Her hand moved up to touch his face and came away wet. She believed him implicitly.

"So am I," said Raf.

Later, when he hung over her in the darkness, both of them drunk with longing, Raf bent forward and kissed Zara lightly on the forehead. There was something else he hadn't mentioned. If he understood it right, then immortality was sexually transmitted; the act of being pregnant infected both mother and embryo.

The second time they made love began slow and ended up hard and fast. It started with Zara swinging herself on top of Raf and straddling his hips, her face only inches from his. Outside their window, the city was expectant for what would come the next day. Guards stood at the gates of the Bardo and patrolled the streets around the palace complex. Major Gide and Raf having agreed this as a matter of protocol only. Done because it was expected.

"Remember the boat?" Zara said.

As if he could forget. Water so blue it was almost purple. The scent of rosemary and thyme carried on a warm wind across a bay. And then the return trip. Hani safely asleep and Zara bringing him a beer as he sulked outside and time and the ocean slid past.

"What boat?" Raf demanded.

Leaning forward, Zara put her mouth over his and bit, hard enough to draw blood. "That boat," she said.

They kissed and, slowly and rather clumsily, Zara reached down to position Raf against her. To Zara he was a shadow against white sheets, a watchful silent silhouette; for Raf she was lit clear as daylight . . . He could see her mouth twisting, eyes open and fixed on nothing, her breasts swaying forward with each rock of her hips, impossibly beautiful.

Reaching up with open hands, Raf felt warm flesh overflow his fingers and tried not to be offended when Zara absentmindedly lifted his hands away and went back to her rocking. After she'd ridden him in silence long enough for Raf to fade out his vision and lose himself in the rhythm, Zara took his hand and positioned it on her abdomen so that Raf's thumb reached between swollen lips.

"There," she said, "keep it there." And went back to her darkness and a burst of half cries and swallowed words. There was no sharing this time. And angry was the only way to describe the abruptness with which Zara shuddered to a halt, her hand still holding his own hard against her smooth mons.

Smooth, because she lacked all body hair.

Zara had given him the list once. One night in another palace; the time she'd cried herself to sleep and woken to swallow him as she knelt on white marble tiles in the middle of a sunlit floor, three days before he prosecuted her father for murder. A fact neither one had ever mentioned. The list was relatively short and went no body hair, no labia minor or hood or tip to her clitoris . . . But, as she'd pointed out, a full Pharaonic would have been infinitely worse.

According to a doctor in New York (the one Zara saw at seventeen, the week after she arrived at Columbia), a rewarding sex life was perfectly possible. It might just take more effort than for some other women. And she stood, the doctor said, a better chance than many of those whose scar tissue was mental rather than physical.

The tiny vibrator the woman gave Zara went unused. Ditto a collection of glass dilators from small to medium. Zara found one article on female genital mutilation, attended one meeting at which she said nothing, then went back to writing law essays. And lying in the darkness as she said this, that time in El Iskandryia, Raf had been unable to work out from the flatness of Zara's voice if she regarded this as common sense or cowardice . . .

"My turn." Raf rolled the two of them over, so Zara lay underneath and he was between her legs. Widening her knees, Raf withdrew until the tightness at the entrance to her sex was about to release him, only to slam back, watching Zara's chin go up in shock or surrender.

Her hands rose and fell, arms crooked at the elbow as fingers fluttered batlike in darkness. Tied to some plea forever unsaid. On her breath were white wine, hashish and the faintest trace of capers. Tastes that Raf took from her lips. And then her legs locked over his and her hips began to grind against him.

They came together with that blinding luck those new to each other sometimes get and slept, still locked in each other's arms.

CHAPTER 54 Saturday 26th March

"Take a guess," said Hani, nudging Murad Pasha and nodding to where Zara and Raf stood beside a wall, holding hands. A half dozen of Major Gide's handpicked guards stood impassive against the opposite wall of the decorated alcove, carefully not noticing. "Go on, guess what they've been doing . . ."

Murad blushed.

"How do I look?" said Hani. She twirled on marble tiles, her silk dress spinning out like the cloak of a dervish. The dress was meant to go with knee-length socks but Hani had refused. Not just refused but refused totally. Sitting naked and dripping on the edge of her bath, unwilling even to let Donna dry her until the old woman agreed that white socks were out.

And Donna, still furious at being dragged from El Iskandryia to Tunis, had threatened to fetch Khartoum but even that failed to move Hani. In the end they settled on short white socks rather than the black tights Hani had wanted.

"How do you look?" Murad considered the question. She was dressed in white silk. Around her neck was a single row of black pearls, fastened at the back with a clasp made from jade and gold. Her ears were now properly pierced and a tiny drop-pearl hung from each lobe. On her feet were silver pumps.

"Anachronistic," he said finally.

Hani punched him.

Not hard. Just enough to deaden his arm.

"The correct answer," she said, "is like a princess."

They were waiting near the entrance to a salon de comeras, hidden from the crowd by an elegant carved screen. Admission to the ceremony was by order of precedence and some people, mostly nasrani lucky to be there at all, had been sitting for over an hour as more upscale arrivals filed in to be shown their places.

It had given the new Emir great pleasure to make sure that the Marquis de St. Cloud was one of those forced to wait in the cheap seats. Sitting much closer to the front, looking slightly bemused, were Micki Vanhoffer and Carl Senior, dressed for what could only be a night in Las Vegas.

Outside, Rue Jardin Bardo was lined ten deep with people waiting for the Emir's Bugatti coupé Napoleon to sweep past, only to be hidden on arrival by veils of silk as it disgorged its occupants, a colonel from the engineers, his young wife and their two children. Decoys insisted upon by Major Gide, who'd gratefully accepted the new Emir's suggestion that she remain his head of security.

The actual players in the spectacle about to unfold in front of TV5, C3N and one other, randomly selected, camera crew had been the first to arrive, spirited into the salon via a back route.

"You ready?" Raf asked Zara.

She nodded. Not entirely convincingly.

Outside in the audience were Hamzah Effendi, Madame Rahina and the brother Zara had tracked down to a squat on the edge of Kharmous, half brother really. Hamzah's bastard. Once a factory and later an illegal club, he'd soundproofed his squat with cardboard and spray painted it gunmetal grey. The floor had been earth, friable and damp but he'd doped it with liquid plastic, tipping the can straight onto the ground.

"What are you thinking?" Raf asked.

"About Avatar. You know, back when he was a kid, was it right to take him home with me–or was I just being a spoilt brat . . . ?"

"Ah," Raf smiled. "The what-if factor."

Zara stared.

"For every action we take," said Raf, "there's probably a better one."

"Does that apply to this?"

"Which this?" Raf demanded. "Us this or this this?" The sweep of his hand took in the coughing and restless shuffle of feet beyond the screen.

"Both," said Zara.

In a different world Raf might have answered that there was nothing he'd do differently where Zara was concerned, not even his jilting her which put Zara across the front of Iskandryia Today and nearly cost him his life. He loved her and had no certainty that any other course of action would have led him to where he stood; but Murad turned and caught Raf's eye and the words went unsaid.

Checking his watch, Raf listened to something in his earbead and nodded.

Three, two, one . . .

On cue, an unaccompanied voice rose in the salon outside. Maaloof al andalusi, the music Ifriqiya made famous. Frail and strong, haunted and ancient. The words a lament for those who had gone before and a greeting for those who were to come after.

Near the far end of the suddenly silenced room, Khartoum raised his head and hung a note on the air so unearthly that Hani shivered. The poem that echoed off the salon's high roof came from Rumi, the great Sufi sage but the intonation was Khartoum's own.

Slowly, one note at a time an 'aoued filled the spaces around the words. Then an instrument that Raf thought might be a nai, only deeper than any flute he'd ever heard.

"Time to move," Hani whispered.

"Yep. Everybody's waiting." This was, Zara knew, a stupid thing for her to say. Unfortunately it was also true: five hundred carefully chosen people were waiting on the far side of that screen to see the proclamation of the new Emir. A ritual intentionally designed to mix Western with North African traditions.

For religious reasons the proclamation needed to happen in the salon de comeras, the hall of ambassadors, rather than the Zitouna mosque, because women and men could not be allowed to mix in the mosque and, anyway, letting nasrani into the prayer hall would outrage the mullahs.

Officially the beards were no longer a problem, Kashif's arrest and subsequent suicide had seen to that. Major Gide's interim report suggested reality was different. The fundamentalist tendency would remain quiet only for as long as their embarrassment lasted at having backed a man given to treachery and wicked living.

"Come on . . ." Zara was shaking Raf's arm.

And as Khartoum's voice rose to a note as ethereal as waves against rock, then ended abruptly, leaving only silence, Murad said, "We can't do this."

"What?"

"We just can't." There was a sadness in Murad's voice, a maturity at odds with the anxious smile on his thin face. This was a boy who'd sat holding his father's hand while the old man died. A boy who'd insisted on attending not just the funeral of his father, as was expected but also of his brother, after Kashif shot himself through the head. Three times. The funeral of Lady Maryam, who succumbed to the same flu that killed the Emir, he refused outright to attend. And that took a different kind of strength.

"Look at us," Murad said.

Age was more than a simple sum of years. Into the load went experience and modes of survival. Strength could be learnt and adopted or developed through necessity and nothing tempered it faster than learning to stay alive.

Murad nodded towards the hidden crowd. Then swept his gaze across Hani, Zara and Raf, finally ending with a glance at a mirror which showed a twelve-year-old boy in a tight uniform, stars of gold and enamel across his narrow chest.

"Look at what I'm wearing . . ."

Murad's new uniform, identical to one worn by Raf, was based around an Egyptian version of the old British cavalry tunic, borrowed by an earlier Emir and introduced as court dress. No North African or Ottoman regiment had ever gone into battle wearing such clothes. Its use was strictly ceremonial. The only difference was Murad's lack of shades.

"I don't support this," said Murad. "I didn't think you did." He looked sadly at Hani reflected in the mirror. "And I don't want to be part of it. I refuse to become Emir." Lifting a felt tarboosh from his head, the boy nodded to a guard. The hat Murad held was inlaid with gold thread and seeded around its base with tiny freshwater pearls. Pinned to the front was a priceless diamond spray of feathers. The chelengk a recent sign of favour from the Sultan in Stambul.

The guard who reached out to take it retreated at a scowl from Raf.

"You have it then," Murad said and Raf shook his head.

"Wrong size," said Raf. "And anyway, it belongs to you."

"Why?" Murad asked, and everyone looked at Raf.

That was the real question. All of Raf's life had been leading up to this, it seemed to him. Standing in an alcove off a crowded salon de comeras, off-loading his responsibilities onto a child. Which was one way to look at it. The other was that Raf was trying desperately to do the right thing in a situation where there was no right thing to do.

"This is difficult," he said.

"Really," said Hani. And when Raf nodded she sighed. "That was irony," she said.

Beyond the screen, Khartoum's voice edged into the silence and soared away, stilling the crowd again. "Ya bay." Raf caught the word in a refrain and lost the meaning as he looked down and saw Murad still waiting for his answer.

"You think it should be me," Raf said, not bothering to make it a question. They'd been through this. None of them believed there should be an Emir to start with, but that wasn't really the point. A coup had been averted.

A new era had arrived.

The last of the UN sanctions had been lifted that morning.

Five hundred people were waiting within the salon for sight of Ifriqiya's child ruler. A hundred thousand filled the streets. Camera crews wandered the Medina recording anything and everything for worldwide syndication. There were two members of the German Imperial Family, a first cousin to the Sublime Porte, the president of the United States, both presidents of Russia and the Prince Imperial of France, despite his recent disgrace. All gathered to welcome Ifriqiya back into the family of nations.

As squabbling, incestuous and venal a group as ever existed.

In thirty years the country hadn't seen half that number of VIPs. Hell, even one VIP would have been more than Ifriqiya had seen in thirty years. The ice age was over and the state's political and diplomatic purdah had been quietly brought to an end.

At a high cost, a fact not doubted by any of those who stood in the alcove; although they differed in their understanding as to how high. What they now discussed was, if one were honest, who should be the first to pay.

"The problem," said Raf, crouching until his face was level with Murad's own, "is that your father was not my father."

That got their attention.

"Yes he was," Murad insisted.

"No." Raf shook his head. "I've known this for days. One of us had Emir Moncef as a father. The other didn't." From his pocket, Raf pulled a sheet of paper folded into three and Hani, being Hani, recognized it for what it was. A sanguinity report.

"This is your father's DNA," Raf said to Murad as he pointed to a column down one side of the slip. "And this is your own," he pointed to the next. "And this third one is mine. You can see there is no relationship between the first two and the third. My mother was not your mother and my father was not your father; we are not even cousins."

"I don't understand," said Murad, face crumpling. "Who are you then?"

"My mother once told me my father was a Swedish hiker. That's probably as true as anything else she ever told me."

The boy nodded, a movement so small as to be almost imperceptible. And then, meeting Raf's eyes, he nodded again, his second nod firmer, more confident.

"Give me that printout," he ordered.

Without a word Raf handed Murad the DNA results. Instead of looking at them, the boy ripped them in two, did it again and then one more time, struggling in his final attempt.

"You're my cousin," he said in a voice that allowed no room for argument. Only Murad's eyes, made larger than ever by sadness, betrayed him.

"And your bodyguard," added Raf. "Should you need one."

Hani raised her eyebrows.

"I thought you might enjoy living in Tunis," Raf said. He didn't quite glance at Murad as he said this but Hani scowled anyway. And he got the feeling she might have stuck out her tongue, if Murad hadn't been watching. "Or we could commute between here and El Isk," added Raf, "if that works better for everyone . . ."

Zara's face was unreadable.

Beyond the screen, Khartoum fell into expectant silence and the guards around the edges of the alcove strained forward as if they might toss Murad's group into the waiting hall themselves, so worried was Major Gide's expression.

Hani, Zara and Raf began to move. Only to stop when Murad held up his hand.

"I go up there alone," he announced. That wasn't how it had been planned or practised in dry run after dry run, but Murad's voice was firm as he stepped through a gap between wall and marble screen. "It's my responsibility."

"And us?" Hani asked. "What are we expected to do?" There was hurt in her eyes and her chin was up. Had Murad not been on the point of walking out in front of the world, he'd have had a serious fight on his hands. One look at the boy's face showed he understood that.

They were children, Raf reminded himself, balanced on the cliff edge of puberty, behaving as adults because that was what politics required of them. In a different world there might be other answers and other systems that worked better. But they were here, in the salon de comeras in Tunis. And it was all the world they had.

"Well?" said Hani.

"You come with me," Murad said, compromising. "When we get to the two steps you stop and I'll stand at the top."

Hani considered this.

"No," she said, "you walk ahead when we go out but I climb the steps and stand just behind you."

Murad sighed.

"And us?" Zara asked.

Hani and Murad looked at each other.

Raf and Zara went first. Walking through the silence beneath infinitely repeating muqarnas vaulting, inset with imported roundels of flying babies. Although the cherubim had the wooden rounds to themselves, an elegant script edged the space where ceiling and tiled wall joined. It said what the Fatiha always said, words that had echoed across the sands of North Africa for centuries.

Bringing war, civilization, coffee and the veil. Poetry and bloodshed. Algebra, an understanding of the physical working of the human body and civil war. No worse or better, in Raf's opinion, than the beliefs it replaced or competed against.

Although maybe the words were more beautiful.

"In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate . . ."

They walked in silence, Zara staring straight ahead.

Her parents were sitting near the front but by a sidewall. A position chosen to reflect Hamzah Effendi's vast fortune whilst not ignoring the occasionally dubious nature of its gathering.

Hamzah smiled, proud and slightly disbelieving.

Zara stalked by without noticing.

Two rows ahead, Koenig Pasha, whom Raf still thought of as the General, sat beside Tewfik Pasha, whose ghost of a beard and moustache were now almost manifest. The Khedive and the General had been busy ignoring each other ever since His Highness decided to dispense with the General's position as Iskandryia's governor. Suggesting they sit side by side had been Raf's way of breaking the ice. Just ahead of them, assorted uber VIPs squatted the front two rows, except for three seats left blank on the right; one should have been Hani's, but obviously she wouldn't be needing it.

Raf stood back to let Zara go first and the look she gave him was hurt and slightly disbelieving. There were tears in her eyes. Although once she realized he'd noticed, she started to scowl.

"What have I done now?" Raf whispered.

"How could you say that to Murad?" she said. "And how long before Hani realizes that if you're not Murad's half brother, then you can't be . . ."

"Her uncle?" Raf asked.

Zara's nod was abrupt.

"What will you tell her?" she demanded.

A smile just wide enough to create laughter lines lit Raf's face. "I'll tell her the truth," he said, leaning close. "And then swear her to secrecy." Behind him Raf could hear a double shuffle of footsteps where the aisle started at huge double doors neither Murad or Hani had actually passed through.

"The truth being what?"

"That I am her uncle," whispered Raf, "but Murad is not her cousin." He took Zara's hand and though it lay slightly unwilling in his own, she didn't try to remove it.

Who had gone to whom with what, Raf had found impossible to discover from the secret files. Somewhere in the mix was the Emir, his mother and Bayer-Rochelle, who'd been working on cerebral transplants, the operation that killed Emir Moncef and left Eugenie de la Croix with a dead commander, international pressure to open labs that could not possibly be revealed to the world and a frightened Swedish hitchhiker as his replacement.

Obvious really, when one thought about it.

And Lady Maryam hadn't been the only woman Eugenie had refused to let see the ersatz Emir. Raf's mother had been the other.

He spoke quickly and very quietly, always aware of the footsteps getting closer. Khartoum, who still stood at the front, both silent and watchful in a simple woollen robe, watched Raf and Zara with interest; when he saw Raf had noticed, the old man flicked one hand in quick greeting and smiled.

"Eugenie knew this?"

"Of course."

As Murad and Hani reached Micki Vanhoffer, the large American burst into tears and wrung Carl Senior's fingers until he almost joined in. "They're going to get married," she told the Japanese ambassador sitting next to her, who only stopped being appalled when Carl Senior leaned over his wife's ample lap to explain that this wasn't likely to happen for some years yet, if at all.

"Okay?" Hani demanded.

Murad nodded.

She could hear her cousin humming softly as he climbed first one marble step, then another, stopping at the point where his proclamation would begin. It took Hani a second or two to recognize the tune.

Emir Murad al-Mansur, Ifriqiya's ruler and bey of Tunis was humming the chant from "Revolt into Nakedness," street song of North Africa's disposed. The new Cheb Rai/Ragged Republic version obviously.

He'd managed to find it that morning on his radio.