Jon Grimwood - Felaheen

"Hani . . ."

"Your Highness." If the child's greeting skirted the edge of mockery, her curtsy on standing was right over the edge, its flamboyance made even more absurd by the oil blackening her palms and streaking one leg of her jeans with a dark tiger stripe.

"That's . . ."

"Risky?" Hani grinned at her cousin. "Everything interesting always is," she said, adding. "Someone once told me that."

Zara blushed.

Switching her attention back to the Khedive, Hani's small face became serious. "This is for you," she said and untucked her T-shirt to pull a long white envelope from her waistband. "Well, not for you exactly, but you'll see . . ."

The envelope she gave the Khedive came complete with oily thumbprint. It was only when Tewfik Pasha held the envelope that he realized it was made from bleached chamois.

He looked at Hani.

"It arrived a week ago," she lied. "Special messenger. At night." She had intended to say that the messenger came disguised as a motorcycle courier but decided this might be too much. "Uncle Ashraf didn't say who brought it."

The Khedive lifted the flap carefully and extracted a sheet of foolscap that was surprisingly ordinary given its sublime wrapping. He skimmed the letter. "You've seen this?"

The small girl nodded apologetically.

Without a word, Tewfik Pasha handed the letter to Zara.

Raf was to undertake a mission of the utmost danger and secrecy. No good-byes were to be said. No one was to be told. At the top of the page were the Sublime Porte's personal arms. At the foot a scribble in purple ink.

"Raf showed you this letter?" Zara asked, her voice flat.

"Yes, he did." Hani blinked at the misery on the face of the woman opposite. "The Sultan's my cousin," she said lamely. "Ashraf Bey is my uncle. It's just family stuff . . . Everyone's my cousin," Hani added. "Even him." She jerked her chin at the Khedive, who stood shuffling from foot to foot, embarrassed to see tears threatening to brim from Zara's eyes.

"I'm not," Zara said and stalked from the room, slamming the qaa door behind her.

"In here."

The bar was narrow and smoky. Little more than a low vault hidden behind bead curtains at the rear of a café in one of the poorer suqs. The brick walls were windowless and the effect was to make those inside feel they were below ground. A sensation heightened by the fact that the street outside was also roofed over.

"Sit," someone said.

Raf sat.

From above, the roof of this part of the medina looked like sand dunes frozen solid and painted white, or giant worm casts under which hidden streets ran into each other or branched off only to meet again. Scrawny weeds forced their way between cracked plaster, scrabbling an existence amid bird droppings, feral cats and rubbish that shop owners had carried up three flights of stairs to dump onto this bizarrely beautiful moonscape.

Mostly the rubbish included bicycles and broken electric heaters, rusting cans of Celtica (a cheap beer allowed on sale by the Emir because it upset the mullahs) and cardboard boxes gone soggy in the rain and dried into improbable angles.

There were other things. Stranger things.

None of this Raf yet knew.

"Why bring him here?" The boy speaking wore a charcoal-striped suit cut from Italian silk, the only person in the whole café not wearing a jellaba. His upper lip hid behind a new moustache while a Balkan Sobranie dragged at his lower lip. Raf disliked Hassan on sight.

Sajjad shuffled his feet. "It seemed like . . ."

"It was," said a dark man sat by the far wall. "In fact, in the circumstances, this is the ideal place." And it seemed to Raf that levels of significance resonated within the words; but then Raf was tired and filthy, unshaven and ravenous from surviving on what little food Sajjad had been able to bring to the hut by the signal box, so stripping meaning from obscurity was probably low on his list of talents.

There were no tables in the narrow room, only stone benches that ran down both sides and a shorter bench against the far wall, where the dark man was sitting.

He was bald and muscle-bound, with the face of a street brawler and five gold hoops in one ear. Someone had smashed his nose years back and although it had mended well there was a telltale scar at the top of the bridge where flesh had ripped. He wore a rough woollen robe.

"How long have you had him?"

"Five days," Sajjad shrugged. "Maybe a week."

"And no one saw you leave?"

Sajjad shook his head.

"Good," said the man. Pushing himself up off the bench he threaded his way between people's feet and stopped in front of Raf, dropping to a crouch so he could look straight into the newcomer's eyes.

It was all Raf could do to stare back.

"We live, we die, we live again," said the man. "Always remember this."

There didn't seem to be much of an answer.

"And you are welcome," the man added, bowing slightly. "My name is Shibli. I've been looking forward to meeting you."

"Right," said the fox.

Shibli nodded. "Right," he agreed and went back to his seat.

When a boy tapped Raf's shoulder, Raf thought he was being offered a plastic mouthpiece for the glass-and-silver sheesa currently doing a circuit; but what the boy in the check shirt actually held was a spliff, plump as a cockroach and already sticky with tar.

"I don't . . ."

"Then start," said the boy, "you look like you need it."

Watched by Sajjad, the kid with the check shirt and the fat boy in the Italian suit, Raf slotted the spliff between his first and second finger, cupped his hand and sucked at the gap between first finger and thumb. Paper flared and transmuted to ash as half the roach vanished in one massive hit. He had their attention now, Raf knew that.

All it ever took was simple and childish tricks.

He held the smoke in his lungs as he counted himself into darkness. On remand in Seattle where everything was freely available and widely used, most of the dopeheads held down their swirl for a minute or so but Raf could double that, which had to do with possessing more red blood cells or maybe just better ones.

Three minutes after he'd taken the toke, with all eyes on him, he tossed out the dregs of his breath in one whalelike blow . . .

(There was little Raf didn't know about cetacea . Not that he ever got to travel on the observation ships with his mother. Although she never forgot to mention in interviews that she always took with her a photograph of her young son, or that the picture was by some photographer better known for naked models and ageing rock stars.)

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

"You done with that?"

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

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

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