Jon Grimwood - Felaheen

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

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

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

"You got your money?"

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

"What now?" Per asked.

"We go our separate ways I guess."

"And your way is where?"

"Into the desert."

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

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

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

Sally nodded and Per laughed.

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

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

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

"Really?"

Per nodded.

"Lions," said Sally, smiling at his expression. "Barbary lions. The kind that ate Christians in the Roman circus."

"What do they look like?"

"Much like this," Sally said and she pulled a tatty newspaper clipping from the back of her wallet. It showed a lion cub so pale it almost looked grey. "The last known Barbary lion was shot in Morocco eighty years ago."

"So how are you going to find one?"

"By looking," Sally said flatly. "There've been rumours for years that a pair exist in captivity at a private zoo."

"Whose?"

Sally smiled. "The Emir's own," she said. "Apparently he sees nobody, but I think he might see me. He's partial to single blondes . . ." She tapped quote marks either side of the words, stressing the irony.

"You want company?"

Sally was about to point out the contradiction between what she'd just said and his question when she noticed the local newspaper tucked into the side pocket of Per's rucksack. It was folded open towards the back and she could just about see the small-ad headings from where she sat, not that she needed to. The boxed-out advertisement for Hertz told her all she needed to know.

"You're going to hire a car?"

"Too expensive," said Per. "I'll buy one."

"This works out cheaper?"

"Depends what I buy. Get a Mahari and it'll run like clockwork, Soviet clockwork . . . Four-cylinder, two-stroke, made in Portugal," he added, seeing Sally's blank look.

"And that runs like . . ."

"It was a joke," he said patiently. "Maharis break down daily but even a child can mend them. What I actually want is a Jeep." Tossing the paper across, Per said, "Take a look." He'd ringed three possibles and put lines through two of those. "Too old," he said, jerking his head towards the first one. "And the other's too expensive. The last one looks okay though."

As she expected the price was substantially more than Sally had. "You off to see it now?" she asked hopefully.

"I wish." Per shook his head. "I called and the first time they can do is ten o'clock tomorrow. Which means finding somewhere for the night."

"Not a problem," said Sally. "There were a dozen guesthouses near Gare de Tunis. We can try there." And so they did, although they ended up with separate rooms because the woman behind the desk refused to rent them a double. She did this through the simple expedient of refusing to understand what Sally and Per were asking for.

One room was under the roof of a narrow four-storey guesthouse that advertised itself as L'Hôtel Carthage, the other on the second floor, up a flight of stairs from the reception area. Both looked onto a narrow side street parked with cars but only the lower one had a shower and loo. Sally chose the roof because her window had a better view. That was what she told Per anyway, in fact the main thing her room had going for it was being a third cheaper than the room Per took.

"You want to go eat?"

"Not really hungry," said Sally. "Although you could always pick up a bottle of red if you go out." She watched Per nod and smiled to herself. Now she had a reason to drop by his room later if that was the route she decided to take; it would be, but Sally was planning to spend an hour or two fooling herself first.

Empirical evidence proved that sitting quietly in front of a half-eaten croissant could keep a waiter from Le Trianon at bay for half an hour. The secret was not to run over thirty minutes. Doing so resulted in someone coming to ask if there was a problem with the food.

Opening her laptop, Hani called up a photograph and stripped off yesterday's additions, starting again. The foreigner's strange shirt was replaced with a new scoop-neck top, her hair made presentable courtesy of digiGloss, which billed itself as the software makeup experts used. Hani had downloaded a fourteen-day trial version of this and a freeware version of Wardrobe v3.1 from a teen site in Kansas City.

Her uncle was missing, check.

Khartoum knew why but wouldn't say, check.

And check Zara moping about in the qaa like some consumptive. Merde and merde again, as Zara herself would say. Hani took a large bite from her croissant and chewed hard. Yesterday she'd come across the woman sitting by the small fountain in the qaa reading Rumi. If this was a side effect of love then . . .

Hani sucked her teeth.

"Is everything all right?" The waiter who materialized beside her table looked worried, his eyes flicking from the child's face to her plate.

"The croissant is delicious," Hani said firmly, "and I don't need another coffee. But actually I do need to see the maître d' . . . to borrow a pen," Hani added, when the man looked worried. Slipping down from her chair, she strolled through the terrace door into Le Trianon and headed for the elderly person standing at a small lectern, leafing through a reservations book.

"Problems?" Hani asked politely.

"Nothing serious." The thin Italian smiled at her. "A double booking for the same cover . . ." He nodded to a table for six beneath a mural, the one decorated with a dancing girl in jewelled slippers and a wisp of cloth. "Sometimes I just think it would be easier to do everything myself."

"It is," said Hani, raising the lip on her notebook and hitting a hot key. It would have been obvious even to someone less versed in the ways of Lady Hana al-Mansur that the child was hovering on the edge of a question.

"What is it?" the maître d' said and kept his smile in place to stop the girl from being anxious. "You can ask . . ."

Hani held up her pink plastic notebook. "My uncle's on a mission," she said seriously. A flick of her eyes around the almost empty café found it safe to talk. Her look swift, instinctive and enough to convince the man that Hani believed what she said. And why not . . . ? Everyone had heard the rumours that her uncle Ashraf Bey was in the direct employ of the sultan in Stambul.

"A mission?"

"Secret," said Hani. "Very secret."

Not being too sure how else to proceed, Hani thrust the screen at the man. "I have to find this woman," she said and watched his eyes. Glad that he didn't like the look of her either. "To deliver a message."