Jon Grimwood - Felaheen

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.