Jon Grimwood - Effendi

By now protocol demanded that Koenig Pasha ask the Senator to call him General or maybe even Saeed; at the very least it should have been sir . . . General Saeed Koenig Pasha, however, had no intention of obliging. Senator Liz, as she insisted he call her, was known to the General as an international busybody so afraid of her own vices that she’d turned the magnifying glass of her insecurity on the virtues of everyone else.

He also doubted, strongly, that her fact-finding mission to El Iskandryia involved the finding out of any facts. In his long experience, special envoys from the White House or Berlin were only interested in trade, polishing their spheres of influence and issuing threats, usually disguised as a once-in-a-lifetime, one-off opportunity.

“Bentley, eight-litre, 1931 . . . Superb machine.”

The small woman looked embarrassed. Too clumsy to make small talk like the diplomat she was supposed to be and too worried about getting it wrong to pretend she knew about vintage cars, Senator Liz retreated into silence, which was something of a first.

Smiling grimly, Koening Pasha put his foot to the floor and swung the heavy Bentley out into the middle of the road to overtake two Army jeeps and a tractor, which were the cause of their slowness. Let the soldiers catch up with him if they could.

Of course the Senator didn’t like his car. Americans expected cruise control, air-conditioning and a basic AI, all of which the General regarded as utterly redundant. If the General got hot, he opened a window, and if that failed to work, he just went faster . . .

As for directions, if he got lost he stopped and asked the felaheen . It was worth it for the shocked look when they realized to whom they were speaking.

“Finally,” said the General, “we’re here.” Stamping on the brakes, he swung his wooden steering wheel and aimed for a farm track, accelerating into the skid so that the car’s rear barely missed shunting one side of a crumbling set of gateposts.

After that, the heavy car ate up the dirt road, bouncing in and out of potholes and past row after row of walled terraces cut into the sides of the hill, until the jeeps were just distant plumes of dust behind it.

His own trail would be visible for miles, an almost biblical column of smoke ascending to heaven. All the same, Hakim and Ahmed would be worried, but then being his bodyguards that was their job, and his new aide de camp would be sweating blood and cursing under his breath. It had better be under his breath, because the General would hear about it if it wasn’t.

“Here we go,” Koenig Pasha announced, skidding to a halt in a slick of gravel that popped like small-arms fire.

Here was a farmhouse cracked open like an egg. Red pantiles lay scattered across the earth, mostly in shards but with the occasional half tile. All the really good ones had been taken, then the not-so-good. What was left were discards, tiles too damaged to make stealing them worthwhile.

A single doorway stood doorless, while wooden shutters hung loose from shattered windows that had never known glass. And from inside came a scuttling like rats picking their way across broken crockery.

“Outside,” demanded the General. “Out of there now.”

“Yes, Excellency . . .” The anxious voice probably called everyone excellency, just to be sure. But the General had to call again before its owner appeared.

“I’m coming, Excellency.” With his eyes blinking at the sudden glare, a moon-faced boy materialized in the dark doorway. His gaze slid to the old man’s face and for a split second the young fellah didn’t recognize who was standing there.

Then he did.

“Stand over there,” ordered Koenig Pasha, nodding towards an outhouse wall. The boy was almost drowning in fear and yet he did what he was told, moving dreamlike towards a point indicated, like a swimmer fighting the current. His feet were bare, just visible beneath an oversized jellaba, which sagged from narrow shoulders and scraped the ground.

“Your brother’s clothes?”

The boy looked blank.

“The jellaba.”

“My father’s old one, Excellency. I . . .” He stopped. “I don’t have a brother.”

The General nodded thoughtfully.

“And who else is in there?”

“In where, Excellency?” The voice was tight.

Koenig Pasha looked round at a row of ancient olive trees that time and war had reduced to splintered stumps. Once there’d been a retaining wall holding up their terracing, until its collapse had let red earth spill onto the level below. There’d been a well too, only that had been filled with rubble and capped off with polycrete. He’d given the order himself, years back.

“Where do you think I mean?” he asked.

“There’s no . . .” The boy’s voice slid an octave and halted.

“Come on,” said the General, directing his order to the empty door. “It’s not safe in there.”

A ratlike scuttle inside turned into a second face, dark-skinned and broad-cheeked. The girl was maybe thirteen, roughly the same age as the boy. Her black hair was pulled back under a hijab tied hastily round her head, so that only her face could be seen.

“We were looking for Hussein’s goat.” Her words were a whisper she didn’t really expect him to believe. Resignation and fear expanded eyes already darkened with charcoal. Red was smeared crudely across her lips. Pomegranate juice, probably. That was what girls used when he was young.

Koenig Pasha looked from one child to the other and back again. “No brother,” he said to the boy. “But this is your sister, right?”

Puzzlement met hope in the boy’s thin face. As if the child was watching for the catch, for a trap that would snap shut on his lies. He said nothing, not even when the General repeated his question.

The old man sighed. “I thought so,” he said and waved them away.

Neither moved.

“Go,” Koenig Pasha ordered. “Go now, before I change my mind . . .”

When they reached the edge of the ruined olive grove, the General suddenly stepped forward and shouted for the boy to stop. He did, as rooted to the dusty earth as the broken stump next to him.

“Good luck.”

Again those puzzled eyes, distant and uncertain.

“With finding your goat.”

The boy grinned fit to burst and snapped a ragged salute. Then, grabbing the girl’s hand, he hurried her out of sight down a slope.

“Truants,” said the Senator.

“Who might have died,” the General agreed flatly. “If their being alone up here was reported to the morales . . . Everything has a price,” he added, leaving blank which everything he had in mind.

“They die. That’s the law?”

The old man shook his head. “I am the law,” he said. It was a statement of fact, nothing more. “The boy would have been badly beaten by his father. But the girl . . .” He shrugged. “Locked in a cellar. Maybe even bricked in to starve or tossed in a ditch with her throat cut. Not stoned to death, not yet. Though that may come . . .”

If you don’t support me . He imagined the Senator could read his subtext easily enough. Stick with me because what comes next will be worse . She’d have heard it before. Hell, she’d probably heard it all over. Mostly in Central America. Apparently half of her research staff agreed. He knew too that the other half thought she was breaking rule one of foreign affairs. Never ask for what you know cannot be delivered .

“What was it you wanted to tell me?” she asked the General.

“Tell you . . . ?”

“This is about achieving deniability, isn’t it, Your Excellency?” Senator Liz indicated the empty terraces surrounding the sunlit farmhouse. In the near distance dust plumed as a pair of jeeps juddered their way up the dirt track road towards the crown of the hill. She and the General had another two, maybe three minutes to themselves at the most.