Jon Courtenay Grimwood Arabesk 3 Felaheen

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equally circumspect (Hani liked that word)
reply from HKS suggested that, unless His Excellency really wanted a mortgage
of the kind that needed repaying over a number of years, the best option might
be a straight loan, at no interest, since usury was obviously forbidden. A
settlement fee to be paid as the final part of the reckoning, please see
sample contract enclosed.
The bank had used longer words than that--because banks always use complicated
words--but that was what Hong Kong Suisse meant.
Hani's reply ended with a flamboyant impression of her uncle's initials and
the only thing that stopped her from scanning an original into her laptop and
using that was a slight worry that HKS might use some kind of fluorescing
system to distinguish fountain pen from printer ink.
As a final touch, Hani found her uncle's spare comb, removed a single hair and
dropped it into the envelope, which might be one touch too many but by then
she'd stuck the envelope and used her only stamp.
Next morning and the morning after found Hani waiting for the postman, cat in
hand. Swapping Ifritah for his fat bundle of letters she chatted about the
weather while sorting through the pile. The letter she wanted was one of five.
Four of these were bills, three of them red reminders . . .
The loan was agreed and the fact Ashraf Bey had initialled rather than signed
his contract as requested was nowhere mentioned: but then Hani remembered
reading that the Empire State Building had once been mortgaged against an
unsigned deed and she was no longer surprised. All that remained, those were
the words HKS used, all that remained was for His Excellency to nominate a
receiving account.
Hani took this to mean she should tell the bank where to send the money. So
she wrote again on a sheet of the paper taken three days earlier from her
uncle's office at the Third Circle.
Stealing it was easy. All Hani had to do was buy a chocolate sundae at Le
Trianon, leave most of it and use the caf�'s internal lift to go straight to
C3's reception on the floor above. The story she'd prepared about wanting to
collect a toy dog from her uncle's office went unused. Madame Ingrid was
giving evidence to a tribunal investigating the crimes of Colonel Abad and
with their office manager gone, most of her junior staff had left for lunch
early, while the rest just nodded at Hani or ignored her.
Taking a single sheet of headed paper from its holder on Uncle Ashraf's desk,
Hani promptly changed her mind and slipped a thick wad of the stuff into her
rucksack. One never knew when it might become useful. As an afterthought, she
added a rubber stamp that sat on the desk beside the wooden box holding the
paper. It was a very ornate rubber stamp with brass claws to hold the block of
rubber and an ivory handle, but it was still a rubber stamp.
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From the desk of Colonel Pashazade Ashraf al-Mansur, Ashraf Bey.
Looking at the faint script left by the stamp on the inside of her wrist Hani
raised her eyebrows. She hadn't realized her uncle was a colonel; at least,
she didn't remember knowing that, but the fact didn't surprise her. Secret
agents and assassins were bound to have military ranks, it was obvious really.
Everyone in North Africa had a rank of some kind or other.
Hani was just letting herself out of the office when she finally realized what
she'd missed. A briefcase, with a gunmetal grey combination lock, below a
black coat hanging from a rack topped by an Astrakhan hat she'd never seen
Uncle Ashraf wear, tight curls of baby fur soft enough to make Hani cringe.
Hat, coat, briefcase.
Hide in plain sight.
Since Madame Ingrid might notice if the case disappeared, Hani resolved to
examine it in situ. Would it be very conceited . . . ? Assuming she really was
eleven, not ten, Hani fed her own birthdate into the combination lock and
Uncle Ashraf's case opened first try. Which was just as well, because there
was serious potential for stalemate if it had been his own birthday and it was
bound to be the birthday of someone or other.
Statistically most combination locks used a birth date within the owner's
immediate family, 73 percent of them in fact. And Hani knew just how hard her
uncle worked at appearing normal. Being a son of Lilith required one to hide
in plain sight, normal being interchangeable with invisible. Hani knew all
about it.
And if she ever forgot, all she had to do was stare in a mirror.
Hani paused to think that last thought through, which was slightly recursive
but necessary. She had no doubt she could become exactly like her uncle if she
tried. Actually, Hani suspected she'd become like him whatever. Flipping open
his case, she spread her catch on the tiles. Another gun. No, she corrected
herself, a Colt revolver
. Specifics were always important. A
carte blanche which was--Hani flipped it open--less than a month out of date.
And inside it something else.
Folded within the carte blanche was a letter from a lawyer in Tunis adressed
to her aunt Nafisa.
Skimming the script as it flowed, elegant and fluid, from right to left across
a perfectly ordinary piece of office paper, Hani began to memorize the
contents word for word. It seemed that Zari Moncef al-Mansur, eldest son of
the old Emir of Tunis had married Sally Welham, an English photographer on the
. . .
The date was so wrong that Hani brushed it aside, stumbling over the fact that
he'd divorced her five days later and halting altogether when she got to the
date of her uncle's birth. Had the letter been printed out on some computer
she'd have dismissed the year as a simple typing error but the note was
handwritten, which made the date either beyond careless or very odd indeed.
Pocketing the letter, Hani turned to a strip of Zaras, the photobooth kind.
Younger, somewhat fatter, her eyes less troubled than now, despite the scowl
with which she faced the camera. And then a photograph of Uncle Raf, staring
into the sun with the
Jammaa ez Zitouna in the background.
Okay, so whatever he'd told Aunt Nafisa before she died, Uncle Raf had been to
Tunis because la
Grande Mosqu�e, built by the Emir Ibrahim Ibn Ahmed in 856C .E. was not only
the second largest mosque in Ifriqiya (the largest was in Kairouan) but also
one of North Africa's most instantly recognizable heritage sites.
In the photograph he looked older. That was, Uncle Ashraf looked as he did
now, not as he should have done back when this was obviously taken. There was
one final photograph.
"Oh . . ." Hani placed it facedown on the tiles and carefully packed the Zaras
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and Uncle Ashraf outside la
Grande Mosqu�e into her rucksack, sliding them between sheets of headed paper.
The Colt she put back into her uncle's case. That left his final photograph.
The girl didn't look poor--on her wrist was an Omega and an empty camera case
hung around her neck. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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