Hani was right of course. The mansion would have frightened Donna even if it hadn’t belonged to the General.
“So who feeds you while I’m working?” Raf asked.
“Me,” said Hani crossly. “I can cook.”
“And when did you last eat?”
“I’ve had breakfast.” Hani scrambled out of his arms but stayed close. Away from the desk and her pink plastic laptop.
“Today?”
The child looked at him.
“You had breakfast today?”
The eyes opposite suddenly bruised with tears. “Leave me alone, all right . . . And take your stupid photograph.” She left the room without looking back, slamming the door for good measure.
As always, adults got it wrong. It wasn’t the photograph she’d needed. Hani had wanted the face on the badge.
And besides, all that look-at-me-I’m-hiding-something routine was to stop Uncle Ashraf noticing what she really had in the drawer. The Doré engraving of hell she’d borrowed from his office.
CHAPTER 36
23rd October
Outside on the beach, Zara’s beach, October waves exploded against the headland and draped dark rocks with seaweed. And on the French windows to her father’s study, a stray leaf trapped in a dying spider’s web released its ribbon of rainbow down the glass as gasoline or herbicide slowly leached from its pores.
Zara saw neither because the curtains were firmly drawn. She wore a nightdress, dressing gown and fur slippers. The warmth of those nursery clothes at odds with the arctic cold in her heart.
“Tell me it’s not true . . .”
She wasn’t meant to shout at her father. She wasn’t even meant to swear either, but the rules were gone, left in a corridor along with her wailing mother and a discarded copy of the New York Times. And all her father could do was huddle in his leather chair, a tumbler of whisky beside him and an old-fashioned revolver lying on a weird etching on his lap. The glass was Soviet crystal. Zara didn’t recognize the weapon—revolvers weren’t her thing. Come the revolution, she’d always seen herself using plastique.
Shutting her eyes to block out the world, Zara nursed the darkness until she could hold on to it no longer. Needless to say, when she looked again nothing in the study had changed, but then it never used to work for her as a child either.
“So it’s true?” Zara said.
Of course it was. She could see it in his face. And even the smell of fresh vomit couldn’t hide the whisky fumes. A whole bottle was gone. Enough to reduce him to childish tears without lifting the horror from his eyes.
Top Industrialist Charged with Genocide . . .
He should have warned her. Before the American papers and the downloads and rolling newsfeeds began, before Trustafarian Ishies with their headsets and cameras started churning the lawns to mud. She could almost feel the hunger out there, calling its questions and tapping at windows, hammering on the big brass knocker and ringing the bell. News was a commodity to the soi-disant Free World, not a duty. And the bear-pit growl of its news gatherers could be heard through the study’s double glazing, through windows closed and locked, curtains drawn and shutters bolted.
“Dad, come on . . .” Dropping to a crouch in front of his chair, Zara rested her forearms on his knees and felt her father flinch. That was all it took to turn anger to tears. Zara began crying then, sorrow rolling down her cheeks. Somewhere she had a tissue, but couldn’t remember which pocket, and it didn’t seem to matter.
They cried in silence together.
She’d taken to asking herself a question a few years back. What was the worst it could be, the secret of her father’s rise from nothing? She’d searched for clues to the answer. Once, aged fifteen, she’d riffled through his desk, using a key taken from his jacket. All she’d found was a small leather case containing pornographic photographs of a young man and two girls even younger . . . Apart from a wood-handled knife, a handful of Sudanese coins and a bone crucifix, that had been the sum total of her find.
She hadn’t been able to look him in the face for weeks afterwards.
The worst she could say, until recently, was that he kept Western erotica in a drawer in his study. Now he was less than that, a man diminished. Zara was rapidly coming to realize that, just maybe, she’d never actually known who he was, not really. Her father, the industrialist Hamzah Effendi.
He broke the law for a living, she accepted that. Only he broke it less than he used to do and nothing like as much as when he was young. And anyway the free market was a crime in itself. As a good Marxist she did believe that. Of course, he also killed, or had done, at least once . . .
When she was nine she had overheard two servants discussing this and been proud. The dead man had been bad, obviously. Someone who attacked her father, forcing him to defend himself. It was all so clear in Zara’s head. Only when she tried asking her ma about it she’d been slapped for her pains. By the next morning both her nanny and the maid were gone.
Now nothing she could say to her father would change what was about to happen. PaxForce wanted him to stand trial and, according to the New York Times, Iskandryia’s new governor had agreed to hand over Hamzah, subject to agreeing upon a timetable.
What more was there to say?
Plenty. And such was the shallowness of the Western press that how it was said would be as important as what was said. Picking up his revolver, weirdshit etching and whisky bottle, Zara slammed Hamzah’s study door behind her and went to get changed. Already she was rewriting elements of her plan.
“Zara . . .” The voice that met her on the landing was angry and bitter, but then it would be, it belonged to her mother.
“What?” Zara demanded.
It had been a joke among Zara’s friends that they could hear Madame Rahina long before they could see her, such was the clatter of gold from her wrists. Noisy bangles and an almost permanent scowl were Zara’s memories of her mother. Sometimes the gold had been so loud Zara hadn’t been able to hear the slap that followed.
“How could he . . . ?”
“I thought you knew everything there was to know about him,” Zara said, her voice contemptuous. “Wasn’t that what you told everyone? Soul mates. Apart from his endless mistresses, your tranquillizers and the whisky . . .”
“Zara . . .”
Zara covered the outraged face with the spread fingers of one hand and pushed. Which was all it took to throw the woman backward. Zara didn’t bother to check how she landed.
Some of the men even had little ladders so they could peer over the heads of other photographers in front. Many wore pale safari suits of the kind carried at airports by ignorant nasrani journalists, who expected to land somewhere blisteringly hot. Only now their suits were dark with rain and hung with all the elegance of rags on a line.
“Miss Zara . . .”
She turned, saw Alex and sighed. The huge Soviet bodyguard stood like a scolded child, head down and fists clenched so hard that veins made freeways along his wrists. An hour earlier, while her father was still drinking himself into a stupor, Alex had been faced with a highly tenacious member of the press, who took bolt cutters to the gates and challenged Alex to shoot him. Without orders, Alex had retreated.
“You took the correct action,” Zara said, for about the third time.
Alex looked doubtful.
“Examine the options,” she said. “You think you should have shot him?” He did too, Zara could see it in his broad face. “Sometimes retreat is necessary,” Zara told Alex carefully. “But now someone must guard the front door. And that must be you.”