Eugenie nodded.
"Can you prove it?"
They met again the next morning, Raf already one newspaper down with two to go by the time Eugenie stepped over the silk rope that separated the terrace of Le Trianon from Rue Missala.
The weather was warmer, almost humid, but Raf wore his black silk suit all the same and she wore the grey skirt and jacket she'd been wearing when the two of them first met, only now they no longer stank of camphor. A discreet holster still sat at the back of her hip. Her makeup remained so immaculate that Raf wasn't quite sure it was there.
As ever, Raf wore his trademark shades and nursed a headache that was three parts caffeine to one part ennui. He'd been waiting for Eugenie's arrival. Which was not to say he'd been looking forward to it.
"Cappuccino," Raf told his waiter. "And whatever Lady Eugenie is having."
"Madame de la Croix," Eugenie said firmly. "And I'll have my usual espresso . . . I turned down your father's kind offer of an upgrade before you were born," she added, once the waiter had gone. "Around the time I turned down his offer of a bed to share. My chance for immortality was how he described it." The woman's smile was so wintry that Raf looked at her then, really looked, the way the fox did when searching for stillness within life's scribble.
It was said, at least it was by Tiri, that a full-grown seal was able to sense the wake of a single fish ten minutes after that area of water had become empty. So too could people sense the ghost echo of long-gone events.
If only they knew how.
Looking at Eugenie, really looking, Raf saw a courage unusual for the world in which they lived. Not in the small holster casually clipped to her belt or in the steadiness of her gaze and her refusal to be the first to look away. Her courage showed most in the way she wore her hair, long and unashamedly grey.
The woman was old and made no pretence to be anything other.
A strength that gave her a crueller kind of beauty.
"Your mother . . ." Eugenie said once the waiter had brought the coffee.
"What about her?"
"Can you still recall what she was like?"
Raf lifted his shades, though to do so hurt because even with clouds to filter out the sun his pupils were reduced to tiny, steel-hard dots. "Total recall," he told Eugenie coldly. "That's what I've got."
"About her?"
"About everything . . ."
Eugenie nodded, like that made sense and she didn't feel it necessary to challenge what he said or have him justify the statement. "Yeah," she said, "I suppose you do."
They sat in silence after that. Raf hidden again behind his shades and Eugenie openly watching the occasional tourist couple stroll hand in hand down Rue Missala. It was too early for the Easter crowd, too late for those who'd come over New Year. The hotels were cheap, the cafés mostly empty. Out of the dozens of horse-drawn calèches that usually plied the Corniche, that great sweep of seafront stretching from Fort Qaitbey down to where the fat seawall of the Silsileh sat in the shadow of Iskandryia's bibliotheka, only a handful were working and those had their leather roofs up, their drivers wrapped in coats against the chance of rain.
"Do you like it here?"
"Yes," Raf answered immediately, leaving himself wondering if he actually meant it. In many ways Seattle had been better and Huntsville had a certain charm, even though it had been a prison. "Mostly," he said, amending his answer.
"And you intend to stay?" Eugenie's smile was part knowing but mostly sad, as if she had reasons for doubting it, reasons she wasn't entirely sure Raf was yet ready to hear. Her attitude irritated the fuck out of him.
"What do you actually want?" Raf demanded.
"Help," said Eugenie, "pure and simple. Your help protecting the Emir."
"I thought that was your job?"
For a split second Eugenie's face glazed, the way faces do when people retreat inside their head. "I'm getting old," was all she said. "The Emir doesn't listen to me like he did and I know he would listen to you."
Reaching across the table, she took Raf's hand, oblivious to the waiters hovering and German tourists on the far side of the rope that separated Le Trianon's terrace from the street. She had a surprisingly hard grip for a woman her age.
"I knew her, you know . . ." said Eugenie. "Right back at the beginning." She was talking about his mother.
"What was she like?" Raf's question came unbidden, sliding its way into being before Raf had time to snatch it back.
"Beautiful," Eugenie said simply. "Fractured even then. Wild as an animal and as dangerous. She was wanted, you know . . ."
"Wanted?"
"By the FBI and Interpol. I think even the Japanese had a warrant out. Something about a bomb in a research vessel."
"What kind of research?"
"The kind that turned minke whales into sushi."
Despite himself Raf smiled. "How did the two of you meet?"
"Oh," Eugenie's mouth twisted. "I was there when she first arrived at the labs. Stupid bitch came trawling out of the desert in a battered Jeep, I almost shot her . . . Should have done," she added softly. "Might have made life a whole lot easier for the rest of us."
Raf wasn't sure he was meant to hear that bit.
CHAPTER 11
Flashback
"What you thinking?" Atal asked, slamming the door on Singh's yellow taxi.
"About our friend Wu Yung," said Sally. "About the islands."
Atal blushed and they both knew why.
As light began fingering the palms that edged the beach, Sally had splashed her way onto the sand and stopped to retrieve her sarong, wrapping red-and-white dragons loosely round her narrow hips, then padded her way along a winding path between rampant bushes of sea almond and wild orchids until she reached the kampong.
At the entrance of her hut Sally stopped again to kick white sand from her heels and, glancing across the kampong saw Wu Yung leave a house on stilts that Atal had chosen. An empty wine bottle in his hand, the camera around his neck.
She ate breakfast alone that day but at lunchtime she joined the others by the jetty, sitting topless while Atal swam and Bozo chilled under a palm, spliff growing cold between his fingers as he stared in wonder at a cluster of coconuts above, any one of which could have killed him.
On the jetty itself Wu Yung worked a barbecue made from an oil drum cut open end to end and welded to the old frame of a metal table. He had two fish the length of Sally's arm crisping on its griddle, fat spitting on the glowing coals, their eyes gone opalescent with heat . . .
"You okay?" Atal asked.
"Sure," said Sally as she watched Singh's cab roar away. "Just remembering how we got here."
Bozo grinned. He knew exactly how he got there, by Boeing 747 from KL to Idlewild, paid for by the weird Chinese guy and with $1,000 spending money in his pocket. "We going to do this, or what?" he said, putting on a fresh pair of gloves.
Almost opposite the Church of Our Saviour stood the Hotel Kitano. A lovingly restored fifteen-storey redbrick hotel that majored in rollout futons and sunken hot tubs for its mainly Japanese clientele, or so Atal said, then got embarrassed when Bozo asked how he knew. And that was where Sally, Atal and Bozo went–across the four-lane, cop-car howl of Park Avenue. Although they detoured round the block to let them approach the hotel from a different direction.
Getting in meant staying confident, what with the riots and everything.