Which meant . . .
"Let me get this right," said Raf. "You're sitting in a dead man's room beside a naked woman and you're internalizing some seminar on comparative religion?"
Yeah, Raf nodded to himself. That was it exactly.
He'd fucked Isabeau. No matter that his memory of the exact act was bricked off with rising doubts, alcohol poisoning and emotional shutdown. The very fact he was having this conversation with himself was proof enough.
Pulling back Isabeau's covers, Raf swallowed what he saw. Flash-freezing her high breasts, soft stomach and hips permanently into memory. Comparing her figure, despite himself, with his memory of Zara. They were alike enough to make Raf feel ashamed. The only real difference, apart from the fact he'd fucked one and not the other (and the one he'd fucked was not the one he loved) was that a small crucifix on a gold chain twisted sideways in the crease between Isabeau's breasts.
"Okay," agreed Raf. That did explain the marble Madonna of his imagining.
There were plane trees beyond the window. Chrome blinds. A crack that ran across the floor where grouting between tiles had snapped along a stress line, then opened up, until the crack changed direction and broke tiles instead.
But the tiles were clean and recently scrubbed. Come to that the whole room was spotless.
"Which says what?"
That Pascal was too poor to afford repairs on the flat he shared with his sister but still liked it kept clean?
"Or wasn't anal enough to worry about interior decoration."
That too, except the tiny music system, sandblasted metal bed and chrome table had anal-retentive written through them like rock. Walking to the bedroom door, Raf glanced at the area beyond. A living space with Toshiba screen. Black leather sofa. Another chrome-and-glass table. Doors led to a small kitchen. A bathroom with shower stall. And finally, a second bedroom, half the size of the one in which he awoke. The other difference was a lock recently fixed to the inside of that door. Ceramic foals sat on a glass shelf but there were no posters or pictures and no slim marble Madonna. Nothing of real interest in the small bedside cabinet.
"Well," said a voice behind him, "find what you were looking for?" The question came from Isabeau. She was leaning against the doorframe of what he now knew was her own room, wearing a towel, which only made Raf more aware of his own nakedness.
"What I was looking for?"
"You were going to find out who Pascal was, remember? Get inside his head and work out who might have really killed him. Since everyone believes Idries, who's convinced it wasn't his cousin. And apparently I'm meant to believe Idries too . . ."
Raf put a hand to his aching head. "I told you I wanted to come here so I could empathize?"
Isabeau nodded.
"And the other stuff," he looked at her towel, "that just happened?"
"Sure," said Isabeau, turning away. "If you must put it like that." Raf heard her feet on the tiles all the way back to the room they'd shared. There was a slam of the door. Two minutes of muted shuffling, then the noise of the door being opened again. He listened to her shoes slap the tiles, then she was gone with a slam of a different door.
Having dressed, Raf let himself out.
CHAPTER 28
Tuesday 1st March
A neatly bearded man in a tarboosh stared out from a creased page. Below him a caption informed the scruffy girl in black headscarf, jeans and silver trainers that the Emir's eldest son would be dining at the Domus Aurea and, in a return to best Ottoman tradition, his mother had asked that all attendants at the celebratory meal be both deaf and dumb.
Unfortunately, finding staff who fitted this profile while possessing sufficient experience had proved impossible. They had, however, all been carefully screened for suitability.
The rest of the page was equally bland, its headlines subdued and reverential; which was probably why someone had dumped that day's El Pays under a chair in the buffet car.
Putting down the paper, the girl swallowed the last of her coffee and returned her plastic cup to the attendant, even though she had to stand on a cat basket to reach his counter. Then, just to be tidy, she collected up half a dozen other discarded cups and returned those too.
"Thank you." The man at the counter smiled. "Are you this tidy at home?"
Hani nodded, even though it wasn't strictly true. Donna did all of the kitchen cleaning at the madersa and got cross if Hani tried to help. And although Khartoum had explained that Donna was the kind of person who preferred others not to interfere, this wasn't much help because Hani's aunt Nafisa had spent her life telling Hani to pick things up, tidy away her toys and generally be busy and industrious, preferably somewhere else.
So now Hani tidied on instinct. It was a hard habit to break.
"Problems?"
"Not really," said Hani, putting down the last of the cups and nodding towards the next carriage. "Unless you count blocked loos and messy basins." She shrugged. "You know soldiers . . ."
The man looked at her. "Ifriqiya needs conscripts," he said, more serious than before.
Hani looked like she wanted to disagree but all she did was shrug her thin shoulders and wrap her hijab more tightly around her face. "You're probably right," she said, "but I'm not entirely sure it needs them to vomit in the basins . . ."
Despite himself the man smiled. "Luckily," he said. "I have my own loo."
Hani looked at him.
"For attendants only," he explained carefully.
The girl kept looking and it was the man's turn to sigh.
"Through there," he said and pointed to a blank door. "Don't take long. I'm closing up in a minute."
The girl who entered the first-class carriage wore dark glasses with drop-pearl earrings; and the only thing that detracted from the look, besides the fact Hani's glasses were too big and blood smudged one ear (where an earring had been forced through flesh), was a tatty rattan cat basket so large it scraped against her leg as she walked.
Catching sight of herself in a window Hani wiped away the blood with her finger and thumb and adjusted her shades.
"Is that seat taken?"
The foreigner in the stripy jacket looked so bemused that Hani switched to French and, as she thought, the seat by the door was free. Hani hadn't really expected him to understand Arabic, but Zara insisted its use was politically essential so Hani tried to remember to use it first. Quite why Arabic should be the natural language of North Africa when almost everyone she met spoke French, Hani wasn't sure.
"Okay," said Hani as she scratched a fingernail against rattan. "We're here."
Inside Hani's basket, Ifritah scratched back, meowed noisily and then hurled herself against the grille with a thud, leaving the foreigner looking more bemused than ever.
"Wild cat," Hani said, reaching for its handle. And it was almost true. The one thing Ifritah wasn't was house-trained . . .
Even before she stepped onto the platform Hani knew she was going to like Tunis. It had as much history as El Isk plus pirates, corsairs and freebooters. She really didn't understand why the Germans, in particular, and the Americans hated it so.
"Ready?" Hani asked her basket. Without waiting for Ifritah's answer, Hani pushed herself out of her seat, slammed down the window of her still-moving carriage and swung open the door to a shout of outrage from a porter on the platform.
Jumping down Hani almost tripped over her new shoes. Really she'd wanted to keep her trainers, but dumped them in a bin along with her jeans, T-shirt and hijab. In their place Hani wore a skirt made from red silk with an embroidered green waistcoat over a white shirt. Since the silk, velvet and white cotton were sewn together, the outfit probably counted as a dress even if it didn't look like one.