On the breast of her green waistcoat Hani had pinned a spray of diamond feathers so impossibly extravagant they had to be fake. As the white shirt left more of her neck bare than Hani really liked, she'd borrowed a fat row of amber beads from Aunt Nafisa's old leather jewellery box. She knew the beads weren't of good quality. If they had been, her aunt would have sold them.
Stalking past the scowling porter, Hani worked hard on looking like someone who knew exactly where she was going. Grown-ups tended only to notice anxiety. So the secret to being invisible was to be seen. Hani smiled at that, pleased to realize she was finally beginning to think like her Uncle Ashraf.
"Okay," she told Ifritah, "first we send Zara a postcard, then we find a taxi . . ."
The postcard bit was easy. Hani had taken a free card from a rack in the transAtlas express and also a free pen; one of those cheap blue ones too short to write with neatly. It was currently pushed under half a dozen rattan strands on Ifritah's basket.
"Table," Hani told herself, looking round the crowded platform. There were a lot of soldiers at one end, plus a dozen men in black uniforms with guns who might have been police. Whoever they were, they were so busy watching the soldiers separate people by sex and herd them into a tent or under a metal arch that they forgot to glance at Hani as she slid under a barrier and strode towards a café near the entrance to the station's marble concourse.
"Is this seat taken?" This time the man Hani asked understood Arabic and smiled an old man's smile as he told her it was free. He left Hani in peace to scribble her message and no one appeared from inside to take her order, both of which were a blessing. Message written, Hani thanked the old man for partial use of his table and headed for a nearby postbox.
Zara was going to be cross, that much was obvious. She'd been coldly furious when she first realized Raf was gone without a word and now she'd be more furious still. And not just with Uncle Ashraf.
"Tough." By the time her card got delivered Hani intended to have found her uncle, delivered the diamond chelengk, and given him back his dark glasses. So if Zara did turn up in Tunis, she'd never know that Raf wasn't really on a secret mission. Mind you, that would probably just make her more furious still.
In the end Hani decided against trying to get a taxi. All her notes were too big anyway and she wasn't really sure where she needed to go . . .
Lieutenant Aziz liked station duty. It was undemanding, he got to drink endless cups of hot sweet cocoa given free by grateful cafés, and there was a long list of brother officers only too happy to share the work. This meant the lieutenant got to go home on time. He wasn't a real lieutenant, of course, just some math student from Bizerte unable to graduate until he'd done national service. That was the deal. Between passing his finals, which he already had, and actually graduating came a year in the army.
That he'd been commissioned into the National Guard the same month that he got married was his own bad luck. Or bad planning on the part of his mother. Either way, he'd been taking weeks' worth of grief from his colonel about his eagerness to sneak off early.
Of course, some of that eagerness really was about getting back to his new bride. The rest of it, well, politics weren't his thing but somehow everyone else in the regiment seemed to feel different.
"Excuse me . . ."
Lieutenant Aziz looked down to see a girl in ludicrously large dark glasses holding a rattan basket. She wore a dress that might have belonged to a gypsy princess in some German operetta.
"I'm trying to find my cousin."
The girl looked so serious that Aziz almost laughed. Luckily he had a young sister and enough imagination to know that his sister hated people laughing at her. So instead he dropped to a crouch, aware that his men were watching.
"Are you lost?"
"Not yet." The girl looked around her. "But I will be soon if you don't help."
Aziz smiled. "When did you lose him?" He took it for granted that her cousin was male.
Hani looked blank.
"Your cousin," said the lieutenant.
"He's not lost," Hani said. "I just haven't found him yet."
Lieutenant Aziz paused. "Okay," he said. "Your cousin was meeting you from the train . . ."
Hani shook her head.
"He didn't expect you to find your own way home?" Aziz looked so shocked that Hani reached out and patted his shoulder without thinking.
"Of course not," she said. "He doesn't know I'm coming yet."
"He doesn't . . . ?" Runaways were the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Order, which meant he'd be perfectly justified in handing over the child and walking away. Something the lieutenant knew he wouldn't be doing.
Aziz started again.
"Where does your cousin live?"
"In the Bardo Palace. But he's going to be at Domus Aurea tonight."
Hani wasn't quite certain how to put what happened next but whoever had been smiling out of those eyes was now hidden. All she got was perfect blankness.
"Domus Aurea . . ." Lieutenant Aziz dragged the address out as if uncertain where it should stop.
"That's right," Hani twirled round to show off her outfit. "I've come for the party."
"And your cousin . . ."
"Kashif Pasha," Hani said. "Or the Emir, he's also a cousin." She put her head to one side as she thought about that some more. "Actually," she said, "everyone's a cousin, except Zara . . ."
The lieutenant commandeered a parked taxi by the simple expedient of telling its driver that his passenger was Emir Moncef's cousin. And having handed the child to a flustered officer at the gates of the Golden House, Lieutenant Aziz told the taxi to take him home.
CHAPTER 29
Flashback
"So, tell me . . ." Accompanying the demand came a mild slap. An aide-memoire, little more. A warning of what might become real. "Why are you really here?"
"To see Prince Moncef." Sally chewed the inside of her lip, hard enough to tear flesh, then spat the salt taste from her mouth, allowing it to dribble slowly down her chin. "As I already told you. So why not just fuck off and . . ."
The second slap splashed blood across her cheek, as Sally had known it would. She spat more of the salt onto her chin, readying herself for another blow.
There were rules to this game. Hell, there were whole Web sites devoted to handling how to be questioned. Not that Sally needed Web sites for instruction. She'd been through the mill for real in London, Vienna and Florence. She'd got away without questioning in Madrid and never even been picked up in New York.
In Zurich the police had skipped on questioning and tossed her over the border with a warning that to return would result in a long prison sentence or worse. A leer from a fat uniform as he told her this was intended to indicate what might be worse than several years' incarceration in Europe's most boring country.
"Enough," said a new voice. The light in Sally's face went out. A moment later fingers grabbed her bottom lip and yanked it down.
"Quite the little professional."
They'd met before on the ridge overlooking the complex. Only this time Eugenie de la Croix wore black trousers and a white shirt, Jimmy Choo slingbacks and a scarf that did little to hide a waterfall of dark hair. Her beauty was such that Sally almost forgave the fingers pulling at her bleeding lip.
"Where did you learn that little trick . . . Seattle?"
"I wasn't in Seattle," Sally replied from instinct and saw Eugenie grin.