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Part of Isabeau obviously wanted to ask what fear?
And for a second, Raf was afraid she might just get up and walk away. Instead
she sipped at cold coffee and watched two twenty-three-year-old actresses
pretend to be fifteen.
"In America," Raf said, "they'd close this café, hire extras to drink coloured
water and have police tape off the road both sides of the gate. Everything
would be done in one shot . . . The only people allowed near that bridge would
be the actresses and the crew. And if the actresses decided to fuck each other
it would be out of boredom."
"You've been to America?" Isabeau sounded disbelieving.
"Once," said Raf. "Years back. When I thought I was somebody else."
"Why tell me this?"
"Because I can?"
"And I can't tell anybody." Isabeau nodded, as if that was obvious. "Without
you telling them about me . .
." Her voice was thoughtful.
"So Hassan doesn't know?"
"Hassan!" Raf could almost taste her irritation. "Oh, Hassan wants to marry
me, all right. So he can get his hands on my quarter of the café." It took a
second for Raf to work out that Isabeau meant the smoky tunnel in Souk El
Katcherine where he'd first met Idries. "That won't be happening . . ."
"You already have a lover?"
The broken window was instantly back. The room inside darker than ever. As
black as those places where the fox hid. In the days before Raf finally
accepted that the fox was him.
"Okay," Raf said. "No lover."
"No," Isabeau agreed. On the far side of the bridge the camera crew began
packing equipment into a white van, faces relieved; and both the actresses now
sat in an old green Lincoln that waited to pull out into traffic, watched by a
crowd of schoolchildren.
"What about you?" Isabeau asked, her eyes never leaving the car.
What indeed. Any answer Raf might be prepared to give was aborted by a sudden
buzz from Isabeau's bag.
"It's me," she said, having reached for a cheap cell phone. "What?"
The answer froze Isabeau's expression. One second, she was watching a distant
schoolgirl with bare legs and checked dress; the next blood drained from
Isabeau's cheeks and her mouth went slack. Spiralling adrenergic hormones.
Textbook shock.
She turned off the Nokia without saying another word.
"I have to go." Eyes unfocused.
"Go where?" said Raf. And when Isabeau didn't answer he reached forward to
take the cell phone from unresisting fingers and put it back in her bag.
Without thinking he also wiped a fingertip of sweat from her forehead and
absentmindedly licked it.
Shocked and scared
, the Raf inside Raf decided, been there/done that/probably about to do it
again.
"You in trouble?" Stupid question really.
"I have to go." Metal scraped on concrete as Isabeau pushed back her chair and
three tables away people winced. "My brother, Pascal . . ."
"I'll come with you," said Raf.
She shook her head.
Raf sighed. "Whatever it is," he said. "I can help. And if you're really in
trouble, then a couple is less easy to spot than a single girl in a city like
this." His nod took in the café crowd and the busy sidewalk on the other side
of the bridge.
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"How can I trust you?" Isabeau demanded. "And how do I know you are who you
say you are?"
"You don't," said Raf. "And I'm not." He tossed some change onto their table
for the waiter and gripped
Isabeau's hand, refusing to let her pull free. "Smile as you walk away," Raf
ordered, and Isabeau's face twisted in misery.
Halfway across the little bridge he made her stop to watch a waterbird swim
beneath their feet, take a last look round the lake and then stroll arm in arm
with him towards the gates. On the way out, Raf bought a loose bag of cookies
from a stall. They were sweet to the point of sickness and warm from being on
display.
CHAPTER 23
_____________
Wednesday 23rd February
"I wonder if you could help . . ." Hani's voice was polite but firm. As if she
regularly wandered alone as evening fell, trawling expensive Italian boutiques
on Rue Faransa, a street once famous for its Victorian brothels and opium
dens.
"A dress?" Returning Hani's demand with a question was all the sticklike owner
could manage. Backed up inside Madame Fitmah's head were certainly a dozen
other, infinitely more important questions, starting with how was this child
planning to pay and ending with what should she, Madame Fitmah, call the small
girl since madame was obviously out of the question?
"I've got cash," said Hani, yanking a roll of dollars from her fleece pocket.
"And you can call me mademoiselle
." She grinned at Madame Fitmah's blossoming shock and nodded towards an
antique brass till inlaid with silver and bronze, although the mechanism was
strictly electronic. "You glanced at that," Hani explained, "then you looked
at me and seemed puzzled."
"Mademoiselle?"
Hani nodded. "And I've got cash," she stressed, holding out the roll of US
dollars, but still the woman looked doubtful.
El Isk was, by the standards of North Africa, surprisingly liberal in its
approach to life. In part this was due to its status as a freeport and, in
part, to the fact that liberalism had been General Koenig Pasha's only defence
against creeping fundamentalism. True, a woman still couldn't inherit
property, hold a job without the consent of her father or husband, drive alone
on Fridays or initiate a divorce; but she could own a credit card and was
liable for any debt she incurred. Unlike, say, Riyadh or Algiers, where all a
man had to do was repudiate his wife's right to incur debt and no court would
enforce an order.
Children were different, obviously enough. In Iskandryia, boys were considered
responsible from the age of fourteen; for girls the age was twenty-one.
Although where marriage was concerned the differential reversed. Then the
legal age was fourteen for the girl and sixteen for a boy.
Even if Hani had possessed a credit card, Madame Fitmah would have been
unwilling to sell her anything without an adult present to countersign the
slip. Cash on the other hand . . .
"What kind of dress?"
"Gold," said Hani. "Thin as the wings of a Great Admiral butterfly, with
pearls around the neck and sleeves seeded with emeralds."
"I'm not sure we've . . ." The Italian woman looked round at steel shelves
lining her haut minimaliste boutique. A shop space taller than it was wide.
And when she shrugged apologetically her scarlet
Versace dress creased at the shoulders. "I doubt if anyone's ever . . ."
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Hani sighed and the gown that Scheherazade wore on the last of her one
thousand and one nights crumbled in her imagination and was gone.
"Show me what you've got," said Hani and sounded so like Zara that she tagged
on a hurried please
, before climbing onto a chrome-and-glass chair to position herself so that
she stared at a red flower painted on the far wall, her spine rigid and legs
bent at the knee. A move that would do more than cash could to convince Madame
Fitmah the child belonged in her boutique.
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