SHAIKH-DOWN
“Witty, entertaining, raunchy and very well written”
Peter O’Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise
Copyright © David Gee
Smashwords Edition
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David Gee
Originally earmarked for the Methodist Mission Field, David Gee discovered that ‘the missionary position’ didn’t suit him. He has worked in London and the Middle East as a teacher and journalist. He now lives on the south coast of England with Sadie and Sophie (who appear in the novel), two mongrels salvaged from a date plantation in Bahrain.
Lines from The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs (Allen Lane, 1979, translation copyright © Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, 1979), reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Cover illustration by Earl Hyde
To Sheila, Susan and Mary
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a novel. Only the dogs are real.
Oh, and the cat.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Death of a Newspaper-Owner
Chapter 11: Missionary Position
Epilogue: The Road to Damascus
The extreme unimportance of the events
in the interior of the Emirates
cannot be exaggerated.
John G. Lorimer
Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf
(1908)
‘Oh Shaikh, I am what you say,
Are you what you seem?’
Omar Khayyam (c.1100)
PROLOGUE
Death of a Newspaper-Owner
Seek for wine, girls and music.
Omar Khayyam
Sodden with whisky and fresh from a belly-dancer’s elastic embrace, Farouk Bahzoomi drove home to his wife in the middle of a mid-September night.
Fifty-two years old, Farouk was a figure of some minor significance in one of the Arab world’s most insignificant states. He owned and edited Al-Khabar, the national daily newspaper of the island of Belaj; he also owned the weekly English-language Belaj Gazette. His neglected wife was a niece of the emirate’s ruler.
The belly-dancer’s name was Leila. A dusky twenty-year-old from Cairo, she worked for Mrs Fadilah, a fellow Egyptian of indeterminate age who operated the island’s only ‘house of toleration’. To the music of two finger-drummers and one player of the oud (a plangent Arab version of the lyre or balalaika), Leila undulated up and down her mistress’s Kashmiri-carpeted salon, whirling the tassels adhered by sorcery to her pomegranate breasts.
Seated on mattresses against the walls, the punters (all Arabs and mostly local) competed for her favours by tucking bank notes of increasing value into the waistband of her golden G-string. Tonight Farouk made what his rivals conceded as the winning bid for Leila’s services when he folded three 1,000-dirham notes (each worth a little over £200) into the taut gold cord.
Leila went to sit beside him on the mattress and they polished off a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label before retiring to a more private mattress in another room. Here, after brief but intensive exertion on Leila’s part and for a total outlay roughly equivalent to the monthly wages of his entire Asian printing staff, Farouk precipitately splashed her mahogany loins.
This might not strike you, O Gentile reader, as - you will pardon the pun - a very satisfactory outcome, but it was a sated as well as a thoroughly sozzled Farouk Bahzoomi who weaved his way home in his treasured and much dented Rolls Royce Continental from Mrs Fadilah’s box-like villa behind the British Club to the eclectically designed house his dowry had purchased in Medina Khaled, Belaj City’s poshest suburb. Parking haphazardly outside the high rendered walls, Farouk left the headlights on full beam as he lurched out into the humid night air and tottered over to the wrought-iron gates.
He didn’t know it but he was about to pay for his manifold sins and, in the process, catalyse a chain of events with repercussions beyond the shores of this tiny island. More immediately and of only incidental relevance, he would make the front page of both his newspapers.
Death stood waiting in the shadow of Farouk’s mock-Crusader walls. Death stepped into the headlight beam and touched him on the shoulder as he fumbled at his Moorish-Gothic gates. Farouk turned with a gasp and stared into the face of Death, a plump and buck-toothed face framed in a white headdress. Unlike Farouk’s, Death’s long white robe was spotless and leather-belted at the waist.
‘Peace upon you, Farouk bin Abdul Bahzoomi,’ Death addressed him formally.
‘And upon you also, noble stranger,’ Farouk replied in the same vein. Belching, he tasted sour forbidden whisky in his throat. ‘Praise God,’ he beg-pardoned. ‘But you are not a stranger. I know you. Your name is –’
‘Death.’
Farouk gasped again and took two steps backward until his fat bottom came up against the silver-plated grille of his cherished Rolls Royce. ‘How can this be?’ he stammered. ‘Surely your name is -’
‘My name is Death,’ the other insisted. ‘You think you know me because one summer in my ignorant youth I bound the bales of that corrupted wood pulp wherein you fawn upon the usurpers of this island and their allies in the lands of the Great Satan. Then I was Hassan, but tonight I am Death to you, Farouk bin Abdul Bahzoomi, you blaspheming whoreson spawn of a buggerer of sheep and camels.’ Arabic is a majestic language in which to flatter or to revile.
On Sunset Boulevard and on Piccadilly, driving, as tonight, under the influence, Farouk had been called ‘dickhead’ and ‘wanker’ by other motorists and had accepted the epithets as his due. But now he quivered with outrage as well as with fear.
‘How dare you address me in this profane calumnious fashion?’ he spluttered, clinging to his dignity.
‘I address you thus because you are a propagator of cringing putrid falsehoods and a kisser of the fundaments of those who pollute the land of my blessed forebears.’
‘On the contrary, I am -’
But Death did not wait on Farouk’s expostulations. ‘Go now,’ said Death, and from a scabbard at his waist he unsheathed a knife with a short curved blade like a scimitar and plunged it into Farouk’s broad chest.
‘Allaaaah!’ cried Farouk, as if hoping to redeem decades of dissipation by calling on his Maker even as he was dispatched into his Maker’s presence. In a last mindless act of lechery he clutched the semi-nude silver nymph on top of the car’s radiator; then his chubby fingers lost their hold and he slid to the compacted sand that was the topsoil of his driveway.
Death - or Hassan, to call him by his discarded name - bent down and retrieved his khanjar from the chest of Farouk Bahzoomi, wiped it on the dead man’s robe and replaced it in its scabbard. Then taking the flowing corners of his headdress, he knotted it into a washerwoman’s bundle on top of his head before climbing onto his motorcycle which was parked a few yards away, where the kerb would be if Medina Khaled boasted kerbs and pavements.
‘It begins,’ he murmured to himself. ‘There will be more. Insh’Allah.’ If God wills.
His night’s work completed, Death - Hassan - roared off into the humid darkness.
PART ONE
(Hello: welcome)
Here we are with . . . this broken-down corner.
Omar Khayyam
CHAPTER ONE
In-flight
2,000 kilometres to the northwest, ten and a half kilometres above sea level (and the level of Farouk Bahzoomi’s blood-soaked driveway), a Belaj Air 737, flight number BJ027, whispered south-eastward through the indigo night sky. Many of those on board would be engaged to a greater or lesser degree in the events set in motion by Farouk’s Shakespearean demise.
Monitored by a bleary-eyed Belaji first officer, the autopilot was in control of the plane. The captain, Doug Richards, an English expatriate with twenty years flying experience, was squeezed into one of the First Class toilets behind the flight deck in the company of a senior stewardess named Monica, a thirty-something brunette. (Monica, soon to run off to Canada with a divorced oil-rig diver, will play no further part in our story but this is not the last we shall see of Captain Richards.)
Erect in both senses, the captain stood between Monica’s cellulite thighs in the cramped toilet. His uniform trousers and BHS boxer shorts were concertinaed at his ankles. Monica’s Calvin Klein bikini pants lay crumpled on the floor. Her feet, in airline-issue low-heeled shoes, rested against the bulkhead just below the ceiling. Her buttocks overflowed the tiny hand basin; the soap dispenser was digging uncomfortably into her waist. As she lifted herself into a less painful position, unthinkingly hastening the captain’s gasping ejaculation into a Durex Fetherlite, the aircraft hit a pocket of turbulence.
The captain, his latex-sheathed organ providing a fulcrum for most of Monica’s nine stone eleven, lurched backwards and sideways and slammed into the door, whose lock promptly gave way. Borne down by the weight of his partner, Doug Richards fell through the opening door and landed on his back in the narrow aisle. His head thumped with concussing force into the door of the vacant opposite toilet.
‘Chrrrist!’ he yelled, fighting unconsciousness.
Monica, now straddling in a herniating embrace the one part of him that was still vertical, experienced the most intense orgasm of her closer-to-forty-than-she-cared-to-admit years.
‘Jeeesus!’ she cried through clenched teeth.
In the front row of First Class a male head, white-shrouded and crowned with a twist of black braiding, turned at the sound of a loud thud followed by invocations to the Christian Messiah who is known to Muslims as the Prophet Issa. Aisle curtains and an untended galley obstructed Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed al-Khazi’s view of the pagan spectacle.
The engineer, another British expat, opened the flight deck door. His mouth also opened and could be expected to reopen often in the hours and days ahead. Doug Richards’s belated induction into the Mile-High Club would become part of the legend of Belaj Air.
The only other passenger in First Class, seated three rows behind Shaikh Ibrahim, vaguely registered the commotion at the front of the aircraft, but Tariq Bahzoomi, nephew of the newly deceased newspaper-owner, had other things on his mind. Dressed in a grey Armani business suit, Tariq, already running to the family flab at thirty-three, was trying to get his rocks off at 35,000 feet. This idea had obsessed him since he first saw the movie Rich and Famous on TCM.
‘Come on, darling,’ he urged the shapely brunette in the next seat. ‘Just some head will do.’ Tariq prided himself on his command of English.
‘I can’t,’ the girl said. ‘If we’re caught, I’ll lose my job.’
‘Job, schmob. I’ll get you a job with one of my dad’s outfits.’
‘I’ve got my future to think of.’
‘Future, schmuture.’ Tariq was beginning to overdo the showbiz Yiddish. ‘Don’t you want to join the Mile-High Club, Bettina?’
Bettina shrugged inside her green-and-orange Belaj Air uniform blouse. ‘Not here, not now,’ she admitted.
‘If not here, where, for Christ’s sake?’
Bettina wondered if this was the time to tell him that she’d been initiated into the Mile-High Club last year in a Business Class toilet by an Italian structural engineer. Probably not, she decided. The Italian, married of course, had been a hunk but the experience was a shade less glamorous than in Rich and Famous. Jacqueline Bisset isn’t seen to have bruised her hip on the tap fitting or to have lost a pair of Janet Reger panties down the loo; nor, at least not on the sound track, does her bottom come out of the sink with a plop like breaking jelly.
Bettina had been Tariq Bahzoomi’s girlfriend for the past four months. Half an hour ago he’d bought her a $2,000 Piaget watch from the duty-free selection, an investment on which he now seemed to expect a quick return.
Receiving no answer to his question, Tariq sighed and said, ‘OK, make it a quick hand-job.’ And he pulled her diamond-watch-wristed hand towards the bulge disfiguring the pelvis of his Armani suit. Bettina tweaked the top of the protrusion firmly between her thumb and forefinger, a stratagem her sister had picked up at self-defence classes. The bulge subsided dramatically.
‘Jesus H. Christ,’ bellowed Tariq, his Harvard Business School English not letting him down under pressure.
In the front row Shaikh Ibrahim’s head swivelled through almost 180 degrees at this third summons to the Prophet Issa which was neither entirely appropriate nor entirely inappropriate in an aircraft whose flight path included the sand-swept lava plateau between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He glared across the empty seats at his brother-in-law’s nephew, a useless playboy whose presence on the flight he had acknowledged with no more than a brief nod when they boarded.
Among several posts in which Ibrahim bin Sayed served his uncle the Amir of Belaj he was the island’s Commandant of Traffic Police. His sister Nayla was, though she didn’t know it yet, the widow of Farouk Bahzoomi.
These persistent blasphemous exclamations were interrupting a near-sacrilegious train of thought in the mind of Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed al-Khazi. He had been fantasising about the houris, the ‘chastely amorous’ wenches with which the Muslim Paradise promises to be liberally staffed. Ibrahim wanted them all to be built like another of BJ027’s stewardesses, a platinum blonde whose breasts were simply mega (Arabic is untypically deficient in this connoisseur area, and Tariq wasn’t the only Belaji with a command of English idiom); her breasts were ‘yummy’ and ‘scrummy’ and totally edible.
Some men are leg men, some are arse men. Ibrahim was a major-league boob man. His very personal video collection (he was also Head of Customs: all sorts of goodies came his way) included the complete works of Russ Meyer and Dolly Parton. He liked breasts that were prominent – let’s face it, he liked them big – but he preferred them to look natural, unaugmented. On his last night in the Hyde Park Hilton he had discovered a bizarre reality TV show, set on a much lusher island than Belaj; a girl with the enticing name of Abi Titmuss had displaced Marilyn Monroe at the top of Ibrahim’s tit-parade.
‘Is there anything I can get you, Shaikh Ibrahim?’ Bettina enquired as she made a detour past his seat en route from her wounded lover to the Business Class section. Ibrahim briefly pondered several replies he could make to this query.
‘No, thank you very much.’ His voice was guttural.
‘You’re welcome.’ Bettina’s mouth, lipsticked by Estée Lauder, parted in a polite but not perfunctory smile, and she moved on. The Commandant of Traffic Police and Head of Customs, who had chain-smoked throughout the flight, lit another cigarette and returned to his reverie of the Gardens of Paradise.
The object of Ibrahim’s mental dalliance was called Sammy-Jo-Ann and known, conveniently, as Sam. She was 28 (the same age as her new admirer) and she hailed from Pittsburgh: almost Dolly Parton territory.
While the Economy passengers were sleeping or watching the movie and the First Class passengers were variously tumescing or detumescing, Sam was sitting with her feet up in the rear of the untenanted Business Section. Next to her was Janice, another Economy stewardess whom airline grooming had not rescued from plainness.
Bettina joined them, plumping herself down in the seat across the starboard aisle from Sam.
‘Men are vile,’ she announced. Sam was quick to agree:
‘Honey, if I got all the men in my life into a herd, I’d have me a hog farm bigger than any in Kentucky!’
‘My Colin isn’t vile,’ protested Janice, who never missed a chance to sing the praises of this paragon.
‘We all know your Colin is the Prince Charmin’ of Twat-ford.’
‘Watford.’
‘Whatever. Who’s gotten you mad, honey?’ Sam asked Bettina. ‘Did that Shaikh person get fresh? When I took him a hot towel after dinner he had a hard-on inside that shirt thing they wear like a log goin’ over Niagara Falls.’ As she laughed, the buttons of her green-and-orange blouse strained against the thrust of their cantilevered contents in a way that the ‘Shaikh person’ would particularly have savoured.
‘It’s not him. It’s that foul Tariq. He was trying to get me to - you know - do things in First Class.’
Janice looked shocked. Sam did not. ‘The Mile High Club! Go for it, Bettina.’
Bettina smirked. ‘I already did. A year ago.’
‘In the john?’ Bettina nodded. Sam’s breasts went into overdrive as she shuddered with laughter. ‘Did your ass come outta the sink with a noise like a wet fart?’ The way she said the last word was onomatopoeic. Janice shuddered, but not with laughter. Bettina shook her head.
‘Nothing like that. It was pure magic. Just like in the movie.’
‘The one with Jackie Bisset? Well, the guy I screwed on a flight out of Houston -’ Janice winced - ‘I had bruises right up my spine and my snatch was sore for a week!’ Sam laughed some more. If Ibrahim knew what he was missing.
Janice’s pursed lips now resembled a clenched anus. Bettina put a hand over her own mouth to hide another smirk and Sam noticed the glittering watch on her wrist. ‘Is that new?’
‘Tariq bought it for me tonight.’
‘No wonder he wanted you to do some stuff! Well, who’s a lucky girl? Nobody ever gave me a diamond watch.’
‘I’ve got three of them,’ said Bettina, looking smug.
‘Yes, but look what you have to do to get them,’ Janice contributed. Bettina’s mouth opened, but Sam got in first:
‘Go piss up a rope, Janice. She doesn’t do anythin’ you don’t do with your precious Colin for a Big Mac and a seat at the movies. Grab it while it’s goin’, Bettina. Best I ever got was a pair of earrings off a PanAm captain one time. Oh yes -’ more laughter, more strain on her buttons - ‘and a ground engineer at Houston gave me crabs!’
A female passenger lay stretched across the four centre seats in the front row of Economy behind the partition separating it from Business Class. Headphoneless, not watching the flickering screen above her, she seemed to be asleep. In fact she was awake and listening to the conversation on the other side of the partition.
Cass McBride had been to Belaj before, for holidays. Her brother was the editor of the Belaj Gazette. But this time Cass wasn’t coming on holiday. She was running away. She didn’t know what the future held in store for her (and wouldn’t have believed it if she did). So far - it was only (she kept looking at her watch) six hours since she’d left Walthamstow - she didn’t feel unduly bothered. What she mainly felt was free.
The loose-fitting tracksuit she wore for in-flight comfort (and modesty in strait-laced Belaj) gave little hint of the figure it contained. Her hair was light brown with ash highlights, and at forty-four she still had the clear complexion of her Highland childhood. She could have claimed to be thirty-eight (not that she did) and got away with it.
She envied the stewardesses. Not the mousy one with the boyfriend in wherever Twatford was and a voice that was inaudible over the engine noise. But she envied the pretty brunette who seemed to have met a lot of generous rich men and she even envied the platinum blonde with the overlarge bust who sounded as if she’d enjoyed, in her earthy way, putting herself about quite a bit.
Cass hadn’t put herself about much. Cass hadn’t put herself about at all. Her husband had never given her a diamond watch, and she doubted that he’d ever given one to any of his girlfriends. He’d also managed not to give her crabs, for which, she thought with a grim smile, she ought perhaps to be grateful.
Never mind all that, she told herself: you’re free now. Things are going to change.
No, they’re not, another part of her mind whispered. It’s too late for change. This whisper was, almost, her mother’s voice. Your goose was cooked a long time ago, my girl.
Go and piss on a rope, she told this voice, blushing as she permitted herself to think in the same crude terms as the foul-mouthed blonde stewardess.
‘Back to the galley, slaves,’ urged the chief steward, cracking an imaginary whip down the Business Class aisle at the chattering trio in the back row.
‘It’s too soon to start breakfasts,’ protested Bettina. ‘The movie won’t finish for another half an hour.’
‘Hardly anyone’s watching it anyway,’ Janice put in.
‘Why do they cut so much out of them?’ asked Sam. ‘Myself, I like to see plenty of bedroom action.’
‘I could give you all the bedroom action you can handle,’ the chief steward told her. ‘Make you a very rich girl, too. The bigger the boobs, the bigger the bucks.’ A short tubby man in his mid-forties with cropped grey hair, his name was Felix ffrench; he always stammered the double consonant - ‘f-french’ - and got very cross if his surname was spelt with a single capital ‘F’. He operated a lucrative sideline that made him a rival of Belaj’s Mrs Fadilah, although the girls who worked for Felix were rarely called on for any belly-dancing. Sam had so far resisted conscription.
‘Sorry, honey,’ she told him now. ‘There’s no way I could turn tricks for money. I don’t mind screwin’ creeps but I have to believe in the creeps I’m screwin’.’ Janice winced again. Bettina smiled (as, on the other side of the partition, did Cass McBride).
‘Well,’ Felix riposted, ‘that’s one hell of a creep you’re screwing these days.’
‘Blow it out your ass, Felix.’
Felix cracked his invisible whip again. ‘Back to work, you idle scrubbers.’
‘Who you calling a scrubber, you bloody poofter?’ Janice revealed a rarely seen streak of belligerence. It was unwise to take on Felix ffrench at verbal abuse.
‘Who are you calling a poofter, you scrawny ugly cow?’
‘Now-now, ladies,’ Bettina intervened. ‘Remember we like to run a happy ship.’ In his pre-flight cabin crew briefing Felix always made reference to ‘a happy ship’. Now he screwed his mouth into a moue.
‘Send Dawn and Melissa up here,’ he told Bettina. ‘They can put their feet up for ten minutes before breakfast.’
‘I heard it was their legs they like to get up!’ Sam cackled at her own joke, then pretended to cower as Felix raised his whip arm.
Now 1,450 kilometres to the south-east of Belaj Air flight 027, the body of Farouk Bahzoomi had been discovered. The Pakistani gardener, who lived in a shed in the grounds, went to investigate the unremitting glare of headlights through the gates and saw his master crumpled in a puddle of blood beside his imperial, not to say imperialist, Rolls Royce.
‘Aiyee!’ screamed the gardener and ran to hammer on the door of one of the cubicle-sized rooms which housed the domestic staff above the garage. A bleary-eyed Indian houseboy emerged clad only in a sarong; he could make no sense of the gardener’s babbling in the Pashto language of the North-West Frontier. Seizing the houseboy by one arm, the gardener dragged him downstairs and over to the gates.
‘Aiyee!’ screamed the houseboy and ran into the main house via the kitchen door. Upstairs a Filipina maid slept on a mattress on the floor outside her mistress’s bedroom. The boy knelt and shook her awake. The domestic staff used pidgin English to overcome the language barrier, but violent death was not in the maid’s vocabulary. Copying the gardener’s example, the houseboy dragged the girl in her crumpled nightdress over to a hall window overlooking the entrance. The gardener had opened the gates and was intoning prayers over the plump sprawl of Farouk’s body.
‘Aiyee!’ screamed the maid and ran back to the bedroom door, which she flung open. The houseboy hung back for fear of glimpsing his mistress in a state of dishabille. Actually Nayla Bahzoomi slept in what in Egypt constituted male daywear, a striped dishdasha in heavy cotton that provided insulation against the overcool central air-conditioning. Farouk had not approved of his wife’s mannish night attire which he’d only infrequently seen removed.
The maid’s screams woke Nayla before the girl could reach her and when the girl did reach her, still screaming, Nayla sat up and slapped her, not too harshly, across the face. The screaming subsided into sobs. The houseboy appeared, tentatively, in the doorway, his head lowered.
‘Excuse me, Madam,’ he began hesitantly.
‘What’s the matter?’ Nayla demanded. Her English was near perfect and accentless. ‘Look at me when you speak to me.’ The boy raised his head.
‘Madam, they have killed Sir,’ he blurted.
‘Who has? Where?’
‘I don’t know, Madam. Outside the gate, Madam,’ he took care to answer each of her questions.
‘Show me,’ his mistress ordered. The half-naked boy entered the room and she allowed him to lead her to a window. Nayla was tall, olive-skinned, voluptuous, at twenty-six two years younger than her brother Ibrahim and exactly half her husband’s age, a feminist intellectual in a society that tended to ignore women and mistrusted intellectuals.
She did not scream when she saw her husband lying like a beached porpoise on the dark-stained sand in the undimmed headlights of his ostentatious Rolls Royce (Nayla drove a discreet Mercedes coupé with smoked-glass windows). The gardener had been joined by the Moroccan cook and the Bengali laundrywoman who cohabited in the cubicle next to the houseboy’s. The multinational trio prayed and keened over the corpse of Farouk Bahzoomi.
‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Nayla demanded of the trembling boy beside her.
‘There is much blood, Madam.’
Nayla sighed, which the houseboy took for an upper-caste Arabic demonstration of controlled grief. But grief was not what the new widow felt. Her marriage had been arranged between her brother and the Bahzoomis, whose wealth was second only to that of the ruling al-Khazi clan. Nayla had despised her husband in life - his gambling and drinking, his belly-dancing whores, his newspapers that kissed the backside of her uncle the Amir - and she felt only relief at his passing, however brutal it seemed to have been.
Lifting a telephone from the table by the window she called the hospital to summon an ambulance. Next she started to punch her brother’s number before remembering that he was not yet back from unspecified business in the UK. After a moment’s pause for thought she tapped out the private number of her uncle the Amir.
Felix had been to check the VIP passenger in First Class. Shaikh Ibrahim, who was not one of Felix’s ‘clients’, slept with a beatific expression on his face and a hefty erection lifting the front of his robe like a tailor’s hand. The chief steward drooled.
Tariq Bahzoomi (who did avail himself of Felix’s services between regular girlfriends) was also sleeping, both hands over his crotch as if to soothe or protect it. The chief steward did not drool over Tariq. Felix liked his trade lean and mean, not dumpy and grumpy.
He returned to Business Class. A dazzling redhead in her early twenties and a brassy-looking thirty-plus blonde had commandeered the rear port-side seats. These were two of the dozen or so stewardesses who ‘moonlighted’ for Felix. The redhead’s name was Melissa, her background Surrey’s stockbroker belt. The blonde, a Cockney by birth and christened Debbie, called herself Dawn, the name she’d coined for her last job on the fourth floor of a tenement in King’s Cross. Unlike the majority of her Belaj Air colleagues, Dawn had had to tart herself down rather than up.
Felix perched on the arm of the aisle seat in front of them and leaned over its back. Dawn took advantage of their first break since Heathrow to report on last night’s business (Felix ran an international operation).
‘That Saudi prince at the ’yde Park ’ilton was a bit of a tosser,’ she grumbled. Belaj Air grooming had done nothing for the dropped aitches and glottal stops of Stepney Green. ‘He only give me a ’undred quid. I ’ad to ’elp me-self to another two ’undred off ’is wallet when ’e went to the toilet. D’you want your ’alf now?’
‘Later will do,’ said Felix. He opened his Filofax. ‘You know you’re doing Issa Bahzoomi this afternoon - at the Bonk-house?’ The Bonk-house was Bahzoomi Mansions, a block of service apartments owned by Tariq’s father which the men of the family, other wealthy locals and visitors from the mainland used for assignations with Felix’s girls and those who worked for Mrs Fadilah.
Dawn made a face. ‘I ’ate Issa. ‘He’s an old fart.’ She laughed. ‘He’s old and ’e farts.’
‘Never mind his wind,’ said Felix; ‘you’ve done it in worse weather in fish-shop doorways!’ He enjoyed reminding Dawn of her previous life, but it was a fact that none of his girls expected to be paid less than £250 for services which only two years ago Dawn had rendered for as little as £35 a time.
He took another look at his Filofax. ‘Tonight you’re seeing -’ he lowered his voice - ‘Shaikh Nasser, at the beach palace. His driver will pick you up at eight-thirty.’
One of Felix’s best customers, Shaikh Nasser was Minister of the Interior, the Amir’s second son and his heir in the event of any misfortune befalling the enormously fat Crown Prince who was at some risk of succumbing to overindulgence or sheer inertia.
‘Nasser’s a bit of all right,’ said Dawn. ‘He’s promised me a Mercedes next month.’
‘Has he now,’ Felix said thoughtfully. He preferred his girls to receive only cash, from which his percentage was easier to extract. He turned to Melissa. ‘You’re doing Shaikh Mubarak from the National Bank. At the Bonk-house. You can borrow Tallulah.’ Tallulah was Felix’s Toyota.
‘Shaikh Mubarak’s nice,’ said Melissa. ‘Tubby and cuddly. A bit like you, dahling. Perhaps even cuddlier.’ Elocution lessons in her teens had given Melissa a cut-glass Belgravia accent which was disconcerting to airline passengers and sometimes put her other clients completely off their stroke.
Felix acknowledged her teasing with an indulgent smile. Noting an entry in his Filofax, his eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t forget he still owes us for last time.’
‘Dahling, you know I’m hopeless on the money side. You remind him.’
‘Put ’im over to me,’ Dawn volunteered. ‘Nobody shags me on tick. Strictly cash up front, that’s me.’
‘And for a little bit extra, up the back too!’ As had Sam earlier, Felix cackled at his own crude humour. Dawn grinned cheerfully, ever tolerant of jokes at her expense. Melissa, to whom sodomy in the line of duty was no laughing matter, smiled bleakly.
Like the previous conversation on the starboard side, this one was being monitored from the first row of Economy. Not by Cass McBride who had finally dozed off, but by her only neighbour, a slim dark-haired young man whose name was Eddy Lawrence.
When the movie began he’d moved to a vacant seat two rows back for a better view of the screen. Stringent Arab censorship had shorn the film, an American adult thriller, of sense as well as sensation. After fifteen minutes Eddy gave up and returned to his port-side window seat in the front row and tried to sleep, stretching his legs over the floor space of the empty seat next to him. A mixture of excitement and apprehension overcame his tiredness.
Like Cass McBride, Eddy felt he was running away to the Persian Gulf, although this was to over-dramatise his one-year secondment to the National Bank of Belaj. Eddy, who was nursing a broken heart, hoped he was not so much running from something as to something: some great new love or, failing that, a great adventure.
And now he listened, spellbound, to the conversation from behind the partition. All three had distinctive voices that easily carried over the engine noise, which had drowned the previous conversation involving the platinum-haired stewardess with the amazing boobs and the pikestaff-plain one who’d served Eddy his dinner.
Before take-off Eddy had been given what he recognised as the ‘once-over’ by the chief steward as he made a head-count of passengers. Eavesdropping now on the chief steward’s briefing/debriefing of the glamorous redhead and the tarty blonde, Eddy almost hugged himself with glee. Two pickpocketing part-time hookers and their gay pimp! Only halfway to Belaj and already things were looking up.
In his first letter to his widowed mother, who’d taught generations of dusty piccaninnies to sing ‘I’m H-A-P-P-Y’ and ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam’, Eddy looked forward to informing her - with a degree of relish - that he had, barely three hours into his year of exile, fallen among thieves and harlots.
Eddy was not going to be disappointed. On the island of Belaj he - and Cass McBride, who in truth was neither Cass nor McBride - would find love and adventure. And Eddy was to contribute, in a small way and entirely unintentionally, to the downfall of Shaikh Khaled bin Khalifa al-Khazi, Amir and Prime Minister of Belaj.
‘This man must be found, and he must be found quickly.’
‘Does Your Highness have a descrip-’
‘It is possible he has a motorcycle. My niece’s maid heard a motorcycle. Or this may be irrelevant. He may have a car, a bicycle or only his feet. He may have accomplices. In any case I want you to check all motorcyclist records.’
‘Your Highness can count on my depart-’
‘And I want men on every roundabout and at every major inter-section before sunrise.’
‘But, Highness, such a drain on manpow-’
‘Liaise with my sons. I have already spoken to them. They are putting the armed forces on full alert. Use every man you’ve got. Cancel all leave. No days off. No sick leave for anyone who can walk.’
‘But, Highness, I would need the authority of your Highness’s nephew to take such dras-’
‘You have my authority,’ the Amir lowered his voice to its coldest tone, sending shivers up the spine of the man at the other end of the line, an immigrant Palestinian who’d risen through the ranks of the Traffic Police to become Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed’s senior assistant. ‘Is that not good enough for you?’ the Amir added icily.
‘I beg Your Highness’s pardon if I gave the impress-’
‘I’m told that Ibrahim bin Sayed is on tonight’s flight from London. Send someone to meet him.’
‘I shall go myself to meet Your Highness’s most illustrious nephew.’ The Palestinian managed to complete a sentence for the first time. The Amir would have liked to tell him to cut the grovelling, but the endless grovelling kept everyone aware of the pecking order.
Shaikh Khaled bin Khalifa al-Khazi was the absolute (and, he would admit, absolutely feudal) ruler of this tiny emirate perched on the rim of the Gulf’s third largest oil field. The Commandant of Traffic Police was his favourite and most trusted nephew. Had Ibrahim been in Belaj the Amir would have called him even before speaking to his own sons. Ibrahim’s staff would be crucial in investigating the murder of ‘the Crawler’, as the late Farouk Bahzoomi had been widely known. Traffic cops in Belaj had powers far beyond the enforcing of speed limits and breathalyser tests.
‘Tell your men to report anything suspicious,’ the Amir said now. ‘Do not tell them about the death of the Crawler. We don’t want to make people nervous. Officially he will have died of natural causes. Political murders do not happen in my country.’
‘Perhaps it was not a political murder, Highness,’ the Palestinian ventured.
‘What else could it be?’
‘I don’t know, Highness. A sex-crime?’
‘The Crawler was married to my niece.’ A yet more dangerous edge entered the Amir’s voice. ‘You think my niece has a lover and he killed her husband?’
‘M-maybe there was a m-m-mistress.’ the Palestinian stammered nervously. The Amir responded with a short barking laugh.
‘The Crawler got his sex at the house of Mrs Fadilah. You think Mrs Fadilah would assassinate one of her best customers?’
‘I don’t know what to think, Highness,’ the other man confessed.
A sneer entered the Amir’s voice as he said, ‘The Crawler died because he was the Crawler. This is the work of those subversives who want my country to be ruled, like Iran, by mullahs or, like Turkey and the USA, by the democratic vote of the people. We must find these subversives quickly. I want their guts for garters.’
Shaikh Khaled bin Khalifa al-Khazi did not say ‘I want their guts for garters’. What he said in Arabic is impossible - and too terrible - to translate into English. At the other end of the line his nephew’s assistant shivered in his warm bed beside his snoring wife.
CHAPTER TWO
Well Come
High above Saudi Arabia’s Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, flight BJ027 continued to soar eastward. Dawn’s saffron fingers streaked the sky on the far horizon as, at the rear of the flight deck, stirring sugar into black coffees for the pilot and co-pilot, Monica’s crimson nails flashed.
In First Class Tariq Bahzoomi breakfasted on smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and champagne, served by Bettina who was anxious to make up for the groin injury she’d inflicted earlier. Shaikh Ibrahim, waited on by Felix, breakfasted on orange juice and five Marlboros. The chief steward’s hovering presence dispelled Ibrahim’s priapic fantasy.
Not so in Economy. Eddy Lawrence was one of several passengers grateful for the camouflage afforded by their tray tables as they peered into the dizzying depths of Sam’s cleavage when she lowered trays over their aching laps.
‘Hot towel, honey?’ His dream partner interrupted the daydream into which he’d wandered. If she stood over him much longer Eddy felt he would need to clean himself in the crotch area rather than the face and hands.
‘Thanks,’ he mumbled.
‘You’re welcome, I’m sure.’ Sam leaned over Eddy’s neighbour who had slept through breakfast and was just beginning to stir. ‘Hot towel, ma’am?’
The woman who called herself Cass McBride sat up and smiled at the busty blonde who’d put herself about a bit. ‘Thank you,’ she yawned.
‘You’re welcome, ma’am.’ Cass - and other passengers in aisle seats - watched Sam’s bottom as she undulated through the now open curtain into Business Class and the one still closed into First Class.
Eddy looked out of his window as the 737 began to lose height. The dark rugged landscape below resembled the Moon, devoid of life or habitation. Then there were two distinct shades of black as the plane descended over a coast; a flash of colour on the water where an oil rig brandished the blazing torch of its surplus gases. For a moment as the plane banked he glimpsed a string of pearls that must be the lights on the four-lane causeway lassoing Belaj to mainland Arabia’s north-eastern tip; then the wing rose and blocked his view as the aircraft levelled. The PA system hissed into life and Felix ffrench launched into his penultimate spiel:
‘Your Excellency, ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing at Shaikh Khaled International Airport -’
Eddy’s pulse quickened: his adventure was beginning.
Cass’s pulse steadied: she’d reached sanctuary.
‘Your Excellency, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Belaj. Local time is 4.14. The temperature is 25 degrees Celsius. Humidity is 98 point 5. Please remain seated until the aircraft -’
The whine of the engines decelerating from their burst of reverse thrust drowned the rest of Felix’s farewell broadcast. Cass converted the temperature into Fahrenheit: 76? 77? - a welcome improvement on London’s autumnal 53˚. Eddy wondered what 98.5 humidity would feel like. The view from his window now was of tarmac, a floodlit fence topped by razor-wire, a dual-carriageway road, also floodlit, and then the airport terminal, domes and cubes of white concrete and glass, dazzlingly illuminated inside and outside.
No sooner was the door opened into the concertinaed passenger tunnel, than Shaikh Ibrahim’s senior assistant rushed onboard. Brushing past Felix and Bettina, he darted over to where his boss, in defiance of safety regulations, sat lighting another Marlboro. Dispensing with the customary formal salutations, the Palestinian blurted:
‘Excellency, I bring bad news.’ Noticing the nephew of the assassinated newspaper owner rummaging in the overhead baggage compartment two rows further back, he lowered his voice to an urgent whisper: ‘Farouk has been murdered.’
‘Farouk? What Farouk?’
‘The husband of Your Excellency’s beloved sister.’
‘The Crawler? Murdered? When? Where?’
‘In the night. Outside his house.’
‘W’Allah,’ Ibrahim exclaimed piously. ‘Does my uncle know of this?’ He didn’t specify which of his many uncles he meant: there was only one who counted.
‘It was His Highness Your Excellency’s illustrious uncle who telephoned me with this terrible news,’ the assistant replied with elaborate courtesy. ‘His Highness has declared a state of emergency.’
‘Why didn’t you radio the plane?’
‘The question of security, Excellency. There are those among the pork-eaters who listen to the airline frequencies - even in the middle of the night.’
Ibrahim, who as a student in London had developed a taste for his landlady’s Spam fritters (as well as a taste for her large pale breasts), acknowledged the wisdom of his underling’s decision with a nod. He rose to his feet. ‘Did you bring my car to the airport?’
‘I came in my own car, Excellency, because of the urgency. If Your Excellency will wait in the VIP lounge, I can telephone Your Excellency’s driver -’
‘No time for that. Where are you parked?’
The chief assistant looked sheepish. ‘I took the liberty of parking in the space reserved for Your Excel-’
‘Give me your car keys.’
‘But -’
‘Now.’ He snatched the keys. ‘See to my luggage.’ He walked swiftly off the plane, ignoring Bettina’s smile and Felix’s little speech about the ‘great honour’ etc.
The Palestinian was left to sort out the Commandant’s carry-on bags, a job more suited to an Asian minion. The senior assistant sighed, accustomed to such humiliations. He beckoned Bettina over to help him. Ibrahim’s hand luggage included a plastic bag from Marks & Spencer whose products, tainted with Zionism, were banned from the more ultraconservative Gulf states. The Shaikh was smuggling in two pairs of boxer shorts for himself and a modest cotton nightie for the mother of his seven children. A thorough search of his cases in the hold would disclose a more daring item of contraband, a DVD of The Seven-Year Itch to augment his Marilyn Monroe collection. But the Head of Customs was, obviously, immune from baggage searches.
Ibrahim’s sandals slapped on the marble floor as he strode through the terminal. Immigration and Customs officials hurried obsequiously forward and then fell back cowed by his grim expression. He acknowledged none of them.
Any lingering thoughts of platinum hair and Marilyn Monroe breasts had been driven from his mind by the news that his uncle’s enemies had dared to strike down his brother-in-law, a despised but useful backside-kisser. If they could kill this close to the throne, who was safe?
The interior of the terminal was, according to Ernest McBride, a notable example of ‘Bauhaus-Islamic’ architecture, with its domes and arches and tented ceilings in bleached pre-cast concrete.
‘Looks like the set for Kismet, doesn’t it?’ Cass suggested to the man behind her in the Immigration queue, the young man who’d sat in her row on BJ027.
‘I suppose it does,’ replied Eddy, who had no idea what she was talking about. At twenty-four his knowledge of musicals went not much further into antiquity than Saturday Night Fever.
‘How long have you been in Belaj?’
Eddy made a show of looking at his watch. ‘About four minutes,’ he said. Cass smiled.
‘Are you here to work or to visit?’
‘Work. The National Bank. Computers.’ He didn’t usually talk in shorthand, but suddenly he felt more exhausted than excited.
‘Is your boss Rupert Devonshire?’
‘Yes. D’you know him?’
‘Vaguely,’ said Cass. This was a lie. She could have told the young man a lot more about his boss, but it wouldn’t be very charitable to disabuse him in his first five minutes on the island. ‘He and my brother are both members of the Brit Club,’ she expanded her answer to include the beginnings of the truth.
‘The what club?’
‘The British Club. I’m sure your boss will take you there.’
‘I can hardly wait,’ Eddy said, also - and more blatantly - lying. Cass smiled again. The queue moved up and a uniformed Arab with movie-star looks flicked open Cass’s passport. Through the window of his steel-panelled booth he gave her a more than cursory inspection - she wasn’t young but she was female - before returning her passport with a leering smile which he switched off as Eddy stepped forward.
A picture of the Amir was pasted onto the glass wall at the back of the Immigration booth. Other likenesses, life-size and larger, full-length or head-and-shoulders, robed or in bemedalled uniform, graced the stark walls of the baggage and Customs area. Some were painted, some were blown-up photographs. Waiting by the carousel, wherever Eddy looked Shaikh Khaled bin Khalifa al-Khazi - like Big Brother (or God) - seemed to be watching him.
The Amir of Belaj was tall and thin, with a big hooked nose and big gleaming irregular teeth. With his bearded mouth closed he resembled one of the hunting falcons of which (according to the Visitor’s Guide Eddy’s new boss had sent him) he had the largest collection in the Gulf; mouth open, he looked more like a wolf.
Crew and First-Class luggage was the first to appear on the carousel. Bettina loaded her fake-Gucci suitcase onto a trolley on top of Tariq’s matched set of genuine Louis Vuitton. Many eyes monitored the contortions of Sam’s breasts as she hefted her J.C. Penney carpet bag onto a trolley shared with Janice’s nylon garment bag of nameless origin. Many eyes also monitored Sam’s undulating bottom as she trailed the rest of the crew into Customs. When she disappeared through the automatic doors to the concourse, a faint sigh whispered through the baggage area.
Across the carousel Cass watched Eddy watching Sam. Men, she thought succinctly, bitterly. Catching her watching him, Eddy guiltily returned his attention to the carousel’s rubber-flapped entrance as it began to disgorge Economy luggage.
Cass retrieved the unmatching pair of Matalan cases in which she had packed everything she considered worth salvaging from a 27-year marriage. Nobody stopped her as she pushed her trolley through the Nothing-to-Declare zone. Eddy wasn’t so lucky: another uniformed Arab, short and stocky with more hair on his forearms than on his uncapped head, rummaged through the small trunk containing clothing and a few mementos of the life Eddy was shelving for twelve months.
‘Sexy books?’ he asked; ‘porno videos?’ From his tone Eddy could not tell whether the Arab was looking for these items or offering them for sale. ‘No,’ he said.
He was expecting to be met by his new boss or someone from the National Bank, but there were few Europeans in the throng of white-robed men and masked black-clad women who flung themselves vociferously upon his fellow passengers as they emerged into the concourse; and no-one was holding a card with his name on it.
He moved towards the plate-glass wall facing the parking lot in time to see a magnificent sage-green Jaguar XJS pull up beside his neighbour from flight 027. A huge Doberman stuck its head out of the passenger window, opened its jaws to reveal a fearsome array of teeth and began frantically licking the woman’s face. The driver, a short white-haired man, got out and greeted his - sister? - with a perfunctory kiss on the cheek before stowing her bags in the Jaguar’s boot while she stood stroking the great dog’s head.
In the car park Bettina only avoided going home with Tariq by promising to meet him this evening when, she knew, she would have to sing for more than one supper. She granted him a kiss and a quick fumble inside her uniform jacket before driving off in the dusty maroon Honda Prelude a previous admirer had given her.
As soon as he was inside his own car, a white Rolls Royce Corniche, also filmed with dust after a week in the car park, Tariq punched his mother’s bedside number on the cellular phone. Even at 4.40 a.m. she would want to know that her precious thirty-three-year-old baby had survived the flight from London.
Like most Belaji women of her generation, Fatma Bahzoomi’s English was limited to ‘How much this?’ and other expressions essential for shopping on Fifth Avenue or Oxford Street, but her son liked to tease her by starting conversations in English.
‘Hi, Ma, how’s things?’ he began now. His mother answered by screaming (in Arabic, of course):
‘He’s gone to Paradise! God has claimed that man we all loved so much!’
For one moment, a sinful, delicious, guilty moment, Tariq assumed she was screaming about his father. Tariq was, in his own right, a dollar millionaire, but with his father dead he would assume the leadership of a hotel and real-estate empire worth many, many millions.
But Ma was not shrieking his father’s name. Ma wasn’t shrieking anybody’s name. His mother, pious and simple soul that she was, spoke only in euphemism:
‘That noble, saintly man -’
Noble? Saintly? This description hardly fitted ‘Pa’, as Tariq insisted on calling him. It didn’t fit anybody he knew.
‘So sad that God did not favour him with sons and daughters -’
There were no childless males in his mother’s family and aside from himself, still resisting the chains of matrimony, Tariq could only think of -
‘Your father’s lovely and most beloved brother -’
Holy shit, thought Tariq. ‘Holy shit!’ he said thoughtlessly, in English. ‘Do you mean Farouk?’ he demanded in Arabic. ‘Is Farouk dead?’
‘Murdered!’ his mother exclaimed with uncharacteristic brevity.
‘Murdered? Who would kill a miserable newspaper owner?’
Helga overflowed the narrow rear seat, rumbling with pleasure as Cass fondled her ears. She was 10 years old. Ernest McBride had inherited her from a Belaj Telephones couple who’d acquired her from an outgoing British Ambassador.
Ernest steered the Jaguar through a slalom course of abandoned trolleys. ‘So you’ve left the land of Zion,’ he said. Thirty-eight years after leaving the Highlands he still spoke with a faded Scots brogue. ‘Zion’ was a snide reference to the fact that his brother-in-law was a Jew. ‘Why now?’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re not telling me much.’
‘There’s not much to tell. Look -’ she removed her hand from Helga, who nuzzled her neck until she resumed the fondling - ‘let’s make a pact: I won’t ask you about Nancy and you won’t ask me about Aaron. Okay?’
Aaron was the husband Cass had left ten hours ago after twenty-seven years of marriage and, she suspected, twenty-six or more years of infidelity on his part. Nancy was the middle-aged widow whom Ernest, a bachelor into his late forties, had met and married during a UK holiday nine years ago. Nancy did not take to Dubai - or Kuwait or Belaj - and they opted for separate lives, Nancy breeding spaniels in Cornwall where Ernest spent Christmas and most of his summer vacation.
Now he patted his sister’s hand. ‘Okay, lassie, it’s a deal.’
Cass freed her hands from Helga’s head and fiddled with the sliding vent in front of her, directing the flow of chilled air into her face. As they reached the roundabout accessing the Outer Ring Road, a pair of police cars, sirens blaring, roared into the landscaped avenue leading back to the airport.
‘I think there was a VIP on my flight,’ Cass said. ‘Are those his escorts?’
‘If they are, they’ve missed him,’ her brother replied. ‘Ibrahim bin Sayed. He was driving out in a Nissan Patrol as I came in.’
‘Perhaps there’s been a revolution,’ Cass suggested.
Ernest chuckled at the idea of a revolution in Belaj. ‘More likely some poor bugger’s been caught with St Michael underwear or a naughty video in his bags,’ he said.
Eddy waited conspicuously by the glass wall and watched as the straggle of passengers and their kin squeezed themselves and their baggage into an assortment of mostly Japanese or American cars. A minibus passed the front of the terminal containing crew members who didn’t own cars or hadn’t parked them at the airport. Eddy got a last glimpse of the American stewardess, her platinum hair freed from the green-and-orange tarboosh she’d worn for disembarkation; there was seismic movement beneath her blouse as she swivelled to talk to the plain girl in the seat behind her.
While Eddy’s attention was focused on Sam, Felix, seated behind Janice, reappraised Eddy. The chief steward’s preference was for local rough trade in large sizes but he was not averse to the occasional drab reminder of what the queens back home were getting. The passenger from the front row of Economy was lean if not noticeably mean.
Felix was also under surveillance. ‘A bit scrawny for you, isn’t he, dahling?’ said Melissa from the back row.
‘The sweetest meat is closest to the bone,’ Felix quoted. ‘But I don’t make passes at boys who wear glasses.’ Eddy had removed his contact lenses after breakfast.
‘Gawd, I feel shagged,’ said Dawn from the seat next to Melissa, apropos of nothing.
‘What else is new?’ Felix retorted. The minibus driver waited for two wailing police cars to screech to a halt in front of the terminal before he pulled out onto the exit road. Four uniformed men hurried through the nearest airlock entrance. No one on the bus paid them any heed. Although Belaj, like other states with amputation as one of the lesser punishments in their penal code, was almost crime-free, policemen were everywhere, clearing traffic from the path of every journey the Amir made, or rushing to the scene of a road accident - there were dozens of these every day. (They might also be ferrying one of Ernest McBride’s ‘poor buggers’ to the far-from-secret headquarters of the Secret Police, a building known in both Arabic and English as the ‘Fingernail Factory’. It was advisable not to talk about the Fingernail Factory.)
The four policemen shouted at the last clutch of passengers and their greeters, shooing them towards the exits. One approached Eddy, his metalled heels clacking on the marble floor. ‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go now, please. Airport is closing.’
‘I’m waiting for somebody to meet me,’ Eddy explained.
The policeman raised his voice: ‘No waiting. Airport closing. Taxis outside. Yallah. Imshi.’
Eddy pushed his trolley towards the exit. As he emerged through the airlock doors he discovered what 98.5 percent humidity meant. The night air was like a sauna. His glasses misted as if sprayed with steam. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped them.
A prominent notice anticipated the new arrival’s first hurdle and offered a testament to the literacy of local sign-writers:
WELL COME TO BELAJ
TAXI PRIZES
CITY CETNER & HOTLES: Dh.20
MEDINA KHALID: Dh.15
INCONTINENTAL HOTLE: Dh.30
One of the waiting taxi drivers, another hirsute individual in a grubby white dishdasha, tugged Eddy towards an ageing Chevrolet. ‘Hotel, mister?’
‘Yes, please. Palm Beach.’
‘Okay, mister. Get inside. I put box in back.’
It was no cooler or dryer inside the Chevrolet, which lacked air-conditioning. Eddy wiped his glasses again. ‘Ay-Cee is broking,’ the driver apologised incomprehensibly.
Ernest lived in one of three adjoining estates of identical square villas laid out in regimentally straight lines. The developer, Issa Bahzoomi (father of Tariq, brother to the late Farouk and client of both Felix and Mrs Fadilah) had given his name to all three estates: Bahzoomi Villas, New Bahzoomi Villas and, in a flash of inspiration, New New Bahzoomi Villas. His tenants, who were mostly British, had renamed the compounds after UK soap operas, DVD episodes of which often slipped through the airport’s security net: ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Albert Square’ and ‘Brookside’.
‘I think I’ll go into the office now that I’m up,’ Ernest said after unloading Cass and her cases and Helga in Brookside. ‘D’you need anything?’
‘I’ll be all right,’ said Cass.
Ernest drove on towards his office in the Industrial Zone behind the Police Fort. Tanks guarded the front of the Amiri compound and the police and army headquarters which flanked it strategically.
‘Has there been a coup d’état?’ Ernest voiced this unspeakable thought aloud in the privacy of his car. Arab thrones changed hands in coups almost as often as through death by cirrhosis. Shaikh Khaled had usurped a dissolute uncle in 1981.
Like the police cars at the airport, the tanks might be nothing more than a display in honour of some visiting head of state. Maybe the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority was on another of his begging-bowl tours. Belaj was a sieve: Ernest would find out soon enough, and the Ministry of Information would let him know whether or not there was a printable story in it.
In Brookside, Cass went straight to bed in the room she usually occupied, guarded by Helga who sprawled on a sheepskin rug on the tiled floor. The telephone rang just as Cass was dropping off. Helga uttered a single throaty bark.
Ernest hadn’t had time to get to the office. Who would be calling him at this hour? - the Belaj Gazette was hardly in the league of the Times. Cass had the feeling that it was Aaron. It stopped, then rang again after about the time it would take to re-punch an international number. Helga did not bark this time. She sat up and rested her great head on the edge of the bed. Her eyes gazed yearningly at Cass. Ernest didn’t allow her on his bed.
‘Come on, then,’ said Cass.
Bounding onto the bed, Helga stretched out to her full length. Cass wrapped herself and the sheet around Helga who rumbled the canine equivalent of a contented purr. The telephone stopped ringing. For a moment Cass felt the urge to weep at the waste of twenty-seven years of her life, but resolution - and Helga’s comforting warmth - held tears at bay. Woman and dog went companionably to sleep.
During the short ride to his hotel Eddy’s shirt and trousers became sodden with perspiration and he came to the conclusion that this climate could not sustain human life. He should have applied for the post in Aberdeen. Surely he had come to Belaj to die.