"Out of my way." Major Jalal jabbed his elbow into the kidney of one photographer and shouldered another into the gutter, watching as frozen slush filled the man's scruffy shoes. Ten paces at most separated the limo from the door of the casino but five photographers barred the way. Well, three now.

"Chill," his boss said with a broad smile. The major wasn't sure if that was an order or if His Excellency was commenting on New York's weather. So Jalal kept his reply to a nod, which covered both bases.

Everything about Manhattan was white, from the sidewalk beneath Major Jalal's boots to the static in his Sony earbead that told the major his boss was off-line again. White streets, white cars, white noise–one way or another snow was responsible for the lot. Well, maybe not the white noise.

Five hours earlier, the windchill along Fifth Avenue had been enough to make grown men cry but now the wind was gone, snow fluttered down between the Knox building and Lane Bryant like feathers from a ruptured pillow and the avenue ahead of him was as empty as the major's crocodile-skin wallet.

While his boss sat snug in Casino 30/54 losing sums of money the major could barely imagine, Major Jalal had been down to Mount Olive trying to bribe his way into the private room of Charlie Vanhie, the Boston photographer currently being wired for a broken jaw.

The contents of his wallet had gone to the pocket of a porter who took the lot and never came back. And then, when the major gave up in disgust, six sour-faced paparazzi appeared out of nowhere to grab frantic shots of him leaving the hospital, in the mistaken belief that the quietly dressed, moustachioed aide-de-camp was his Armani-clad, elegantly bearded boss. The major just hoped His Excellency was having a better night of it.

Unfortunately, Kashif Pasha wasn't.

Although the casino was in New York and His Excellency came from Ifriqiya, the roulette wheel at which he played originated in Paris. This ensured it had only one nonpaying number rather than the zero and double zero found on US tables. It was French because Kashif Pasha placed bets so high he could dictate the choice of wheel, thus limiting the edge allowed to the house. But for all this Kashif Pasha was still losing. (A situation drearily familiar to his aged mother, the Lady Maryam, his father and his bankers.)

"Excellency . . ."

Looking up, Kashif Pasha was in time to see an apologetic croupier lean forward and rake ten scarlet chips from the grid. So busy had he been listening to the dying clatter of the ivory ball that he'd forgotten to check on which number it landed. To Kashif's ear that unmistakable, addictive clicking was pitched somewhere between an old man's death rattle and the tapping of an infestation of wood beetle.

Both of which reminded him of home.

"You there." Kashif Pasha tried to snap his fingers and winced, making do with a quick wave of his injured hand. The effect was identical. A young black woman in a short deerskin skirt hurried forward, a box of cigars open on her silver tray. Her legs were bare, her breasts laced into a tan waistcoat that otherwise gaped down the front. A badge shaped like a feather announced her as Michelle.

"Sir . . ." The waitress waited for the well-dressed foreigner to select a Monte Cristo and take the matches she offered. Something Kashif Pasha did without appearing to notice the bitten nails of his own hands, which spoke of long nights and too little sleep.

Embossed on the matchbox was a tomahawk. The casino's designer had no idea if Mohawk Indians actually fought with hand axes or, indeed, if any Native Americans had ever used such weapons, but tomahawk sounded like Mohawk and 30 West 54th Street was Mohawk land.

Before it became such, the land on which Casino 30/54 sat belonged to Clack Associates, owners of a small hotel much loved by rich European tourists. Augustus Clack III sold the hotel for an undisclosed sum to the billionaire financier, Benjamin Agadir, who promptly swapped it with the Mohawks for seven glass necklaces and a blanket. Since federal regulations specifically allowed casinos to be opened on reservations or any Indian land held in trust, this neatly circumvented the state law that banned the establishment of casinos in New York City.

"Faites vos jeux," announced the croupier, as if inviting a whole table of high rollers to place their bets rather than just the one.

Kashif Pasha ignored the man.

Striking a match, the eldest son and current heir to the Emir of Tunis lifted the match to the tip of his cigar and sucked. His mother disapproved of smoking, gambling, whores and alcohol but since cigars were not expressly mentioned in the Holy Quran, she sometimes kept her peace. Besides, Kashif Pasha was in New York City and she was not.

Quite what Lady Maryam would have made of the striking murals in the gentlemen's lavatory it was best not to imagine. Kashif Pasha's favourite by far featured Pocahontas undergoing what Americans called double entry. For what were undoubtedly good cultural reasons, her lovers both sported tails, the back legs of goats, and small horns.

At home there were no paintings in Lady Maryam's wing of the Bardo and no statues. Even his great-grandfather's famous Neue Sachlichkeit collection of oils had been banished, saved only by the Emir's flat refusal to have them destroyed.

Representative art was abhorrent to his mother for usurping the rights of God. But then this was a woman who found even calligraphy suspect. Which, undoubtedly went some way to explaining why she'd burned the present his father sent her at Kashif's birth. (An Osmanli miniature from the sixteenth century showing the Prophet's wet nurse Hamina breast-feeding.) And this, in turn, maybe helped explain why Emir Moncef had refused to see his wife since.

Kashif Pasha smiled darkly, his favourite expression, and pushed five ivory chips onto the number thirteen.

"Rien ne va plus," announced the croupier, as if he hadn't been waiting. No more bets were to be made. There was a ritual to go through, even though the room was almost empty and the roulette table reserved for Kashif Pasha. The wheel spun one way and the ivory ball was sent tumbling another and when a number other than thirteen came up, Kashif Pasha just shrugged, carelessly he hoped.

Over the course of the next hour the rampart of counters in front of him became a single turret, then little more than ruined foundations and finally almost disappeared, leaving Kashif Pasha with only six ivory chips.

The casino would keep the table open for him while Kashif Pasha ordered more counters, that much was given. High rollers like His Excellency got what they wanted. Their own suites, complimentary meals, limousines to and from the airport. Even use of the casino's own plane if necessary. And what he wanted now was a break.

"Okay," said Kashif Pasha. "I'll be back here at . . ." He glanced at his Rolex and added two hours to the time it was. "At seven," he said. "Have the table reset. New wheel, new ball, new grid, new stack of counters." Which was what his croupier seemed to call those hundred-thousand-dollar red chips.

Sliding his six remaining counters across the table, His Excellency smiled. "For you," he said and watched the croupier blink. It was a good tip, more so since Kashif Pasha was sometimes known not to tip at all. The croupier would give half to the house, but that still left more than he earned in six months.

"Thank you, Excellency," said the man, moving aside to make room for a crop-haired woman who'd been watching the game from a discreet distance.

"Your Highness." This was a title Kashif Pasha didn't warrant but Georgian van Broglie used it anyway. So far she'd acted as facilitator on every visit Kashif Pasha made to Casino 30/54 and he had yet to complain about the social upgrade. "Shall I have the kitchen organize some supper?"

She took his silence as assent.

"Chicken breast," she suggested, "on focaccia, with honey and mustard sauce. A litre of Evian and maybe some more ginger ale?" She nodded to a line of small and empty bottles of Canada Dry, the plastic screw-top kind.

Kashif Pasha's usual order. A glorified chicken sandwich washed down with three plastic flasks of champagne. Quite why a forty-four-year-old North African playboy would want to drink Veuve Clicquot from an empty Canada Dry bottle Georgian van Broglie didn't know, but then she'd never met Lady Maryam.

"Does Your Highness require anything else?"

She saw the man glance across the room to the deerskinned waitress who'd brought him his cigar. "No possible," she muttered apologetically. "House rules. I'd love to make an exception but . . ."

Kashif Pasha sighed. "Send up something similar," he said crossly. "After you've found me the house doctor." He checked his knuckles, which were looking more lopsided than ever. "And get room service to bring me a bucket of ice."

"Nicolai . . ." Emir Moncef's call was for his bodyguard. A small and intense Uzbek whose name was probably something completely different. The Uzbek and a Tajik called Alex took turns to protect the Emir. They were a recent birthday present from the Soviet ambassador. One Moncef had not known how to refuse.

He called again, just in case either guard was within hearing, then turned his attention back to the snake. Death was always going to come. That it chose to manifest as a slithering viper was unexpected but not impossible. Although, if the elderly Emir had been forced to bet (a vice he deplored), he'd have selected a fat-tailed scorpion as being more likely.

Scorpions got carried into camp on the flatbeds of trucks or in date baskets. Once, if he remembered correctly, a fat-tail had hitched a lift in the cuffs of an NCO's dress trousers. The man had succumbed within hours and the Emir had banned cuffs on all uniforms from then on.

He would die as he had lived his last forty years, in the simplicity of Ifriqiya's southern desert. A place where privation reduced leaves to water-protecting spikes and insects hid within thickly waxed bodies to conserve what little water they contained; where beetles survived on one meal in two years, if the habitat so demanded, and glass wort displayed a near-suicidal tolerance for salt.

Tossing back his a'aban, a heavy cloak still worn by Berber men of a certain age, Emir Moncef raised a silver-topped stick. Ready to defend himself.

"Get behind me . . ." His order was aimed at a boy in camouflage who still gripped a Nintendo game pad with frozen fingers.

The Emir's younger son shook his head.

"Murad."

That the Emir used his real name scared the boy almost as much as the viper now crawling its way across a carpet. Mostly his father called him SP, which stood for small pasha, a name he'd been given by his mother before she was killed. His mother had been one of the Emir's guard, an American convert from Los Angeles.

Her Jeep had gone off the side of a cliff. An accident.

"Do as I say."

Looking from his father to the horned viper, the twelve-year-old again shook his head. Snakes were rare in the camp, dangerous or otherwise, because intricate webs of woven copper wire lay buried beneath the perimeter. The webs created an electric field that upset snakes, scorpions and spiders. That was what Eugenie de la Croix said anyway. And it was her job to know these things.

"Don't be afraid. Just back away."

Afraid? Several options presented themselves to Murad and none involved fear or retreat. His duty was to defend his father, His Highness Moncef al-Mansur, better known as the Emir of Tunis and ruler of Ifriqiya (father of his people, loved by all). This Murad knew from reading it each morning in the cheap, Arab-language red tops the Emir insisted on having delivered by helicopter.

Kashif Pasha punches American paparazzi . . .

Today's Es Sabah lay on a leather and oak table, one so ancient its iron nails had gone dark as the wood and quite as shiny. Under the paper rested a photograph album almost as old. No one was allowed to look inside. Which was why Murad had never been able to ask why it contained postcard after postcard of bare-breasted women ranging from girls his own age to those as old as his mother would have been.

Berber said some, others Taurag. Most were simply described as Mauresque, sometimes Belle Mauresque, occasionally Jeune Femme Arabe. . . Once as Tuenisch-orientalische Typen. Almost all stared flat-eyed at the camera. As if trying to withdraw from a world where colonial officers scribbled "c'est très intéressant" across the back, stuck a five-centime stamp over the breast of a twelve-year-old and posted it to a cousin in Marseilles.

"Murad."

Outside, speakers blared male habtl madjatch, a rai track even older than his father, whose favourite song it was. The rhythms and repetitions, drum and weird whistle as familiar to the boy as any adhan, the call to prayer, though Murad would never admit as much and even thinking so worried him.

So be it. His choice was made. As God wills.

Murad added inshá allá without even noticing. The way his mother used to say bless you every time he sneezed.

He was twelve, after all. Old enough for what came next.

Fires had been lit for the midday meal and someone nearby was roasting goat over branches ripped from a thornbush, both wood and goat having been brought in by truck. There was no kindling this far south. He would miss the meal and the camp and his father . . .

Their previous camp had been better, more to do and less sand. The goat-hair tents were carried on camels only when photographers were around. The rest of the time a ponytailed Texan called Pigpen bundled the tents into trucks and broke them down and set them up wherever the Emir wanted.

Few outsiders understood why the Emir allowed a nasrani such freedom. Those who did had seen the speed at which the Texan could break down a camp when the old man wanted it done really fast.

"Pull yourself together . . ." The Emir was cross now.

"I'm not frightened," Murad shot back with all the indignation he could muster. "I'm planning." His father was always telling him to think ahead.

Dropping his Nintendo, Murad reached for a silver coffee jug and flipped back its lid. The jug was inlaid with copper and bronze. Even its ivory handle was hot. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Emir shake his head but it was too late, Murad had already hurled coffee into the face of the horned viper.

Most of it missed.

"Guards."

Ignoring the old man's demand and the sudden hammering of fear in his own ears, Murad threw the silver pot after the coffee, just managing to hit the viper's tail. So much for his first plan.

On a sidewall of the tent hung the sword his great-grandfather took from a dying colonel after a skirmish outside Neffatia, the year the French were driven from Tunisia, as Ifriqiya was then called.

The boy was lunging for this when Emir Moncef stepped forward, grabbed Murad by the shoulder and threw him towards the entrance with more force than the old man knew he possessed. He understood when a viper was about to attack, even if his youngest son didn't.

"Alex, Nicolai . . ."

Kashif al-Mansur liked snow and always had done. Mostly he liked it in cities such as New York, where flakes fluttered down between canyons to bury the sidewalks and cars. Everything turning white and picture-postcard.

At home when snow fell, which was not often, white sprinkled the mountains of the High Tell and oak valleys towards the northern coast, dusting the red roofs of farmhouses built and later deserted by French settlers. He'd been impressed by that as a child, until he discovered what winter really looked like.

The snow Kashif Pasha really liked, however, fell on carefully selected ski resorts. St. Mortiz in Switzerland, Geilo in Norway, America's own Aspen. Playgrounds that featured mountain lodges, black runs, and a large, interchangeable and ever-fluid collection of people who wanted to be his friend.

Thickset industrialists with salt-and-pepper hair, fake tans and astute eyes readily offered him use of their chalets, snowcats, and daughters. Not to mention unsecured loans and bribes disguised as business opportunities.

His father might be a pariah but Kashif Pasha was a different proposition, loved by those who hated every value for which Emir Moncef stood. And Kashif worked hard on his reputation. His loans were always repaid and he was politeness itself to the Western girls who, drunk or drugged, fell against him in the ritzy bars as if champagne or charlie had taken away their balance.

From time to time, there would be a flash that lit the darkness of some bar and another photograph would appear, apparently showing him snuggled up with the daughter of a German industrialist or American banker.

The inevitable result of this was a letter from his mother. Handwritten, sealed with wax and sent through diplomatic channels. Lady Maryam's lament was always the same. At her age and in her state of health, how could he . . . The woman, needless to say, had the nerves of a trained killer and the physical constitution of a battle-hardened commando. Only her age was against her.

Kashif Pasha's replies were as ritual as his mother's complaints. The whey-faced teenager in the photograph was the daughter/

niece/lover of some man he barely knew and had certainly never shared his bed. It was doubtful if Lady Maryam believed this, but then she knew far less about her son than she imagined.

His preferences had been formed early, one Saturday in early January while his mother was away, sometime between the calls to prayer at dawn and noon. That was when he'd first noticed Sophia, a barefoot Sudanese maid maybe two years older than he. He wasn't even aware of having seen her before until she came into his room to sweep up and found him still half-asleep in a bateau lit.

Her hurried apology got lost beneath his demand that she open his curtains, which were both long and heavy. Kashif had just been moved into a new suite of rooms, one fitted out in the English style, so that he would not disgrace himself by exhibiting unfamiliarity on arrival at his new school outside London, a city chosen largely because his father had wanted Paris.

"Open them all," Kashif's twelve-year-old self had demanded. "That's an order."

With reluctance, the girl (whose name Kashif was only to ask a week later) left the safety of her doorway and yanked back the nearest curtain, though it was embarrassment not anger that made her movements so abrupt.

"And the next window and the one after that."

Sophia went along the wall as instructed, pulling back curtains originally sewn by the venerable Paris textile house of Nobilis Fontan, until Kashif had an uninterrupted view of a courtyard outside. One so large that a regiment could have assembled there.

"Excellency . . ." Sophia's curtsy was made clumsy by her dash for the door.

"All the curtains," Kashif demanded, nodding to the only window that mattered, a small one set high in the wall over his head. To get there Sophia would have to step onto his bateau lit and reach up. Kashif watched her face darken as she realized it. She had keloid scars on her cheeks, the way Berber women in the south had tattoos beneath their eyes. Scars, a face far finer than his, and huge, doubtful eyes.

"That window too please." Kashif was suddenly polite. As for the first time he understood that she might refuse. If that happened, Kashif wasn't sure he knew what to do.

"Excellency." Sophia gave something that was half nod and half shrug, accepting the inevitable. Three steps took her to the bed and then, as Kashif watched from the corner of his eye she stepped up onto his mattress, revealing a dark flash of calf. For a moment she fought for her balance, then did what he'd only half believed she might, stepped clean over him and reached up, her fingers tugging the curtain.

He expected her to step down immediately and run from the room but she remained where she was, staring up as if at some vision. And although she wore no pants there was little for Kashif to see. A dark gash for her sex, a curve of bare buttock, more shadow than flesh. Heavy legs. An ankle showing some kind of insect bite.

He was still considering this when Sophia stepped down and gestured towards the bigger windows behind her. All of them revealing the same miracle. For the first time in Kashif's life and, for all he knew, the first time in history, fat flakes of snow had begun to fall on the city of Tunis.

Kashif Pasha smiled.

"Here you go." He slipped a red chip into the hand of the girl who'd earlier brought him a cigar and dropped another two into the waiting fingers of the croupier. Tipping so much to Michelle was an extravagance and, from the hastily controlled expression on the face of his facilitor, Georgian van Broglie, not quite how 30/54 liked its patrons to behave.

Kashif Pasha's smile grew broader. Next time the cigar girl would come to his suite of her own accord, never realizing she'd been bought, in advance, for far less than he would have paid.

"And this belongs to you . . ."

Georgian van Broglie prepared to bristle at the indignity of being tipped, something she'd stopped needing the moment she got put on a cut of the house percentage. And found herself instead holding a business card. The card was just that, a rectangle of thick paper made from wood pulp, its china-clay surface embossed with a small logo. Below the logo, which managed to combine a torque wreath with an old-fashioned propeller was the address of a private airport, one of Long Island's finest.

"Anytime you're bored, feel free to call that number. One of my pilots will take you, plus family or friends, anywhere you want and bring you back again, when you want. Caracas, Bombay, Hong Kong . . ."

Her stunned expression was worth the gesture. Besides, Kashif gave good odds she'd never take up his offer. That card would remain in her wallet and get shown to friends, both social and business, while his jet would remain on the ground, fuel unused. So far no one had ever taken him up on a flight. Something about the very extravagance of his gesture prevented them.

Georgian van Broglie was still stuttering her thanks when someone knocked at the door. "Excellency, I'm sorry . . ."

Outside, in the panelled expanse of lobby stood an officer from the NYPD and beside him, looking flustered, the casino's head of security, all cropped hair and diamond earstud. Accompanying them was a small man with the smell of a lawyer.

"Kashif al-Mansur?"

No sooner had the uniformed officer spoken than the small man put up a hand. "Not in here," he said firmly and glanced at the head of security as if expecting the man to toss the officer onto the street. "This casino is on tribal land. You know the rules."

"What's the problem?" Kashif's voice was calm, with an easy familiarity that didn't reach his eyes.

"There's been a complaint . . ."

"Outside," insisted the small man, managing to look apologetic and determined at the same time. The officer got the determination, Kashif got the apology.

"A photographer alleges . . ."

Before the small lawyer had even relaunched his protest Kashif Pasha was holding up a white booklet. He put it half an inch from the officer's face. "Do you know what this is?"

The man shook his head. They both knew that was a lie.

"It's a carte blanche," said Kashif Pasha, flicking to the first page. The photograph showed a man younger by four years, a little less worn, his cheeks less full; the beard was the same though. "Total diplomatic immunity," Kashif explained, though this was unnecessary. The words were written in several languages across the top of each page. "You have a problem, take it up with the embassy."

"The embassy is in Washington."

"So take a plane. Or even better don't bother. I'm leaving New York in about . . ." Kashif Pasha checked his Rolex, which looked silver but was actually platinum. "Thirty minutes. Everything I need to do here I've done." Rubbing his fist absentmindedly, Kashif rechecked the time and smiled past the officer at the snow falling onto 54th Street beyond.

Once in a time when animals still talked and djinn walked the earth quite openly, the Sultan of Bokhara sent for a mullah living in a distant village. His message was simple.

"Come at once. I need advice." For the Sultan expected the arrival of an Indian ambassador and the Mullah was . . .

A rumble in her tummy made Hani suck her teeth in sudden irritation. Now someone was bound to offer her food.

"Hungry?" Ashraf Bey's question came from across the qaa, a reception room that occupied almost all of the first floor of the al-Mansur madersa: the mansion His Excellency shared with his young niece, his Portuguese cook, a Sufi porter and the woman Iskandryian gossip still assumed was his mistress, wrongly as it happened.

In summer the qaa was open to the elements along one side but now was winter and the arches overlooking the central courtyard were closed off with specially cut sheets of glass. A small fountain played in the middle of the qaa floor, carved, five hundred years before, from a single block of horsehair marble.

Silver balloons floated from this because today was Hani's tenth birthday. Although Khartoum, who was friends with the cook but tended to disagree with her on almost everything as a matter of principle, insisted it was Hani's eleventh. Largely, Hani suspected, because Donna insisted it wasn't.

And as no one could actually find a birth certificate for the child and Hani had been born elsewhere, the question remained open. Lady Nafisa might have been able to provide an answer but Hani's aunt was dead. Something else for Hani to feel guilty about.

"Hungry?" Raf repeated.

"No," said Hani. "Not really."

The mullah's reply to the Sultan was equally simple. "I am unable to attend, O King, as I rely for life upon the sweet air of Qasr al Arifin and have no way to bring this with me in storage jars."

Hani paused, her small fingers hovering in midair. A matrix of fine wires across the back of her hands ended in finger thimbles. Every time her hands flicked across the invisible keys of her imaginary keyboard, words got added to a processing package installed on her laptop one floor up in the haremlek. Very clever but not madly practical because Hani relied on seeing a screen to write.

All the same, it was kind of Hamzah Effendi to send her a present. Hamzah Effendi was Zara's father and Zara was the girl her Uncle Ashraf should have married, the one everyone thought . . .

If only.

Hani kicked her heels against the legs of a silver chair and sighed. Another four paragraphs and she'd let herself go down to the kitchen to make coffee.

At first the Sultan was perplexed by this answer. And then, after consideration of the mullah's open disrespect, he determined to remonstrate with the man when they next met, famous sage or not. At about this time the visit from the Indian ambassador was cancelled and so the Sultan needed no advice from anyone after all.

Many months later, as fig leaves began dropping and the stars grew cold the Sultan sat down to supper and no sooner had he picked up his goblet than an assassin leapt upon him. Immediately, Mullah Bahaudin, having entered the dining room at this exact moment, jumped upon the assassin and wrestled him to the ground.

"O Mullah," said the Sultan, "It seems I am indebted to you in spite of your earlier rudeness."

Mullah Bahaudin smiled. "O Sultan," he said sweetly. "The courtesy of those who know is to be available when actually needed, not sit waiting for emissaries who will never arrive . . ."

Hani flicked her fingers over a nonexistent trackball to shut down her laptop and pulled off her gloves. She would write the rest of Bahaudin's story, particularly the bit where the Mullah met a miracle worker who could walk on water–but to get things right she really did need a screen.

"Okay," Hani said, slipping down from her chair. "I'm off to make some coffee." She left her comment hang in the air, a fact that seemed to escape both Uncle Ashraf and Zara. "Anyone like some?" Hani asked loudly.

"Donna can make it," Raf replied.

It was the wrong answer.

Monday morning brought clouds. Relative humidity stood at 71 percent, projected to drop ten points by early afternoon. And there was, according to Raf's watch, near certainty that it would rain–hardly shocking news for February in El Iskandryia.

Longer-term predictions featured a severe depression beginning in March. One that would, if the forecasts lived up to their current accuracy ratings, pull hot air from the Sahara and wrap parts of North Africa in a khamsin wind, but for now temperatures remained around 10°C and the sky was slate grey.

"Wrong," said the voice inside Raf's head, "it's molten lead."

He ignored this and concentrated on ripping apart his breakfast. Peeling back oily flakes to reveal sticky almond paste within.

The next voice came from the world outside.

"Excellency." Le Trianon's very own maître d' scooped Raf's empty cup onto a silver tray and replaced it with a fresh cappuccino. "Is something wrong with your croissant?"

"No, it's fine."

Le Trianon was Iskandryia's most famous café. A statement both Pastroudis and Café Athineos would probably dispute. Occupying the corner site where Rue Missala met Place Saad Zaghloul, with a terrace on Rue Missala and exits on both, Le Trianon offered an aquarium darkness of spotless linen and Napoleon III chairs. Discreet wooden screens managed to combine art deco with Moorish fantasia, while a series of art deco murals displayed pert-breasted, half-naked dancing girls in jewelled slippers and diaphanous trousers.

"You love it really," said the fox, who hated Orientalist kitsch. But then Tiri refused to buy into a rule that defined everything over a century as classic by default.

The table Raf used was on the terrace and he sat facing the street, because this allowed him to ignore a bank of elevators inside. There were three elevators, framed in brass, with deco moulding and coloured enamel around their doors. Only directors of the Third Circle were allowed to use these, which was fine with Raf because, as the son of a pasha, he automatically qualified for a C3 corner office with magnificent views of Iskandryia's Eastern Harbour.

Raf had his own opinion about his parentage but as no one else seemed bothered he was attempting to keep this to himself.

Between the harbour wall and Raf's office stood Place Zaghloul, so his windows also overlooked palm trees, a busy bus station and a stark plinth on which rested Zaghloul Pasha, nationalist leader and the man who drove the British from Egypt in 1916.

As befitted his rank as a bey, Raf's office featured a Bokhara rug, a white leather sofa, a filing cabinet made from mahogany and edged with brass and a large, predominantly blue-and-pink Naghi of the square outside, painted in 1943 and borrowed from the Khedival institute in Al Qahirah. What the room lacked was a computer or telephone, files to put in the elegant cabinet and any documents of real importance.

No one expected directors to work, least of all Madame Nordstrom, who in her twenty-fourth year as office manager of C3 regarded all directorships as entirely token, much like the salary. So he spent his mornings in the café downstairs, an arrangement that satisfied both Ingrid Nordstrom and Le Trianon's maître d' but was beginning to irritate Raf. Not because he disliked drinking cappuccino or reading the papers but because, every morning as Raf was shown to his table on the terrace, Tiri popped up to mutter emotional institutionalization. It was a phrase with which they were both far too familiar.

Most of the visitors to the famous café drank espresso or sticky, mud-thick shots of Turkish mocha; but then, what with it being February, everyone else ate their breakfast indoors.

Only Raf insisted on a pavement table.

For a while, a matter of weeks only, he'd had bodyguards to hold the tourists at bay and protect him from fundamentalists, crazies, German agents of the Thiergarten and anyone else who might be likely to attack the Governor of El Iskandryia; but that was before he resigned, when he had a different job.

"Wrong," said the fox. "That was when you had a job. Working at the Third Circle doesn't really . . ."

". . . count," said someone, sitting herself down.

Raf blinked.

She was dressed entirely in grey, with a grey plait and minimal makeup. Her beauty had the fragility of old skin over fine bones, worn for so long she took it for granted. "No magic," she said. "You were talking to yourself. One of the many traits you share with your father."

There was no real reply to that so instead Raf concentrated on his visitor. And even without his acute sense of smell he'd have noticed a stink of camphor rising from her elegant skirt and jacket, spotted the dust under the buckles on her black shoes.

"Mostly I wear a uniform," said the woman, settling back into a chair. "These were what I could find . . . Your nostrils flared," she added by way of explanation. "Anyway I have a file on you. Augmented reflexes, heightened vision, hearing and smell . . . Ever since Khedive Tewfik sent me a copy I've been wanting to ask you if that also went for taste . . ."

"Obviously," replied the fox.

Raf took longer to think about it, studying the woman as he did so. She wore no jewellery, not even earrings. Her blusher was so immaculate as to be invisible. Her jacket well cut, with double stitching to the buttonholes. Although the most noticeable feature was a discreet bulge to one side where she wore a small holster clipped to the back of her hip.

Something small but effective, like a .32 loaded with hollow point.

"Impossible to judge," said Raf, returning to the question of taste. "Because, in the end, how do I know how things taste to you?"

"How very Cartesian," said the woman and raised a finger. "Espresso," she told her waiter. "Make it a double and keep them coming." The man actually bowed, which marked the first time Raf had ever seen one of Le Trianon's waiters do that.

"He's Ifriqiyan," she told Raf, pulling a cigarette case from a small crocodile-skin handbag as if this explained everything. Flipping open the case, she tapped out a Gauloise, one of the old-fashioned kind without filter. "You don't mind if I smoke." Her question was very much an afterthought, if it was a question. It sounded much more like a statement of fact.

"Ashraf Bey," she said. "Colonel Ashraf al-Mansur, ex–Chief of Detectives, ex–Governor of El Iskandryia . . . You don't keep any of your jobs very long, do you?"

"I have a very low boredom threshold." Raf's voice was deadpan.

The woman laughed. "Good," she said. Dragging deep, she settled back in her chair and sighed, smoke softening her thin face and making her appear suddenly younger. Her age was indeterminate, somewhere over sixty but after that difficult to say.

Expats and settlers, Raf had seen other women like her. Bodies kept lean by the heat and a diet of cigarettes and alcohol. Usually they were bottle blond with faces leathered by hard living and too much sun. Whoever she was, this woman was different. She'd let her hair go grey for a start.

"Who are you?" Raf demanded.

She shrugged. "Ask the waiter when he arrives." She nodded to the man bringing her coffee, so Raf asked. And what impressed Raf most was that the waiter looked to the woman, seeking her permission before answering. It took a lot to outrank a director of the Third Circle in a café directly below C3's head office. But it was becoming rapidly obvious to Raf that this person did.

"You've heard about the attack on the Emir?"

"Only what was on the news."

"Half-truths and guesses," said Eugenie de la Croix. "All of it." She gazed at Raf, face intent. "What do you know about the Revolt of the Naked?"

Raf's answer was honest, less than zero.

"They took over Baghdad," said Eugenie. "After the death of Harun al-Rashid. An uprising of the poor made poorer by a dispute between Harun's sons over the succession. I don't approve of chaos," the woman said, "but sometimes it is deserved."

"When was this?"

"About twelve hundred years ago."

Behind his shades Raf raised his eyebrows.

"Quite," said Eugenie. "So why do I have your half brother Kashif swearing that something called the NR is behind the attack on your father?"

"Because he's lying?" said Raf. "Always assuming he is my half brother . . ."

Eugenie smiled. "So cynical," she said, "and you haven't even met him."

"Nor do I intend to," said Raf. "And if I were you, I'd start with the Thiergarten. Berlin usually seems to be behind most problems."

Eugenie shook her head firmly. "Not in Tunis," she said. "We have an agreement . . ."

"Are you sure?" Raf took a sip of lukewarm coffee. "I thought the Thiergarten were a law unto themselves . . ." Popular rumour had Berlin's agents able to scale sheer walls and pass unseen through double-locked doors. A belief that sold papers and did Berlin no harm at all.

"Believe me," said Eugenie. "I'm sure." She spoke like someone who had the negatives, which she probably did, or at least duplicates. Old and undoubtedly embarrassing. The fact the man in question was long dead would do nothing to make them less deadly. The Kaiser was very protective of his late father. Understandably, in the circumstances.

"Then start with Kashif's suspects," Raf suggested. "See if they really could mount such an assassination attempt."

"That's why I'm here."

Raf looked at Eugenie.

"I thought you might do it."

"No way." He shook his head.

"I suppose I could appeal to your sense of family duty," Eugenie said. "Or mention the fact your aunt's debts seem to have swallowed what little money she left, while your salary from the Third Circle is worth less than nothing. Then there's your boredom . . . Which one would work?"

"None," Raf said.

"He is your father."

"My father was a backpacker from Sweden." Raf's voice was firm. "I'd give you more details but my mother forgot to get his name."

"Ah yes," said the woman, "Per Lindstrom. I've heard that version . . ." She looked at him. "Some people," she said, "would be proud to call the Emir of Tunis their father."

"A lunatic," said the fox. "Ruler of the only country not to sign the 2005 UN accord on biotechnology . . ."

"Some people aren't me," said Raf, which sounded either too smug or more bitter than he intended, but Raf let the words hang anyway.

"You'll need shoes."

Somehow that wasn't quite what Sally had expected the Chinese man to say. Of course, at first, she didn't realize he was Chinese. She had that English ignorance of Far Eastern looks and took it for granted that as he was wearing a blue-checked sarong he had to be local, probably Malay and a fisherman. The fact his Ph.D. was in X-linked mutation and he'd been fired from Bayer-Rochelle for releasing details of his research on "GTPases and their influence on brain structure and cognitive ability," Sally didn't find out until later.

"Why shoes?"

"Because otherwise the coral will rip your feet to shreds." He nodded to a point a stone's throw out from the beach where the water switched from a medium to a pale blue. "The reef starts there," he said. "You'll be safe as long as you swim in shoes."

The man spoke with a California drawl, interspersed with occasional words that sounded unbelievably English, as if he'd once worked for the Home Service. His wispy white beard could be found on bamboo scrolls in hotel shops across Singapore, which was where she'd landed.

A taxi to Semberwang dropped her at the causeway, the stink of durian fruit and raw rubber thickening the air as she approached the Malay side of the straits and the jumbled buildings of Jahore Baru. A better smell altogether than the stink of hydrocarbons that had clung to her clothes in Singapore, that island of tigers where all the tigers were now dead.

As Sally wondered whether to explain she'd thrown away her shoes the better to get in touch with her instincts, she saw Wu Yung's eyes refocus.

"They with you?" he asked, glancing over her shoulder.

Sally shook her head, not even bothering to turn. No one was with her and she was with no one. And that was how she intended to remain. All three of her guidebooks dealt with how to keep at bay unwelcome attention from local men. Only the Rough Guide had thought to mention that her real problem was likely to be other backpackers.

"Hi . . ."

Rehab is for Quitters read the blond boy's T-shirt and his shorts were the kind with long pockets and tabs with buckles. Slivers of doubt flecked his blue eyes.

"How you doing?"

The black guy with him stared through aviator shades so cheap they had to have been given away with some magazine. His silence could have been intentional but more likely resulted from a battered iPod he wore clipped to the waistband of his cut-down Fat Boys.

"I'm Atal," said the blond boy and stuck out his hand. "Okay if we crash here too? We're out of dosh," he added by way of explanation.

If the Chinese man noticed the Oyster Perpetual on Atal's skinny wrist he didn't mention it. Sally, however, made her glance obvious.

"Fake," said Atal quickly, "from a market in Bangkok."

It wasn't.

"Pretty good copy," said Sally's companion and Atal blushed.

"I suppose the trainers are fake too," Sally said. They were airPower, the ones with scarlet kangaroo-skin inserts down both sides.

"This is Bozo," said Atal, ignoring the question. "He doesn't say much."

Bozo smiled, a slow and lazy smile that revealed his teeth, which were mostly gold with a hole in one canine where a diamond had worked loose.

"Sally," said Sally and turned towards the old man, realizing for the first time that he hadn't given his name.

"Wu Yung III."

"As in . . ." Atal stopped and did a double take, eyes widening. His next look at Sally was an attempt to work out their relationship.

"We've just met," said Sally.

Wu Yung smiled. "And you're all welcome," he said smoothly. "Please stay for as long as you like . . . This island is mine," he added when Atal stared blankly. "I take it none of you read Chinese or Malay?" Wu Yung nodded to a peeling sign nailed a nearby palm tree, half-buried behind a tumble of deep green.

The three backpackers looked at each other.

It seemed not.

Gulls shrieked, the way gulls mostly do when circling against a wet and dirty sky. Somewhere beyond the drizzling rain the sun's last rays withdrew, unnoticed by everyone except Raf, who lifted his shades and flipped frequencies to watch that day's little death, its final flicker lost among chimney flare from the Midas Refinery.

At the back of Raf's throat was the burn of cheap speed. Crystals of methamphetamine so filthy he'd picked out the blackest of the misshapen lumps and discarded them into a puddle. The wrap was one of a dozen left over from his brief and glorious stint as Chief of Detectives, evidence signed out from the precinct and never returned. It was, if he recalled correctly, the second to last of those left.

There were several ways Raf could restock his supply. The most obvious was to ask Hamzah Effendi, but somehow Raf couldn't bring himself to do that. Another alternative was hit up Hakim and Ahmed, his old bodyguards, but that didn't appeal either; which left buying his own and that brought its own problems, like making contacts and the fact he'd need to find some money.

He was a notable, living if not sleeping with the daughter of North Africa's richest man. He had a title, contacts, and a reputation for ruthless efficiency entirely at odds with the facts. His niece was a certified genius. A woman he'd never met had just asked him to investigate an assassination attempt in which the only thing to die had been a snake. Short of not enough sleep and using too much speed, it was hard to work out why he was quite so depressed.

Unless it was the rain.

"Figure it out," said the fox. "Before we both drown."

As North Africa's only remaining freeport, El Iskandryia shipped tobacco, rice and oil as legal cargoes; while illegal cargoes included most of the hashish destined for Northern Europe, commercial information, prostitutes, political intelligence and people in search of new identities.

At the back of Misr Station was an alley that did nothing but fake passports, identity cards, driving licences and new birth certificates; novelties all, apparently, but novelties good enough to pass the brief glance of a harried customs officer. Quality fakes came from the old Turko-Arabic district of El Anfushi, between Rue El Nokrashi and the chemical stink of the western docks.

Only, in El Anfushi there were no shop windows full of fake ID cards, no posters advertising driving licences, any country. . . Here you needed to be introduced, and even that took money. Zara's father ran this, the high end of identity laundering, just as he controlled the refinery, tobacco shipments and illegal runs that carried hashish to Heraklion and returned with crates of fake Intel chips and memory boards, few of them labelled accurately.

This was where Zara's fortune came from and where Hani acquired her dowry. From the trade in underage Sudanese whores, processed opium and scum on the run as much as from the vast petrochemical complex that squatted on El Iskandryia's western edge, where slums ended and just before the desert began.

Raf knew this.

His garden was being rebuilt with dirty money. It was dirty money Zara had in Hong Kong Suisse, millions of dollars worth. And it would be Zara's dirty money that sent Hani to school in New York, were he to allow that to happen.

The kind Bayer-Rochelle paid to his mother.

Of course, Raf had needed no introductions to acquire his new identity. This had been handed to him, five months back, outside Seattle's SeaTac Airport, not so much on a plate as in an Alessi briefcase, empty but for a passport, a strip of photographs and a plane ticket.

The ticket had been to El Iskandryia, the passport a white leather affair stamped with the Ottoman crest and the cheap fotobooth pictures had been of a younger Zara, happy and smiling, words Raf wouldn't associate with her now. His aunt had been responsible. The dead one.

Was it–Sally wondered–immoral to steal a sunrise muffin before smashing up Koffe King or should she trash all the food along with the glass counter? Which was worse, wasting food in a world where hunger killed twenty-four-thousand people a day or eating corporate crap, which quite possibly contained GM flour?

Tough call.

Pressing the mute button on her Sony minidisc (an impromptu gift from Bozo, who'd liberated it from near the Exxon Building on 6th), Sally consigned New York Freeze to silence and pointed to a tray.

"One of those, please."

"Which kind?"

There were two types, Sally realized. Both looked pretty identical to her and probably came out of the same machine, but maybe the dough mix was different.

"What's the . . ." Sally began to ask and got a mouthful of fluff from her ski mask. So she yanked up the front edge. "Whatever," she said. And when the boy still looked blank Sally chose one at random. "One of those on the right . . . Your right," she added, when the boy reached in the wrong direction.

"Would you like a drink with that?"

"Skinny latte, grande," said Sally.

Behind the chrome counter a Hispanic kid who looked about twelve took a sneak at the baseball bat Sally held.

"Easton Z," said Sally. "C500 alloy, high-strain graphite core."

The kid nodded to himself. "You want that muffin and coffee to go?"

"Yeah," said Sally. "Definitely."

They both waited while another kid made a quick espresso, slopped in milk from a plastic carton and jammed the mixture under a hissing chrome nozzle. From the metal jug to a cardboard cup took another practised slop and then the kid drizzled a streak of cocoa across the top.

"I asked for a latte, skinny," Sally said, then shrugged. "Doesn't matter."

"Have a nice day . . ."

Sally nodded. "And you." Behind her Atal and Bozo stood in silence, waiting patiently. They were on guard duty and Sally was the person they guarded. That was because, after this, Sally had another job to do, although this was the job she had to be seen to be doing, it had all been worked out.

"Go now," she said to the two Hispanics. "You don't get paid enough to get hurt protecting this place." Sally looked back, to check that Atal and Bozo felt the same and they both nodded.

"She means it," added Bozo, his voice dark as chocolate, the 70 percent cocoa solids kind. "Get while you can."

The kid who'd asked Sally which muffin she wanted looked from Sally's alloy bat to the link cutters that hung from Bozo's huge hand, then took in a neoprene-handled clawhammer stuck in Atal's woven belt. Something gluey was stuck round the claws.

Discarding their silly hats at the door, the counter staff left. Today wasn't a good day to be wandering Manhattan south of Canal Street in corporate camouflage. Anyone with a brain knew not to blame the McKids stuck behind counters, who were as fucked over by corporate capitalism as the coffee growers, beef farmers and dairymen; but not every protestor currently wandering the streets of Manhattan had a brain.

"Do the clock," Sally ordered and Atal frowned. It was true he outranked Bozo, being a vidhead, in as much as anyone outranked anyone, but Sally didn't trust Bozo not to break the clock while he was trying to adjust it.

Climbing onto a chrome stool, Atal yanked the clock off the wall. It was battery-operated with hollow wood-effect surround that surprised no one. Twisting a plastic knob on the back, Atal ran the minute hand forward exactly three-quarters of an hour and wiped down the knob and casing to remove his fingerprints.

"Okay," Atal said. "How do you want to do this?"

"The way we agreed." Sally lifted her baseball bat over her head and paused while Atal found the angle. There was always an angle, apparently.

"Take it from the start," said Atal, signalling to Sally that she should put down her bat. "Okay," he said, "now move in from the door and take out the countertop . . ."

She did as he instructed. Going out of the door and coming back so Atal could start running the camera at the point when the door began to shut behind her. Three steps took her to the counter, up went her chrome baseball bat and down it came, fracturing twenty feet of hardened glass.

"Now smash the front . . ."

That took two swings, because the angle of attack was awkward. Of course, the whole sequence would have been better with sound, but Atal was scared he'd pick up some interference from outside, like a passing black-and-white and the police would be able to get them from that.

"Tables . . ."

These were chrome-topped, but cheap chrome glued over fibreboard circles and edged with silvery plastic that splintered at the first blow. Ten blows, ten tables, that bit was simplicity itself.

"Now the clock . . ."

Swirling round, Atal's camera panning as Sally spun from the last of the tables to where the clock had been returned to its place high on a wall, Sally did something fiddly with her baseball bat which involved skimming it in a figure eight, then rolled it three times in a row backwards over her hand. A trick that looked more impressive than it was and the only thing of value she'd picked up from Drew, a nanchuku freak briefly her boyfriend. Since this turned out to be the only skill Drew had, Sally was loath to let it go to waste.

"Do it," Atal said.

So Sally did.

Snapping the handle into the palm of her hand, she reached up and smashed the clock into fragments and destroyed every framed poster in the place. She didn't want New York's Finest thinking the clock had been given undue attention.

"Okay," said Sally, flipping her bat in another circle. "Out of here. We're done."

Koffe King wasn't the first place they trashed. At Sally's insistence they'd already hit an antique emporium on the corner of 19th and Broadway. The kind of store where narrow people bought expensive things during the week and wide people went window-shopping on Saturdays.

Only there were no tourists to gawp as Sally took her bat to the biggest window of the emporium and showered a wooden Buddha with diamonds. Everybody had decided to stay home–except the fashion crowd who were watching from roofs right across Tribeca.

Atal liked the Buddha, needless to say, and so did Sally (if she was honest). What she hated was the fact that it cost more than the person who crafted or found it made in one year, quite possibly more than that person made in one lifetime.

So she did the window and liberated the statue, leaving it on the roof of an empty black-and-white as a present for the cops when they came back.

After ditching their ski masks and cycling gloves in a bin, Sally, Bozo and Atal swapped jackets, put on shades and hailed a cab on Madison. Apparently the NYPD were waving licensed cabs through a roadblock near Grand Central. Something that made no more sense to Sally than it did to Singh, the driver with limited English and advanced negotiating skills who finally took a risk and stopped for them.

Two blocks south of 42nd Street, Sally had Singh hang a right just before the Hill Building and shoot over onto Park.

"Outside the church," she said.

They all caught the point at which Singh flicked his gaze from Bozo's red tarboosh to the stone Messiah above the door of Our Saviour.

"Showing him the sights," said Sally as she flicked the catch on a Balenciaga bag and overtipped horrendously. The bag came courtesy of a poorly guarded boutique next to the Thai café on Thompson, between Bleecker and West 3rd. The cash was liberated from almost everywhere.

"What doesn't?" Eugenie de la Croix said, stopping opposite Raf. There were plently of chairs vacant but she stood, slightly impatiently, until a waiter slid from the gloom of Le Trianon's interior to pull one back for her, apologizing profusely.

"What doesn't what?" Raf demanded.

"Make any sense . . . ?"

He looked at the elderly woman in front of him.

"You said, It's impossible to work out."

"I did?"

Eugenie nodded. "Then you said, No it's not. It just doesn't make sense. . . So my question is, What doesn't make sense?"

"To eat so many almond croissants."

Eugenie raised her eyebrows.

"Eighty-seven," said Raf blandly, "since I arrived in El Iskandryia."

"I'm surprised you can afford them," said Eugenie, "given how little you currently earn. Have you paid off your overdraft yet?"

They both knew the answer to that.

"So how do you afford to do this every day?" Eugenie indicated the table and its litter of dirty plates, a half-drunk cup of cappuccino and discarded papers, one or two of which were still running comment pieces about the ex-Governor's heroic rescue of Umar.

"It's on my tab."

"Tab?"

"Credit," said Raf. "They keep note of what I owe."

"Which is how much?"

Raf shrugged. "They're the ones keeping track," he said lightly and ignored the fox who grinned inside his head, anxious to give him the exact figure.

"You're broke . . ." Eugenie said.

"And you're repeating yourself."

Eugenie sighed. "I can pay you." She opened her bag and extracted a manilla envelope. "Very well indeed."

When Raf raised his eyebrows it was in imitation of her earlier expression, although his shades ruined most of the effect. "You said nothing about paying me."

"Nothing . . . ?" For a split second Eugenie looked triumphant, but her face fell as she caught Raf's twisted smile and realized he was mocking her.

But she threw out the hook all the same.

"Your father's rich."

"If he is my father . . ."

Eugenie sighed. "Believe me," she said heavily and pushed the envelope across the table. "He is and you are an al-Mansur."

"Just suppose," said Raf, pushing it back, "that really were true. Why would I be interested?"

"What if I told you he wants to disinherit His Excellency Kashif Pasha?" Eugenie said, her words curdling around the honorific. "And that his favourite son is too young to command support of the army. And that without the support of the army Murad can't be appointed the Emir's new heir?"

Raf looked blank.

"That leaves you," she said. "Doesn't that make you feel like coming to his aid?"

At the shake of Raf's head, Eugenie shrugged. "I told him this wouldn't work," she said, but she was talking to herself.

"I've got a question for you," said Raf. "Ignore whether or not they were actually married. Did my mother really sleep with the Emir?"

Eugenie nodded.

"Can you prove it?"

"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.

"I need to use your bathroom," said Sally before the uniformed doorman even had time to speak. Whatever the man had been about to say got lost inside her smile.

"It's on the right, down some stairs." He'd been about to call her lady but the kid's accent was just too upscale for that.

"Wait in the bar," she told her companions. Shuffling the Balenciaga bag so it sat higher on her shoulder, Sally headed for a dark wood door without looking back.

The woman who exited the chrome, glass and slate bathroom wore Dior lipstick the colour of dry blood, a small pillbox hat, and a dress of tissue-thin black silk that rustled over her small breasts and made obvious her lack of a bra. The bag was gone, tossed into a chrome trash can, and with the bag her shades and Atal's jacket, all three spoof-bombed against DNA tests with crud vacuumed up from the backseat of a bus.

It looked on first glance as if she wore no knickers at all. It looked that way on second glance too.

"Champagne," she told the barman, "chilled not frozen." He didn't get the reference. That was the problem with using English tag lines, few Americans ever did. "And some olives," Sally added. "Preferably in brine."

Over at his table, Atal smirked.

"You both know what to do?" Sally asked, grabbing a chair and leaning forward, so that her dress gaped at the neck. On cue, the eyes of her two companions flicked from their beers to the swell at the top of her breasts.

That worked then.

"Well?"

"We know," insisted Atal, his eyes still fixed on her front.

"Glad to hear it." Sally sat back, picked up her drink and smiled. In ten minutes' time she'd be meeting a fiftyish WASP, probably done up in dress-down Fridays twenty years too young for him so he didn't get coshed by protestors. And the man wasn't going to listen to a word she said, which suited Sally fine since she was planning to busk that bit of the routine.

"Finish up," she said. "We're on."

"So you see," said Eugenie, "it went like this . . ."

Before Arabic was reintroduced as the court language of Tunis all laws were issued in Turkish, legacy code from the city having been ruled by an Ottoman beylerley, which translated as some kind of pasha.

The return to Arabic took place around two centuries ago, at least, it did according to Eugenie. She kept her grip on Raf's wrist while she talked.

Already prosperous, Tunis had grown fat on the rewards of slaving, piracy and trade. And when the moriscos were finally expelled from al Andalus in 1609, many settled in Tunis, adding their skills in cookery, ceramics and metalwork to the city's existing richness. It was a city of pragmatic compromise, where Jewish merchants flourished alongside those princely pirates the corsairs, who built ornate dars to house their families and influenced Ifriqiya's foreign policy. Renegade Europeans mostly, converts to Islam from Spain and Italy, sometimes excused the requirement to undergo circumcision.

As for the wives of Ifriqiya's rulers, these were either Turkish or captured Christian, rarely indigenous. And the solid foundation of the state, those who worked the fields, led caravans or bartered in the markets were often Berber, a people given to mixing magic and mysticism with their Islam.

Quite why Eugenie felt it necessary to tell him all this Raf wasn't sure; until she got to the bit about captured foreigners giving birth to ruling beys. And then the grip on his wrist was as sharp as the steel in her grey eyes.

"Think about it," she said.

Bizarrely, Eugenie stood to say her good-byes, first shaking Raf by the hand and then dipping forward to kiss him on the cheek.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what?"

Eugenie paused, briefly considering her answer. "I could say," she said, "that I'm sorry I couldn't convince you. That I failed to persuade you to help the Emir. But it's more than that . . ."

"If you can fake sincerity," said the fox and got shushed into silence. If Eugenie was counterfeiting, then she was a better actor than he. Raf could almost feel her regret punctuate each word.

"I'm not faking anything," Eugenie said flatly. "You're not doing yourself any good behaving like this and you're not helping Zara or Hani. I've read your file," she said. "I know when someone's got issues."

"I . . . don't . . . have . . . issues . . ." Raf said.

"No," said Eugenie. "Of course you don't. You have the fox instead."

Four nuns sat by one window, two pairs facing each other across the carriage like sour-faced crows. They had black habits and whatever those white hats were that went straight down, giving them cheekbones they didn't deserve.

They all wore sensible shoes for the journey, flat soles and laces. And they carried sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper and a salami in its own cotton case, like a fat cloth condom. Sally was pretty sure she'd seen sisters in New York wearing pale blue jumpsuits, God Loves Baseball caps and trainers; but maybe convents were tougher in North Africa or perhaps this kind were just a different genus–or should that be species?

Whatever, they didn't approve of Sally's bare legs and T-shirt and that struck her as unfair. Particularly as she'd been on her best behaviour ever since tumbling into the carriage at Banghazi in a clatter of rucksack and carrier bags, with her ancient Leica still safe in its pigskin case. And it wasn't her fault the boy opposite her had decided to practise his English, which was adequate, or his seduction techniques, which stank . . .

Sally, however, had to admit that whipping up his white shirt to show her a stab wound was a new one. Clever too, since it let the boy show off his six-pack and slim hips without being obvious. Unless, of course, it really was his wound she was meant to be admiring.

The scar was bigger than Sally expected. An ugly strip speckled with pigment-dark dots where both edges had been stitched. A nightclub was involved somewhere and a Danish girl, blond like her but not as beautiful, the last said hastily as if Sally might suddenly take offence . . .

"Seven litres," he told her proudly, "that's what I lost."

Sally considered pointing out that the human body couldn't hold seven litres of blood but restrained herself. Maybe the red stuff had been pouring out one side while being pumped in the other.

He'd told Sally his name, she was sure of that. And unfortunately they were several hours too far into a conversation for her to ask it again. Particularly since her name peppered his every sentence, Sally this and Sally that . . .

If every compartment hadn't already been full and the corridor outside locked solid with people standing, she could have moved; but the very thought of pushing her way from carriage to carriage past hundreds of grinning men was enough to make Sally stay where she was.

So what if the nuns stank of garlic sausage cut in fat slices from that salami? She didn't smell so hot herself. A stink was on her own fingers from using a station loo at Tripoli, and she needed a bath. It was five days since she'd stayed at a tiny pensione outside Catania airport, where a fat Sicilian customs inspector had stopped midsearch when he reached the box containing her contraceptive cap.

"What's in here?" he'd demanded.

Dropping to a squat, Sally had spread her knees and mimed shoving a finger into her vagina. He'd let her go after that although his scowl followed her all the way through the air-conditioned hell of Arrivals and out into the sweet heat that told her she was back in Sicily.

The pensione was the first one she'd come across. A drab little house with peeling yellow paint that turned out to be immaculate once she stepped through the door. Clean sheets in her attic room, a double bed charged as a single as there was only one of her and the little hotel was hardly overbusy. A dining room that they opened especially, so that the English student didn't have to eat alone in her room.

And then a bath to wash away the dirt of New York. The pensione had plenty of hot water the owner told her proudly, little knowing that Sally would take hers shallow and almost cold. A habit she traced back to school.

She was tired from the flight and a twelve-hour stopover in London. Most of her spare money had gone towards a ticket that agreeing to the stopover made just about affordable. Although breaking at London meant she spent one night camped at Heathrow fighting off bad pickup lines and assuring the security staff that yes, she did have a valid ticket for onward travel. Of course, Sally could have afforded to fly more or less direct, with a simple change of planes in Frankfurt but then she wouldn't have had enough money left for what she needed to do.

Later, as she dried, staring in the looking glass of the pensione's attic, Sally tried to see herself as Atal had seen her, as Wu Yung and the boy before the man that Wu Yung was. Wondering what had they seen, the three men she'd bedded in the two years since she first let herself seduce Drew, the nanchuku nut, from boredom . . . She'd told Wu Yung fifteen lovers, to stop him thinking she might take him seriously; which Sally had, though common sense made her keep that private.

A thin face. Good bones, her grandmother would have said. Pale blue eyes. Narrow shoulders and small breasts. A flat stomach and no hips. That was her most obvious flaw. She had, an early gym mistress once told her, the figure of a natural athlete. That was shortly before the woman tried to massage knots from the cramped muscles of Sally's inner thigh.

Examined coldly in the flecked mirror of a cheap pensione within spitting distance of the airport's razor wire, Sally still looked good; a fact that made life easier but did nothing to make her proud. She kept herself fit, she didn't take drugs, not even the pharmaceutical kind, and she avoided meat. All the same, her looks and intelligence were the product of good genes which were, whether she liked it or not, the result of careful breeding on the part of her grandparents and parents. Though her grandmother referred to it, rather sweetly, as making a good marriage.

Something Sally had no intention of doing.

After rough bread and rougher wine for which she was not charged, Sally relinquished her room, the bed unused, and took a bus south to Siracusa. She'd been planning to hitch but the owner's wife told Sally that good girls didn't do that in Sicily and when Sally discovered how little a ticket would cost, she decided to be good after all. She stayed with the bus until it reached its destination, the port.

So white in the sunlight that it almost burned Sally's eyes, the SS Gattopardo was anything but inside. Stairs scabbed with chewing gum, heat-mottled lifeboats, walkways and rusting steps painted an institutional green and rough unshaded benches bolted in rows on the upper deck. Made worse by a stink of oil from the engine room and a sour tang of static that clung to every surface.

To top it all the Gattopardo broke down six hours out from Malta, its first stop, and, having sat out a blazing afternoon, decided to limp back at dusk, arriving just as Valletta's cathedral rang midnight. Invited to go ashore and return at daybreak, Sally refused and ended up sleeping on a floor in a women's loo, having first made safe the door by tying a short length of climbing rope between its handle and the nearest tap. Just one of the survival tips she'd picked up on her travels.

Noon next day found Sally arguing with a steward who refused to accept she'd been aboard the previous day and was thus entitled to the complimentary lunch recently announced over the ship's tannoy. Eventually the man gave up and watched in disgust as Sally stuffed her rucksack with oranges and figs, pocketed a fat shard of hard cheese that wanted to be Parmesan but wasn't and took a dozen slices of prosciutto just because she was pissed at him. The fruit and cheese she kept, the meat went Frisbee style over the side to feed the gulls.

All that remained after that was to negotiate customs at Banghazi and she was running for a carriage, filthy clothes, rucksack and all.

"Sally . . ."

The Arab boy with the scar was tapping her bare knee, which was a new one, except that it seemed he really did want to get her attention.

"What?"

Looking round, Sally realized their train had halted in the middle of nowhere. At least nowhere that looked like anywhere. All she could see from her dusty window was a wide expanse of red earth dotted with bushes of some kind.

"We've stopped," she said.

The boy nodded and one of the nuns suddenly started to fire short, frightened sentences at her in a language Sally definitely didn't understand. When Sally shrugged, the woman repeated herself louder.

"Any idea what she's saying?"

He nodded.

"Well," said Sally. "Are you going to tell me?"

"Sure," shrugged the boy. "Why not . . . ? She says this train's been hijacked by bandits who will kill her because of her faith and rape you because you're not wearing enough clothes."

"Is that true?"

He shrugged. "Anything's possible," he told her. "Not likely, but possible." The boy looked from Sally to the nuns and back again. "Do you have anything with longer sleeves?"

She did, in her rucksack.

"And anything other than shorts?"

Jeans, if those were any good.

"It's probably unnecessary," said the boy, sounding apologetic, "but you might want to change just in case."

Peeling off her top while simultaneously popping the plastic buckle on her rucksack to extract Atal's favourite shirt, Sally shook out a Paul Smith she'd borrowed on the Islands and never returned.

Needless to say, Atal had insisted it was a fake.

The shirt was white with thin stripes, made from cotton and had tails old-fashioned enough to cover her modesty as she wriggled out of her shorts and slid into jeans. At school, most Friday nights she used to change back into her uniform in the rear seat of a taxi that would drop her fifty yards from the small gate.

With her rucksack safely shut and back in an overhead rack, Sally turned to find the entire contingent of nuns glaring, not at her this time but at the boy who'd been watching with obvious interest.

"Thank you," Sally told him.

"My pleasure." His smile revealed the kind of teeth that travelled third class on a slow train between Tripoli and Tangiers. As ruined as Sally's own were perfect.

And although her father, ever the unthinking traditionalist, openly admitted to choosing Sally's mother on looks alone (just as Sally's mother admitted marrying for security), her mouth's perfection was down to more than genes. It was the product of three years of night braces, nylon train tracks and restrainers. Every kiss had tasted synthetic. Which maybe explained why there'd been so few.

"You think it's bandits?" she asked the boy.

"Probably not," he said, "but better to be safe." For a moment he looked serious. "Your clothes . . . Long sleeves are better. And only small girls have bare legs here. Very small," he added in case she hadn't understood.

"He'll be back from his mission soon," said the note. "Look after yourself, Tiri."

That was it, nothing more.

And Uncle Ashraf hadn't even bothered to disguise his handwriting. As for its being a real mission . . . that seemed unlikely because then he'd have left a better note under her pillow, one that bothered to lie properly. He was running away, from her crossness and Zara's anger, the noise of the builders and breakfast at Le Trianon and Hani wasn't at all sure he'd ever come back.

Keying the note into her diary, Hani recorded the time–19:58–and shut down her screen. She was trying fairly hard not to cry and even harder not to mind that Zara was still sitting in the qaa with some stupid book while Hani was banished upstairs and Donna had rattled round the kitchen all day, so put out by His Excellency's unexplained absence that she'd shouted at Hani for bothering her.

Pushing open a box of matches, the long kitchen ones, Hani put flame to her uncle's message and watched curls of ash crumble into her basin.

Hani kept her diary inside a lion. When the words got too tangled she hacked off whole threads and hid those in other animals. Uncle Ashraf's arrival in Iskandryia occupied a hippopotamus. Anything to do with Zara got a gazelle, which was being generous. The murder of Hani's Aunt Nafisa filled a vulture, Egyptian obviously. And since Neophron percnopterus had a scrawny neck and nasty little eyes, this was entirely appropriate.

What had happened to her other aunt occupied no space at all, since the General had decreed Lady Jalila's death a secret, back when General Koenig Pasha was still Governor and Hani wasn't confident her idea of scrambling text inside picture code was entirely original.

The day-to-day details of life at the al-Mansur madersa got a Barbary lion, one that stared myopically from her screen with an awareness in its pale blue eyes of approaching extinction.

I knew you before you knew me.

I knew you before you lived . . .

The words were Uncle Ashraf's own. Well, Hani strongly suspected they weren't, but he'd been the one to say them on first seeing her lion and no amount of Web searching had pulled up their real owner. Hani wasn't too sure what they meant but the sentiment sounded sad. And sometimes Hani liked sad but at the moment she was just plain furious. That was why she'd refused to go to noon prayers. She'd have gone with Khartoum to his little mosque, only she was a girl and he was a Sufi, wasn't he?

So she'd been sent to her room by Zara, which was novel. A waterfall of raw emotion tumbling across the older girl's face, as sudden fear that Hani might refuse turned to shock that she'd just scolded someone else's child and ended with anger at being put in that position. Hani was good at reading faces. Growing up with Aunt Nafisa one had to be . . .

And Hani had been tempted to refuse and probably would have done if it had been her uncle, but that was silly because if Uncle Ashraf had been there Hani wouldn't have refused to go to prayers and Zara wouldn't have been upset. So Hani went to keep Zara happy, if that made sense.

The problem with being eleven or ten (or whatever she was actually meant to be) and having a dead mother and two dead aunts was that Zara now felt the need to look after her. Hani had a dead father too, of course, but since she'd never met him that was different.

"Weird . . ." She tossed the comment over her shoulder. Ifritah glanced up just long enough to make certain that nothing important had been said.

On her way out of the qaa, Hani had stopped at the lift, turning back. "He loves you," she'd shouted louder than she intended. "Even if you don't love him." And as she slammed the grille she knew absolutely/for certain that tears already blinded Zara's eyes.

Highlighting the code for some sad-eyed bush baby, Hani opened the picture with a word-processing package so cheap it failed to correct her grammar. Page after page of scribble filled the buffer and right towards the end, round about where anyone normal would begin hitting page down out of sheer boredom, Hani found her list of clues.

"Isaac and Sons?" The street sweeper repeated Raf's question slowly, unsure of its exact meaning. The Isaac he got, this was a foreign version of Isacq which was a common enough name, the rest of it . . .

He shrugged.

"Máa Saláma." Raf said a polite good-bye to the man with the broom and stepped back from the pavement, running his eyes along a row of shop fronts. He was looking for a sign. Something hand-painted onto board to judge from the other signs that hung above darkened windows. Actually he was looking for far more than that.

Ali bin Malik watched the beggar limp away. The stranger's shoes were those of the very poor. A slab of rubber cut from a tractor tyre and punctured with two loops of twine to fit the whole foot and the largest toe. But even these shoes were better than the striped jellaba he wore. This was torn beneath one arm and stained around the ankles with mud or dried concrete.

"Wait," Ali called after the beggar and the man stopped. "Ask Ahmed, my uncle." Pointing along the street he indicated a shadow crouched by a dustcart . . .

"Es-salám aláykum."

Ahmed looked up from his spoils.

"Ahmed?"

A brief nod. And then the man remembered his manners and returned the peace. "Waláykum es-salám."

"Máhaba," Raf said. Hello.

That earned him another nod, less abrupt this time.

"I'm looking for an office," said Raf, "that's meant to be on Rue Ali bel Houane." With a shrug he glanced both ways along the almost deserted street. As if the office might be hiding somewhere in the half dawn. It was maybe six in the morning and Raf could see everything as clearly as if it had been high noon with the sun direct overhead; a lot clearer than most people in Kairouan could have seen even then.

Raf's eyes liked early morning. When the world came into complete focus. There were times when Raf felt sure his circadian rhythms were reversed. That what his body expected from him was to sleep in the day and wake at night.

Baudelairian delusions of Bohemia, Zara had called it in one of her crosser moments. Maybe the only moment he'd ever really seen her cross. After she'd come to his room in the haremlek at night and found him dressed, sitting by an open window in the dressing gown of a dead man. He'd tried to explain to her then who he thought he really was. It was an unwise move. After she'd gone, he looked up Baudelaire and Bohemia to confirm what she'd been saying. A verdict he would dispute but understood how she got to where she got. But then that was negative capability all over, an overdeveloped talent for seeing both sides of everything and agreeing with neither.

Putting the time at six was a guess as Raf had left his watch in El Iskandryia. The fair call to prayer had been twenty minutes before, however, and the sun was somewhere on the horizon, although buildings prevented Raf from knowing exactly where.

"This office . . . You know the number?" Ahmed had a smoker's voice and nicotine stains on the sides of his fingers to match.

"It's number . . . ?" Casually Raf pulled a packet of bidi from the ripped pocket of his jellaba and lit one, dragging deep. As an afterthought he passed the packet to Ahmed and offered Ahmed his cigarette so the street cleaner could light his own.

"Afraid not." Raf shook his head.

It was a lie, of course. That number became fixed in Raf's head the first moment he stood in the qaa, with steps leading from the courtyard to the madersa's first floor behind him and Lady Nafisa ahead, angrily pushing a letter in front of his face only to withdraw it and read him extracts, her tone furious and disdainful.

Sometime around noon, with the sun burning down on the outside of Sally's airless carriage, three men wearing combat trousers, khaki T-shirts and checkedkufiyyehcame by to throw passengers off the stalled train. At least that's what Sally assumed was happening given that the nuns suddenly stood up and began to collect together their baskets, wrapping what was left of the salami inside its white cloth and burying the package at the bottom of the biggest basket, as if bandits might have stopped the train to steal their food.

"I find out what's happening," said the boy and nodded to Sally, pointedly ignoring the nuns as he jumped down onto the track. Sally watched him walk away, dodging between exiting passengers until he disappeared from sight. After a while she realized he probably wasn't coming back.

Everyone waited in the sun for two hours beside the train. And then its diesel engine fired up and the abandoned carriages began to reverse slowly away from where the passengers still sat, picking up speed as they went. True to type, the nuns immediately formed a small circle with their baskets in the middle, as if they were the wagons and their luggage the settlers waiting for an Indian attack. Occasionally one or another would glance over to where Sally stood, too nervous to sit, but that was all.

As dusk arrived so did the soldiers. Teenage conscripts with hard haircuts and soft eyes, the clash between appearance and their friendliness not yet kicked out of them. They carried stubby submachine guns stamped out of cheap metal which they played with endlessly, flicking the safety catches and snapping out quarter-curve magazines only to snap them back again. The conscripts seemed to have no more idea of why they were there than Sally did.

Night never really came. The moon was too bright and, though air convected and a warm wind blew from the distant sea and a whole orchestra of insects finally fell silent, darkness stayed away. Sometime after midnight a new train rolled up. It looked much like the old train but dirtier, with carriages that were separate, unlinked by any corridor. The man driving wore combat fatigues, with an AK49 slung across his back.

"Great," said Sally. No corridor meant no loos. And that meant six hours locked in a carriage with an uncertain stomach.

"Need help?"

Sally turned to find a barefoot boy wearing a samurai topknot, the baggiest Fat Boys she'd ever seen and a leather choker with a plum-sized amber bead tied round his neck. The orange lettering across his T-shirt proclaimed Rock and Ruin. And underneath in much smaller letters was a line that read archaeologists do it in spades.

Sally sighed. "Help with what?"

"Getting on the train." The blond boy pointed at her rucksack, then nodded to the nearest carriage which stood empty with its door still shut. It was, Sally suddenly realized, going to be hard enough clambering up without having to drag her luggage after her.

"Yeah," she said, "that would be good."

Still smiling, the boy pushed out his hand and announced, "I'm Per."

"Sally," said Sally without thinking about it and remembered too late that she'd meant to travel as someone else.

Together they clambered up into a dusty-smelling carriage and Per yanked down the blinds on the side where everyone stood, blocking out moonlight and the shuffling crowd beyond. For about five minutes it looked like this might work, as compartments either side filled with noise but no one tried their door.

And then, with the train shuddering as its diesel fired up, the door was jerked open and a close-cropped skull gazed up at them. Whatever doubts the conscript felt about being faced with two nasrani lost out to his need for a seat. Pulling himself up, he was about to shut the door when someone shouted his name.

Five conscripts tumbled in after him, pushing and swearing until they saw Sally by the far window with Per opposite.

"Hi," said Sally and six faces blinked as one. They were kids she realized, only a few years younger in age but a dozen in experience, uncertain how to react to some foreign girl in men's clothes. Their problem, Sally decided, not mine, and nodded to one of them to shut the door.

"Sleep tight," said Per, settling into his seat.

Sally wasn't sure if that was the Swedish boy's idea of a joke.

Along with everyone else in the carriage Sally found herself slipping down in her seat as the minutes turned into hours, until her head rested on her arm and her legs were supported by the seat opposite. She had Per's bare toes almost in her face, clean but dirty (if that made sense). And her own sandalled feet were being used by Per as a cushion. Without even thinking about it he'd wrapped his arms round her knees, pulled her feet in close and fallen asleep, so that now his breath came slow and regular as waves against a summer beach.

"Sleep tight," she said but he was already.

Headed for sleep herself, Sally hardly noticed Per shift onto his side and brush one hand along her calf. For a second she imagined it an accident but then the touch came again, so softly she could have been dreaming if not for the rattle of rails and dark sky scudding past outside.

Shutting her eyes, Sally decided to be asleep; remaining asleep as Per's fingers crept up from her ankle to knee before smoothing down towards her ankle again. He moved his fingers in time to the lurch of the wheels. As if that somehow made it coincidental, merely part of the journey. And she kept feigning sleep as Per's stroking became heavier and his hand moved higher, until the top of every stroke almost reached her buttocks.

Part of Sally, the part to which she usually refused to listen, regretted changing out of her shorts, because those were baggy and, well, short really.

"You awake?" His voice was soft, concerned.

Sally almost shook her head.

Shifting in her seat, she moved lower so she was almost balanced between the seats. At the same time she kept her eyes shut and her breathing regular, even when his fingers found the backs of her thighs and slipped between them, smoothing along a seam.

That was where Per's fingers stayed, their movement so slight Sally could barely sense it though the effect was like water rising behind a flood wall. The warmth between her legs more than mere body heat, the dampness not just sweat.

"Per . . ."

The Swedish boy stopped. One bare arm still hooked round her leg and his hand crushed between her thighs. A barrier was formed by his half-turned body, screening them from the others, those sleeping children with their cruel haircuts and faces made soft by rest and dreams.

"Too much?"

Sally wondered what he'd do if she said yes. Not that she would.

"Wait," she told him and sat up in her seat. Switching sides quickly, Sally snuggled down facing Per. Only this time round she was the barrier between the woken world and the snoring conscripts.

"Better," she said.

"Much," Per agreed.

They kissed or rather Sally kissed Per. And when his hand reached for her, Sally didn't move away but put her own fingers over his and snuggled closer, holding it there.

Per skipped several of the stages she'd come to expect from boys her own age, stages that Wu Yung had also ignored. And when Per removed his hand it was to reach between the buttons of Atal's shirt and expose one breast.

"Small," she told him.

"Perfect," he replied, dipping his head.

When Sally eventually opened her eyes, it was to see one of the conscripts watching her in the window, his distance doubled by reflection. The boy said nothing but neither did he look away.

"Okay?" Per asked, his head still buried between her small breasts, licking salt and a distant echo of cheap soap from a bath she'd taken in Catania; so distant as to be almost lost under the dirt of five days' travelling without a break.

"Sure," said Sally, "everything's fine."

Per's back was to the window and his head was bent, his arms tight around Sally and little doubt could exist as to what his reflection tasted. On the other hand, for two strangers making out in a railway carriage they were being unusually discreet. So Sally shrugged and shut her eyes again.

Somewhere between barest dawn and reaching the Italianate Gothic monstrosity of Tarabulus station Per dropped his fingers to the waist of Sally's jeans and discovered she'd already freed the top button. As she wouldn't let him ease the jeans past her hips, he made do with sliding his hand inside.

She bit his shoulder so hard when she came that Per was the one who cried out. A muffled yelp, hastily swallowed. Although had Per turned round he'd have discovered how redundant that was. Every conscript in the carriage was already awake, wide-eyed and envious.

Discreetly, so that her move wasn't too obvious Sally put her hand down and held Per, watching him tense. She waited until he shut his eyes at the intensity of her grip, then let go.

"Your turn after Tarabulus," she said. "That is, if you're not getting off at this stop."

Per hesitated.

"I'm going on to Gabes," Sally added.

"Take a break," he suggested. "Spend a few days in Tripoli."

"No time." Sally shook her head. "I've got stuff to do."

"What stuff?"

Sally dropped her hand into his lap, making it look casual. "I'm on a quest," she said.

"For what?"

"The Libyan striped weasel," said Sally, and gave his trousers a squeeze.

As they pulled out of Tarabulus less than an hour later, sat in a carriage that was once again theirs alone, Per asked what had been troubling him from the first moment they met beside the stopped train.

"How old are you?"

Without even stopping to think Sally lopped three years off her age. And tried not to grin when the Swedish boy looked suddenly appalled.

"Yeah," said Raf, "I already know . . ."

A life of brain-rotting boredom awaited Tunisia's last bey, who took with him into exile his wife, his German mistress (standard Thiergarten -issue, one), a dozen, French-educated ministers, most of his children and a 392-piece set of china made in the Husseinite colours by Noritake.

And while the brave speech made from the door of his departing train was enough to make some doubt the probity of supporting Colonel al-Mansur's plot to overthrow the government, the convenient discovery two days later of an empty beyical treasury was enough to make those same people realize how right Colonel al-Mansur had been to propose himself for the new position of Emir.

"You done now?" Raf asked.

Inside his head, Tiri nodded and smiled, glad to be back. Raf's refusal to talk had lasted a whole bus trip and half a train journey. So now the fox was sticking to easy thoughts and simple facts. Which was why it didn't mention what was happening up ahead.

The secret police were waiting for Raf on platform three of Gare de Tunis. It was nothing personal. They were waiting for everyone. Although, to be honest, Raf didn't care. He was being someone else for the day, maybe longer.

Maybe forever.

Slung under the arms of each mubahith was a new-model HK7, the complete works right down to Zeiss laser scope and double-length magazine. Since Ifriqiya was on the UN embargo list for weapons sales and the ministry in Berlin responsible for overseeing HK shipments obeyed the ruling when it suited them, shipping must have been via false end-user certificates. Presumably the same applied to the military-issue BMW bikes parked on the concourse behind.

Their black uniform wasn't one Raf recognized but whatever force they represented it seemed to require them to wear steel-capped eighteen-rivet boots cut from shiny leather. Always a bad sign. For his part, Raf still wore sandals cut from an old tractor tyre and a filthy jellaba. His skull was hidden under a cheap Dynamo's cap and three-day stubble accentuated rather than hid the scar on his jaw; he looked rough, made worse by the fact that seventy-six hours of not eating had hollowed his cheeks and put dark circles round his naked eyes.

The smile on his face was that of an idiot savant. Or maybe just an idiot.

That the mubahith wore aviator shades went without saying, since mirror shades and big boots went together across most of North Africa like midsummer riots and tear gas. Raf's own dark glasses were missing and in their place he wore cheap contacts that turned his eyes brown and overlaid the world with a haze of ghostly smoke.

"You." A hand clipped his shoulder, sending him stumbling. "Can't you read?" A soldier with corporal's stripes was pointing to a sign. A dozen soldiers and an officer in khaki were there to do the actual work. The mubahith just stood around in black uniforms looking bored.

Raf shook his head mutely and the corporal sucked his teeth.

"Into line," he ordered and indicated a row of barriers set up to funnel passengers through one of two metal arches. Men, who made up the bulk of the crowd, jostled and pushed their way towards one arch, where a bored soldier sat off to the side, chain-smoking in front of a bank of screens.

The few women alighting from Raf's train had their own arch with no screens visible. All results of their strip scans were hidden within the walls of a tall black tent and seen only by trained nurses. Sécurité's gesture to common decency.

"Come on."

Most of those who passed through the arches raised little interest. Although a few of the men were pulled out of line and made to turn out their pockets just for show.

"Your turn," said the fox and Raf nodded, dropping his bidi to the platform and grinding it under heel. Raf had no real idea why he did that. Unless it was meant to be polite.

Shuffling forward with the felaheen gait of those too poor to own correctly sized shoes, Raf passed under the arch. And all might have been well if he hadn't looked up and stared straight into the eyes of Sergeant Belhaouane, recently promoted to the mubahith.

"You," the man jerked his heavy chin. "Come here."

Raf did what he was told.

"Look at me."

Reluctantly Raf raised his head then looked away. He stank of sweat and his jellaba was rotten beneath the arms from lack of washing.

"Your papers." The order was barked out. It didn't take the fox to tell Raf that the security man was enjoying himself, which didn't stop the fox from telling him anyway.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing." Raf shook his head. "Nothing, Captain."

Sergeant Belhaouane looked almost mollified by his sudden promotion. Although that didn't stop him from clicking his fingers loudly to hurry Raf along.

"Come on . . ."

Raf hurried. Scrabbling in his jellaba pocket, then in all the pockets of the tattered trousers he wore beneath. Finally, when the sergeant's patience was almost gone he found his wallet.

"Your Excellency," said Raf, producing it.

The mubahith flipped open the battered square of leather and looked inside. Then he checked the pocket behind the empty slots where credit cards would have been were this felah the kind of man to have credit cards.

A hundred US dollars hid there, in tatty green ten-dollar notes. One month's wages to the sergeant, three months' wages to someone like Raf. About as much as a family might scrabble together to send one of them to the city to find work.

"These your identity papers?"

Raf shuffled his feet.

"Thought so." The man pocketed the notes with a twist of the wrist as deft as any magician making cards disappear. "Right," he said when that was done. "What's your business in Tunis?"

"Work," said Raf. "I came to find a job."

"Doing what?"

"Unloading ships . . . There's a strike."

Sergeant Belhaouane snorted. Work at the docks passed from father to son, strike or no strike. The only way an outsider like Raf could ever get dock work was to marry the daughter of a stevedore and hope that, when the time came, the jetty bosses were open to bribes and the man about to retire didn't already have a son.

"What's your village?"

Raf named a place so small it didn't occur on most maps.

"Where?"

In reply he named a town nearby not much larger. Although the sergeant appeared to have heard of it this time, probably because Segui was known as a place of annual pilgrimage for Soviet nasrani who spurned UN sanctions and raced the salt lakes with sail boards on wheels.

It was obvious from the sergeant's dismissive gaze that he held out little hope of Raf finding work enough to send money back to his village. The concrete-stained sandals and filthy jellaba identified Raf as a man mostly used to casual graft. And construction in Tunis was run by one family. If you didn't pay for an introduction, you didn't work. Life was that simple. And since the last thing Tunis needed was another itinerant from the south Sergeant Belhaouane decided his best course of action would be send the idiot back to Segui on the next train.

Unfortunately the fox disagreed.

The lift in the al-Mansur madersa was an old-fashioned Otis that worked on counterweights, great slabs of lead that rose between two greased poles as the Otis descended and went down when the lift rose. Apparently the lift was now so ancient it was valuable.

For the bulk of her short life Hani would no more have dared visit the men's floor than she'd expect a man to visit the haremlek, where her own room was situated. Uncle Ashraf's arrival from America had changed all that. Along with other things such as eating breakfast in the kitchen, to the intense disapproval of Aunt Nafisa's elderly Portuguese cook.

Uncle Ashraf's cook now, she supposed.

Donna was afraid of Hani's uncle. That much was obvious from the way she always tapped her forehead, tummy and one breast after another every morning when Uncle Ashraf first came into the kitchen. For herself, Hani relied for safety on a silver hand of Fatima worn under her vest on a length of black cotton. Not that Hani believed her uncle possessed the evil eye.

His power was baraka, the sanctity that clung to those who walked the difficult path. Hani had discussed with Khartoum her idea that baraka might have required her uncle to vanish and the fact the old Sudanese porter hadn't dismissed her idea out of hand was beginning to convince Hani that she was right.

Easing open the brass grille, Hani slipped into the Otis and pushed herself into a corner; all of which was unnecesary because Hani had only just seen Zara cross the darkened courtyard below the qaa and disappear under a marble arch that led to the covered garden. Gone to see how far her father's workmen had got, probably . . .

Hani checked her watch. Four hours since lunch. Well, if the tray of pastries Donna had left discreetly outside Hani's door passed for lunch. And two hours before their visitor was due to arrive.

His Highness Mohammed Tewfik Pasha, Khedive of El Iskandryia and ruler of all Egypt . . . One time puppy prince to Koenig Pasha's mastiff. Hani reeled off her cousin's titles, adding a few choice ones of her own.

These days of course the General was fighting US attempts to extradite him for kidnapping a psychotic battle computer that answered to the name of Colonel Abad. Since Washington simultaneously insisted that Abad was merely a machine, Hani was puzzled as to how General Koenig Pasha could be charged with kidnapping, particularly in an American court; always assuming Washington managed to extradite him, which was unlikely because the General was many things (including her godfather), but what he wasn't was without friends.

The day before the day before yesterday, which was a Tuesday. (Hani checked that fact in her head and discovered she'd got it right.) The day before, etc. an invitation had arrived for her uncle and in his absence Hani had felt obliged to open it, watched unfortunately by Donna who'd also heard the knock at the door onto Rue Sherif. And Donna had been less than happy when, having skim-read the Khedive's note, Hani promptly vanished up to her room to feed it through a pink plastic scanner.

Having saved the file, Hani typed an answer on her uncle's behalf, folded it neatly and took it down to the kitchen for Donna to post. The reply, brief to the point of rudeness, regretted that Ashraf Bey was unable to attend the Khedive as invited and suggested that instead the Khedive might visit the al-Mansur madersa at 7:00P .M. on Friday 18th Jumaada al-awal, AH 1472 . . .

"Stay there," Hani told her cat and lost Ifritah's reply in a crunch of lift wheels. Until Zara took Hani shopping at Marshall & Snellgrove, Hani had assumed that all lifts were like this one; but then, until eight months back when Uncle Ashraf first arrived, Hani hadn't been outside the madersa, ever . . . So what did she know?

Hani shrugged.

She had work to do.

Two facts were insufficient. Hani had stopped calling them clues, because they revealed so little. Her uncle was gone. A workman's jellaba was missing. Not clues, Hani told herself crossly, isolated facts. A situation she was about to change by finding others.

The room her uncle used was dark, silent and damp so Hani folded back his shutters to let in air and with it sodium haze from the surrounding city. Directly below was the courtyard, its fountain silent, and beyond the courtyard a flat-roofed store used by Hamzah's builders. In the old days the open-sided store had been a room for entertaining visitors not quite grand enough to be invited up to the qaa. Now it was full of sacks of cement, endless sheets of glass sorted into piles and machines for sandblasting metal.

On the far side of the store began the garden. Only most of its roof was gone, each glass pane carefully removed so that the supporting framework of Victorian girders could be stripped back to metal, treated against rust and repainted. In the middle of the garden, staring blindly into a muddy pit that would become a carp pond stood Zara, unaware of being watched. Unaware, it seemed to Hani, of anything very much since Uncle Ashraf's disappearance.

In one corner of her uncle's room was a bateau lit, sheets folded down neatly. A silver chair, made from walnut overlaid with beaten metal, stood next to it. Apart from that there was only a double-fronted wardrobe against one wall, doors inset with matching oval mirrors that reflected Hani back to herself, a silhouette watching a silhouette, and a bow-fronted walnut chest against another wall. A tatty rug occupied the floor in between.

Having confirmed that there were no loose tiles beneath the rug, Hani debated her next move and decided on the wardrobe. In a shoe box underneath it she found a revolver and picked this up by the handle, only then remembering to consult the notebook she'd borrowed, her tiny Maglite playing over the fat man's spidery writing. It took Hani longer than she liked to find the right page.

Never touch evidence with bare hands . . .

Well, that was a good start.

Doing something clever like hook her torch through the revolver's trigger guard was out because Hani needed that to see what she was doing. And while it was true there were wire clothes hangers, any one of which would have done, dozens of the things on an otherwise empty rack in the wardrobe, just looking at those stung the back of Hani's legs. So instead Hani transferred her grip from handle to trigger guard and brought the barrel up to her nose. It stank of old fireworks.

Other than this the wardrobe was bare. Nothing on top or in either drawer beneath.

Search systematically, said the notebook.

For all its dusty elegance and probable value, Raf's chest of drawers was equally devoid of clues, lined with crinkled white paper and filled mostly with dust and dead spiders. Just to be thorough Hani yanked out one drawer after another to check that no one had taped anything important to the back.

She knew for a fact Donna had tidied no clues away because the old woman was far too terrified of her uncle to enter his room. It was Khartoum who cleaned this floor and Khartoum had been nowhere near the main house for . . .

Now that was interesting.

Hani thought about it and grinned.

Once she was done here, she'd wander over to the porter's room next to the back entrance of the madersa and have a serious talk with Khartoum, assuming she still had time. The arrival of her cousin the Khedive obviously took precedence.

Make notes, the book said somewhere. So Hani wrote bedroom in pencil on a blank page towards the end and put a tick next to it. On the line below she wrote bathroom.

Her uncle's cast-iron bath was full of dust, its enamel yellow with age. One of the claws at the tap end showed black metal where an old accident had chipped the surface away. Maybe his shower cubicle would hold more clues.

Make that any clues, Hani thought to herself.

Coal tar soap. A dry flannel. Camomile shampoo. The shampoo was half-full and the flannel as stiff as peeled skin. It was the soap that was interesting. Tiny splinters of hair porcupined its surface. Not washed-out strands as one might expect but clippings. Dropping to a crouch, Hani ran one finger across the bottom of the shower tray and came up with a whole crisscross of clues.

He'd cut his hair then. No, Hani crossed that out and pencilled in cropped instead. Uncle Ashraf had cropped his hair. And that meant he was in disguise. Something she should have known from the missing jellaba. Disguise meant Uncle Ashraf was on a mission. Hani nodded to herself, heading for the lift. There was work to do. Khartoum would have to wait.

"In here."

The bar was narrow and smoky. Little more than a low vault hidden behind bead curtains at the rear of a café in one of the poorer suqs. The brick walls were windowless and the effect was to make those inside feel they were below ground. A sensation heightened by the fact that the street outside was also roofed over.

"Sit," someone said.

Raf sat.

From above, the roof of this part of the medina looked like sand dunes frozen solid and painted white, or giant worm casts under which hidden streets ran into each other or branched off only to meet again. Scrawny weeds forced their way between cracked plaster, scrabbling an existence amid bird droppings, feral cats and rubbish that shop owners had carried up three flights of stairs to dump onto this bizarrely beautiful moonscape.

Mostly the rubbish included bicycles and broken electric heaters, rusting cans of Celtica (a cheap beer allowed on sale by the Emir because it upset the mullahs) and cardboard boxes gone soggy in the rain and dried into improbable angles.

There were other things. Stranger things.

None of this Raf yet knew.

"Why bring him here?" The boy speaking wore a charcoal-striped suit cut from Italian silk, the only person in the whole café not wearing a jellaba. His upper lip hid behind a new moustache while a Balkan Sobranie dragged at his lower lip. Raf disliked Hassan on sight.

Sajjad shuffled his feet. "It seemed like . . ."

"It was," said a dark man sat by the far wall. "In fact, in the circumstances, this is the ideal place." And it seemed to Raf that levels of significance resonated within the words; but then Raf was tired and filthy, unshaven and ravenous from surviving on what little food Sajjad had been able to bring to the hut by the signal box, so stripping meaning from obscurity was probably low on his list of talents.

There were no tables in the narrow room, only stone benches that ran down both sides and a shorter bench against the far wall, where the dark man was sitting.

He was bald and muscle-bound, with the face of a street brawler and five gold hoops in one ear. Someone had smashed his nose years back and although it had mended well there was a telltale scar at the top of the bridge where flesh had ripped. He wore a rough woollen robe.

"How long have you had him?"

"Five days," Sajjad shrugged. "Maybe a week."

"And no one saw you leave?"

Sajjad shook his head.

"Good," said the man. Pushing himself up off the bench he threaded his way between people's feet and stopped in front of Raf, dropping to a crouch so he could look straight into the newcomer's eyes.

It was all Raf could do to stare back.

"We live, we die, we live again," said the man. "Always remember this."

There didn't seem to be much of an answer.

"And you are welcome," the man added, bowing slightly. "My name is Shibli. I've been looking forward to meeting you."

"Right," said the fox.

Shibli nodded. "Right," he agreed and went back to his seat.

When a boy tapped Raf's shoulder, Raf thought he was being offered a plastic mouthpiece for the glass-and-silver sheesa currently doing a circuit; but what the boy in the check shirt actually held was a spliff, plump as a cockroach and already sticky with tar.

"I don't . . ."

"Then start," said the boy, "you look like you need it."

Watched by Sajjad, the kid with the check shirt and the fat boy in the Italian suit, Raf slotted the spliff between his first and second finger, cupped his hand and sucked at the gap between first finger and thumb. Paper flared and transmuted to ash as half the roach vanished in one massive hit. He had their attention now, Raf knew that.

All it ever took was simple and childish tricks.

He held the smoke in his lungs as he counted himself into darkness. On remand in Seattle where everything was freely available and widely used, most of the dopeheads held down their swirl for a minute or so but Raf could double that, which had to do with possessing more red blood cells or maybe just better ones.

Three minutes after he'd taken the toke, with all eyes on him, he tossed out the dregs of his breath in one whalelike blow . . .

(There was little Raf didn't know about cetacea. Not that he ever got to travel on the observation ships with his mother. Although she never forgot to mention in interviews that she always took with her a photograph of her young son, or that the picture was by some photographer better known for naked models and ageing rock stars.)

(The other thing she never forgot to mention was the time Norwegian commandos boarded SS Valhalla outside Spitzbergen and she'd had to hide two rolls of Kodachrome in her vagina and follow it with a tampon. This, she reminded everyone, was the point she converted to digital photography.)

"You done with that?"

Raf looked at the olive-skinned woman sat opposite. Given that every single café he'd seen on his short walk through Souk El Katcherine had been filled only with men, her sex made her a rarity.

"It's obvious," she said, plucking the roach from his fingers. "I'm allowed in because Jean-Marie, my uncle, owns the café. Besides, I'm half-French so I don't know any better."

Isabeau Boulart had one of those ambiguous faces, angelically innocent from the front but slightly dissolute in profile. A gap separated her front teeth and she had a gold nose stud. Her chin was strong, her lower lip narrower than the upper as if top and bottom didn't quite meet or match. Her figure looked good, though, neat breasts pushing at a cotton top slightly too short to cover the soft curve of her tummy.

"Finished staring?"

Raf smiled blissfully and across the room Sajjad laughed. "Prime kif," he said. "Idries imports it himself. Guaranteed to take away your senses . . ."

"Yeah," said the woman, "if you have any to start with."

Idries was the boy in check shirt and jeans who'd handed Raf the roach. Somehow, in a way Raf hadn't yet worked out, Sajjad was waiting for Idries' agreement on something. And Raf was still just about awake enough to know it concerned him.

"Where are you originally from?" Idries' voice was casual, unthreatening. Which was enough to make Raf try to clear his thoughts.

"I'm, well . . ."

"You can tell us," said Isabeau. It was hard to work out whether or not she was being sarcastic.

"I don't know," Raf admitted finally. "I've never known the answer to that question," he added, when Isabeau raised her eyebrows. "People ask and my mind goes empty." It would have been easier to give them the name of the village he'd told the soldier but that had gone out of his head.

"What was your father's name?" Idries demanded.

"He doesn't know his father," said Sajjad flatly. "And I saw him half kill a member of the mubahith. He's one of us."

The fat boy in the Italian suit kept hogging the sheesa and Shibli went on quietly sipping his hot mint tea from a small glass, but the others were listening and watching, weighing up his words.

Waiting.

The kif had done its job if that was to flood Raf's brain with delta-9-tetrhydrocannabinol and make him reveal the truth. Something he'd be happy to do if only he could recognize it.

"Where did your train come from?" asked Isabeau.

This Raf could handle.

"Ben Guerdane." He named a two-horse town on the Jeffara plain in the shadow of Jebel Dahar, maybe twenty klicks from the border with Tripolitana. Originally the fox's plan, such as it was, had been to bus the distance from Ben Guerdane to Kairouan, then take another to Tunis, but the night bus had already gone so Raf caught a local train instead, buying his ticket at one window, booking his cracked wooden seat at a second and confirming the ticket he'd just bought at a third. The entire cost of his ticket and seat reservation was less than a cappuccino at Le Trianon.

"That's true," Sajjad nodded. "I saw it come in."

"Where were you standing?" Hassan demanded.

"In the café overlooking the concourse. The one with the balcony."

A place with a façade that could have been lifted straight from the Marais in Paris and probably was. All green tiles and glass. As well as a whole sprawl of red-roofed suburbs, the French had managed to build a cathedral, an Art Nouveau theatre, an opera house and the Gare de Tunis by the time the Emir's great-grandfather threw them out of his city.

Raf was glad he could remember that.

"No other way onto the platform?" Shibli asked.

Sajjad shook his head firmly.

"Okay," said Shibli, "so we assume he got off that train. Let's deal with the next point." He nodded to Idries and told the boy to pass Raf the leather bag Sajjad had lent to him.

"Open it," he said. So Raf did and pulled out the submachine gun. Someone, probably Sajjad, had slotted the magazine back into place and without thinking Raf broke it down again. Separating clip from chassis.

"How did you get this?"

Raf told his story for a third time. Sajjad having been both the first and the second time.

"Didn't you realize there would be mubahith and soldiers?" Shibli looked more puzzled than anything else.

No, Raf could honestly say the thought never occurred to him. Police yes, in North Africa the police were everywhere, but soldiers questioning every felah, khamme and Berber clansman to climb from a local train . . . ? That was something else again.

"Okay," said Shibli, putting down his tea glass. "Let's take this from the top . . ." He smiled and for a split second it was possible to see the man he'd been. Someone whose hunger for meaning had taken him through all life had to offer and out into a stark stillness beyond.

"Do you want to keep the gun?"

Raf shook his head.

"Good . . ." The Shibli held out his hand, looking puzzled when Raf made no attempt to hand over the HK.

"Fingerprints," Raf explained apologetically. Without really thinking about it, Raf freed a catch on the side and dropped to his knees, field-stripping the HK on the dirty floor in front of him. When the weapon was reduced to barrel, breech, stock and chassis, Raf reached behind him and took a tiny bowl of olive oil from Isabeau's plate without even asking.

Ripping a strip from the leg of his borrowed SBCF jumpsuit he soaked it in oil and wiped over the parts in front of him. As an afterthought Raf flipped the bullets from their magazine and reloaded them, having first made sure each was clean.

Thirty seconds later the gun was whole and the room was in silence. Most of the expressions when Raf looked up were unreadable.

"You originally travelled from Egypt?"

Raf looked surprised.

"The jellaba you wore," said Shibli, "Sajjad said the pattern was Egyptian."

"Not mine," Raf said.

"Meaning what?"

"I needed some clothes so I stole them."

"And what were you wearing when you stole someone else's jellaba?"

Raf thought back to his black Italian suit, white cotton shirt and red tie, the shades, his black shoes and the gold cuff links Hamzah Effendi gave him for something he once did.

"Uniform," said Raf finally. "I was wearing uniform."

Per gutted supper with a swift cut, turning his knife sideways to hook out the rat's intestines, which tumbled onto the coals at his feet. Without pause, he sliced a ring around the neck of his catch and tossed the blade aside to ease his fingers beneath the animal's skin, peeling it back like a man turning a glove inside out. Only then did he answer the blond girl sitting in the dusk opposite.

"Sure I'm sure . . ."

"It's safe to eat?"

Per nodded. "You'd be surprised what's safe if you cook it properly. You certain this isn't a rare species?"

Sally was.

When Per first returned with supper wriggling in his hand he'd asked Sally if his catch was rare. Since the rat was obviously still alive at this point Sally had assumed Per was trying to avoid killing something endangered. Now she was beginning to wonder. The small stuff she knew, his hatred of shoes, the fact the first thing he did each morning was retie his hair, and the raw scratch marks across his back were definitely hers: but she still had little idea as yet of what was inside his head. But then it was fair to say that Per had less than no idea of what was in her own.

"Rosemary," Per said, crumbling leaves under her nose. "And this one's fresh thyme."

Sally had watched the snake-hipped Swede build a fire from brushwood, doing everything the way Sally felt it should be done. First he dug a small pit and ringed it with stones collected from the outcrop under which they camped. Raked a wide area around the pit with his fingers as a second move, brushing aside anything that might flare like tinder. And filled the pit with twigs, arranged by thickness as his third move. Spaghetti-thin in the middle, pencil-fat around that and fatter still around the outside and over the top.

The flame came from an old lighter; so old she hadn't seen that kind before.

"Just petrol," said Per, noticing her interest. "Works even in a high wind." He did something vaguely obscene with the chrome circle at the top of the lighter and Sally realized he was jacking it up and down like a metal foreskin. "Belonged to my grandfather," he said proudly.

"And you still use it?"

"Why not?" said Per. "It still works."

Sally smiled. He was an odd mix. A carnivorous technopagan who thought modern war inherently immoral but happily believed killing to be a hardwired human reaction, if only on a personal level. As for global politics, genetics and the other stuff that really interested Sally, they hadn't even begun to go there. The only thing that really fired Per was history and old ruins.

"What are you thinking?" His voice studiedly casual, borderline curious. Something about her obviously fascinated him and Sally had yet to work out what. Leaving aside the obvious.

"That you're a good fuck . . ."

Per grinned. "And you're a good judge of these things?"

"You're not?"

Still grinning the boy put his lighter to the kindling and they both watched flame catch. An immediate helix of twisted vision ruptured the air between them. There was no smoke to disturb the summer sky, only a spiral of heat haze. Sally was impressed by that.

They could have got off at Gabes but Sally wanted a bank and knew, because she'd already checked, that Coutts & Co. (Tunis) kept a branch where Avenue de Carthage intersected with Avenue de Paris.

So she made Per look after her luggage in a café across the road while she sauntered into one of those grey-stoned colonial mansions with sash windows, bay trees at the door and industrial-strength air-conditioning and banged her chequebook on the counter, which was Italian horsehair marble, obviously enough.

The florid young man who glanced up looked first at Sally's tatty chequebook and only then at the blond foreigner and Sally was glad it was that way round. The five minutes she'd spent cleaning up in the thin trickle of water extracted from an ablutions hose in the café loo had done little but smear dust across her sunburned face. Dirt still grimed her arms and Sally's hair was a mess under her scarf. Although Sally had to admit that tying back her hair helped make her look local.

"Madame?"

"Mademoiselle," Sally corrected without thinking. Mademoiselle it was and mademoiselle was the way it was going to stay. She'd seen the price her mother had to pay for security and that was just too high.

"I'd like to check my account."

Sally pushed her book to Kaysar Aziz and watched him flick back its cover and discreetly check the laser-stamped photograph embossed on the inside. Equally discreetly, Aziz fanned a dozen of the most recent stubs. The amounts scrawled in a variety of cheap pens got smaller each time.

"If you could just wait here." He vanished through an oak door to check her balance, something he could have done quicker by flicking alive a flatscreen angled into the countertop. This was discretion apparently.

She knew the answer the moment Kaysar reappeared, long before he had time or need to frame his reply.

"Empty?"

"I'm sorry . . ."

Sally shrugged. "Not your problem if my father's a prick."

His blink was lightning-fast.

"Cancelled," Sally explained. "Until I come home. He's been threatening it for months. Now he has . . . You got a loo round here?"

Aziz looked blank.

"Toilet," Sally said. "Which way?"

Rinsing her hands to wash off the soap, Sally started on her face and realized, too late, that she was splashing water down her front. The decision made itself. Unwrapping her scarf she shoved it into the pocket of her jeans and pulled her damp T-shirt over her head, revealing bite marks below one breast and a barbed-wire tattoo round her upper left arm. The tattoo was a mistake, an old one. The jury was still out on the navel stud and the gold dumbbell through her left nipple.

The body of an animal, Wu Yung had said, and that was when Sally knew she'd finally outgrown him. The old man meant lean and muscled like a predator but he'd missed the essential truth. What he thought was a compliment was merely a statement of the obvious. And the fact Wu Yung never realized this disappointed her. She was an animal as was he, as were Bozo and Atal, that overprivileged, underchallenged little idiot with his kangaroo-skin shoes.

Homo sapiens. One point three percent off being a chimpanzee. A species outside evolution and seriously in need of an overhaul.

Sally sighed.

When she'd wrung out as much water from her hair as she could Sally wrapped it still damp in her scarf, splashed cologne onto her breasts from a bottle on a glass shelf above the basin, struggled back into her T-shirt and turned to go. That was when she noticed an elderly Arab woman sitting in an alcove.

Gazes met and held, pale blue and darkest brown and Sally nodded, shrugging off the lack of a nod in return.

To make a point she left her last US dollar in the saucer by the door.

Empirical evidence proved that sitting quietly in front of a half-eaten croissant could keep a waiter from Le Trianon at bay for half an hour. The secret was not to run over thirty minutes. Doing so resulted in someone coming to ask if there was a problem with the food.

Opening her laptop, Hani called up a photograph and stripped off yesterday's additions, starting again. The foreigner's strange shirt was replaced with a new scoop-neck top, her hair made presentable courtesy of digiGloss, which billed itself as the software makeup experts used. Hani had downloaded a fourteen-day trial version of this and a freeware version of Wardrobe v3.1 from a teen site in Kansas City.

Her uncle was missing, check.

Khartoum knew why but wouldn't say, check.

And check Zara moping about in the qaa like some consumptive. Merde and merde again, as Zara herself would say. Hani took a large bite from her croissant and chewed hard. Yesterday she'd come across the woman sitting by the small fountain in the qaa reading Rumi. If this was a side effect of love then . . .

Hani sucked her teeth.

"Is everything all right?" The waiter who materialized beside her table looked worried, his eyes flicking from the child's face to her plate.

"The croissant is delicious," Hani said firmly, "and I don't need another coffee. But actually I do need to see the maître d' . . . to borrow a pen," Hani added, when the man looked worried. Slipping down from her chair, she strolled through the terrace door into Le Trianon and headed for the elderly person standing at a small lectern, leafing through a reservations book.

"Problems?" Hani asked politely.

"Nothing serious." The thin Italian smiled at her. "A double booking for the same cover . . ." He nodded to a table for six beneath a mural, the one decorated with a dancing girl in jewelled slippers and a wisp of cloth. "Sometimes I just think it would be easier to do everything myself."

"It is," said Hani, raising the lip on her notebook and hitting a hot key. It would have been obvious even to someone less versed in the ways of Lady Hana al-Mansur that the child was hovering on the edge of a question.

"What is it?" the maître d' said and kept his smile in place to stop the girl from being anxious. "You can ask . . ."

Hani held up her pink plastic notebook. "My uncle's on a mission," she said seriously. A flick of her eyes around the almost empty café found it safe to talk. Her look swift, instinctive and enough to convince the man that Hani believed what she said. And why not . . . ? Everyone had heard the rumours that her uncle Ashraf Bey was in the direct employ of the sultan in Stambul.

"A mission?"

"Secret," said Hani. "Very secret."

Not being too sure how else to proceed, Hani thrust the screen at the man. "I have to find this woman," she said and watched his eyes. Glad that he didn't like the look of her either. "To deliver a message."

"This message is from His Excellency?"

Hani shook her head and left it at that.

"I see," said the thin Italian, visions of the Khedive using his young cousin to pass secret messages to unsuitable foreigners flicking through his head. Or maybe it was Hamzah Effendi, because rumours had the industrialist quietly financing a return to power for Saiid Koenig Pasha.

"The thing is," Hani began. "I was wondering if she'd ever eaten here?"

Mubahith came looking for Raf. At least they did accordingto Isabeau. But this Raf only found out later, and first there was another shift to get through. His seventh in three days. Two scraping dishes, one suds diving, three prepping vegetables and now this.

"More fire . . ." Chef Antonio skimmed the hot chicken breasts across his kitchen, one after the other and a commis chef ducked.

It was inevitable the new broiler man should fumble the catch. If only because he had two hands and there were five flying breasts of chicken. But he caught three and won $20 for Idries who'd bet Raf would catch more than he dropped.

"Owe you," Idries told him.

The kitchens at Café Antonio were thick with steam. The floor slippery. A radio spat raiPunk and the only thing louder than the fury of Cheb Dread was the chef's voice.

"Burn it," Antonio snarled. "Blackened chicken needs to be fucking blackened." With a scowl he swung round, gearing up to persecute somebody else.

Out of the fat chef's sight Raf grabbed a hand towel and began to wipe off his fumbled catches.

"Run them under a tap," Idries said over his shoulder.

So Raf did, then tossed the five chicken breasts back into oil and smoking butter. Sixty seconds later, having seared both sides to charcoal against the pan's heavy bottom he scooped them out, rolled them on cheap kitchen paper and dumped them back on a plate.

"Ready," he shouted and discovered the plate was already gone.

"Swordfish two," came the cry from a teller, "and let's hustle, tagine three."

The tagine would be lamb because that was the only kind Café Antonio served. Lamb tagine, blackened chicken and pan-seared swordfish, those were Antonio's bows to ethnic cookery; and if the Soviet kids with their rucksacks and cheap condoms didn't know that tagine came via Morocco, the chicken courtesy of the Caribbean and the swordfish recipe from Malta then Antonio wasn't about to tell them. His ingredients were local, mostly . . . The fish caught by boats from Odessa and frozen on-site. When the Soviet crews docked at Tunis, which was rarely, Antonio would be waiting, ready to come to an agreement.

The captain would eat free for his entire stay, much vodka would be drunk and one or maybe two sides of frozen swordfish would go missing.

Other than these dishes Café Antonio served pizza and that was all. Antonio pushed the pizza because he was from Naples after all, and his staff also pushed pizza, whatever their nationality, because that's what they were told to do. Pizza was good to eat, quick to cook and the markup was excellent; the other dishes took more time, cost more to make and irritated Antonio with their inauthenticity.

"So why serve them?"

Idries shrugged. "Have you seen the real thing?"

Apparently Antonio needed the ethnic dishes for the kind of tourists who thought they wanted to eat local food but never did when actually presented with lumps of goat heart, fatty lamb still on the bone or fish that scowled back from the plate.

"Swordfish three."

"Got it," said Raf and reached for a dish, realizing suddenly that it was empty. "I'm . . ."

"Fucking amateur," said a dark boy, dumping a pile of swordfish by Raf's station. He was wearing check trousers and clogs, a white jacket and a scarf to keep curling hair out of his eyes; only his grin removed sting from the words. "Next time, call me before you get eighty-six." They both knew the boy should have got there first.

A quick flick with a blade to free a steak from the frozen stack and Raf rattled it, still hard, onto the griddle, following it with a second and a third. Ninety seconds later the fish was seared.

"Chicken, fire five." Antonio grabbed a ticket from a teller he felt was working too slowly and shouted out the orders, hanging each yellow slip from a peg when the list was done.

"Come on," he howled at Raf. "What are you waiting for?"

Fallout from the oil that hissed in his pan worried Raf not at all. He'd assigned the pain to colours, running the rainbow according to intensity and length. Most of his double shifts sped by in a low-level intensity of blue with the occasional flashes of purple.

Already his wrists were freckled with tiny burns and his first finger raw from pressing down on a knife. There would be real calluses later, Isabeau had explained to Raf the day before, turning over her own hands. Somehow he'd felt the need to check and then, holding her hands, had not known how to give them back.

Which, obviously enough, was the point Hassan slammed into the cold locker. And the sudden snatch of her fingers had looked like guilt to all of them.

"Chicken," Raf shouted and scooped blackened breasts onto kitchen paper, rolled them over, then dumped them into a heated dish. Someone else would dress the plates. Glancing over to the hatch to see what other orders were headed his way Raf found the teller leaning against the wall, a cigarette ready for lighting.

A redheaded Australian waitress with a flour handprint on her behind was scowling as she dusted the ghostly fingers from black jeans. Raf looked round for anybody with an answering print on their face but all he got was Hassan looking smug.

The last order had just been served. Wind-down could begin.

"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 . . ."

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.

"You've been measured before."

"Oh," Hani smiled sweetly. "I'm always being measured." And so she was, against the edge of a door in the kitchen by Donna, who took a fresh measurement every month and wrote the date against it. Although obviously this wasn't what the woman meant.

"But you don't have your card . . . ?"

"I've grown," Hani told the woman. She sounded ridiculously smug about this, as if the growth spurt had been down to her and not to nature. That wasn't the real reason Hani had left her card behind, of course. The one she'd had done with Zara featured Hani's name and address encoded on the chip.

The scanner was silent as it passed through the small girl's fleece, T-shirt and jeans to map the skin beneath, then looked through skin to the bones and measured those as well. Any clothes cut to measure would fit perfectly but Hani was too impatient to wait so Madame Fitmah matched her measurements to an inventory of stock.

"I'm sorry," the owner began to say and stopped as the face of the child in front of her immediately dissolved into tears. Half a second later and the grief was gone, pulled back into glistening eyes and a trembling mouth. A second after that and Hani's face was neatly composed.

"I'm sorry to have troubled you," Hani said as she slipped from the chair. Pushing her bundle of dollars back into a fleece pocket, she headed for the door.

"Wait." Madame Fitmah stood beside a screen, scrolling down the list. "I'm sure we can adapt something. Is this for a special occasion?"

"Oh yes," said Hani. "One of my cousins is having a party for his parents."

"Next time," Chef Antonio's voice was flat, "I sell your ass to my nephew Hassan, who likes that kind of thing." He took back his high-carbon Wusthof and threw the recipient of his scorn a cheap Sabatier kept for casual labour.

The Australian boy in question looked from Antonio to the blade that quivered in the door beside him and his shock, outrage and (let's be honest) unconcealed admiration went a tiny way towards restoring the chef's good humour. There were basic rules in life and first up was touch someone else's knife at your peril.

Antonio pointed to a half-full bucket of tomatoes. "You don't stop until you've skinned the lot. You understand?"

The Australian did.

With a sigh the chef turned back to his radio. "Sources close to the police say the man just arrested has known links to fundamentalist terror groups." The newsreader spoke with an accent so impossibly Parisian it had to be fake.

Antonio twisted the dial and watched a needle judder its way across a thin strip of glass inscribed with stations that, like as not, no longer existed. The radio was Soviet, the size of a cinder block, only three times as heavy. Someone, probably a prisoner in a gulag workshop, had painted individual swirls of grain across its metal casing.

". . . more news for you on the hour."

"Try another station," demanded Hassan.

Antonio took time out to stare at his wife's nephew but he still did what the fat boy suggested, stopping as the hiss of static thinned into Arabic.

"No further news on the murder at Maison Hafsid . . ."

Running the length of the dial twice, Antonio checked out as many of the local stations as he could find. It was easy to tell an approved station because those were the ones carrying identical versions of the same story. The pirates were more interesting but nothing they suggested sounded remotely like the truth.

"Any news on Isabeau?" Chef Antonio demanded.

"She hasn't phoned back."

"Okay," Antonio told Idries. "Let me know if she does . . ." But when a call finally came it wasn't from Isabeau.

"For you," Hassan said.

"Who?"

Hassan returned the stare he'd been given earlier. "For you," he said and dropped the receiver to let it spin, vinelike, tipped by a matte grey plastic fruit.

Sometime or other Antonio was going to have to talk to his wife. It was all very well having her nephew on board, but the deal was that the boy was here to learn, not behave like he was already part owner.

"Yes," Antonio barked, voice harsher than he intended. "What?" Whoever answered had presence enough to fill the chef's voice with something very close to respect. "I'll be there." The chef listened again. "We'll be there," he agreed, amending his words.

"Scrap the tomatoes," he told the Australian boy. "We're closing for tonight." He nodded at Idries. "Turn off the ovens and put everything back in the cooler . . ."

"You be good," Hani told Ifritah, placing the cat firmly on her bed. No sooner done than Ifritah jumped for the suitcase Hani was trying to buckle, claws ripping into old leather as she scrabbled for a hold.

Hani sucked her teeth. "Try," she told Ifritah. "At the very least, try . . ."

Hong Kong Suisse had delivered her cash. Late, admittedly, but Hani was no longer cross about that. She had a party dress made from red silk, green velvet and real gold embroidery. It was designed for someone several years older than Hani and on Zara would have been indecently short. On Hani it fell to her ankles like a ball gown. Added to which Madame Fitmah had even given her a discount on a pair of matching shoes.

Mortgaging her uncle's madersa to finance the trip had been wrong, Hani realized that. And if she'd been allowed access to her own money it wouldn't have been necessary. But to get that would involve asking Hamzah or the Khedive, and they'd want to know why she needed money. Hani shook her head. Sometimes simplicity was everything.

So she'd written to Uncle Ashraf's bank instead, using headed paper and quoting his account number, which had been ridiculously easy to find since it featured on various statements kept in a desk outside his bedroom. Marked confidential, her letter inquired delicately about the opportunities for mortgaging a famous seventeenth-century madersa in a prime position. An equally circumspect (Hani liked that word) reply from HKS suggested that, unless His Excellency really wanted a mortgage of the kind that needed repaying over a number of years, the best option might be a straight loan, at no interest, since usury was obviously forbidden. A settlement fee to be paid as the final part of the reckoning, please see sample contract enclosed.

The bank had used longer words than that–because banks always use complicated words–but that was what Hong Kong Suisse meant.

Hani's reply ended with a flamboyant impression of her uncle's initials and the only thing that stopped her from scanning an original into her laptop and using that was a slight worry that HKS might use some kind of fluorescing system to distinguish fountain pen from printer ink.

As a final touch, Hani found her uncle's spare comb, removed a single hair and dropped it into the envelope, which might be one touch too many but by then she'd stuck the envelope and used her only stamp.

Next morning and the morning after found Hani waiting for the postman, cat in hand. Swapping Ifritah for his fat bundle of letters she chatted about the weather while sorting through the pile. The letter she wanted was one of five. Four of these were bills, three of them red reminders . . .

The loan was agreed and the fact Ashraf Bey had initialled rather than signed his contract as requested was nowhere mentioned: but then Hani remembered reading that the Empire State Building had once been mortgaged against an unsigned deed and she was no longer surprised. All that remained, those were the words HKS used, all that remained was for His Excellency to nominate a receiving account.

Hani took this to mean she should tell the bank where to send the money. So she wrote again on a sheet of the paper taken three days earlier from her uncle's office at the Third Circle.

Stealing it was easy. All Hani had to do was buy a chocolate sundae at Le Trianon, leave most of it and use the café's internal lift to go straight to C3's reception on the floor above. The story she'd prepared about wanting to collect a toy dog from her uncle's office went unused. Madame Ingrid was giving evidence to a tribunal investigating the crimes of Colonel Abad and with their office manager gone, most of her junior staff had left for lunch early, while the rest just nodded at Hani or ignored her.

Taking a single sheet of headed paper from its holder on Uncle Ashraf's desk, Hani promptly changed her mind and slipped a thick wad of the stuff into her rucksack. One never knew when it might become useful. As an afterthought, she added a rubber stamp that sat on the desk beside the wooden box holding the paper. It was a very ornate rubber stamp with brass claws to hold the block of rubber and an ivory handle, but it was still a rubber stamp.

From the desk of Colonel Pashazade Ashraf al-Mansur, Ashraf Bey. Looking at the faint script left by the stamp on the inside of her wrist Hani raised her eyebrows. She hadn't realized her uncle was a colonel; at least, she didn't remember knowing that, but the fact didn't surprise her. Secret agents and assassins were bound to have military ranks, it was obvious really. Everyone in North Africa had a rank of some kind or other.

Hani was just letting herself out of the office when she finally realized what she'd missed. A briefcase, with a gunmetal grey combination lock, below a black coat hanging from a rack topped by an Astrakhan hat she'd never seen Uncle Ashraf wear, tight curls of baby fur soft enough to make Hani cringe.

Hat, coat, briefcase.

Hide in plain sight.

Since Madame Ingrid might notice if the case disappeared, Hani resolved to examine it in situ. Would it be very conceited . . . ? Assuming she really was eleven, not ten, Hani fed her own birthdate into the combination lock and Uncle Ashraf's case opened first try. Which was just as well, because there was serious potential for stalemate if it had been his own birthday and it was bound to be the birthday of someone or other.

Statistically most combination locks used a birth date within the owner's immediate family, 73 percent of them in fact. And Hani knew just how hard her uncle worked at appearing normal. Being a son of Lilith required one to hide in plain sight, normal being interchangeable with invisible. Hani knew all about it. And if she ever forgot, all she had to do was stare in a mirror.

Hani paused to think that last thought through, which was slightly recursive but necessary. She had no doubt she could become exactly like her uncle if she tried. Actually, Hani suspected she'd become like him whatever. Flipping open his case, she spread her catch on the tiles. Another gun. No, she corrected herself, a Colt revolver. Specifics were always important. A carte blanche which was–Hani flipped it open–less than a month out of date. And inside it something else.

Folded within the carte blanche was a letter from a lawyer in Tunis adressed to her aunt Nafisa. Skimming the script as it flowed, elegant and fluid, from right to left across a perfectly ordinary piece of office paper, Hani began to memorize the contents word for word. It seemed that Zari Moncef al-Mansur, eldest son of the old Emir of Tunis had married Sally Welham, an English photographer on the . . .

The date was so wrong that Hani brushed it aside, stumbling over the fact that he'd divorced her five days later and halting altogether when she got to the date of her uncle's birth. Had the letter been printed out on some computer she'd have dismissed the year as a simple typing error but the note was handwritten, which made the date either beyond careless or very odd indeed.

Pocketing the letter, Hani turned to a strip of Zaras, the photobooth kind. Younger, somewhat fatter, her eyes less troubled than now, despite the scowl with which she faced the camera. And then a photograph of Uncle Raf, staring into the sun with the Jammaa ez Zitouna in the background.

Okay, so whatever he'd told Aunt Nafisa before she died, Uncle Raf had been to Tunis because la Grande Mosquée, built by the Emir Ibrahim Ibn Ahmed in 856C .E. was not only the second largest mosque in Ifriqiya (the largest was in Kairouan) but also one of North Africa's most instantly recognizable heritage sites.

In the photograph he looked older. That was, Uncle Ashraf looked as he did now, not as he should have done back when this was obviously taken. There was one final photograph.

"Oh . . ." Hani placed it facedown on the tiles and carefully packed the Zaras and Uncle Ashraf outside la Grande Mosquée into her rucksack, sliding them between sheets of headed paper. The Colt she put back into her uncle's case. That left his final photograph.

The girl didn't look poor–on her wrist was an Omega and an empty camera case hung around her neck. But the Fat Boys were definitely frayed and her feet were both bare and dirty. Her hair also looked like it needed a wash, being matted into rat tails around her thin face.

What shocked Hani was not the dirty hair or bare feet. Not even the half-open shirt she wore, washed so fine that what couldn't be seen of the woman's breasts through the gap was revealed by the translucence of the cloth. It was the way she leered into the lens, her mouth half-open, her eyes obviously fixed on the person holding her camera.

This Hani hadn't considered and she doubted if Zara had either. Men went to brothels and, if they were sensible, women ignored this fact. So Hani had learnt from listening at the door to her late aunts, Nafisa and Jalila. As for mistresses, if a man could afford to run more than one house, this too was acceptable. Not least, Aunt Nafisa had sighed, because it did so help to lighten the load.

But a nasrani girlfriend . . . One who was thin, dirty and badly dressed?

Hani took another squint at the photograph. What with her rat's nest of fair hair and narrow face, washed-out eyes and tight lips the barefoot woman was unlikely to be anything but nasrani. . . If this was the real reason her uncle refused to marry Zara, then that changed everything. For the first time since he'd stamped up the stairs into the qaa all those months ago, Hani came close to deciding that maybe she didn't like her uncle after all.

"Too fucking hot." Even at 30 mph, which was way too fast for the ruts in the track, the wind roared in Sally's ears and swept words from her mouth. So she said it again, just in case Per hadn't heard her the first time.

"Yeah," said Per tightly, "I know." Swinging the wheel of his black Jeep to avoid a missing bit of road, he bounced Sally hard into her door, setting off a new round of swearing. The Jeep was eighteen years old, cigarette burns pocked the top of its plastic dash and he'd been forced to buy a petrol rather than diesel version. Black was also, in Sally's opinion, just about as stupid a colour as it was possible to find for skirting a desert; since it positively lapped up direct sunlight and made the interior too hot to touch.

The Jeep's air-conditioning–and there'd been air-conditioning when they started–had lasted for all of three days. Per blamed Sally's habit of hanging out of her side window for burning out the unit. Sally's view was that if he'd bought an open top model as she originally suggested, he wouldn't have needed air-conditioning and she wouldn't have had to keep opening the window to take photographs.

She now knew about his interest in mythology, bush meat and oral sex. His plans to open a restaurant and the age he first smoked blow. He knew she liked cameras.

Having first dwindled into tight-lipped sentences, their conversation had since shrunk into near silence. They still fucked like animals but no longer had anything to say to each other afterwards. There were a lot of relationships like that, Sally realized. And she did enjoy fucking Per far more than talking to him. And they were animals. So . . .

Opening the Leica with one hand, Sally removed a completed roll of film and dropped it into the foil packet she'd already ripped from its replacement.

"What the fuck is there to photograph?"

The whole absurd and cruel beauty of Ifriqiya's Chott el Jerid. Shrubs so hardy they came back from the dead, Lazarus-like; grasses able to tolerate saline levels that killed other plants; the distant pinks and yellows of minerals blooming across a flatbed of salt.

"Nothing," Sally said, snapping shut her camera. "Absolutely nothing." Beside the road stretched the largest salt lake in North Africa. Rock-hard in summer and partly flooded in winter, drying in early spring to brine pools and a treacherous skim of crust. Mysterious and wonderful. Utterly at odds with the olive groves and ubiquitous hedges of prickly pear that had made up yesterday's trip south. Those could have been found in southern Spain, Sicily or Greece.

This was different.

How different the Swede could not even begin to realize. Here life was leaner, sharper and better able to deal with exotic levels of deprivation. At the edges of existence, life was forced to make a compromise. One that the world would soon find itself forced to make if the canker of global interests could not be cured.

In that at least Wu Yung was right. Although his way was not her way. Something the old Chinese man had still to realize. Any more than her way was Atal's way or even Per's . . .

Sally Welham shook her head. Per had the soft liberal reflexes of his class, race and age. He would no more understand what she wanted from the chott than accept how she intended to achieve it. He was a mindless fuck and a zipless one at that; defined by overprivilege, education, a simplistic rejection of Calvinism and a carpetbag of beliefs strip-mined from other cultures.

Whereas she . . .

At least Sally had the grace to grin. Grin, shrug and discard the comparison. She was the same, the difference was that she knew it.

"Ruin," said Per, seconds ahead of slamming on his brakes. Sand slid down a bank like snow and when the Jeep stopped it was half on the track and half off, one rear wheel hanging over the side of a ditch.

"How about giving me some warning?" Sally snapped.

"I just did," Per said and, pushing open his door, he was gone, all stiff-backed and straight-shouldered.

Sally sighed.

Once out of the jeep, she casually dropped her jeans then stayed to watch the warm stream run mercury-like over the sand's crust, hardly touching its surface. That was the problem, rainfall raced across the desert's surface like piss, filling oueds and flooding chotts and wadis. Grasses grew, flowers happened, insects bred; life blossomed and died in the time it took the sky to squat.

Still grinning ruefully, Sally stepped out of her jeans, yanked her T-shirt inside out and went to find Per. He'd be looking for mosaics in the ruins of some hovel he'd insist was Roman.

"Don't walk on it," Per said, not looking round. He was on his hands and knees sweeping rubbish from a floor with his fingers. Sally was willing to bet it was made from stamped-down dirt and that she had a better chance of becoming pope than Per did of finding a priceless mosaic beneath the crap that carpeted his goat hut.

Still, she let him brush away ring pulls and screw caps, plastic bottles and disposable nappies until his enthusiasm faded and he looked round to see Sally behind him, naked and with filthy feet. An equally dirty grin written across her face.

"Lie flat," she told him, so Per did and Sally stepped forward and squatted again. His face was hot between her thighs, his tongue frantic. He licked and (later) fucked with the hunger of someone still drunk on her body. And Sally might have found such innocence endearing if she wasn't already waving Per good-bye in her head.

Goats grazed in three rooms at the back, wandering in from a darkened courtyard through a hole in the rear wall. They were white with black faces and stunted horns, too fat, overfed and pampered to be convincing scavengers. Besides, their leather collars betrayed them. Most goats kept within the medina made do with string, if they had collars at all.

Chef Edvard kept the goats to amuse. And amuse his dinner guests they did. But then Maison Hafsid's evening crowd were usually friends of Kashif Pasha, those with money and those who had actually travelled outside Ifriqiya, the kind of customers cosmopolitan enough to pay for the privilege of eating elegantly prepared retrofusion in the dining room of a draughty, half-wrecked Ifriqiyan palace opposite a mosque still called new because it was constructed during a trade boom in the mid-eighteenth century.

Maison Hafsid was owned by a tall and elderly Madagascan called Abdur Rahman, so labelled because this was one of the names specified by the Prophet as beloved by God. And, as his mother had reminded him often, "Names matter. So will you be called on the day of judgment . . ."

On his arrival in Tunis ten years earlier Abdur Rahman changed his name to Edvard. And under this name he was known to most, even Kashif Pasha and his mother Lady Maryam. But it was as Abdur Rahman he owned Maison Hafsid, because this was the name that mattered. And it was as Abdur Rahman that he had shares in Café Antonio and three other restuarants.

"You done yet?" Chef Edvard shouted.

"Nearly," said Raf and raised his chopper. Steel bit into flesh, then wood. Slicing the lamb into rough chunks, Raf slid them off his chopping board and into a glass bowl. Some kitchens kept specialist butchers. At Maison Hafsid the work was done by whomever Chef Edvard designated. It kept the cuts from getting too neat.

"I'll take it," said Isabeau and the bowl was gone.

"Well," Raf said, entirely to himself, "we're here." His voice echoed the fox's growl. That was their compromise. The fox still spoke but now Raf realized the fox was him. So far it seemed to work for both of them.

"Yeah," said Raf. He tried not to mind that the fox sounded impossibly smug. As if it, rather than chance or Raf, had been responsible for getting Raf to the kitchens of Maison Hafsid, site of one murder and supplier of culinary staff to the notables of Tunis. "Right where we need to be . . ."

Had the fox been someone else, Raf could have reminded it that its plan of sneaking off to hunt down Ibrihim Ishaq of Isaac & Sons, Kairouan, had not been an unmitigated success. As well as mentioning that Those Who Went Naked had not turned out to be the revolutionary masterminds Eugenie seemed to suggest. He could even have admitted that he missed Hani and Zara and was adrift in a city with only an instinct that here was where he was meant to be to keep him from going home.

But he'd only be telling himself. And they both knew that.

There were Turkish baths less hot than the cellar kitchens at Maison Hafsid, so everyone kept telling Raf, who was beginning to believe them. Idries had already taken him to one of the city's poorer public baths, a place of cracked tiles and broken mosaic situated just behind the central market, where he'd sat surrounded by a dozen strangers, sweat dripping from every pore as a robed attendant ladled water onto heated stones.

The cleansing room had stunk of physical effort and butchers who killed most days but sweated themselves clean once or twice a week because that was all they could afford. They were polite to the stranger in their midst. Not friendly but polite. And once, when talk touched on Carthage Dynamo vs. Sophia Crescent, the conversation widened to include him. Other than that, the atmosphere had been restrained, almost elegant in a peeling, impoverished sort of way.

Maison Hafsid was something else. No one was polite. At least not down in the kitchens. And what constituted conversation was a hard-edged banter likely to get you knifed in most bars in Seattle. Ear-bleeding nu/Rai ripped from a corner-mounted wall speaker. In the kitchen Raf didn't speak at all. He screamed into the steaming chaos. And others shouted back. Mostly about his parentage, race, sexual orientation and short life expectancy.

Anyone who took offense at Chef Edvard worked elsewhere. Actually, anyone who took offense, full-stop, left for some other industry: one not driven by impossible hours, heavy attitude and dirt-cheap drugs.

"You," he said to Raf, next time Raf staggered by under the weight of a lamb carcass. "I want to know where to file you."

Three kinds of scum ended up in kitchens apparently. Those on the run too stupid to do anything else, brilliant and spoilt artists, and finally mercenaries, those in it for the money, mostly solid and reliable line cooks. Some American years back had given his name to this law, but Chef Edvard didn't mention that, he merely wanted to know which label fitted Raf.

"All of them," said Raf.

"All?" The elderly Madagascan eyeballed his newest recruit for a long second, then slapped Raf on the shoulder. "Misfits are good," he said, his Arabic thicker than coffee grounds, "they stay longer."

Everything Raf had learnt at Café Antonio was unlearnt at Maison Hafsid. At Hafsid no one ever served swordfish or blackened chicken, even if customers asked politely. Right now Raf's job was to braise those chunks of lamb (bone and fat and skin and all). The ironically crude chunks reached the table drizzled with a custard-yellow sauce made from cloudberries flown in from Table Mountain. Given the price Maison Hafsid charged for its speciality dishes, Raf could only imagine the berries travelled first class.

"Faster," Edvard barked.

Raf nodded, but the chef was shouting at someone else.

On a marble slab to Raf's left were a series of bowls filled with herbs and spices, which a kid of about eleven kept topped on a regular basis by ripping handfuls of wilting oregano from fat twigs or grating nutmeg against a tiny grid hung on a string around his neck. Raf used a lot of oregano and nutmeg; also olive oil, anchovies, dried juniper berries and small pods for which Raf didn't yet have a name. The chef seemed to use those in almost every dish.

A great aluminium pot roiled on the edge of a hundred degrees at a station behind Raf, creating its own microclimate, waiting to soften whatever pasta was required. Linguine mostly, with a weird locally made thread noodle that came semiopaque and ended up near invisible; not that much of either got eaten to judge from the quantity scraped from dirty plates into a metal trough that ran the edge of one wall. The noodles and pasta seemed to be something between a base and a garnish.

"A hand to six . . ."

The chef's eyes found Raf, who held up five fingers and nodded. Five minutes to braise the lamb for table six and pass it across for plating. That was the difference between home cooking and doing it for real. Restaurant food got dressed, just like the customers. And an artistic sprig or a near-odourless/tasteless swirl of sauce could hide culinary sins as easily as discreet makeup and good clothes could hide sins of the flesh. Warm plates, flamboyant furnishings, elegant garnishes and adequate food, the demands of haute cuisine at Maison Hafsid were less than its devoted clientele imagined.

"Three," shouted the chef and Raf swirled his pan, smelling oil, seared flesh and oregano. Across the other side of the cellar was a wood oven for which Raf sometimes seared lamb or beef to be roasted, so that no steam from raw meat might dampen the oven's desertlike dryness. It wasn't really Raf's job but Raf was racking up favours, taking shifts he didn't want, helping to hump crates too heavy for one person alone. He'd even rescued a cucumber sauce for wild greyling with a nylon sieve, a splash of Chablis and nerves of steel, decanting it onto a warm plate seconds ahead of the plate heading for the hatch.

Mind you, Raf probably wouldn't be forgiven that one. The sauce came from an Algerian sous-chef and the deputy was less than happy. Particularly now Chef Edvard had decided Isabeau's earlier boast about Raf's having been a sous-chef himself in Seattle was true.

To test the claim, Raf had been handed a red fish of a species he'd never seen and been told, in front of a watchful kitchen, to find a knife and fillet the thing.

Pulling a Sabatier from the back of his belt, Raf oiled up a sharpening block and set about giving himself an edge. All the while checking the fish, noticing its every curve and the geometric relationship between anus, eyes and upper fin, the way the scales changed near the tail.

When Raf cut, it was swift, taking his stance and the looseness of his wrist from a Sushi master who ran a dockside café his old boss Hu San often frequented. Raf spent one memorable evening there near the beginning of his time with the Five Winds, as Seattle's most influential triad was named. And for a while, with tiny dish after dish reaching their table and Hu San chewing in silence, her eyes closing at particularly impressive slivers of raw fugu, Raf thought he was in disgrace. And then, when she looked up and smiled almost without thinking, he realized she intended to sleep with him.

He still hadn't started to shave and she was in her late thirties, maybe more, but her tastes were for the raw and the fresh. Whatever, the moment never arose and as her Lincoln pulled up outside his flat Hu San dismissed him with a polite good-bye and left him standing on a sidewalk in the rain.

Raf cut three times in all. Once to gut the fish and discard its entrails. Once to fillet one side of the fish and once to fillet the other. The skin he'd already removed in a single scoop of his thumb, not using his knife and not damaging the flesh.

"Done?" Chef Edvard had asked, his face impassive.

Raf nodded and waited while the chef told a boy to fetch a set of scales. First Edvard weighed the entrails, then both fillets and finally bones and skin.

"Not as bad as I expected."

Behind his eyes Raf scowled but he kept silent, eyeing a strip of skin so clean it could have been sent for tanning. Not a flake of flesh clung to the spine or ribs, the cut at tail and gills was near perfect.

"I'm out of practice," Raf announced finally and the skeletal chef almost smiled.

Then came three questions.

Where had he cooked before?

Raf named Antonio's pizza place and a five-star hotel in Seattle so famous that even the silent and anxious Isabeau recognized its name.

"This true?"

That question was for Isabeau. Asked almost politely. No one had said anything to Raf but he'd caught the glances. There wasn't a single person in the kitchens unaware of her brother's murder. Even Chef Edvard was making allowances.

"He's been working for Antonio," she said. "I can't guarantee the other."

"Why do you want to change jobs?"

"Debts," said Raf. "Waiting to be paid."

"I work my staff harder," Chef Edvard told Raf flatly. "Believe me I make you sweat for every extra cent."

And so the slot became his, at least until Idries' cousin got released from prison, if he did. Two points went unspoken. One, should Raf turn out okay then Edvard might keep him on anyway, and two, if Idries' cousin was not released, then Raf had the job until someone better came along.

But first Raf had to do a day's suds diving to show he was serious. And do it for nothing. Those were the rules. So he scraped plates, hosed them down and loaded them into a washer the size of a small truck for as long as it took for some elderly Philippino to fry his own fingers in a red-hot wok–which was about four hours. The man wanted to work on but Edvard insisted on wrapping his hand in a towel filled with ice and ordered him home. Only the promise of a full day's pay got the crying man out of the kitchen and into a corridor that ended in steps leading up to an alley at the back. Even then someone had to walk the man up the stairs and shoo him out into the alley.

"Want me to handle his station?"

"Screw up and you're out."

Raf took that as a yes and stripped to the loose cotton trousers he'd borrowed from Antonio's and would one day return, with luck. He took a coat someone handed him.

"Nice scars."

The chef's smile was mildly mocking, as if his own might prove far more impressive if only he could be persuaded to discard his white jacket with the word Edvard embroidered over the pocket in red silk. And to judge by the jagged seams up both wrists and a yellow callus thick as tortoiseshell at the base of one thumb anything was possible.

So Raf cut lamb and braised goat, spatchcocked quail and generally kept the meals coming, on time and done as ordered.

"It's not a skill, you know . . ."

"What isn't?"

"This shit. Being able to do everything. That's just a design function. You telling me you can't recognize an adaptive mechanism when you see one?"

"Hey, white boy . . . You okay?" Raf looked up from wiping out his iron skillet to find the tall Madagascan standing next to him, frowning. A couple of the others were staring across as well.

"Sure," Raf said. "Just talking to myself."

"Well," said Chef Edvard, "when you've got a moment."

They went to the table, an old black thing that looked as if it came from a French farmhouse that had burned down. Fire damage chewed along one edge but someone, probably years before, had scraped most of it away with the flat of a knife and put that edge to the wall.

"Drink," Chef Edvard said, pouring Raf a glass of marc."And then listen . . . I've got a job if you're interested. You know about Kashif Pasha's party?"

The whole of Tunis knew. At his mother's suggestion, the Emir's eldest son was holding a dinner to celebrate his parents' forty-fifth wedding anniversary. If both of them turned up, it would be the first time they'd met in slightly over forty-four years. The meal was Kashif Pasha's attempt to heal the rift, a peace offering to his father and a sign of the pasha's developing maturity where the Emir was concerned. That was the official version anyway.

"You want me to cook?"

Amusement tinged the old man's eyes. "You're not that good," he said. "You wait tables . . . Still interested?"

"Oh yes," said Raf, "it's exactly the kind of opportunity I've been waiting for."

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."

"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.

"How about New York?" Although her eyes were amused, Eugenie's hold on Sally's lip tightened and there was a realness to her questions lacking until then. Eugenie was not the baby-faced guard she'd replaced. She could, and would, rip apart Sally's mouth. "Well?"

Sally's answer was just about comprehensible.

"Really," said Eugenie, suddenly letting go the lip. "You weren't in New York either?" She dropped a handful of papers onto a table and stood back so Sally could see. Photocopies of NYPD reports, mostly. Plus a fat file from a detective agency in Kuala Lumpur. There were also a handful of flimsies but what Sally noticed first was a P10, request for arrest, issued by MediPol, the terrorism-clearing group for Southern Europe, the Levant and North Africa.

"Cut off her clothes," Eugenie ordered the puppy-faced recruit, who blinked. "What?" said Eugenie. "You have a problem with that?"

The recruit shook her head. "No, ma'am." She glanced between Eugenie and the English girl tied to a camp chair. "Which end do you want me to start?"

"Quiet," hissed a black-haired boy sitting next to Hani. He stared down at his plate, on which a tiny bird sat in the centre of an elaborate matrix of sauce dribbled into the shape of recurring arabesques. So far he had yet to touch his meal.

"Why should I?" Hani demanded, still not bothering to lower her voice. She wanted to know why her Uncle Ashraf was not at Domus Aurea and no one seemed able to tell her. Hani found it hard to believe he hadn't already achieved what he set out to do. Whatever that was.

It also hadn't occurred to Hani that her uncle might miss Kashif's party.

Dressed in a silk kaftan with gold embroidery around the neck and wearing a Rolex several sizes too big, Murad Pasha glanced nervously across to where his half brother sat watching them. "My brother doesn't approve of noise."

"And I don't approve of the pasha," Hani announced rather too loudly. A grey-haired woman standing with two Soviet guards behind the Emir glanced across to smile. Hani got the feeling she didn't like Kashif either. "Anyway," Hani said, "if he prefers silence, why are they here?"

A jerk of her chin took in a white-robed group who stood slap-bang in the middle of the cruciform dining room, below an impossibly huge chandelier. Five of them were chanting while a sixth beat time on a goatskin drum.

"These are the Emir's choice," Murad Pasha said, as if that should be obvious. "Those are the artists selected by Kashif." He pointed behind him to a group of nasrani over by a far wall, all dressed in black suits and white shirts with black bow ties, like Kashif, in fact. One of them carried a Perspex violin, which he swung loosely by its neck.

"Great," said Hani. "I can't wait."

The boy seemed roughly her age but still half a head shorter, which made him rather small for eleven. He had narrow shoulders and girl's wrists and might have been good at running, except he looked far too sensible to run anywhere. Everybody else at the top table was talking, but the only time the boy opened his mouth was to answer one of Hani's questions. The rest of the time his eyes slid past her to watch Kashif, the Emir and Lady Maryam.

"Don't you want that?" Hani pointed at his quail.

Murad shook his head without bothering to look at her.

"Why not?"

Murad Pasha sighed. "I'm vegetarian," he said. "I don't approve of killing animals. And I'm only here under protest."

"So you don't mind if my cat has it?"

The area in which they sat had once been a biat bel kabu, the living quarters for a corsair and his family. Shaped like a fat, crudely drawn cross, with a long downstroke leading to a courtyard, now glassed over, and the shorter upstroke opening onto a smaller, still-uncovered courtyard where Chef Edvard had set up his kitchens, the cruciform room had sidebars that led nowhere.

In total there were six archways into the dining room. And in the centre, below the chandelier, three tables had been positioned, one high table at which sat Murad Pasha and Hani, Kashif, the Emir and Lady Maryam and two lesser tables, at right angles to the top table.

The Berber musicians occupied the open space between the three and because they always faced the Emir, everyone on the side tables saw the singers only in profile. Behind the Emir stood Eugenie de la Croix, flanked by two guards in jellabas, their striped robes in contrast to the drab uniform of a single major who stood behind Kashif Pasha.

Hani didn't recognize Eugenie or anyone else and was happily unaware that at least one of the men sitting at a side table had recognized her.

Hani, three seats away from where Eugenie got shot, eyes locking on his, too frightened to be puzzled at not recognizing a face so familiar.

Raf reran that sequence in his head, letting Alex, Nicolai and Eugenie tumble endlessly in time to his own, real-world punches. To turn back like this, to attack an enemy was probably the last thing anyone hopelessly outnumbered was meant to do . . . But then, as he'd spent a lifetime telling himself, Raf wasn't anyone.

He was the guy with an eight-thousand-line guarantee and weird-shit eyes, batlike hearing and a sense of smell acute enough to revolt a dog. A man with pixel-perfect memory for every last one of those bits of his life he was able to remember. And ice-cold gaps where the rest should be.

Slamming the soldier's head against a wall, Raf lowered a limp body to the ground and began stripping it. The tunic was too tight across Raf's shoulders and the trousers short. The boots were good, though, and the cap fitted. After dressing the conscript in his discarded trousers, shoes and shirt (the waiter's tunic having already been dumped), Raf dragged the unconscious man into position against an alley wall.

"Drunk," said Raf as he stood over the body. He sounded disgusted but not quite disgusted enough. Pushing his fingers down his own throat, he retched across the other man's chest and down into his lap. Alcohol and scraps of food stolen from serving plates being taken back into the kitchens.

"Who's that?" demanded a voice. An NCO stood behind him in the entrance to the alley. Ahead of them both was a side door into the Domus Aurea.

"Some filthy drunk," Raf said and kicked the body.

Originally, way back, the dar had been built for some half-Alicantean taifa. Isabeau had told Raf its history as they both helped Chef Edvard set up his makeshift kitchen in a small yard off the bait bel kebu. The red-and-white horseshoe arches that provided access to the dining room, the carved capitals in Mudejar style, gilded stucco muqarnas work across the ceiling, the intricate, impossibly complex tiling. All had been purchased with the spoils of piracy. It was like discovering that Dick Turpin held up stagecoaches because he had a passion for snuffboxes and French enamel . . .

"Keep looking," ordered the NCO.

"Yes, sir," Raf said.

There were days now–whole days, sometimes days that ran into each other–when Ashraf Bey understood that he'd created the fox. What had happened when he was seven was his responsibility alone. He had chosen to walk out across that girder, the soles of his school slippers melting with every step. Just as he'd chosen to steal a fox cub from its cage and hide in the attic. Not knowing that the fire he'd set would reach his hiding place. And certainly not knowing it would burn down his whole school.

He'd wanted to destroy the biology building. An ugly block of cheap polycrete faced with pine slats like some tatty ski lodge. That was where the animal experiments were done. Where frogs were dissected and roadkill skinned to reveal underlying muscle structure. Where he'd been made to peg out the pelt of a badger and rub salt into stinking leather, having first scraped it so thin that in places it looked almost translucent. "What's done is done," Raf told himself and headed into another alley, stopping at a door to kick it open. "So why cry?" The question was rhetorical, Raf accepted that. But he answered it all the same.

"No reason."

He was beginning to see how it worked. Every question he'd ever asked the fox he answered for himself. Pulling information from memory to provide those clinically precise, unhelpful answers. Sweating the small stuff to make the big stuff go away. His life had been one long refusal to take the real facts and make them add up.

Raf searched the house swiftly, five rooms on three floors, saying nothing to the frightened inhabitants. On his way out he shook his head at a couple of conscripts on their way in. "Empty," Raf told them. "No one hiding."

Why was he upset? Good question.

Tiri had been kept in a wire cage at the rear of the biology block. Most of the smaller animals lived inside. Hamsters and rats, mice bred for so many generations that generations of biology masters had lost count. A black widow spider permanently catatonic with cold. Sickly stick insects. Guppies in water thicker than fog. And a single, magnificent Siamese fighting fish, all broken fins and ragged tail.

Raf freed the rats and shook the stick insects onto grass at the front of the block. This had seemed like a good idea at the time. Although later, looking down from his burning attic at fire trucks lining up on the lawn he realized he hadn't given them a better life at all. He hadn't known what to do with the fish so he removed most of the water from the guppies because their tank was dirtier than that of the Siamese fighting fish, then tipped one tank into the other. If Raf couldn't free the fighting fish he could at least give it a decent meal.

He'd never liked guppies anyway.

Some soldier had lit the spotlights around Domus Aurea but these only did what they were meant to do, threw walls into relief or picked out aspects of architectural interest.

There were trucks on the road beyond the medina, circling the old city walls with soldiers hanging from their open doors. Kashif Pasha's men. All of them searching for him. A grinding of gears came from a square ahead, more trucks arriving for the hunt. From Raf's left came shouted orders. Farther away, to his right, beyond a low line of workshops, more orders, more shouting. Engines racing and truck doors that slammed.

This was no way to track a fugitive. Even without the fox Raf knew that. Or rather he knew that without needing the fox, because he was the fox. One and the same. Separated not at birth but standing on that burning girder. What Raf knew (such as it was), he knew for himself and in himself. Just as Raf knew that he needed to get out there. To become himself. A man with responsibilities and a life.

And if not a man, then whatever he was.

On the dirt track a group of hunters struggled with a dead boar. They had its carcass lashed to a pole and slung between two of their party. A third man had a Ruger across his back and carried the rifles of the first two, one slung under each arm. Behind those three walked two more men, rifles ported across their broad chests.

Gravel crunched beneath their boots and each wore a loden coat with broad belt, tweed plus fours and long woollen socks.

Every last one of them watched the Bugatti Royale grind past. All their guns had telescopic sights and featured extended magazines that came only as an (expensive) optional extra. The man at the back had two dead rabbits hanging from his belt.

"Season ends in about three weeks," said Hani. She waved to the hunters, who stared back, eyes hard. The Bugatti, one of only seven ever made, had been climbing for the last five minutes towards a distant farmhouse that kept vanishing behind the hill. The track over which it rattled was rough, edged with thorn and a few bare oaks unwilling to accept that spring was due.

"There it is . . ."

Thick walls washed white under a roof of red pantiles. Windows kept small to protect the inside from winter winds. Protecting the glass were oak shutters, their wood stripped bare by winter frost and summer heat. A hunting lodge really, built by a wine shipper from Cahors. It could have been lifted wholesale from the Lot valley and set down amid the pines and oaks of Ifriqiya's rugged north coast.

Its original owner was long dead. His marble tomb was decaying in a colonial churchyard where a pubescent angel stood guard over his final resting place, her downcast eyes at odds with the plumpness of her body and the thinness of her robes. Now she waited, rendered wingless by vandals, an atrocity victim waiting for eternity.

Claude Bouteloup began his life as a peasant farmer and ended it a baron, gold having dug deep enough to discover a previously overlooked family title. The walls of his old home remained lined with heads taken from the boar he'd shot in the Northern Tell. An implausible spread of horns over the main door stood memory to his plan to reintroduce aurochs, a few of which still roamed the hills, but fewer by the year.

All this Hani read out to Murad and Raf as her uncle yanked the Bugatti's fourteen-foot wheelbase round a tight bend in the dirt road while trying to ignore a drop that fell away to a white, storm-fed river far below.

"Put the book down," Raf told her. "Before you make yourself feel sick."

"Too late," said Hani. She flicked backwards for a few pages, then flicked forward. "This guide doesn't say who owns it now," she complained, skim-reading the entry again.

"It wouldn't," said Raf.

The first clue that this wasn't just another hunting lodge came at the gates. These looked normal until Raf got close enough to see otherwise. Tiny cameras tracked his arrival, watching from stone gateposts where they were bolted discreetly between the open claws of granite eagles.

Micromesh, fine enough to be virtually invisible, lined the far side of the gate's flowing wrought iron. Its heavy, old-fashioned lock was electronic. Cracking paint covered hinges that Raf was willing to bet conformed to some exacting military standard he didn't even know existed.

"You step out of the car," said Murad. "And then someone opens the gates if they like the look of you . . . I've been here before," he added, without glancing up from his toy Ninja Nizam. Hani and he had spent from Tunis to Bizerte arguing about whether or not action figures were childish.

Hani kept on saying they were. Until finally Murad announced that as Hani did nothing but play with a stupid cat, her opinion didn't count.

"Ifritah's not a toy."

"Did I say she was?"

After that came blessed silence, from Bizerte to just past Cap Serrat, where Raf turned the Bugatti off the crumbling blacktop onto something that barely qualified as track. The Ettore-Bugatti-built coupé Napoleon had been a present from the Prince Imperial in Paris to the Emir's grandfather and, until Raf claimed it, had been garaged in a mews at the back of the Bardo Palace.

No one had dared to stop Raf from commandeering the 275bhp, 12.8-litre monster. But then, from the chamberlain who ran the nearly empty palace to the uniformed sailor who first saw a blond notable in shades and black Armani suit striding towards its main door, no one had known how to treat Ashraf al-Mansur at all.

"Why did Kashif's soldiers walk you to the car?" There was something in Murad's voice that said he'd been mulling over this question for most of the trip. Which he had. He'd been trying to decide if asking it would be rude.

"No idea," said Raf and pulled the borrowed Bugatti into a parking space in front of the farmhouse and cut the engine.

Behind him Hani snorted but Raf ignored her. He was too busy watching Murad in the rearview mirror. Everything from eye colour to skin hue was different. The boy had narrower shoulders than Raf. A softer face. And thick dark hair instead of the fine ash blond that made Raf so visible. But there was something lost in his face, the same closed-down expression and the boy even chewed his lip in the same way.

Only Raf's squint was missing. His habitual reaction to trying to see without shades. Those had come later, after the second round of operations in Zurich. Besides, the dark glasses were meant to be a temporary fix, Raf could remember being told that.

"You okay?" he asked the boy.

"Sure." Murad shrugged. "Why not?" And in a way Murad was telling the truth. For a twelve-year-old who'd recently seen four people murdered he was doing fine, especially as one of them was a woman he'd known all his life. Opening the Bugatti door, Murad stepped out onto gravel. It was the only way he could avoid more questions . . .

"You know," Raf told Fleur Gide, stepping through the front door, "my brother thinks Berlin turned that Sufi."

"Berlin, Your Highness?" Major Gide looked genuinely shocked. "I assumed it was Washington or Paris."

She'd been the one to take the decision to let the Bugatti through the gate. A responsibility that fell to her as Eugenie's temporary replacement. Fleur Gide was as ambitious as the next special forces officer but this was one promotion she would happily have done without.

"Someone turned him, you agree?" said Raf. "And you don't have to call me Highness. I'm an Excellency at the most. If that . . ."

The newly promoted officer nodded doubtfully.

"Word on the street has the Sufi working for Kashif Pasha," Raf said. "Only that's wrong. Well, it is according to my brother."

Mentioning that the nearest he'd got to checking the word on the street was listening in while Murad Pasha scanned a dozen pirate stations seemed inappropriate. A twelve-year-old princeling lacked something as an information source when dealing with Ifriqiya's new head of intelligence, temporary or not.

Dr. Pierre smirked from the side of a barn, his mouth supercilious above the fading remains of a silk cravat. A lifetime of rain had worn his luxurious sideburns to a ghost of their former glory. A jagged scar split his chin where a builder had repaired cracked brickwork with no thought for the advertising mural beneath.

He was advertising pâté dentifrice. As used in Paris.

"Where are we going now?"

"Cap Bon," said Raf. "To question the Marquis de St. Cloud."

It said much for Murad's cool that he didn't ask why his half brother had the Bugatti's headlights switched off. Recalibrating his eyes, Raf glanced in the mirror and saw Murad lit by screen glare from Hani's pink plastic laptop.

"Can you turn the screen down . . . ?"

"Why?" Her voice was petulant. As if she still hadn't quite forgiven him for one or more of the many things for which he still needed her forgiveness.

"Because too much light makes driving difficult."

"If I must," said Hani and flicked off her laptop. Adjusting the screen was much too easy an option.

Raf didn't tell Hani his other reason. That somewhere above them would be a UN spysat capable of tracking their journey from the farmhouse to Cap Bon. If they were lucky, that was. If they were unlucky, then the satellite had probably just captured every one of Hani's keystrokes.

He drove in silence. Letting darkened walls and hedgerows flow around him until the dirt track became a minor road, then something that actually had central lines. Shortly after that came the périphérique around Tunis, the city flickering by in a smudge of suburbs as the huge Bugatti burned up the outside lane, lights out and its three passengers shadows held in darkness, like ghosts going on holiday.

One of the cardinal points of the Emir's work creation programme was that everyone in Ifriqiya should have a job. And if that meant more road sweepers, line painters or ditchdiggers than there were roads then so be it.

What Ifriqiya needed, of course, at least in the opinion of every visiting dignitary, was fewer donkeys and wider roads. Only the land lost to build the roads would, when added together, shave hectare after hectare off the country's reserve of perfectly good smallholdings. On the Emir's orders, a survey had been carried out after some commissar with mining interests in Gafsa had complained that trucking phosphate was becoming increasingly uneconomic.

In response to a hint from Moscow that the CCCP might help Tunis fund a programme to build new motorways, the Emir sent them the address of every family who'd lose land and invited Moscow to write to each, explaining why it was necessary.

To the reply that this would be pointless, since most of those would undoubtedly be unable to read, he pointed out that the literacy rate in Ifriqiya was slightly higher than western Russia as a whole, and at least 25 percent above that of Georgia, which was where both the commissar and the Soviet president originated.

The roads remained unwidened, still lined with prickly pear except in the far south, where the ground was too barren to grow even that.

"What are you thinking?" Hani asked, her voice no longer sullen. On her lap the computer balanced on top of Ifritah's cat basket. Now forgotten.

"About prickly pears," said Raf.

Hani nodded, as if that was to be expected. "The roads," she said, "and Moscow's plan to widen them. It's mentioned in the official guidebook."

"Probably," said Raf. From what he'd just seen, Emir Moncef was quite capable of having it included just to signal his independence from the only country still willing to trade openly with Ifriqiya.

"How do you two do that?" Murad demanded, his tone more interested than aggrieved.

"Do what?" Hani and Raf asked together.

And the answer was he didn't know. Raf accepted that he'd no more understood what his own mother was thinking than she'd known what hid inside his head. They had remained, from his birth until her death, two strangers separated by common blood and long silences: every glance between them was embarrassed, each hug brief and gratefully cut short. If ever he took her hand she flinched. Every time she touched him he froze.

It was a relationship safe only when conducted at a distance by e-mail or letter. So maybe Zara was right and he really was the last person to be looking after a troubled, hyperintelligent, unquestionably lonely small child.

Alternatively, he was ideal.

"You okay?"

Raf glanced in the mirror and saw Hani watching intently.

"Thought not," she said. One thin hand came up and gripped his neck, small fingers digging into muscle knots on both sides. "Twist your head," said Hani.

Raf did and heard bones crunch as something slid back into place. "Donna does it," she said, "every time I get a headache."

"You get many headaches?" Murad asked. And Raf realized he had no idea of the answer either.

She looked at Murad. "Since my uncle arrived," said Hani, "life's been one long headache." She smiled as she said it and neither of the other two quite noticed she'd avoided answering Murad's question.

As dawn's white thread became visible over the Golfe de Hammamet a call quavered onto the wind from the minaret of Nebeul mosque, Allahu Akbar intoned four times, followed by Ashhadu anna la ilah ill'-Allah, I testify there is no God besides God. And finally, towards the end, a phrase to distinguish this call from those that came later. Al-salatu khayr min al-nawn. Prayer is better than sleep.

Though both of those were a rarity for Raf.

Only now was he beginning to understand, as opposed to know, the difference between various types of Islamic building. A mosque was a church, well, it was to Raf. A marbarat the tomb of a saint at which believers might pray (a habit discouraged in the Middle East, but popular in North Africa where Berber instincts lightened the stark purity of their conqueror's interpretation).

A ribat was a fortified monastery, medressa were schools, somewhere between a tiny university and a religious college, zaouia were shrines, often Sufi . . .

What Raf didn't understand, or even know, was what value this knowledge had for a man who lacked all belief in God; for whom mosques were works of intricate beauty and calls to prayer haunting echoes of antiquity; but who saw nothing at the centre. Who saw, in fact, no centre at all.

"Can I ask you something?" said Hani, when she'd finished her prayers.

"Of course." Raf dropped the Bugatti down a gear to overtake an elderly truck loaded with soldiers.

"Who's Tiri?" She hesitated for a second. "When you left that note. You signed it ‘Tiri.'"

"My fox," Raf said and Hani nodded.

"What fox?" Murad demanded crossly. He was leaning on Ifritah's basket, which rested between Hani and him on the fat leather backseat of the Bugatti. Raf wasn't sure where he'd put his action figure but Ninja Nizam hadn't appeared once since Hani accused Murad of being childish.

"The fox . . ." Raf thought about it. "The fox is an identity."

"Ashraf Bey's an assassin," said Hani. "So he needs to be lots of different people . . . I didn't know the fox was called Tiri," she added.

"It's called lots of things," said Raf. "And I'm not an assassin."

"No," Hani said. "Of course not."

Beyond Hammamet was a turning for the A1, south towards Sousse and Kairouan. Glancing in his mirror before overtaking the next truck, Raf saw Murad still staring at him. The moment the boy met Raf's gaze he dropped his own.

They'd had a brief quarrel on the road back from Dar St. Cloud. Anger exploded from the boy as he demanded to know why Raf had failed to arrested the Marquis. In that shouted fury had been everything the twelve-year-old felt for his father; mostly love and fear, plus a primal, night-waking panic at the thought of life without certainty or comfort.

"You should have arrested him."

"St. Cloud didn't do it," Hani had said softly, resting one hand on the boy's arm. Murad shook her off.

"But Ashraf Bey said . . ."

"He was bluffing," explained Hani as she climbed into the car. Her smile faded the moment new fury twisted Murad's face. This time it was at being excluded from what Raf had known and Hani only suspected. Their visit to Dar St. Cloud had been cage rattling, little more. The Marquis paid no taxes, had tastes that were highly dubious and based himself in a country without a single extradition treaty. He had more to lose from Emir Moncef's death than almost anyone.

Since learning this, Murad had been almost translucent with silence. Pointedly ignoring Hani and her endless spray of facts about Khayr el Din, better known as the Barbary pirate Barbarossa, and the sack of Tunis by Charles V of Spain, in which seventy thousand men, women and children were slaughtered.

That he'd asked about the fox at all was significant.

"I'm sorry," Raf said. "One problem is I don't always know what I'm going to do or how things are about to work out." He yanked the Bugatti's thin steering wheel and managed to avoid a cartload of goatskins, untreated ones to judge from the smell. "That makes it difficult to warn people in advance."

"It's a children of Lilith thing," Hani added. Although it was obvious from Murad's blank stare that this didn't make it any clearer.

The boy shrugged with all the weight of coming adolescence on his shoulders. "I just was wondering," said Murad. "You know, back there, what exactly happened?"

Raf opened his mouth to answer but Hani got in first.

"What happened," she told Murad, "was that Uncle Ashraf put a curse on the Marquis. Children of Lilith can do that."

Murad's eyes widened and, without even realizing, he made a sign against the evil eye. And then flicked his glance fearfully from the face of his cousin to the dark-suited stranger in the front. The elder brother no one had bothered to tell him he had.

"Do you believe in magic?" Raf asked.

Murad nodded, fiercely.

"You shouldn't," Raf told him, "it doesn't exist. There are no djinn. If you hear something go creep in the night and it's not a burglar then it's a cat . . . Everything can be explained," he added, before Hani had time to protest. "Even those things that can't."

"How do you explain things that can't be explained?" Murad demanded doubtfully.

"By admitting we don't yet have an explanation."

The boy thought about that for as long as it took Raf to drop back a gear and overtake three trucks, leaving soldiers radiating outrage as he roared by in the half dark, lights still off.

"So what happened with the Marquis?" said Murad. He spoke slowly, listening to his own words as he said them. Raf could remember another boy like that. A boy who tasted each word as it was said. Who survived in dark places because his words, wielded viciously, could do more damage than the fists of other boys.

Which left Raf wondering whose fists Murad had been avoiding. Or if he'd learnt to think before he spoke for other reasons.

"I put a gun to his throat," said Raf. "That's usually enough to make anyone afraid."

The boy nodded uncertainly. "But he's St. Cloud," Murad said, obviously unable to think of another way to put it. "Even my brother Kashif Pasha is scared of him."

"Kashif is scared of Uncle Ashraf," Hani pointed out. "Anyone with any sense is. He works for the Sublime Porte."

"No, I don't . . ."

"Then why wear the chelengk?" Hani asked triumphantly.

He thought about what she'd said before that. "Are you?" he asked.

"Afraid of you? Of course I am," Hani said. "Every time you do whatever you did back there."

Raf sighed. "Did you notice a mark left on his neck afterwards from the muzzle of the gun? And my hand on the back of his neck?"

Hani nodded.

"I cut off his blood supply. Oxygen starvation combined with panic. It made an ancient part of St. Cloud's brain kick in, nothing else."

"That was it?" said Murad.

"Sure," Raf said. "Simple oxygen starvation." He avoided mentioning the flames still dancing djinnlike across the inside of his eyes or the rawness that tightened his face like the aftereffects of searing heat.

"Wait in the car," Raf told them when they finally reached Kairouan. "I'll get some breakfast."

"Crêpe," suggested Murad, "with jam and cream cheese."

"I don't think so," Hani said. "Does it look like that kind of place?" She wound down her window and sniffed, inhaling the cafés, street stalls and rotisseries. "Get some briek," she told Raf. "And Coke, if you can find any."

A dozen signs for local colas swung in the breeze. All variations on a theme of red and blue. None had names Hani recognized. This whole country was less like El Iskandryia than she'd first imagined.

"I'll see what I can do," Raf promised.

Watching her uncle stride away, Hani waited until he was lost in the crowd. His black coat swallowed by the burnous and jellabas of those around him. "Okay," she said, turning to Murad, "I'm going shopping. You wait in the car."

Murad Pasha stared at her.

Hani eased open her door and checked that the road was clear before beginning to slide herself out.

"I'm coming with you."

"No," Hani said hastily. "Someone has to stay with the car," she insisted, "and you're the boy . . ."

"So?"

Wide eyes watched him, apparently shocked. "I'm a girl," said Hani. "Surely you don't expect me to stand guard over the car all by myself in a strange city?"

Murad settled back. His eyes already scanning the shop fronts. "Don't be long," he said.

The first chemist Hani entered was full of old men who stared as if she'd walked in from another planet. So, muttering an apology, she gave an elegant bow, which she hoped would muddle them even further. The second catered to Soviet tourists. Hani knew this because a poster in the window had pack shots of painkillers and cough mixture above simple descriptions written in five languages, three of which Hani could read.

Catering to Soviet tourists was entirely different to there being any. Hani realized this as soon as she pushed her way through the shop's bead curtain and found the place empty, apart, that was, from an old man with what looked like the inward stare of a mystic or kif smoker. Although, it turned out to be neither because when Hani got closer, she realized his eyes were milky with cataracts.

"Saháh de-kháyr," she said politely.

"Saháh de-kháyr," he replied, then added, "Es-salám aláykum."

So Hani had to start all over, replying and to you peace, before rewishing him good day. Formalities complete, she stopped, unsure how to continue. She could see what she thought she needed on a shelf behind the counter, low down and almost out of sight.

The man waited while Hani opened and shut her mouth so often she was in danger of turning into one of Zara's promised carp.

"Telephone?" she muttered finally.

Absolute silence greeted this request.

Pulling a note from her pocket, Hani held it out to the old man. The note was American, a five-dollar bill.

The man called something over his shoulder and a young woman appeared, hastily wrapping her scarf around her head. Only to relax slightly when she discovered her customer was a child.

"Telephone?" Hani repeated.

Taking the bill from the man's hands she held it up to the light and slipped it quickly into her dress pocket. Man and woman had a hasty conversation, so fast and so low that overhearing was impossible. Whatever the content, they seemed to reach a conclusion.

"No telephone," said the woman. "Not here. But I take you . . ." She gestured towards the rear and Hani realized that she was meant to follow. For about fifty paces she fought her way down a busy back alley, then the woman steered her towards a small door set in a crumbling wall.

"Through here," she said, as she pushed Hani ahead of her, shouting "Hamid!" as they came out into a small courtyard.

A second yell produced a head peering from an upstairs window. Another burst of conversation followed in what Hani finally realized was chelha, the original dialect of Kairouan's Berber inhabitants.

"Where do you want to call?" asked the woman, tossing Hani's answer up to the boy, then stopping for his reply.

"El Iskandryia we can do," she agreed, "but it will cost more than five dollars . . ."

Reluctantly Hani peeled another note from the roll in her dress pocket and palmed it into a small square before making a pretence of searching her remaining pockets, muttering crossly all the while.

"My last one," she said.

The cell phone was a Siemens. Unquestionably illegal in a country where all cell phones had to be registered with the police.

"Two minutes," said the woman, "call me when you're done." And she vanished into the house to give the foreign girl some privacy. The boy remained sitting on a stone bench next to the courtyard entrance just to make sure Hani didn't suddenly disappear with his phone.

Hani could just imagine it. Donna stood in the kitchen surrounded by pans, trying to ignore the buzz of the coms screen, Zara out shopping and Khartoum lost in thought or rereading tales of the Ineffable Mullah Nasrudin, all of which he already knew by heart.

She sighed.

The message Hani left was simple. She was in Kairouan with her uncle. On her way to Tozeur. There was nothing to worry about.

"Where have you been?" Murad demanded when Hani finally got back.

"Getting these," said Hani, handing him a cardboard dish of makrouth, lozenge-shaped sweetmeats filled with date paste. She dropped a cheap paper napkin next to his knee and clambered up into the huge Bugatti. The rest of the napkins she stuffed into a side pocket. She let Murad eat the sweetmeats because, unfortunately, even after her walk her tummy still had cramps.

Second coffee. That was how Eduardo counted his days. First coffee, second coffee, third coffee . . .

The first always found Eduardo listening to IskTV. While others watched the newsfeed avid for every close-up, Eduardo listened carefully as he doodled hats and moustaches onto pictures in Iskandryia Today or filled in the Os in every headline.

The Emir of Tunis had been taken into protective custody following the declaration of martial law in Ifriqiya. The story was in his paper as well as on-screen. Iskandryia Today treated this as news while IskTV assumed it was background, leading with a different story. One that had His Excellency Kashif Pasha, the Emir's eldest son, swearing that his father was alive, safe and would remain that way. Apparently Kashif Pasha swore this on his life.

What IskTV found interesting was the fact that this promise was relayed on Kashif's behalf by a half brother, Ashraf al-Mansur, who personally visited the Mosque de trois ports in Kairouan to pass the message to the head of the Assiou Brotherhood.

The head of the brotherhood had, as requested, released Kashif Pasha's promise to the world.

So Eduardo wasn't surprised to receive a scrambled call just after second coffee. Although it took him a moment to remember that he needed to connect an optic from the silver Seiko he wore to the computer on his desk. That was what the man had told him to do, plug in as soon as Eduardo heard the hiss and never try to make a connection using infrared. Which was fine, because Eduardo wouldn't have known where to start.

A doctor at the Imperial Free once suggested Eduardo reduce his coffee intake to one cup a day but Eduardo had barely paused to consider this. The man was a foreigner, newly arrived in the city, and would learn. No one who actually lived in El Isk for longer than a week could have made that suggestion.

Instead, Eduardo had agreed with himself to cut his intake to eight cups a day. This wasn't always possible, given the nature of his job; but his success or failure gave Eduardo something to talk about to Rose, a mild-natured whore he'd met a few months earlier, when the man sent him to do a job at Maison 52, Pascal Coste.

Rose claimed to be English and, although she had the hips and buttocks of an Egyptian, the smallness of her breasts convinced Eduardo that this might be the truth. As did the half-smoked Ziganov forever hanging from her fingers, its gold band stained with lipstick. In Iskandryia, even licensed whores didn't smoke in public.

But then women tended not to visit cafés either. Unless it was one of those expensive places around Place Saad Zaghloul like Le Trianon, where ordinary rules seemed not to apply. Money did that, Eduardo had decided. It rewrote the rules. Or perhaps it just remade them into something so complex and discreet that ordinary people like him no longer understood what they were. The man was like that, governed by rules Eduardo took on trust.

Eduardo's office was above a haberdasher's at the back of a bus station on Place Zaghloul. The place was a walk-up with winding stairs and a toilet on the half landing, which Eduardo had to share with the shop below. It had a melamine desk, a cheap chair in black plastic that looked almost like leather and a grey metal filing cabinet. Plus a state-of-the-art computer, quite out of keeping with the rest of the furniture.

The computer lived on a side table. Well, it would have been a side table if it hadn't actually been an old door supported at either end by plinths of crudely mortared bricks. Eduardo, whose work it was, had tried to apologize for its ugliness but the man had waved away Eduardo's explanation. It seemed Ashraf Bey liked the door/table combination more than he liked anything else in the office.

Sharing Eduardo's office space were two cockroaches and a colony of ants who dwindled come autumn and, Eduardo imagined, would be back with the spring. He wasn't sure, not having had the place long enough to find out. The cockroaches remained, however, sharing his desk and living off a diet of sugar that fell from Eduardo's morning doughnut.

With his first coffee, which he drank just after dawn, Eduardo ordered an almond croissant. He'd adopted the habit after having breakfast one morning with the bey because this was what the bey ate.

"Eduardo?" The voice came hollow with static and thin from being bounced off a satellite too far above El Iskandryia for Eduardo to really comprehend. All the same, he would have known it anywhere.

"Excellency . . ."

The voice sighed.

Eduardo was meant to call him boss on the phone. Even when answering his watch in the office out of sight of everyone else.

"I'm here, boss," the small man said hurriedly.

"You listening?" The voice on the other end wasn't cross, just careful.

"Sure, boss. Always . . . No, I mean it." Eduardo tried to sound hurt but the man was right, Eduardo hardly ever listened. And when Eduardo did he always had to concentrate extra hard to make sense of what the other person said.

"Yeah, I got it," Eduardo said finally, when the voice had finished explaining what Eduardo was expected to do. "Well, except for that bit about becoming a policeman . . ."

Life was a series of comings and goings . . .

Some philosopher said that, or it might have been Cheb Rai; every time the thought popped into Eduardo's head he got a tune just out of reach. Three chords leading to a fourth that Eduardo knew would, should he ever remember it, give him the whole.

All the same, whoever said or sang them, the words rang true. People came and went. They walked into one's life and walked out again with no reason that Eduardo could see, but then he wasn't very clever. Lots of people had told him that. Smarter people could see the threads that tied together events. And none were smarter than the bey. Eduardo really believed that.

In the cafés people talked of how the trial of the warlord Colonel Abad was tied to a dock strike rolling out across the North African littoral. And how Ashraf al-Mansur, now in Tunis, had gone there to kill the father who'd abandoned him. Others insisted he was there to save the old man's life. And a few, mostly Bolsheviks, were of the opinion that the Emir was already dead and all al-Mansur wanted was to make sure he got his share of the inheritence.

Eduardo knew different.

Ashraf Bey was trying to find his mother's original wedding certificate . . . Sometimes politics were way more complicated than Eduardo could understand.

An elegant young woman outside Arrivals was waving for a taxi. Something Eduardo didn't need to do since he had a car already waiting. At least, he had a uniformed driver clutching a board with Eduardo's name on it so Eduardo assumed he had a car as well.

Eduardo almost offered the woman a lift into the centre but when he nodded to her she just scowled. So Eduardo went back to helping Rose navigate her way through a crowd of C3N cameramen waiting for taxis at the front of Tunis Arrivals.

This was what happened if one suddenly lifted the embargo on flights to facilitate the departure of nonessential diplomatic staff. More people turned up than left. He was pretty sure that wasn't what the UN had in mind.

"We're here, sir."

Eduardo liked that last word. It suggested that the driver thought he and Rose looked properly Western, which they were more or less. Soviet tourists would have got commissar, not meant obviously but always good for increasing baksheesh as tourists called tips, getting wrong both country and language. Anyone local wearing a suit like Eduardo's would have merited effendi, just to be on the safe side.

So that sir meant the young driver realized Eduardo was not local and not a Soviet tourist. Unless, of course, the boy called everybody that.

Originally Eduardo had been planning to fly alone and travel first class, the man having said buy any ticket he liked as long as the flight left that afternoon. But when Eduardo realized that premium cost half the price of first he decided Rose should come with him.

So that was what they did. And though Eduardo got the feeling Rose had never flown before, she insisted she'd flown dozens of times to numerous destinations. But then he'd told her exactly the same.

What's more, she'd enjoyed the flight. Eduardo knew, because he'd been careful to ask. And she looked great. He'd been careful to tell her that too.

The Benz waiting outside Tunis Arrivals was big and black, smarter than Eduardo could ever have expected, with metal pipes coming out of the engine and running down either side of the hood. The pipes had been silver to start with but now they were grey with wide bands of kingfisher blue, like petrol floating on top of a fresh puddle.

Alexandre, who was young and wore the uniform of a Tunis detective (something he suspected his visitors might not yet have realized), walked round to the back door of the Emir's second-favourite car and held it open.

At a nod from the small man, the woman clambered in and smoothed a black dress covered with red roses down over her pink knees. Leaving her partner still anxiously eyeing their luggage, such as it was.

"My case . . ."

Ashraf Bey's original call had told Eduardo to buy a new suit, new shoes, several shirts and a tie. The man had even specified the colour of each: dark blue for the suit, white for the shirts and red for the tie (no stripes). He'd said nothing about buying a case in which to put these things.

"Of course, sir." Alexandre was apologetic. "I should have realized you'd need your case with you." He picked up the cardboard box with its cheap handle, wondering at its lightness, and waited for Eduardo to join the woman. Only then did Alexandre put the case in the well of the borrowed car, beside Eduardo's feet.

"Where to, sir?"

Eduardo thought about it. "What are my options?"

Alexandre tried not to sigh.

Accelerated entry to officer level and descent from an ex- colon family that had owned dairy farms in the High Tell guaranteed he got given the shitty jobs by sergeants who grew up in the medina or the nouvelle ville, people he'd outrank within the year and who knew that fact but could never forgive it.

All the same, the fact Alexandre had been warned to handle this job with discretion meant the anxious-looking man in the rear seat had to be somebody important. Exactly why that might be became clear when Alexandre opened his mouth to answer, only to discover that the man sat behind him was already talking, mostly to himself.

"We could start with the Police HQ, I suppose."

Alexandre nodded.

"Or we could go find the boss . . ."

To Alexandre that meant his colonel. He got the feeling this man had someone else in mind. "The boss?" Alexandre asked, in a tone he hoped was politely casual.

"Ashraf al-Mansur . . ."

"You know the bey?"

"He's my boss." Eduardo sounded as proud of the fact as he felt, which was very proud indeed.

"And my boss too," Alexandre said. "Apparently Ashraf Bey is the new Chief of Police." That was what he'd been told anyway. It was all change at HQ.

"Actually . . ." Eduardo glanced at Rose and looked embarrassed. "The thing is, you see . . . I'm the new Chief." Eduardo tasted the words as he said them and sat up a little straighter in his seat.

And, like a good detective, he noticed the way Alexandre immediately did the same, straightening his shoulders and quickly adjusting his cap. That was when he realized Alexandre was one of his men.

"I'm sorry, Your Excellency. I didn't know."

"Why should you?" Eduardo said, feeling expansive. "And you don't need to call me Excellency, sir is fine . . . All the same, I have a question for you. An important question."

Alexandre froze.

"What do you know . . . ?" Eduardo whipped out a leather notebook he'd bought at Iskandryia airport, flipped it open, and watched the opening page come alight. "Let me see, what do you know about a pâtissier called Pascal Boulart? Other than the fact he was stabbed in an alley behind Maison Hafsid and a sous-chef was arrested . . ."

It turned out Alexandre knew even less than that. He knew the killing all right, he just had no memory of anyone having been arrested by the police. As Alexandre tried to point out, as circumspectly as possible, this might just mean the murderer had been picked up by Kashif Pasha's men.

Although the military wing of the police was meant to liaise with the civilian branches, this sometimes failed to happen, very occasionally, obviously.

"Find out if they did," said Eduardo. "And get me files on everyone killed in the massacre at the Domus Aurea."

"There were only four." Alexandre regretted the remark as soon as he made it. "I mean, the fifth one got away."

"Four is enough," Eduardo said firmly. "Now take me to the hotel." He needed a shower, as did Rose. And with luck, if the shower was big enough, they could share.

"Hotel . . . ?"

Eduardo nodded.

"You are not staying at a hotel, sir. My orders were to take you wherever you wanted and deliver your luggage to the Dar Ben Abdallah."

"Dar, maison, hôtel," said Eduardo, "it's all the same, you know." He turned to Rose. "In French," he explained, "hôtel means big house, like in Hôtel de Ville. Isn't that right?"

Alexandre nodded, not taking his eyes off the road.

On their way into the city all the other traffic moved out of the way. Eduardo was wondering about this until he remembered the flag. He wasn't sure what the flag on the hood stood for but it looked very official.

Palms shaded yellow earth, so that sunlight sketched patterns across the banks of a narrow stream, highlighting twigs and dead fronds. The water in the seguia was dirty, the grass edging the ditch and the undersides of the palms less bright than Zara expected. Only ungrown dates, tiny and green and still vulnerable to the sand winds, seemed created from a brighter scheme altogether. This was a world of ochres and earth hues. An Impressionist umbrella restricted to the palette of a Klee.

Farther along, half-in/half-out of the stream lay a fallen palm with its trunk ringed like an endlessly extruded pinecone. The crown was gone but, since fronds extended fingerlike from beneath the sand that covered a newly repaired footbridge, the reason was not hard to find.

The coolness of the gardens was in welcome contrast to the last fifty miles across the chott, when the air had been salt and hot, unseasonably so the taxi driver had told her, several times.

"I'm here to collect Lady Hana al-Mansur."

Zara stood on the edge of Tozeur's famous grove, home of the translucent deglet nur and site of a quarter of a million palms fed by two hundred springs that carried water to the date trees. The only thing to stop her reaching a small palace on the other side of the stream was a single soldier guarding a narrow bridge. The palace had been built by one of the old beys or emirs. It must have been, because only a notable could get away with building a palace on land historically reserved for growing dates.

Over the centuries, gold and slaves had passed through this area, carpets and priceless manuscripts, swords and spices. None of them creating the wealth of the date palms. At its height, a millennium before, a thousand dromedaries a day were said to have left Tozeur, laden with dates and even now many of the town's inhabitants were khammes, sharecroppers who maintained the groves and in return took one-fifth of the harvest as their pay.

Behind Zara in an airport taxi sat a driver, looking in disbelief at a pile of notes on his lap. She'd paid him what was on the meter, Tunis to Tozeur, having brushed away his offer to negotiate.

In fact, the man could honestly say she'd hardly glanced at the meter their entire trip, most of which she'd spent watching distant green fields turn to sahal before becoming moonlike around the phosphate town of Gafsa. A place of which a wise man once said, "Its water is blood, its air poison, you may live there a hundred years without making one true friend . . ."

"She is here?" Zara said, frowning at the guard. "Hani al-Mansur?"

The soldier to whom Zara spoke was thickset, with cropped hair more salt than pepper. He'd been having one of those weeks.

"I'm not sure, my lady . . ." The man made a show of unclipping a radio from his belt, wondering as he did so, why the young woman's face suddenly tightened. "I'll make a call."

"Zara Quitrimala," Zara said, "Ms. Zara Quitrimala." The way she said it made her name begin with a hiss. "And you don't use honorifics when talking to me. I'm perfectly ordinary."

The look the guard gave her begged leave to differ.

Moncef Hauara was unmarried which was rare for a middle-aged man in Tozeur, unmarried and about to retire from active duty. Living with his mother, a woman who'd spent her life repairing clothes for notables, he recognized both shot silk and the French way of cutting on the bias. Although, if asked, he'd have said the jet buttons were what he noticed. Most manufacturers used black plastic while a few of the flashier labels chose machine-cut obsidian. Only Dior and Chanel still used buttons hand-carved from Italian jet, the way they'd always done.

He knew, the way he knew a storm was brewing, exactly how long it would have taken someone to sew that jacket. How long it took to double-stitch the hems and edge each buttonhole. There were a dozen differing grades of silk, variable in their wear and lasting qualities as well as their ease of cutting and ability to hold dye.

There was nothing ordinary about that dress or the cut. And Corporal Hauara doubted strongly that there was anything remotely ordinary about the woman who wore it. At least not in any sense that a soon-to-retire soldier who still lived with his mother would understand.

"Yes, sir. I'll do that."

The corporal clicked off his radio and promptly dialled a fresh number. Sweat was beginning to show beneath his arms. A short conversation followed, of which Zara heard only one half.

"A young lady."

"Zara Quitrimala."

"Quitrimala."

"Yes, sir. Quite possibly."

"Yes, sir. I'll ask."

"Forgive me," said the guard, "but Major Jalal would like to know if Hana al-Mansur is expecting you? Also, why you think she is here . . ."

For someone so determined Zara did a good imitation of not having foreseen that question. "My father's . . ."

Corporal Hauara knew who her father was. At least he did now.

"He's guardian to . . ." Stumbling over the sense as much as the words, Zara tried to work out exactly what her father was to Hani, other than extremely fond. A fact replete with problems for someone whose own childhood memories were of a loud, occasionally threatening figure; a version of himself Hamzah Effendi seemed to have left behind.

"She told me she'd be here," said Zara finally, waving a piece of headed paper, signed by her father and the Khedive of El Iskandryia. This announced that they were the child's trustees and Zara acted with full authority. It slid over the fact they were trustees only where the child's money was concerned. Zara's furious request to her father that he let her go save Hani from imminent civil war had seen to that.

As for the Khedive, Zara had no doubts that he countersigned Hamzah's letter because she had tears in her eyes when she asked.

"What time does curfew begin?" Zara demanded.

Corporal Hauara looked at her. "Curfew?"

"It was on C3N. What time do Kashif Pasha's troops lock down the streets at night . . ."

"There is no curfew," the guard said carefully. "At least not in Tozeur. Perhaps in Tunis." He wanted to add something else, but the years had taught him to swallow such thoughts. That was the secret of surviving. To stay silent while seeming to do nothing but talk.

"Okay, let's try that again."

Eduardo spun the knife in his hand and tossed it at a door scarred by more cuts than it was possible to count. At least, impossible to count without taking the offending object off its hinges, having the thing carried to Police HQ and getting someone to shoot it, resize the photographs and cross off the cuts one at a time.

A lifetime's worth of staff at Maison Hafsid had stood in a short corridor outside the cellar kitchens and honed their throwing skills or taken out their frustration on that cupboard door.

"You know what's really interesting?" Eduardo said.

No one answered, but then that wasn't surprising. He'd recognized them all. Not the names and not even the faces, but the types. Loners and misfits. The usual scum found working in kitchens. And they'd recognized him. As one of them.

Besides, the knife he threw was the one found plunged into the heart of Pascal Boulart. In the alley behind Maison Hafsid.

"What's really interesting is that the killer left no fingerprints on his blade . . ." There were, in fact, dozens of fingerprints on the blade, but all of them belonged to the coroner, his assistant or members of the police who'd processed the knife later, when it was being bagged for evidence.

"Why do you think that is?" Eduardo asked.

A boy shrugged.

"Because he wore gloves?" The man who spoke was tall and dark-faced, his hair grey with age. A heavy bruise ripened over one high cheek and his mouth was split. According to a report recently filed by Kashif Pasha's mubahith, Chef Edvard could be a difficult and sometimes violent man. So far there had been nothing to suggest that either of those statements was true.

"Gloves? Possibly," Eduardo admitted. "But then there are none of the victim's fingerprints on the blade either. Which is very odd, because Pascal was stabbed five times . . ." He paused and was disappointed to realize they didn't all immediately see the implication. "Have you ever been stabbed?"

Only Chef Edvard nodded.

"Show me your hands," Eduardo demanded.

There were faded slash marks across one palm and a long cicatrix that vanished beneath his sleeve. In return Eduardo showed the chef his own hands with their wounds from days Eduardo did his best not to remember.

"There were no defensive cuts on the hands of Pascal Boulart. His fingerprints were missing from both blade and handle. Do you know what this suggests to me?"

Ripping the knife from battered wood, Eduardo walked ten paces to the far end of the corridor and threw again. Another bull's-eye. Straight into the middle of the door, where it joined a hundred other cuts.

Behind him, where the corridor gave way to the kitchens, someone clapped, probably mockingly but maybe for real. That was Eduardo's tenth throw and the tenth time he'd put the knife in the door exactly where he wanted it.

A misspent childhood had its uses.

"You try." He pointed to the boy who'd been clapping. A thin youth with a rash on his chin hidden beneath what looked like blusher. "Come on . . ."

Reluctantly Idries stepped forward. Well aware that he had no choice.

The first thing Eduardo had done on entering the cellar was flash his shield. This was gold, maybe real gold, in a crocodile-skin case with a top that flipped up, like one of those little vidphones. It had been left for him at Police HQ, in his office, along with a matte black .45 paraOrdnance and a scribble pad of notes covered with Ashraf Bey's writing.

Eduardo hadn't even known he had an office until a fat man with sweat stains under his arms, a man who wouldn't meet his eye, silently offered him the key. Concerned with trying to make sense of His Excellency's terrible writing, it took Eduardo until the next morning to realize his scowling deputy with the striped shirts and perspiration problem was the old Chief.

In the end, unable to translate Ashraf Bey's notes into any language he understood, Eduardo stored them for safety in the top drawer of his new desk and turned to the files he'd asked Alexandre to bring him. Sometimes in life it was just easier to start over.

And he was right; the files were much more interesting.

"Find me the man with stripy shirts," Eduardo demanded. He had a box on his desk that let him talk to a serious-looking woman in the office outside without having to get up and open the door.

"You wanted me?"

Eduardo indicated a seat without looking up from his files. "You used to run this place?"

The man's nod was sullen. Although he added, "Yes, sir," when Eduardo raised his head from a folder.

"You can have it back once I'm done," Eduardo said. "I don't imagine I'll be staying. In fact"–he stared at the unhappy man–"assume you have total autonomy in everything except the Maison Hafsid case, but first find me . . ." Eduardo glanced down at a crime report. "Ahmed, cousin of Idries, who worked at the Maison Hafsid."

At first Chef Edvard felt sure Eduardo was there to shut down his restaurant. Given the disaster at Domus Aurea and the fact he'd put an Egyptian deserter on the staff list as Hassan, because that was the only way to get the man through security clearance, Chef Edvard could hardly have been surprised if this was true.

Mind you, if the mubahith had even suspected that second fact he'd already be dead. Chef Edvard's position, held to under questioning, was that he'd assumed the thin-faced blond waiter was just another undercover police officer providing protection.

Neither he nor his staff had ever seen the man before.

"Throw it," Eduardo told the boy.

"What about prints?" Idries glanced back at the others, looking for support. At least that's what Eduardo assumed he was looking for.

"I don't want to trick you," Eduardo said. "I just want to see you throw the knife." Pulling a pair of cheap evidence gloves from his suit pocket, he tossed them across. "Wear these."

The boy threw as expertly as Eduardo had expected. Without even bothering to heft the knife to find its balance.

"Now you," he told a girl hovering silently near the back.

She struggled with the gloves, finally throwing with the latex fingers only half over her own so they flopped like a coxcomb. The knife bounced off the door.

"Try again," said Eduardo as he handed Isabeau the knife and a clean tissue, something Rose insisted he carry. "Get rid of the gloves," he said, "then wipe down blade and handle when you've finished. I don't mind."

She stared at him.

"Throw," said Eduardo.

Without the gloves to hamper her, Isabeau put the blade straight into the door.

"I don't understand," Chef Edvard said into the silence that followed the thud of the blade. "Are you saying Ahmed flung this knife at my pastry cook? That was how Pascal was killed?"

"Of course not," said Eduardo. His tone of voice made it clear he'd never heard anything quite so ridiculous. "Wipe the blade," Eduardo told the girl, "and give it to someone else."

They all threw after that. Taking the handkerchief and carefully wiping clean the knife before passing it to the next person. Even Chef Edvard, his throw little more than a dismissive flick of the wrist that buried the blade in the door at throat height.

"Right," said Eduardo. "Only two more questions and we're done." Plucking the blade from the door one final time, he wiped it on his own shirt and dropped it back into its evidence bag. The stain on its steel blade was rust not blood and its edge was blunt. The only thing this knife had ever been good for was throwing at a door.

"Where's the fat boy?"

Eduardo had read the files, seen the photographs and memorized the names. But just to be safe he'd had the serious-faced assistant at his office type out a list of everyone working at Maison Hafsid and then he'd read them off at the beginning, like doing a roll call at school. He knew who was missing. Ahmed, obviously. Also Hassan.

"Gone," Chef Edvard said flatly.

"Where?" Eduardo demanded.

"We don't know. He just didn't show up today. And he missed his shift at Café Antonio last Friday."

"Let me know if he appears," said Eduardo. "Okay, final question. Where exactly in the alley was Pascal Boulart's body found? I want each of you to show me in turn."

"Your Excellency."

Given that someone had stolen all three door knockers, the barefoot Nubian in the white silk robe had little option but to hammer ever louder on the door of Dar Welham. As a method of attracting Ashraf Bey's attention it proved surprisingly unsuccessful, all but the final knocks being drowned out by the thud of ancient and unserviced fans inside.

Until he made his stop at Kairouan the previous week, Raf hadn't even realized he owned a house in Tozeur, let alone one in the oldest district; but the tall dar with its ochre, geometrically laid brickwork and dark interior had been a wedding present from the Emir to his mother, apparently.

Un présent de mariage.

Isaac & Sons' files were dust-buried on the shelves of their deserted walk-up when Raf and three uniformed officers cut the padlock on the rear and kicked in a door at the top of the stairs.

All it took was Raf presenting himself at Kairouan's Police HQ and demanding the loan of three good officers, bolt cutters and a hydraulic battering ram, one of the small handheld versions. His name alone had been enough to turn his wish list into reality. The officers were uniformed, respectful and obviously experienced. And the really terrifying thing, at least the thing that Raf found really terrifying was that at no point did anyone ask him for any form of identity.

He went looking for a wedding certificate and came back with copies of a deed of ownership, which did just as well. The date he wanted was at the top. While his mother's signature and that of Moncef were at the bottom. Fifty years earlier, on the day after they were married, Moncef had presented his mother with a house in Tozeur and another in Tunis. Fifty years . . .

Lady Nafisa, his aunt, had known this because it was for her that the copies were made by notario Ibrahim ibn Ishaq. Thanking the police officers, Raf had taken one copy of the deed and ordered the men to remove all other documents from the office and have them shredded, then burned. He made the most senior officer repeat that order, all documents, all shredded, all burned.

When Raf left to find Hani, Murad and the Bugatti, the officer was already radioing for backup while the other two had begun to arrange the files into dusty piles on the floor.

Dar Welham, his new house, stood behind the main road from the Palm Groves to Zaouia Ishmailia, on the right, halfway down an alley too old and narrow to merit a name. One side of his street had already been partly rebuilt using traditional yellow brick. Raf's side remained a mess of crumbling façades and locked doorways, with most of the houses obviously empty. Almost all of the triple door knockers, which allowed long-gone inhabitants to know if the person calling was a man, woman or child, had been stolen. As had a number of the old iron locks and the door handles themselves.

The private courtyard of Dar Welham still stank of cat's piss and sewage, although Raf had slopped it down at least three times and tipped buckets of rusty water through the open grilles of the drains. Hani and Murad had concentrated on the inside of the dar, sweeping floors and scrubbing at mineral deposits that had leached up through the floor tiles.

That the dar had electricity to drive its fans at all was a miracle. One involved twisted flex glued direct to rough walls and fed through a large hole into next door's cellar, where Raf jammed open the trip switch of a junction box with half a clothespin. Air-conditioning would obviously have helped. Although being somewhere other than Tozeur at the start of a khamsin wind might have been better.

Sand fall was expected. And Murad kept referring to a chili, alternating that word with khamsin. It had to do with a depression moving into the Gulf of Gebes. One that had kicked the afternoon temperature up to 98°F and threatened to drop sand as far north as Madrid. The local radio station talked about little else.

"Door," Hani said, looking up from a game of chess. She was winning five games to zero. The only way Murad had been persuaded to play again was her promise that this would be his last for the day and her assurance that he'd soon be good enough to beat her. But then, as Murad pointed out, she'd said that the day before as well.

At Hani's feet stretched Ifritah. Panting in the heat.

"What?" Raf put down the deeds to Dar Welham.

"Someone's at the door," said Hani. "I'd go but it's probably for you."

And it was. Apparently Kashif Pasha's messenger saw nothing odd in presenting an envelope featuring an ersatz version of a European coat of arms, one bearing a Western interpretation of an Othman turban, on a silver salver in the style of Napoleon III, overlaid around the edge with Quranic script in beaten gold, bronze and copper.

"Will there be a reply?"

Having read Kashif's message, Raf put it carefully in his pocket.

"No," he said, "I think not."

The Nubian might have come to the door of Dar Welham barefooted and dressed in a white robe but he drove off in a black four-by-four with smoked windows and roo bars big enough to knock down a buffalo.

"Who was that?" said Hani. She stood on the stairs with Murad behind her. A windup radio was in the boy's hand.

"Just one of Kashif Pasha's friends."

"My brother Kashif doesn't have friends," Murad said firmly, then paused, worried that he might have sounded rude. "I mean," he said more politely, "he has only allies or enemies." The boy's voice made no secret of which camp he'd found himself in. "What does the message say?"

"That's private."

Two heads turned to face Raf. Hani's frown now a full-on scowl. "No secrets," she reminded Raf. "Remember? That's what you told me when Aunt Nafisa died. Anything I asked you would answer."

It had been a simple enough promise, made to a crying child who wanted to know why life was so unfair. One that Raf would have liked an adult, any adult, to have made to him. And it was proving impossibly difficult to keep.

"Hani, I'm really sorry . . ."

"You promised."

So he had. "It's from Kashif Pasha," Raf said.

"But that's the Emir's coat of arms," Murad insisted.

"I know," said Raf, "but it's not his message. Kashif and I need to meet."

"You're not going to go . . ." Murad sounded appalled that Raf might even consider it. "Have you listened to the latest news?"

Raf hadn't.

Apparently C3N had been told by St. Cloud that Ashraf Bey was behind the attack on Emir Moncef. Colonel Abad, that well-known war criminal, was mentioned. As was Raf's part in helping Abad avoid being brought to justice. The Marquis even managed to suggest that the bey might be behind last autumn's attacks on the Midas Refinery, jointly owned by St. Cloud and Hamzah Effendi.

"If you go, Kashif will hurt you," Murad said flatly. "I know him."

"All the same," said Raf, "I think I must." Skimming the note, he ran through words he already knew by heart. The message was short. "It seems Kashif's captured the missing waiter," Raf told them both. "He'd like me to be present at the questioning."

Hani opened her mouth and shut it again. "Something else," she said finally. "What else?"

"Because of the current danger," said Raf, failing to extract the bleakness from his voice, "my brother has extended his offer of protective custody to include Zara."

"She's here?"

"Apparently . . ."

"So what do you want Murad and me to do?" Hani asked.

"Stay here," said Raf. "And keep out of trouble. If that's remotely possible."

Hani's look was doubtful.

Three hours after Raf left, men in black jellabas locked off the unnamed alley using Jeeps they swung across both ends, isolating the stretch in between.

Once again the Jeeps had smoked glass, fat roo bars and whip aerials. The man who seemed in charge had dyed hair combed forward like a Roman emperor, a heavy moustache and a black mubahith blouse on without insignia of any kind. Only a slight bald patch and the fact his choice of top accentuated his paunch took the edge off an effect that was, Hani had to admit, still quietly threatening.

"You take a look," she said, handing Murad an old pair of opera glasses. The boy did what she suggested, staring down at the alley entrance.

"Soldiers," he said.

Hani nodded.

"In disguise," she said. "Who's the man?"

Murad took a second look at the mubahith with the weird hair. "No one I recognize," he said, like he wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

"Are they from the Emir's guard?"

"Of course not." Murad shook his head. "All Eugenie's troops are women." He spoke as if Eugenie were still alive. "Those are not women . . ."

Only fear let Hani restrain herself. Some people shouted when they got afraid, others closed down, went silent. That was her. "Look," Hani said, "you think they support Kashif Pasha?"

"You heard the radio," said Murad. "All the soldiers support my brother Kashif."

"Now there's a surprise." Hani sounded like Zara at her most cross. The way the older girl had been those last few days at the madersa before Raf vanished, sharp and snotty but nothing like as cruel as Raf had been with his dark silences and exile inside his own head.

"Kashif," Murad said. "He won't hurt you."

"Yes, he will. And he'll hurt you. And it won't be the first time, will it?"

"He's still my brother." Murad's voice was quiet.

"And the Emir is his father," said Hani flatly. "But he still ordered that attack." She didn't know this, of course, but she knew her uncle and it was obvious he thought so.

"I don't believe it."

"You don't want to," Hani told him. They were sitting together on the flat roof of Dar Welham, peering over the parapet. Behind them, sheets dried on a line and drifting sand wrote patterns across cracked tiles and gathered into tiny dunes.

Picking herself up, Hani stepped back from the edge. And four floors below, now unseen by Hani or Murad, the man without insignia ordered one of the jellaba-clad men to knock on the door. After that, the soldier tried the door without being told and found it locked. So he hammered again, harder.

Faces appeared from the roofs of houses opposite and disappeared just as rapidly when their owners realized what was happening.

"Open in the name of the NR."

When this unnaturally loud cry went unanswered, the man tried the handle himself. Finding it still securely locked, Poul Fischer nodded to a young Berber. "Plastique," he ordered.

The flexible breaching charge the corporal pulled from under his disguise wasn't strictly plastique. At least not in any sense he understood. It was a short length of three-hundred-grain-an-inch cutting charge with a soft rubber body that could be bent into any shape needed and a sticky foam that glued it to the door and helped reduce the danger of back fragmentation. Correcting a mubahith officer, however, was not in the corporal's career plan.

Fixing one length around the lock, the corporal positioned two more around the hinges, then did top and bottom where bolts might be, just to play safe. The FBC series also came in six-hundred-grain and twelve-hundred-grain densities but for hinges of this age three-hundred-grain was probably already overkill.

"It might be best, sir, if everyone stood back." Quickly, so he didn't have to see Poul Fischer's answering expression, the corporal fixed an electronic match to each charge and began to enter his identity code into a firing box.

"Ready when you are, sir."

"You came," said Major Jalal, as if he'd been waiting hours for Raf to appear. Hawk eyes glittered above a sharp nose and heavy moustache. And the smile that accompanied his comment hovered on the edge of contempt.

"How could I refuse my brother?" Raf said lightly. A single glance was enough to swallow the scene: Major Jalal in full uniform, a lieutenant and, standing behind him, the inevitable black Jeep.

Two soldiers stood by the Jeep trying to look casual.

"Well, now you're here," said Major Jalal, "where would Your Excellency like to sit, front or the back . . . ?"

"Zara?" Raf asked, not moving.

"Your mistress is safe," Major Jalal assured him. "And you can see her soon. But, before that, I've got orders to take you to Kashif Pasha. He would like a word."

Raf smiled. "You know how it is," he said. "Family comes first."

"I understand that's one of the things His Highness wants to talk about." Major Jalal's voice was dry. "The fact you seem to believe he's your brother."

Kashif hadn't always been manipulative. So people said. Mostly those who'd never met him. As a small boy he'd been loved and loving, open and happy to consider the feelings of others. That was how Kashif Pasha's official biography reported it anyway.

One day, maybe thirty years ago when he was first made a general, so sometime around seventeen, Kashif had demanded sight of his early school reports. Harrying some minor archivist into finding the file and doing whatever was necessary to get it released.

This was during one of Emir Moncef's periodic bouts of madness. With the man camped out under a summer sky somewhere south of Wadi al B'ir, speaking to no one and sleeping between two of Eugenie's troop for warmth. Wearing nothing, apparently. Although the girls were allowed to retain their pants. It was all extremely adolescent.

Of course, only Lady Maryam dared call it madness. Everybody else spoke of the Emir's retreats and his need to remain in touch with the land. But it was madness all the same. A howling depression that had Moncef claiming (literally) to be someone else. At these times only Eugenie could help. Wherever she was and whatever she might be doing, Eugenie stopped doing it and came, elegant and stern-faced. He was quieter after her visits. Sometimes for months and once for the period of a whole year.

The school Kashif attended was at the rear of the Bardo Palace next to a mosque. School and mosque were not connected. It was, however, reasonable to assume they were and many people did, both in Tunis and abroad. There were eighteen and a half pupils in Kashif's class, this being the national average. And his year was taught the national syllabus, which included French, gymnastics, mathematics and poetry. The half pupil was achieved by allowing one boy to attend every other lesson.

If one left out the fact the other seventeen and a half pupils in Kashif's class were either his cousins or chosen from the sons of government ministers, then Bardo High was a typical local school of the kind found all over Ifriqiya. What most news reports forgot to mention was that Kashif's school had only one class, his own. The school opened when he reached five and shut when he reached fifteen; there never was a year below Kashif or a year above. The pupil to staff ratio was two to one.

His reports had been as exemplary as his marks. Each master describing a warm and outgoing child. A boy who'd unquestionably have had a great future ahead of him irrespective of birth.

Having reread these, Kashif Pasha demanded the real reports–on the basis that these must exist. A request which sent the already nervous archivist into near-terminal decline. Faced with arranging the forbidden, the archivist tried to explain to Kashif about secret bags, inadvertently offering the seventeen-year-old boy a whole new source of information and income.

Secret bags were kept in a vault below the Bardo, that much the archivist knew. Once sealed they could only be opened in the presence of a witness, provided . . . There'd followed a long list of stipulations to which the young Kashif hadn't bothered to listen.

Practically dragging the archivist to where the man believed the secret bags were stored, Kashif demanded they both be given entry. With the Emir gone and that wing otherwise empty, the chamberlain had done the obvious; opened the front door and saluted smartly. It had taken Kashif ten minutes to identify the vault and another five to bully someone into unlocking the door. A problem never to arise again after Kashif relieved the porter of his key.

Goatskin, Kashif decided, maybe sheep, nothing too fancy. Cured in a way that was almost intentionally perfunctory and stitched crudely with gut. Impressive signatures covered each bag, mostly from his father and occasionally Eugenie. One from the Soviet ambassador and even one from the Marquis de St. Cloud. Any person wanting to open a bag to examine its contents had to sign the outside before the seal was cut. Some of the newer seals were almost silver, others oxidized down to a dull black.

Kashif was inordinately proud to discover that he had a whole rack to himself. Seven leather bags in total. Starting with the first, Kashif cut its seal and began to read an account of his life that he recognized.

He was surly, bad at games and prone to violence. His unbroken run of goals, his easy knockdowns in boxing and rapid fencing victories owed more to who he was than to any innate physical talent.

His marks suffered an automatic 25 percent inflation. The French mistress he liked most had been paid off after complaining that he'd molested her in a corridor.

The summer Kashif turned seventeen was the year he got his reputation for working hard. He'd appear every morning at the relevant wing of the Bardo, notebook in hand and a nervous young archivist two steps behind. And each evening he'd make his way back to his mother's dar with another courtier's life pinned to the board of his memory.

He made friends fast that summer and was given three cars, including his first Porsche and a speedboat he used to take Russian girls water-skiing, until he hit a sunken rock and an attaché's daughter ended up a casualty. The high point was when he acquired his own villa on Iles de Kirkeah, from an elderly general whose devotion to his childless, long-suffering wife was apparently exceeded only by his devotion to a long string of pretty Moroccan houseboys.

Every bag he chose Kashif dutifully signed, leaving it to the archivist to repack the contents and affix a new seal. The one for his mother was especially interesting. Particularly in relation to a visit made to Gerda Schulte three weeks before she married his father. A surgeon briefly famous for patenting the only medically undetectable, biologically foolproof method of restoring virginity. A technique surprisingly popular among the middle classes of North Africa and the source of her heir's considerable wealth.

It was a snippet of information Kashif parlayed with his mother into a new apartment in the Bardo, one with its own entrance. His other knowledge Kashif kept close as an enemy, deadly as a friend; using it only as necessary once that first flush of power was gone. Murad wasn't even born when Kashif discovered the bags and, by the time he was, the bags had gone. Exactly when they vanished Kashif never discovered. He'd gone to Monte Carlo one Monday and come back two years later to find the room empty and repainted, awaiting delivery of an apparently valuable collection of late-nineteenth-century tax returns.

One thing Kashif knew for certain though. No bag had made reference to his father having married again. At least not until that American girl to whom Eugenie introduced him, Murad's mother. The one who went off a cliff. And the bag that dealt with Moncef's bastards made no reference to an Ashraf al-Mansur or Ashraf anything else, come to that . . . Whatever the late Eugenie de la Croix or his father might claim.

Opening the door was easy. Hani just pushed a button that read emergency release and a swirl of blissfully cool air exploded onto Ibn Chabbat Square. To close the door behind her she hit a button marked shut. This button was on the inside, obviously enough. And then they were in the coach, examining its hydraulic seats and checking the spiral stairs that led to a glass observation bubble.

"Too obvious," said Hani.

At the very rear of the coach was a wall of showers and toilets (two of each, divided into male and female). Between these and the seating area farther forward was a short corridor featuring a couple of sliding doors on each side. So the bus went seats/narrow corridor/wall of loos where a back window should be. The sliding doors were marked stateroom 1, 2, 3 and 4 . . .

"I don't get it," Murad complained, not for the first time.

"Good," Hani told him. "Stick with that."

She pushed him through one of the sliding doors, having first flipped up its lock with a penknife, an act of breaking and entering made much easier than she expected by the coachmakers' fear of litigation, which guaranteed that every door was simplicity itself to open from the outside should the need arise. Which, in Hani's opinion, it had.

A man's room, Russian to judge from the phrase book and an open magazine left on the side. "Try the next one," said Hani and bundled Murad back through the sliding door, relocking it behind her.

A woman, travelling alone. The upper bunk unmade, blankets still folded, the lower one exhibiting neatly turned-back covers and a perfectly straight pillow. Also Soviet. Too neat by half. "We'll try the other side," Hani said.

Both bunks in the next cabin had been used. The cover on the bottom one hung neatly, the cover to the top bunk was still crumpled. A Bible in English, translated by someone called St. James. Hani didn't want to be prejudiced, but . . .

Actually that could be good.

On a bedside locker, open and facedown, lay a Discovery Channel guide to Ifriqiya, its spine cracked in half a dozen places. A handful of foreign change filled a saucer.

"E pluribus unum . . ." From one, many. Or was it, from many, one? Hani's Latin was too rusty for her to be certain which it was if either. So she put down the coin and picked up a flowery dressing gown draped over a peg on the door.

"Nylon," she told Murad.

The garment was surprisingly short, albeit still long enough to drag on the carpet when Hani tried it on without sandals. It was the gown's width that impressed her. She and Murad could have hidden inside the thing three times over.

"This'll do," Hani said with the certainty of someone who distrusted thin people even if she was one. Years of living with Aunt Nafisa had seen to that. "We hide here."

"Hide?"

"Okay, then," said Hani, settling herself on the floor. "We wait."

He stank and there was little doubt that he'd just pissed himself again. Liquid his body could ill afford to lose. Raf had also started to think of himself as he and that was never a good sign.

Maybe it was this that allowed the fox to return. Alternatively, Raf had just got bored with trying to hold himself together.

"Now dislocate your other shoulder," ordered the fox.

Raf shook his head. His teeth gritted not from bravery or pain but because he was trying to stop his upper left canine from falling out and keeping his mouth closed was all he could come up with, given both his hands were shackled behind his back and fixed to a wall.

Impossible.

"Not impossible," said the fox, "just painful. Work on the difference." And then Raf stopped letting the different bits of himself talk to each other and started to listen to the sound of a sea that had vanished millions of years before, after the Chott el Jerid finally separated from the Mediterranean to become first an inland sea, then a lake and ultimately the flood-prone salt flats it finally became.

Except that the waves like the voices, came from within him and there was nothing supernatural about them.

What Raf could hear was the sound of his own blood echoing off the stone walls of an azib, a domed shelter built for goats and now his prison. At first the noise had been slight as meltwater over pebbles, growing louder, until now it splashed like a fosse falling into a cool meltwater pool far below. He was listening to what was left of his own life.

"Do it," Raf told himself. "Dislocate."

His first idea after Major Jalal had bolted the heavy azib door was to somersault out of his predicament by rolling forward to hang upside down from his shackled wrists, then twist sideways to land on his feet, facing the wall, with the shackles now in front of him. All he needed to do then was free his wrists and dig himself out.

Two failed attempts had convinced Raf this was impossible. So now he was going with the fox's suggestion, that Raf begin by convincing himself he was really merely testing the strength of the chains shackling him to the wall.

As ever, when facing something unpleasant, the trick was to remove oneself from the pain. A trick he'd previously spent many months unlearning. Although back then he'd been somebody else. Or rather, Bayer-Rochelle had made him somebody else and done a good job of it too; much better than any of his schools had managed.

Removing oneself from pain wasn't a trick everybody could master. For a start, it required a certain working knowledge of the subject, preferably one built up over many years. Unless, of course, it was possible to go for a single cataclysmic thunderburst that shocked the flesh into learning something it never forgot.

Raf didn't know, that wasn't the route he'd taken.

The secret was to be somewhere else. Answering questions other than those asked. While hunting for the fracture behind reality.

Breathe through nose or mouth . . .

Saturday or Sunday . . .

Live or die . . .

"Just one collection of questions after the next, isn't it?" said the fox. "Life I mean. Or what passes for it . . ."

How long he'd been in the azib Raf wasn't sure. Being knocked unconscious did that to you. At least it always did to him. And his back history was punctuated, at significant points, by such bouts of darkness, although often differently induced.

Actually, it was probably more accurate to say his life, back history, call it what one would, was a string of cold darkness punctuated by sharp, occasionally contradictory memories of being awake. What Raf had taken to calling the sickroom conundrum and what the fox insisted on calling Schrödinger's paint pot.

If he went to sleep in a ward that was green and woke in the same room but it was grey, what had changed? Reality, the room or Raf? There was something very primitive about that question. Almost classic. A puzzle replete with a dozen resonances Raf undoubtedly failed to appreciate.

There was, of course, an even more primitive conundrum slumped against the wall opposite, quietly decomposing in note after note of sweet decay. At what point did Hassan cease to be human? And what exactly did death remove from that original mix of 65 percent oxygen, 18 percent carbon, 9.5 percent hydrogen and all those other elements neither Raf nor the fox could be bothered to remember?

Dying seemed simple, decomposing less so, if Hassan was representative. A veritable matrix of influences constraining or facilitating the metamorphosis: beginning with attack by insects, originally flies, then beetles, finally millipedes; amount of clothing intact, in this case none; level of physical trauma, considerable; ambient heat, sweltering . . .

The fox and Raf also agreed on the probability that soil type made some impact.

Felix would have known. Having wiped his finger on the floor of the azib he'd have announced a high saline content was hindering decomposition or saltpetre was causing mummification. Of course, the fat man was quite capable of wiping his finger straight on the body.

When Raf first woke, Hassan had been coming out of rigor, locked muscles slowly relaxing, starting with his eyelids, lower jaw and the soft jowls of his neck. And Raf didn't need voices in his head to tell him this was decomposition of muscle fibre.

By evening the boy's face had turned a weird greenish red, with a veritable tie-dye of corruption brightening his flabby chest and blotching his naked thighs. It was around this time that Hassan began to smell. At least that was what Raf thought then. Now, reassessing, he understood that corruption had barely started.

After the face began to melt, millipedes arrived to eat mites busy feeding on flesh, the blowflies having already gone. And gas-filled blisters began to appear under the skin as liquid leached from anus, nostrils, mouth and ears. In all probability, Raf realized, he was taking more interest than was wise in the intricacies of what was happening. But it was hard to avoid when shackled in a stone azib, five paces from one's very own memento mori.

"Enough with the thinking," said the fox, its voice completely present for the first time in weeks. "You can dislocate your way out of this or stay here and die. Make a choice."

It looked out through Raf's eyes. The bit of him that had never been entirely human.

"You want this to end," it said, "then end it. But ask yourself this . . . How many more times can you afford to die?"

Sometime after the lights went down in the main part of the coach, and those who had couchettes let back their seats, and the loos and showers occupied by tourists preparing for sleep finally emptied, Micki took Hani to the loo, using the width of her hips to shield the child from anyone who might glance round.

Micki was pretty sure everyone was safely dozing. She'd already made three visits, earning herself pitying glances from a middle-aged, pudding-faced Soviet woman in the back row who'd finally fallen asleep with a crumpled copy of the previous day's Pravda on her lap.

"I'll keep guard," Micki told the child, ushering Hani through a door. "Don't worry," she added, when Hani looked anxious, "I'll be here when you come out."

"Micki," Hani's voice was little more than a whisper.

"What now?"

"Um . . ."

The child had the face of an angel. A foreign angel obviously but an angel all the same. Men were going to fall into those dark eyes and never find their way back. Not for years though, Micki told herself hastily. When the girl was properly grown-up.

"What is it?" asked Micki and when Hani still didn't answer, she dropped to her knees the way she used to do when something was worrying Carl Junior. Carl Senior never got the importance of this, although she'd tried to explain it more than once. He always towered over the boy, then wondered why he got frightened.

"You can tell me, honey . . ."

Something fleeting and sad passed over the face of the child as she bent close and whispered in Micki's ear.

"You know," Micki hissed to her husband, when Hani and Murad were safely dozing on the floor, wrapped in separate blankets that they both managed to kick off in their sleep. "She hadn't even heard about Kotex. It was a miracle the child even knew what was happening to her . . . Can you imagine it?"

Carl had less than no interest in imagining any such thing but had long since learnt not to say as much, so he muttered something he hoped sounded suitably shocked and had another go at drifting off to sleep.

"That must be how their parents decide they're ready to marry," Micki announced. "The first time they . . . You know."

That was one you know and a couple more theys than Carl could follow but he didn't mention this either. "Could be," he said and drifted off to sleep, leaving his wife to the comfort of outrage.

The call from the minaret came harsh as a crow. Only there was no minaret and when Raf kicked at a shadow it squawked into life and sliced the night in a spread of serrated black blades.

"Very pretty," said Felix, nodding at Raf's shackles. So Raf swung them at him and missed, earning himself a smile. A real fat man grin.

"Ignore him," the fox said. "He's just like all the others."

Tiri was talking about the ghosts who walked out of the salt wilderness towards Raf, their carcasses destroyed, their faces twisted in the final moments of death or smoothed free of all memory.

"I know," said Raf and forced one foot in front of the other, extracting another step from his shaking body. They were dead and so was he. At least that was what it felt like. This razor state between existences, flash-filled with waterfalls of exaltation that appeared one minute to run down his spine, then vanished the next, leaving him spent as an hourglass.

Behind Raf stretched footprints speckled with blood from where he'd slashed his feet on rose petals. Rose de sable, crystallized gypsum. He'd come across a field of the things, stone flowers sharp as knife blades, and had walked through, being too tired to walk around.

Raf thought they grew there naturally. But the fox insisted they'd been dumped as second-grade goods, unsuitable even for tourists like him. It claimed to have been there when the dumping was done.

"I'm not a tourist," said Raf, but the fox had to disagree, informing Raf that he was a tourist in his own life. A hit-and-run recidivist who fixed himself on occasional moments of clarity. Their argument lasted so long that Raf forgot to feel pain and when he next looked around, he'd walked two, maybe three miles without ever seeing anyone he'd killed.

Felix came round twice and looked happier the next time he appeared, face shredded and egg yolk running from one eye but definitely more smiley. "You're fragmenting," he told Raf.

"You can talk." The retort just came and Raf was still wondering how to apologize for his tactlessness when the fat man gave a shrug like he agreed and blew apart in the night wind. Without shades, minus clothes, his hands chained. And now rudeness. The fox was right. Raf was excelling himself.

Sharp edges cut his ankles every time Raf's feet broke through salt to hit one of the many puddles of brine beneath. Smears of what looked like rust threaded the chott's drying surface, marbling its saline whiteness. Blood on snow, his mother's favourite shot. Only the saline sting to tell Raf that what he walked on wasn't ice or snow.

Somewhere up ahead should be a road. A strip of tarmac floating on treated polystyrene blocks, linked together and slung across the chott, Raf seemed to remember that was how it went. Polystyrene blocks so the weight of the road didn't sink it into the chott's soft surface.

Raf couldn't have used the road even if it had been heading north towards Camp Moncef rather than west towards Tozeur. But Raf needed to cross it and until he did, he was, by definition, more than half a day away from killing Kashif Pasha.

"You know what?" said a voice.

Raf didn't.

"You look shit." The drawl was skin-crawlingly familiar, the lips from which it issued tinted with a shade of Shu Uemura too deep to class as ironic. A turned-up collar framed a face sharp enough to break hearts. "Life not treating you too well?"

"I'm fine," snapped Raf.

"Of course you are," said Wild Boy. "Anyone can see that." He touched pale fingers to his brow in a mocking salute, swept dark hair back from his eyes and vanished.

"I don't remember killing Wild Boy," Raf muttered.

"You don't remember much at all, do you?" said the fox. "And what you do remember changes each day. I've never met anyone like it for avoiding the obvious." The animal paused, took a look through Raf's eyes at the night wilderness of the chott and sighed. "What do you think happened to him after you went missing?"

"He came looking for me?"

"And did he find you?" asked the fox.

Raf shook his head.

"Did anyone?"

There wasn't an answer to that. At least not one that made real sense. Although maybe that wasn't surprising given his mind was full of ghosts and memories and things that might have happened but probably didn't or were about to happen, but only . . .

"Only what?" the fox demanded.

"Count them," said the fox. So Raf did. A handful of mubahith, teenage girls in khaki jumpsuits, jellaba-clad orderlies and two visiting Berber elders wrapped respectively in lengths of blue and black. Awaiting a day that threatened to be as impossibly hot as the day before.

Eleven in all.

And then there was Raf watching from the chott, flayed by UV that already filtered through scummy cloud to tighten his skin.

Sweat shivering down his spine in anticipation.

He stank of shit and piss and blood, the smell assailing him every time he halted long enough for his own body heat to reach his nostrils. Evidence of his own humanity.

St. John the Baptist. Minus the loincloth.

Now that a road existed between Kibili and El Hamma du Jerid, carefully skirting the edge of the wilderness before slanting off from the chott's edge to cross at the narrowest point, few people except 'packers and Soviet tourists in fat-tyred UAZ four-by-fours tried to cross the salt lake any other way.

The camel trains were gone, along with the slave markets and spice routes. And while it was true that an annual Sand Yacht Championship was held on the chott, this was only ever attended by Soviets and, in any case, was not due for another three months.

So the khaki-clad teenager sweating out her early shift on the southern perimeter of Camp Moncef watched the arrival of a naked apparition with disbelief. At first she assumed the tiny speck was an animal either lost or abandoned. Dogs escaped from cars, half-dead donkeys were cast loose when the amount they could carry stopped being worth what they cost in feed.

Not yet worried enough to find herself a pair of binoculars, Corporal Habib kept an eye on the approaching animal. But sometime between tucking a cigarette inside her hand because one of Kashif Pasha's men had suddenly roared up in his open Jeep and saluting the departing sergeant without getting caught, the speck vanished.

"Shit."

Corporal Habib blinked into the chott's acid glare, ground the butt of her cigarette underfoot and reached into her pocket for a pair of shades; circumstances demanded it even if wearing them on duty was almost as bad as smoking, being the preserve of officers.

Her shades cut down haze and cancelled out most refraction but the figure was still gone, leaving only early-morning shimmer and diminishing slivers of what had to be surface water left over from the winter rains.

Fifteen minutes later, Corporal Habib was still squinting into the distance when the emptiness beside her suddenly took her feet from under her and followed the corporal down, slamming itself into her rib cage. Bone splintered, on the wrong side; Corporal Habib's heart kept pounding and by the time she realized her aorta wasn't pierced and both lungs still drew breath the emptiness sat back on its heels, waiting, with the corporal's own machine gun to her throat.

Only the camouflage of her jumpsuit had kept Corporal Habib alive. Had her uniform been bottle green, the colour of Kashif's own guard, or the black of the mubahith, she would have been dead. Something that might still happen to judge from the blue eyes that stared down at her, pale as cracked ice.

"Single shot," said a crow's voice, raw and bitter. "All you'll get at this distance is a gas star and no chance to cry for help. You ever seen a gas star?"

The corporal nodded. A gas star happened when muzzle flash entered flesh, from guns almost touching you got burn rings, and then powder tattoos: part of the corporal was certain gas stars only occurred on upper limbs or torso but she kept that to herself. Something about the apparition staring down at her suggested he might have a more intimate knowledge of the phenomenon.

"You want my clothes?" The corporal's strangled question did exactly what she meant it to, told the apparition she wasn't about to put up a fight.

"Water," Raf demanded. Watching as the corporal silently unclipped her flask and held it out. She did a very impressive job of not looking at his nakedness or chains.

He drank.

"And those," said Raf, "I want these, too." Lifting the shades off her nose, he nodded to the two spare magazines on her belt. "And those." The weapon he held in shaking fingers was an old-model MP5i 9mm Heckler & Koch, the one issued with a thirty-round mag.

"Now get up."

Corporal Habib did what she was told.

Conditioning, Raf told himself, worked every time. He should know.

"Is Kashif Pasha here?"

The corporal nodded, only to freeze when she saw Raf's scowl. Very slowly, probably unconsciously, she began to shake her head, as if that might change the answer.

"And the Emir?"

A frightened nod. And with it a look that suggested she wanted to say more but wasn't sure whether to risk it.

"What?" Raf demanded.

"He's dying. So if you've come to kill him, there's no point."

"I haven't," said Raf. "I wouldn't . . . One last question. What's that over there?"

Corporal Habib never saw the blow that dropped her into a heap. Or realized, until long afterwards, that when Raf went through her ammo pouch he took only her bar of chocolate. Everything else he left . . .

"So we now know that the kids are unharmed. The reports of their death undoubtedly NR black propaganda. This is Clair duBois for Television5 . . ."

Flanked by Hani and Murad, TV5's most famous reporter was talking direct to camera when Raf spun into the huge tent, leaving two dying soldiers in the dust behind him, windpipes crushed.

One was the corporal who killed Hassan, the other had just gone for a gun.

"Yeah," said Raf, eyes locked on Major Jalal, "it's us." Behind him stood an impossibly beautiful Japanese boy and a fat man with half his head missing. Although when Clair blinked, looked again, those two were gone.

"I've brought you a present."

Over by the door, Major Jalal continued scrambling for his own weapon. A pearl-handled Colt that had belonged to his father. It was elegant and valuable, came with the original buckle-down holster and was an incredibly stupid choice.

Clair duBois's backup camera was still trying to pull focus when the major finally freed his Colt and the feed went live on a naked man in shades, framed by the tent's doorway, an old-fashioned H&K in one hand and a Browning automatic in the other. Backlit by daylight/filmed without lights from shade. One of the world's worst options.

"Drop your toy." The words were in French, the whisper dry as dust. A change of angle caught the apparition's gun come up. "One chance," it said. "More than you ever gave Hassan."

Despite herself, or maybe because Clair duBois was who she was, she glanced at her notebook and made two minor adjustments for sound. One for volume, the other an echo on the apparition's voice, too slight to be noticed by anyone not in the business.

"Do as he says . . ." The command was soft, sickly sibilant, the words not much louder than those Raf had used; but it carried total authority, a complete awareness of the futility of the situation. "That's an order."

And there it might have finished, with Raf turning to the Emir, and Major Jalal returning his Colt to its holster if only Kashif Pasha hadn't stepped forward. "This is the assassin," he told his father, voice furious. To his aide-de-camp, he said nothing, just nodded.

Major Jalal raised his gun, a young girl who was meant to be dead howled out a warning and Raf's head flicked sideways.

The major died on camera. Wounds pixilated in some countries, not shown at all in England, Sweden and Korea and featured widely everywhere else. Looped, in one case, into ultraslow motion that let the major's brains crawl like sticky rice after Raf's casually fired slug, flowering into a fat cherry blossom that tumbled apart in a mass of bone, jelly and blood. So close to chaos in appearance and so utterly removed in reality.

Clair duBois screamed.

As genuine a response as she'd ever made and one, her unkinder critics later claimed, that went a long way towards explaining the clean sweep she made of most of the coming year's press awards.

As Clair watched, the naked apparition's searching eyes finally found the two children who stood behind her.

"You," it said to the boy, "are not me." Then it turned to the girl who gripped Murad's hand, her knuckles white with tension.

"I thought you were dead."

Picking up a mic, Clair duBois thrust it towards Raf.

"Who are you?" The mic was totally unnecessary, given the TV5 camera was already wired for sound but it made for a great image. Elegant reporter in lightweight silk suit (black obviously, with Clair duBois it was always black), interviewing a naked, stinking man in shades, carrying a still-smoking gun. "Tell me," she insisted. "The world wants to know."

"Ashraf al-Mansur," said Raf. "Guardian to Lady Hana and half brother to Murad." He stared at Kashif. "Also to him."

"I refuse to believe it," said the pasha, "without proof."

Raf shrugged. "What you believe is unimportant," he said, adjusting the H&K so its first burst would take out several lengths of Kashif's intestines. "I'm arresting you for murder."

"I don't think so." Kashif's voice was silky. "Given they're obviously still here." He nodded dismissively towards Hani and Murad. "Their death was a lie. I wouldn't be surprised if you spread the rumour yourself."

Nothing happened. It's a lie.

Away, to one side of the huge tent, Zara shivered and stepped back until she was pressed against an outer wall, which was still too close.

Really, nothing happened.

Shortly after Zara mentioned her uncle to her nanny, the man disappeared. There'd been more shouting, twenty-four hours of plate throwing by her mother. Zara had gone into Al Qahirah hospital for her operation a few days later, delivered personally by Madame Rahina while her father was on business in Sicily. The Monday following, when Zara got home was the only time she ever saw her mother with a black eye.

"I'm not talking about Murad or Hani," said Raf. "If you'd hurt either in any way, you'd already be dead . . ." So intent was Raf on Kashif Pasha that he missed Hani's wide-eyed shock; missed too a softening in Zara's expression.

"You had a sixteen-year-old boy tortured," Raf said flatly. "And then gave the order for his death."

"He was an NR terrorist," Kashif Pasha announced to the camera. Neither of them wanted TV5 there. Neither could afford to be the one to tell Clair duBois to get out. "Who tried to assassinate my father."

"Crap," said Raf. "By the time your aide-de-camp had finished Hassan would have signed anything." He scowled at the body on the tent floor for as long as it took for the camera to follow his gaze. "How do I know? Because I was the waiter. Acting for Eugenie de la Croix."

Clair duBois turned so fast that the tiny Aeriospecialle camsat locked on her face went out of focus, something the manufacturers claimed was impossible.

Bells rang from the twin towers of St. Vincent de Paul, that Gothic monstrosity with all its pews removed and a Persian carpet covering the altar. Flags hung from office windows or whipped in the slipstream of car aerials. Drifting on the wind came the stink of cordite, bastard cousin to the endless firecrackers let off all morning, too close to gunfire for the peace of everyone.

Martial law had been lifted, the act signed by Ashraf Pasha, newly created heir to the Emir. He'd signed the edict on behalf of his father, a man now too weak to hold a pen, even to write his own signature.

The return to normal law came the day after Raf had questioned his half brother in the presence of their father. This took place in the al Andalus–inspired HQ of Dar el Bey, overlooking Place du Gouvernement.

Raf sat at a desk with Kashif on the other side; the Emir had a motorized wheelchair and only Major Gide stood.

It was a very polite questioning. There wasn't a blowtorch in sight and no one in the room, from the Emir to the major, even suggested tying anyone else to a table.

"The snake," Raf said to Kashif. "That was your first mistake. A simple enquiry could have revealed that all venomous snakes at Tunis Zoo have their poison sacs removed. Only Major Jalal couldn't risk asking that question, could he? So you made an assumption, the Emir got bitten and Ifriqiya got its very own miracle . . ."

"I know nothing about a snake."

"Of course you don't. How about the death of two guards, bribed or blackmailed into releasing the snake in the Emir's tent . . . ?"

"I know nothing about any guards."

"They got shot," said Raf, "at the banquet you threw for your father. Remember? The one where Eugenie died."

Kashif was blaming it all on his dead aide-de-camp. In fact, he was horrified to discover some of the things Major Jalal had done in his name.

"I take it," said the Emir, "that you have proof for this accusation against your brother?" His words were thin and took longer to say than they should, but there was amusement in them and something close to admiration lit his lined and leathery face.

"If Kashif is my brother . . ."

Moncef looked at him then. "Meaning?"

"I just wondered."

"You are Ashraf al-Mansur," said Moncef, almost firmly. "And I am Emir of Tunis. Your mother was the love of my life." Sad eyes swept the small office, barely noticing Kashif as they passed over Raf, a selection of police files in front of him. One of which contained the results on DNA testing that Raf had yet to mention to anyone.

When the Emir's gaze finally alighted, it was on the young girl half-perched on an office chair and the boy who gripped her hand, rather tightly. "You have your responsibilities and I have mine."

"Obviously," said Raf. And when the Emir smiled, Raf was waiting with the only question that really mattered. "What do you want done with Kashif Pasha?"

"And if I say kill him . . ."

"Then he dies," said Raf and took a gun from its holster under his arm. Placing it on the desk at which he sat.

"If I say let him go . . . Which is what I'm minded to say?"

Raf paused, all too aware that Hani was watching him, just as Murad watched the Emir, both holding their breath.

"If you say let him go," said Raf, "then that's what happens. But it places this family above the law. And gives victory to everyone who thinks Ifriqiya is corrupt beyond redemption." He added the second consequence as an afterthought. Not quite realizing how much weight it would carry with the Emir.

"So what would you suggest?"

"Let him stand trial . . ."

The Emir nodded and struggled with the control pad of his wheelchair. Waving Murad away, Emir Moncef rolled slowly towards the door and stopped, one hand reaching for the doorknob, his other edging the chair into reverse. "You're right about everything," he told Raf in a voice little more than a whisper, "except for Alex and Nicolai. The decision to have them shot was mine. My only regret is not warning Eugenie, but then"–Moncef shrugged–"she'd only have tried to stop me."

Eduardo sat on the edge of a metal table swinging his feet. Every time his shoe scuffed the floor it produced that unmistakable mouselike squeak of leather against ceramic.

A noise that was driving everybody else in the room insane. And the really great part was that none of them could do a thing about it. He was the most senior officer present at the briefing, a thought so bizarre that Eduardo shut his eyes just to savour it.

"I'm sorry, Boss." Alexandre looked worried. Under the misapprehension his question had been stupid enough to drive the Chief to anger.

"No," said Eduardo, "it's a good point. Just not one I can answer."

This truth elicited a frown from a thickset sergeant at the back. A man with a bald patch, common enough, and a Kashif-like moustache, which now made him something of a rarity in the Tunis PD. It was truly staggering the number of officers who'd decided in the last twenty-four hours to shave off their moustaches, reshape them or else begin to grow a beard.

"Got a problem?" Eduardo asked the man.

"Yeah," a bull neck raised an even heavier chin. "With all due respect, sir, I don't see how a case involving a dead pastry chef can be so secret that the master file has to be shredded in front of two witnesses."

It was obvious from his tone that respect was the last thing the sergeant felt for the small morisco in the leather coat sitting on the old Chief's table.

"I can understand that," said Eduardo, "to you it looks like a simple open-and-shut murder, hardly worth bothering about. To me it had all the marks of a cause célèbre from which Ifriqiya needs to be protected. Maybe that's why I'm kicking my heels up here and you're kicking yours at the back."

Several officers smiled and Eduardo resisted the temptation to take a brief bow. He was in the operations room; a large space of cheap desks and dirty grey chairs, wall charts, holiday rotas and a small kitchen, which might have been slightly too grand a name to describe a corner partitioned off with hessian boards and containing a sink, two ancient kettles and a cheap microwave.

Eduardo had called his officers together to make an announcement and the announcement was simple, the Maison Hafsid case was closed and, for internal security reasons, the files would be shredded and all evidence sealed in sterile bags and remain so for the next hundred years. The reason was actually very simple but Eduardo had explained this only to Rose.

She'd been lying there on a big double bed in their room at the Dar Ben Abdallah. And as she'd rolled over, a frown on her face, Eduardo had smiled as a breast popped out of her dressing gown. He'd almost forgotten what he intended to say, the way he did some mornings when he looked over the foot of the bed and saw Rose, with her back to him in the early dawn, wearing nothing but a G-string and black tights.

"So what happened to Cousin Ahmed?" She'd read the files and knew the names.

"There was no cousin."

"So who did the mubahith arrest?"

"No one," said Eduardo with a satisfied smile. "That's the whole point. No one vanished in police custody. I've had every file checked. Even the ones that don't exist."

"So who killed Isabeau's brother?"

"I think that's got to remain a secret," said Eduardo. It seemed odd to be making those kind of decisions but no one else was available and someone had to . . . Well, Eduardo assumed that was true. His Excellency couldn't have dragged him from El Isk just to unravel who did what, that would be far too simple.

There was unquestionably more to the equation than could at first be seen.

It had taken Eduardo a while to work out the unseen integer but he'd got it the moment he saw the knife supposedly used for the murder. Once, long before, Eduardo had worked in a kitchen, although there was nothing very special about this, everyone worked a kitchen at some time in their lives. At least, everyone Eduardo ever knew.

The first rule of kitchen culture was that no one, repeat no one, touched anyone else's knives. Spit in their face, mock them and, if you must, insult their football team, that was fine, but no one messed with another person's steel.

Knives were sacred. Touch my arse before you touch my knife. Mess with my arse and die. . . Eduardo knew the sayings. Three months grilling merguez in a workingmen's café in Karmous had been enough to guarantee that.

So what was anyone meant to think when presented with a blade that was blunt, bent at the tip and stained? Well, Eduardo couldn't actually say what anyone else might think. To him, however, it suggested no one really owned that knife. And if no one owned it . . .

The more Eduardo thought about it the more he was convinced he was right.

Notes said the mysteriously arrested Ahmed owned the knife when it was obvious that no one owned it or it wouldn't have been such a mess. Someone was lying. Actually, he told Rose, several people were lying.

She'd been dressing when he said this. After she'd undressed at his insistence and gone to take a shower while he lay in bed getting back his breath, Eduardo had returned to his thoughts.

They ate breakfast in a café. Rose choosing coffee and a croissant and Eduardo eating rough flatbread cooked on a clay griddle by a middle-aged woman who sat on a stool by the door. With the unleavened bread he ate slivers of some meat that obviously wasn't pork, with a helping of menakher dates, as befitted a man making the most of being in a different country.

Then he left Rose to her shopping and jumped a cab to the Police HQ without bothering to wait for his official car. A decision made easier by his discovery, right at the start, that naming the Police HQ as his destination was enough to ensure that no driver ever asked him to pay the fare. Their surprise on the few occasions he did offer payment was worth double the handful of change his journey actually cost.

So now he was on a table in the operations room, trying to explain without really doing so that there was no murderer; at least not one who could be arrested by the police. Eduardo knew exactly who killed Pascal Boulart and he was certain (as certain as he ever was about anything), that His Excellency knew too. Why else would he have brought in Eduardo but to tidy up such loose ends?

Isabeau checked her rail ticket and re-counted the notes. No writing appeared anywhere on the envelope and she was willing to bet there'd be no fingerprints either. In her memory, she had it that the small man with the black coat kept his gloves on throughout his entire visit.

She was bathed and dressed, standing on the platform of Gare de Tunis beside a cardboard suitcase that looked like leather until one got close. She wore new shoes and black Levi's, a shirt and a shawl as befitted the cooler weather. Her hair was covered in a waterfall of blue silk; not quite a hijab, not exactly a scarf; something elegantly in between. And though Gare de Tunis was less than a klick south of St. Vincent de Paul and the air was clear enough for sound to travel, Isabeau ignored the bells. Despite the small cross she wore, politics not religion had been her life. All seventeen years of it.

The MediTerre ticket in her pocket was an open one. A month's rail travel anywhere in North Africa and Southern Europe. With the ticket came a student ID, an Ifriqiyan passport and glowing references from Café Antonio. So far as Isabeau could see all of these looked real; except they couldn't be, for a start she'd never passed her baccalaureate and no university would take her.

Isabeau had no illusions about what was happening. She was being bought off, which was, she realized, preferable to being jailed or killed. The small man who'd limped into her life with a simple telephone call had more or less said as much.

All he wanted was a meeting. It seemed not to have occurred to him that Isabeau might refuse and it was only afterwards, once she'd meekly agreed, that Isabeau realized it had never occurred to her either. And no, he didn't need an address.

He seemed scarily knowledgeable on most aspects of her life.

Four o'clock would do. He expected her to meet him in the hallway and to let him in. She would recognize him by . . . His voice had paused at that point. She would recognize him by a copy of that afternoon's Il Giornale di Tunisi, which he would carry under his left arm, folded in three.

And so a small man limped up the tired steps to her apartment block, his black leather coat bigger than it should be, a fedora pushed down over his eyes. The paper he held had a black border round the whole of the front page and was folded to reveal a headline:

"Well," said Raf, breath jagged and a grin on his face.

"Well what?"

Outside Zara's bedroom window, crowds were already gathering beyond the gates of the Bardo and Raf could hear the growl of early traffic and clattering as impromptu market stalls were erected.

The police would be along later to take them down but trade would continue all day, stalls going up as soon as the old ones were broken down. Food sellers, hawkers of rice-paper rose petals and purveyors of cheap plastic flags, Raf had even seen his face on the side of a balloon.

The woman lying beside him had already made her opinion plain on all of that. As indeed she had on many other things. It had been the kind of discussion that, in later years, would raise smiles and get described, only half-ironically, as full and frank. At the moment they both still felt slightly vulnerable.

"Come on then," Zara demanded. "Well what?"

"Oh, I don't know . . ." Raf wrapped one arm round Zara's shoulders and pulled her on top of him. "How about, Well, what do you plan to do with your day?"

She laughed, kissed him back.

So Raf slid down slightly on the bed and took Zara's nipple in his mouth, sucking comfort from her breast. She watched him as he did so, seeing only the top of his head and feeling his uncertainty.

"Are you all right?"

When Raf didn't answer, Zara stayed where she was and closed her eyes. They had another hour before they needed to leave and if that wasn't long enough then the wretched ceremony could wait.

Last night had been difficult. Difficult and different. Zara so nervous her whole body shook. And Raf . . . ? She took him to her room, something she'd done with no other man and stripped to her thong in front of him, only losing her nerve at the last minute. Having sent him to the bathroom, she killed the light and hid under the covers.

Except that when he came back, all Raf seemed to want to do was lie in the darkness and let the moment wash over him. Something impossible for Zara.

"This is not fair," she'd said suddenly.

And thinking he knew what Zara meant, Raf nodded agreement and in that second's movement shut down his night vision until everything in her room became outlines and shadow.

"It is now."

"No, I mean this."

And he knew then that Zara meant their lying in the dark, so much unspoken between them.

"There's something I need to tell you . . ." Raf said tentatively.

"Let me guess," she said. "I'm not the first. In fact you've fucked your way through an entire phone book of my friends. You have three children, well, that you know about . . . You're only after my millions . . ."

"This is serious," said Raf.

"So was I," Zara answered. And pulled Raf to her and kissed him as her hand slid under his rib cage and then both her hands locked behind his back, so that Raf's full weight rested on her trapped arm.

She felt him go hard.

"You're naked," said Raf, the fingers of his right hand tracing the crease of her buttocks, just to make sure he hadn't got that wrong.

He hadn't known, Zara realized. She'd been safely tucked under a quilt by the time he returned to the room.

There'd been one night, months before, when she'd talked and he'd listened, although she couldn't remember it and he could; but then, if Raf was to be believed, he remembered everything, which was maybe not a good place to be.

"It's important," said Raf, holding her face between his hands. "And it concerns who I am. What I am . . ."

"You're you," said Zara. "That's enough."

"No," said Raf sadly, "it isn't. It's not anything like enough."

Zara wanted to know why, so Raf told her. Or rather he didn't. He told her a fairy story instead. "Once," said Raf, his fingers caressing the side of her face, "there was a son of Lilith . . ."

Raf took it as read that Zara knew Lilith's story. Adam's first wife, mother to vampyres and djinn. A woman expelled from Eden for fucking the snake.

"He was older than he looked because, although his days were as your days, his nights were often longer, one of them so long that fir trees grew and houses were built while he slept. Someone who loved him grew old and stopped loving him, seeing her own life and increasing age reflected in the puzzlement in his eyes every time he woke from the cold sleep . . ."

If Zara thought it was odd that Raf told her a folktale she kept this thought to herself. Remembering stories Hani had told her. Small girl's stories. Of the kind easily dismissed.

"He slept the cold sleep because that was the easiest way not to die. Until one day he awoke and Lilith had died and her friends had forgotten him or no longer cared if he escaped. So he did what sons of Lilith do, moved to a strange country to live undetected as a human for seven years. For if a vampyre or djinn can live undetected for seven years he will become as human."

"So Hani told me," said Zara.

"She did?"

"She's told everybody," Zara said. "It's in a book, the original story. About how a son of Lilith can become as human. But the children will be born sons of Lilith."

"Sons of Lilith, daughters of Lilith," said Raf. "In my case it's called germ line manipulation. Whatever I am my children will become."

"And what are you?"

Raf thought about it. "I'm not sure," he said finally. "I get voices. I see in the dark. There are three extra ribs on either side of my rib cage. My eyes hurt in the daylight. My memory is too distressingly perfect for my mind to manage . . ."

"All of this is your mother's responsibility?"

"Or Emir Moncef's," said Raf, "but it gets messier." He felt the girl go still and shifted gently away from her, giving Zara space. "I've opened the bags . . . Secret files," he added, when he realized she didn't quite understand. "It's like reading the technical specifications for a new type of car. One that might not work."

"What's the worst?"

"Immortality. Or if not immortality, then longevity. How long I don't know but longer than is now normal."

"You knew this when you refused to marry me?"

"Some of it," said Raf. He stopped himself. "More than some," he said but the anger was directed at himself. "What I wasn't told as a child I overheard. It's relatively easy to code for heightened hearing. Less easy to understand the implications if one's own hearing is normal and the subject is three rooms away."

"I'm sorry," Zara said. Her hand moved up to touch his face and came away wet. She believed him implicitly.

"So am I," said Raf.

Later, when he hung over her in the darkness, both of them drunk with longing, Raf bent forward and kissed Zara lightly on the forehead. There was something else he hadn't mentioned. If he understood it right, then immortality was sexually transmitted; the act of being pregnant infected both mother and embryo.

The second time they made love began slow and ended up hard and fast. It started with Zara swinging herself on top of Raf and straddling his hips, her face only inches from his. Outside their window, the city was expectant for what would come the next day. Guards stood at the gates of the Bardo and patrolled the streets around the palace complex. Major Gide and Raf having agreed this as a matter of protocol only. Done because it was expected.

"Remember the boat?" Zara said.

As if he could forget. Water so blue it was almost purple. The scent of rosemary and thyme carried on a warm wind across a bay. And then the return trip. Hani safely asleep and Zara bringing him a beer as he sulked outside and time and the ocean slid past.

"What boat?" Raf demanded.

Leaning forward, Zara put her mouth over his and bit, hard enough to draw blood. "That boat," she said.

They kissed and, slowly and rather clumsily, Zara reached down to position Raf against her. To Zara he was a shadow against white sheets, a watchful silent silhouette; for Raf she was lit clear as daylight . . . He could see her mouth twisting, eyes open and fixed on nothing, her breasts swaying forward with each rock of her hips, impossibly beautiful.

Reaching up with open hands, Raf felt warm flesh overflow his fingers and tried not to be offended when Zara absentmindedly lifted his hands away and went back to her rocking. After she'd ridden him in silence long enough for Raf to fade out his vision and lose himself in the rhythm, Zara took his hand and positioned it on her abdomen so that Raf's thumb reached between swollen lips.

"There," she said, "keep it there." And went back to her darkness and a burst of half cries and swallowed words. There was no sharing this time. And angry was the only way to describe the abruptness with which Zara shuddered to a halt, her hand still holding his own hard against her smooth mons.

Smooth, because she lacked all body hair.

Zara had given him the list once. One night in another palace; the time she'd cried herself to sleep and woken to swallow him as she knelt on white marble tiles in the middle of a sunlit floor, three days before he prosecuted her father for murder. A fact neither one had ever mentioned. The list was relatively short and went no body hair, no labia minor or hood or tip to her clitoris . . . But, as she'd pointed out, a full Pharaonic would have been infinitely worse.

According to a doctor in New York (the one Zara saw at seventeen, the week after she arrived at Columbia), a rewarding sex life was perfectly possible. It might just take more effort than for some other women. And she stood, the doctor said, a better chance than many of those whose scar tissue was mental rather than physical.

The tiny vibrator the woman gave Zara went unused. Ditto a collection of glass dilators from small to medium. Zara found one article on female genital mutilation, attended one meeting at which she said nothing, then went back to writing law essays. And lying in the darkness as she said this, that time in El Iskandryia, Raf had been unable to work out from the flatness of Zara's voice if she regarded this as common sense or cowardice . . .

"My turn." Raf rolled the two of them over, so Zara lay underneath and he was between her legs. Widening her knees, Raf withdrew until the tightness at the entrance to her sex was about to release him, only to slam back, watching Zara's chin go up in shock or surrender.

Her hands rose and fell, arms crooked at the elbow as fingers fluttered batlike in darkness. Tied to some plea forever unsaid. On her breath were white wine, hashish and the faintest trace of capers. Tastes that Raf took from her lips. And then her legs locked over his and her hips began to grind against him.

They came together with that blinding luck those new to each other sometimes get and slept, still locked in each other's arms.

"Take a guess," said Hani, nudging Murad Pasha and nodding to where Zara and Raf stood beside a wall, holding hands. A half dozen of Major Gide's handpicked guards stood impassive against the opposite wall of the decorated alcove, carefully not noticing. "Go on, guess what they've been doing . . ."

Murad blushed.

"How do I look?" said Hani. She twirled on marble tiles, her silk dress spinning out like the cloak of a dervish. The dress was meant to go with knee-length socks but Hani had refused. Not just refused but refused totally. Sitting naked and dripping on the edge of her bath, unwilling even to let Donna dry her until the old woman agreed that white socks were out.

And Donna, still furious at being dragged from El Iskandryia to Tunis, had threatened to fetch Khartoum but even that failed to move Hani. In the end they settled on short white socks rather than the black tights Hani had wanted.

"How do you look?" Murad considered the question. She was dressed in white silk. Around her neck was a single row of black pearls, fastened at the back with a clasp made from jade and gold. Her ears were now properly pierced and a tiny drop-pearl hung from each lobe. On her feet were silver pumps.

"Anachronistic," he said finally.

Hani punched him.

Not hard. Just enough to deaden his arm.

"The correct answer," she said, "is like a princess."

They were waiting near the entrance to a salon de comeras, hidden from the crowd by an elegant carved screen. Admission to the ceremony was by order of precedence and some people, mostly nasrani lucky to be there at all, had been sitting for over an hour as more upscale arrivals filed in to be shown their places.

It had given the new Emir great pleasure to make sure that the Marquis de St. Cloud was one of those forced to wait in the cheap seats. Sitting much closer to the front, looking slightly bemused, were Micki Vanhoffer and Carl Senior, dressed for what could only be a night in Las Vegas.

Outside, Rue Jardin Bardo was lined ten deep with people waiting for the Emir's Bugatti coupé Napoleon to sweep past, only to be hidden on arrival by veils of silk as it disgorged its occupants, a colonel from the engineers, his young wife and their two children. Decoys insisted upon by Major Gide, who'd gratefully accepted the new Emir's suggestion that she remain his head of security.

The actual players in the spectacle about to unfold in front of TV5, C3N and one other, randomly selected, camera crew had been the first to arrive, spirited into the salon via a back route.

"You ready?" Raf asked Zara.

She nodded. Not entirely convincingly.

Outside in the audience were Hamzah Effendi, Madame Rahina and the brother Zara had tracked down to a squat on the edge of Kharmous, half brother really. Hamzah's bastard. Once a factory and later an illegal club, he'd soundproofed his squat with cardboard and spray painted it gunmetal grey. The floor had been earth, friable and damp but he'd doped it with liquid plastic, tipping the can straight onto the ground.

"What are you thinking?" Raf asked.

"About Avatar. You know, back when he was a kid, was it right to take him home with me–or was I just being a spoilt brat . . . ?"

"Ah," Raf smiled. "The what-if factor."

Zara stared.

"For every action we take," said Raf, "there's probably a better one."

"Does that apply to this?"

"Which this?" Raf demanded. "Us this or this this?" The sweep of his hand took in the coughing and restless shuffle of feet beyond the screen.

"Both," said Zara.

In a different world Raf might have answered that there was nothing he'd do differently where Zara was concerned, not even his jilting her which put Zara across the front of Iskandryia Today and nearly cost him his life. He loved her and had no certainty that any other course of action would have led him to where he stood; but Murad turned and caught Raf's eye and the words went unsaid.

Checking his watch, Raf listened to something in his earbead and nodded.

Three, two, one . . .

On cue, an unaccompanied voice rose in the salon outside. Maaloof al andalusi, the music Ifriqiya made famous. Frail and strong, haunted and ancient. The words a lament for those who had gone before and a greeting for those who were to come after.

Near the far end of the suddenly silenced room, Khartoum raised his head and hung a note on the air so unearthly that Hani shivered. The poem that echoed off the salon's high roof came from Rumi, the great Sufi sage but the intonation was Khartoum's own.

Slowly, one note at a time an 'aoued filled the spaces around the words. Then an instrument that Raf thought might be a nai, only deeper than any flute he'd ever heard.

"Time to move," Hani whispered.

"Yep. Everybody's waiting." This was, Zara knew, a stupid thing for her to say. Unfortunately it was also true: five hundred carefully chosen people were waiting on the far side of that screen to see the proclamation of the new Emir. A ritual intentionally designed to mix Western with North African traditions.

For religious reasons the proclamation needed to happen in the salon de comeras, the hall of ambassadors, rather than the Zitouna mosque, because women and men could not be allowed to mix in the mosque and, anyway, letting nasrani into the prayer hall would outrage the mullahs.

Officially the beards were no longer a problem, Kashif's arrest and subsequent suicide had seen to that. Major Gide's interim report suggested reality was different. The fundamentalist tendency would remain quiet only for as long as their embarrassment lasted at having backed a man given to treachery and wicked living.

"Come on . . ." Zara was shaking Raf's arm.

And as Khartoum's voice rose to a note as ethereal as waves against rock, then ended abruptly, leaving only silence, Murad said, "We can't do this."

"What?"

"We just can't." There was a sadness in Murad's voice, a maturity at odds with the anxious smile on his thin face. This was a boy who'd sat holding his father's hand while the old man died. A boy who'd insisted on attending not just the funeral of his father, as was expected but also of his brother, after Kashif shot himself through the head. Three times. The funeral of Lady Maryam, who succumbed to the same flu that killed the Emir, he refused outright to attend. And that took a different kind of strength.

"Look at us," Murad said.

Age was more than a simple sum of years. Into the load went experience and modes of survival. Strength could be learnt and adopted or developed through necessity and nothing tempered it faster than learning to stay alive.

Murad nodded towards the hidden crowd. Then swept his gaze across Hani, Zara and Raf, finally ending with a glance at a mirror which showed a twelve-year-old boy in a tight uniform, stars of gold and enamel across his narrow chest.

"Look at what I'm wearing . . ."

Murad's new uniform, identical to one worn by Raf, was based around an Egyptian version of the old British cavalry tunic, borrowed by an earlier Emir and introduced as court dress. No North African or Ottoman regiment had ever gone into battle wearing such clothes. Its use was strictly ceremonial. The only difference was Murad's lack of shades.

"I don't support this," said Murad. "I didn't think you did." He looked sadly at Hani reflected in the mirror. "And I don't want to be part of it. I refuse to become Emir." Lifting a felt tarboosh from his head, the boy nodded to a guard. The hat Murad held was inlaid with gold thread and seeded around its base with tiny freshwater pearls. Pinned to the front was a priceless diamond spray of feathers. The chelengk a recent sign of favour from the Sultan in Stambul.

The guard who reached out to take it retreated at a scowl from Raf.

"You have it then," Murad said and Raf shook his head.

"Wrong size," said Raf. "And anyway, it belongs to you."

"Why?" Murad asked, and everyone looked at Raf.

That was the real question. All of Raf's life had been leading up to this, it seemed to him. Standing in an alcove off a crowded salon de comeras, off-loading his responsibilities onto a child. Which was one way to look at it. The other was that Raf was trying desperately to do the right thing in a situation where there was no right thing to do.

"This is difficult," he said.

"Really," said Hani. And when Raf nodded she sighed. "That was irony," she said.

Beyond the screen, Khartoum's voice edged into the silence and soared away, stilling the crowd again. "Ya bay." Raf caught the word in a refrain and lost the meaning as he looked down and saw Murad still waiting for his answer.

"You think it should be me," Raf said, not bothering to make it a question. They'd been through this. None of them believed there should be an Emir to start with, but that wasn't really the point. A coup had been averted.

A new era had arrived.

The last of the UN sanctions had been lifted that morning.

Five hundred people were waiting within the salon for sight of Ifriqiya's child ruler. A hundred thousand filled the streets. Camera crews wandered the Medina recording anything and everything for worldwide syndication. There were two members of the German Imperial Family, a first cousin to the Sublime Porte, the president of the United States, both presidents of Russia and the Prince Imperial of France, despite his recent disgrace. All gathered to welcome Ifriqiya back into the family of nations.

As squabbling, incestuous and venal a group as ever existed.

In thirty years the country hadn't seen half that number of VIPs. Hell, even one VIP would have been more than Ifriqiya had seen in thirty years. The ice age was over and the state's political and diplomatic purdah had been quietly brought to an end.

At a high cost, a fact not doubted by any of those who stood in the alcove; although they differed in their understanding as to how high. What they now discussed was, if one were honest, who should be the first to pay.

"The problem," said Raf, crouching until his face was level with Murad's own, "is that your father was not my father."

That got their attention.

"Yes he was," Murad insisted.

"No." Raf shook his head. "I've known this for days. One of us had Emir Moncef as a father. The other didn't." From his pocket, Raf pulled a sheet of paper folded into three and Hani, being Hani, recognized it for what it was. A sanguinity report.

"This is your father's DNA," Raf said to Murad as he pointed to a column down one side of the slip. "And this is your own," he pointed to the next. "And this third one is mine. You can see there is no relationship between the first two and the third. My mother was not your mother and my father was not your father; we are not even cousins."

"I don't understand," said Murad, face crumpling. "Who are you then?"

"My mother once told me my father was a Swedish hiker. That's probably as true as anything else she ever told me."

The boy nodded, a movement so small as to be almost imperceptible. And then, meeting Raf's eyes, he nodded again, his second nod firmer, more confident.

"Give me that printout," he ordered.

Without a word Raf handed Murad the DNA results. Instead of looking at them, the boy ripped them in two, did it again and then one more time, struggling in his final attempt.

"You're my cousin," he said in a voice that allowed no room for argument. Only Murad's eyes, made larger than ever by sadness, betrayed him.

"And your bodyguard," added Raf. "Should you need one."

Hani raised her eyebrows.

"I thought you might enjoy living in Tunis," Raf said. He didn't quite glance at Murad as he said this but Hani scowled anyway. And he got the feeling she might have stuck out her tongue, if Murad hadn't been watching. "Or we could commute between here and El Isk," added Raf, "if that works better for everyone . . ."

Zara's face was unreadable.

Beyond the screen, Khartoum fell into expectant silence and the guards around the edges of the alcove strained forward as if they might toss Murad's group into the waiting hall themselves, so worried was Major Gide's expression.

Hani, Zara and Raf began to move. Only to stop when Murad held up his hand.

"I go up there alone," he announced. That wasn't how it had been planned or practised in dry run after dry run, but Murad's voice was firm as he stepped through a gap between wall and marble screen. "It's my responsibility."

"And us?" Hani asked. "What are we expected to do?" There was hurt in her eyes and her chin was up. Had Murad not been on the point of walking out in front of the world, he'd have had a serious fight on his hands. One look at the boy's face showed he understood that.

They were children, Raf reminded himself, balanced on the cliff edge of puberty, behaving as adults because that was what politics required of them. In a different world there might be other answers and other systems that worked better. But they were here, in the salon de comeras in Tunis. And it was all the world they had.

"Well?" said Hani.

"You come with me," Murad said, compromising. "When we get to the two steps you stop and I'll stand at the top."

Hani considered this.

"No," she said, "you walk ahead when we go out but I climb the steps and stand just behind you."

Murad sighed.

"And us?" Zara asked.

Hani and Murad looked at each other.