Chapter 42

Before she had even reached the harbourmaster’s office door, Fareeha was struck by the realisation that she was fretting about the wrong things. Of course the Gulf could be dangerous at night in a small boat, especially in one full of land-loving gangsters. Of course she should have looked in Hassan’s old books to find out a few of the basics for herself: she still had no idea about knots, nautical miles, bearing, latitudes, longitudes, wind speeds, currents, and all the rest of it. Even worrying about the guns could wait. What was far more deserving of her fear at this particular moment was Bashar Khan’s whereabouts and how she was going to find him before the day was out. And if she couldn’t . . .

By the time she had made it out of the door and onto the verandah the problem was clear—as were all the bloody consequences of not solving it. She fell against the railings to catch her thoughts. Until now, Bashar had always found her when he needed to; except, of course. for that first regrettable time in the square: a rash act that Fareeha had since wished undone a thousand times. She turned around and leaned back against the rail, and with her now-free hands she tightened her headscarf. Before pushing away to begin her search, she looked up at the bright blue sky, raised her hand to her forehead, and felt along the scar. Her lips moved but the prayer got stuck somewhere deep inside.

*

She trudged along the boulevard and crossed the main plazas. She circled the bazaar and checked the cafés on its south side. She peered in through the front of a barbershop that she and everyone else knew was now the preserve of the new ruling class. She looked for his Jeep outside the bathhouse and she even walked through the spice market. But today Bashar Khan was as elusive as the Sultan and she didn’t even pick up his scent. Asking for him might have landed her in more trouble than was already coming.

Fareeha scrounged a cup of filmy water from a stall-holder in the market but she had to return home for food, having no money left to buy even scraps. Mrs. Sharwalla had given her a little charcoal and she was able to boil up a panful of the dried beans she still had, mixed with a pinch of salt. When they were finally on her plate, however, she could hardly eat any of them: Bashar Khan was in the kitchen spoiling her appetite with his unleashed disappointment. She saw his red-rimmed piggy eyes reflected in the blade he was sharpening; and she heard his gruff voice talking about getting the bitch up to the citadel. She managed a few spoonfuls—enough at least to keep her alive until Bashar Khan finally cut her head off.

Soon after clearing away her unfinished meal, she bent to lace up her sandals. But before she had even cursed the broken strings hanging through the eyelets of her ancient footwear, she heard a familiar sound. She closed her eyes briefly and muttered a quick prayer, more of a reaction than anything spiritual. To the background roar, she somehow managed to finish putting on her sandals; then with the same sticky, trembling fingers she retied her headscarf. Ducking through the linoleum, she wondered why he hadn’t called out; and when her eyes at last fell on Bashar, she saw that he hadn’t even rolled himself out of his vehicle. He sat there sweating behind his mirrored sunglasses in a cloud of dust.

‘Fareeha Azziz,’ he growled over the noise of the engine, ‘get in.’

She froze. ‘In the Jeep?’

Bashar dropped his head but stopped before the movement became a nod. He pinched off his shades to give her a full picture of his unadorned face, in all its fleshy glory.

Fareeha winced, looked behind at her home, and then began to shuffle towards him; there seemed to be nothing else to do.

‘And cover your face,’ Bashar added.

She stopped moving forward and opened her mouth.

‘Your face, woman,’ Bashar growled, ‘cover it.’

As she obeyed with a swift rearrangement of her scarf, she hoped that this was simply deference to custom and not something more sinister. She was careful not to expose the ugly mess on top of her head.

‘Quickly,’ Bashar said.

‘Why . . . what is it?’

‘Just get in,’ Bashar said and he thumbed her into the empty space in the back of the Jeep, next to a turbaned thug. The usual two other faceless henchmen filled out the rest of the vehicle with their muscular bodies and oversized guns.

The driver, on a nod from Bashar, pulled away before Fareeha had positioned herself in the seat and the unexpected acceleration flung her back against the shiny leather.

Bashar Khan replaced his sunglasses onto his pudgy nose, turned around, and grinned at her. ‘Sightseeing,’ he said, ‘but no cameras.’

Fareeha looked away and raised her hands to her covered face, There was only one sight in Sa’ An that Bashar was famous for visiting—and of course nobody ever took any pictures when he was there. The man squashed up against her moved and she felt the butt of his rifle jab into her fleshless ribs; down came both hands.

They left the city westward, with the afternoon sun above them, and took a dirt road into the dry wilderness beyond. When the dust started to blow up in thick billows, Fareeha sank back into the seat and lifted the veil to cover her eyes. She didn’t need to see the passing scenery to find out where they were taking her: she already knew. The Jeep suddenly turned and began to climb a steep incline; and through the cotton, she began to smell fresh sea air.

‘Get out,’ Bashar ordered when the tyres had finished their skid to within feet of the precipice.

Fareeha, pulling her clothing together, moved to obey as quickly as she could; but halfway out she stiffened as a rifle butt pressed into the small of her back. She lost her step and fell the rest of the way through the door, sprawling onto the rocky ground. A muffled cry escaped from behind the scarf. She turned her head to the right, looked along the bumpy earth, and focussed on the sandstone blocks of the immense orange walls that reared skyward out of her field of view. Everything was the colour of a setting sun.

Bashar had already marched around the front of the Jeep and was now standing next to her head, his huge boots suddenly blocking out the citadel ramparts. He bent down and ripped the veil from her face. ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said, ‘we begin our work together.’ He grabbed at her elbow and slowly pulled her up; and when she had found her feet, he lifted his thick right arm and draped it around her shoulder. He pressed his fleshy face close to hers, close enough for several of his longer whiskers to scratch at her cheeks; close enough for her to feel the hot, bitter breath that he forced out of his overworked lungs.

Fareeha stiffened and tried to pull herself away, wondering how he knew that everything was arranged for tomorrow night; but the more she resisted, the tighter he gripped, until at last she gave up the struggle and went limp.

‘We’ll meet down there.’ The words came out like gristle from a meat grinder.

Bashar turned her around and pointed away to the left with his free hand; but Fareeha’s eyes could only make it the few feet to the edge, where the headland dropped away in sheer cliffs to the pounding waves below. His grip tightened, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Angel’s Bay.’

Fareeha raised her head up and to the left, following Bashar’s fat rat’s paw into the blue distance, towards the beach that lay out of focus between the headland and the limits of the city. Bashar’s flexed forearm was now pressing against Fareeha’s windpipe. She spluttered and dropped her head. The next moment her neck stretched and filled with pain and she realised that Bashar was pulling her even closer to the edge—by her head. She dragged her feet; not because of a conscious effort to resist, but because her legs simply wouldn’t work. When Bashar stopped pulling, Fareeha managed to suck in air before he moved his forearm back to her windpipe. All the acts of the past few weeks began to flash through her mind in stark clarity; the last image, however, was from the immediate future: one in which she saw herself being flung off the precipice and bouncing down the sharp rocks into the thunder below.

‘I don’t need to tell you . . .’

Bashar’s gruff voice brought her around but filled her body with the urge to vomit—physically push out the fear from within. She didn’t, and in a second everything fell from her mind, in a sudden wave of departure. It all washed away and she was cleared, as if she were back in the past, before all of this started, free and happy.

‘. . . or you’ll be down there . . .’

Bashar’s grip relaxed for a moment, bringing Fareeha back from her faint. His next words were grave and he reinforced their seriousness by grabbing at the back of her neck and pushing her out over the edge. He was demanding some kind of a promise from her.

Fareeha shouldn’t have looked down, but instinctively she peeled back her eyes and stabbed them down over the jagged rocks of the precipice and into the crashing waves far below. Her eyes came back to her feet, which she was trying desperately to stop from slipping over the crumbly edge. She coughed, cleared her throat and miraculously succeeded in spitting out a word or two of reassurance, words that she would never be able to exactly remember.

‘Good,’ Bashar cried, with the finality of an amen at the end of grace—before the eating begins. He pulled her in and released her.

Fareeha fell to the stony ground with a whimper, trying to fight back her tears. A rock rolled over the precipice and she instinctively scrambled back a few uncomfortable yards, crab-like on her hands and knees. She had not the energy to lift herself up; she felt empty, lifeless, nothing left inside to pull her together and push her on.

The driver fired up the engine and backed to within inches of Fareeha’s lifeless body; black fumes from the exhaust pipe made her cough.

‘Get in,’ Bashar ordered.

*

Fareeha continued to whimper from her slumped position on the backseat as they sped back down the dusty road towards the city, which was fast fading into twilight. She reacted to a sharp bend and a slight rise in the road, which pointed the jeep south, in a direct line with the top of a distant hill, across a wide valley. A Sparkle of light scored a jagged line along her forehead and she looked up. Through swollen eyes, she could just make out the glinting panes of glass from the windows of a distant house on the hill. She raised a hand to where the light had made its mark above her right eye and ran her finger along the groove.

She moved her weight slightly forward; she wiped at her eyes and strained them into the distance and when they had focussed on the house she huffed in recognition: it was the harbourmaster’s villa reflecting the sun’s dying beams. She again shifted her body forward, out of its heap of self pity. The Jeep hit a rock and Fareeha jumped and in that split second she saw herself, her true self, a flash of self knowledge that was gone before she knew it. She sat upright, and affirmed who she was, what she wanted. She looked to the right and saw the sun bearing down on the distant horizon and she felt something begin to come alive inside her. She elbowed at the gangster next to her to give herself more room.

*

‘Get out,’ Bashar said when the Jeep at last skidded to a halt outside Fareeha’s house.

Fareeha didn’t move, instead she reached forward and tapped Bashar on the shoulder, ‘Bashar,’ she said.

Bashar turned around, his face shining with displeasure. ‘What?’ he barked.

Fareeha palmed her knees and took a deep breath. ‘No guns.’ She spoke with a calm voice.

Bashar’s indignation came swiftly, in the form of a hand slapped against the leather upholstery. ‘What did you say, woman?’

‘No guns,’ she said again. ‘If the skipper of tomorrow’s ship so much as smells a weapon he will sail away. No business.’ She repeated almost verbatim the harbourmaster’s stipulation.

Bashar’s fleshy face exploded into a sea of ripples. ‘Why did you agree to such nonsense?’ he growled.

‘Because I want to make some money,’ she answered.

Bashar rolled himself out of the Jeep and ordered Fareeha to follow. Before speaking, he crashed his flattened hand onto the hot bonnet.

Fareeha jumped back.

Bashar stepped towards her and pushed his face close to hers and in a lowered voice, as near to a whisper as he could get, he said, ‘Don’t forget what we talked about up there.’ He then grabbed Fareeha’s forearm and raised his chunky head in the direction of the citadel.

Fareeha felt his clammy paw squeezing into her tendons. She looked where she was supposed to but saw only shadows and a vague silhouette of the battlements. ‘No . . . I won’t,’ she muttered. ‘And . . .’

‘What is it?’

‘I have the details of tomorrow night’s run . . . inside.’

‘Get them.’