"Pashazade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grimwood Jon Courtenay)

Chapter Three 29th June

Tiri had definitely been there when ZeeZee first landed in Iskandryia, twisting itself in and out of people's legs, sometimes so thinned by distance that ZeeZee lost track of everything but the fox's silver tail and hacking cough.

Too many cigarettes, a biology master had told him years before, when ZeeZee had asked why a cub stood choking in a distant field, shoulders hunched as it tried to throw up a splinter of bone. The other men present had laughed and one had rumpled the small boy's blond hair.

My own little wild animal, the visitor called him. That was just before ZeeZee decided to fail all his exams ...

'Read this.' An immigration officer in khaki thrust a green embarkation card into ZeeZee's hand and waved him towards the end of a queue. There were several queues, all moving inexorably towards a row of desks where simple polygraphs stood waiting, their guts exposed to the air. A golem-featured man from the line alongside glanced over and ZeeZee thought for a moment he was going to nod or say something. But he just stared at ZeeZee's matted hair and then looked away.

It was one of those evenings.

On the card was a list of statements to be read aloud, in a choice of French, Arabic, German or English ...

He wasn't a drug addict.

He wasn't infectious.

He didn't plan to overthrow the khedive ...

So far so good. ZeeZee skimmed his eyes down the next three prohibitions against entering El Iskandryia.

He wasn't planning to purchase for export any classical or Pharaonic artefacts.

He didn't belong to a proscribed fundamentalist group.

He'd never been charged with murder. Except he had ...

It might have been the last prohibition that made ZeeZee sweat, or it could have been the lack of air-conditioning. Whatever, he was still sweating when he reached the head of his queue to find himself facing a middle-aged man who wore a fez, an oiled moustache, a gold lapel pin shaped in the name of God and a rectangular tag that announced he was Sergeant Aziz.

'Where did your journey begin?' demanded the sergeant.

'America,' said ZeeZee and Aziz nodded. Given the bleached dreadlocks, hobo beard and beige elephants stampeding across an ill-fitting sports shirt it was unlikely the thin man came from anywhere else.

'Make your declaration,' the sergeant said. So ZeeZee put his hand on the plate and let Aziz click shut a wrist band. Then he swore his beliefs away, only stumbling when he reached the final prohibition.

'Again,' demanded the sergeant.

'I have never murdered anybody,' said ZeeZee flatly and every diode on the cheap Matsui lie detector stayed green. On the far side of the desk the fox grinned like the fox he was and, without thinking, ZeeZee grinned back.

Drugged or drunk, Aziz decided, his eyes flicking from the passenger's darkened armpits to his bead-slicked forehead. Either way, he was suspect.

'ID card?' Irritation made the sergeant snap his fingers.

'I've got this,' ZeeZee said apologetically. The document he proffered was unmistakable, its cover pure white and hand-stitched from Moroccan leather softer than velvet.

'Excellency ...' In place of a sneering NCO stood a man in shock, career options cashing themselves in right in front of his own eyes. The diplomatic pass he now held was registered to a pashazade, the son of a pasha, senior grade. Basic survival instinct made Sergeant Aziz forget everything except his need to make the sweating tourist someone else's problem.

Not even bothering to stamp the carte blanche, the sergeant clicked his fingers for a jellaba-clad orderly and ordered the underling to escort the important pasha to the fast-track desk and quickly.

Eyes like a maniac, beard like a dervish and a pair of combats that were way too long in the leg ... plus the man kept looking round for something he obviously couldn't see. Captain Yousef was worried. He had an apartment in a block off Rue Maamoun that needed repairs to its balcony, he'd only just made Captain and — God be praised — his wife was pregnant for the third time. He couldn't afford to make a mistake.

But which would be the mistake? To hold a notable with a carte blanche for questioning or to let through someone who couldn't look less like a real bey? The call was impossible to make and the implications of getting it wrong were horrific —for himself and his wife, for his children, his home ...

'Sir ..." Captain Yousef's accent was elegantly Cairene. His words those of someone born not in El Iskandryia but in the capital. All the same, his voice shook as he asked his question. 'Do you have some secondary form of identity?'

The notable in the elephant shirt and shades said nothing and did nothing except shrug. It was obvious that his answer was no.

Looking from slumped man to the elegant Ottoman diplomatic passport, Captain Yousef had real trouble reconciling the dishevelled mess in front of him with the photograph encrypted on the carte's chip that gave his family as al-Mansur and his place of birth as Tunis.

The passport was five years old, almost expired. The encrypted picture showed someone clean-shaven, neatly dressed, who stared hawk-eyed at the camera. While this man looked like the worst kind of American, the poor kind.

And yet.

And yet ...

'Ashraf Al-Mansur?'

ZeeZee began to shrug, caught himself and smiled for the first time since he'd entered the airport. It was a rueful, what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here smile. Not the kind that the Captain had ever seen from a real bey.

Casually Captain Yousef adjusted his red fez with one hand, while touching a discreet buzzer on the underside of his desk. Trying to enter El Iskandryia on a fake passport was a serious crime. Pretending to be a notable was even worse. And when that passport was a diplomatic one, then... The Captain didn't waste time worrying about it further. No point. His decision was a good one and besides, it was no longer his business. Orders specifically said to pass this kind of problem straight to the top.