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

Chapter Five 29th June

First isolated as a pure chemical in 1820 but sourced from shrubs long before that and spread across the littoral a thousand years earlier by the armies of Islam, caffeine was the North African drug of choice and something of a local vice. Which was fine with ZeeZee. He'd spent time at both Scottish and Swiss boarding schools and could think of worse ones ...

Lifting the airport cup to his lips, ZeeZee winced as the scalding black mud burnt his lips. The taste was of sweetened silt and arabica beans that hadn't been gently roasted so much as charred to death in their very own auto-da-fé.

'Best let it cool,' announced an elderly, whipcord-thin man who was sat opposite facing him over a low table.

'Yeah,' said ZeeZee. Thanks for warning me.'

General Saeed Koenig Pasha smiled and sipped from his own cup. Until thirty minutes ago the General had been bored. And then serendipity had seen him arrive at the airport just as all the fools on the scene started to panic about having breached diplomatic protocol.

Now he had the object of their worries in front of him, and the General had to admit he could see their problem. Not that he would ever, under any circumstances admit that to any of them. All the same, in his long and detailed experience as Governor of El Iskandryia, beys came in three types.

Old ones who lived in rambling palaces and wrote to him complaining about the laxity of the young.

Middle-aged ones who were too worried about their expanding bellies and nagging wives to have time to trouble him.

And young ones who drove too fast, lived hard and had acquired bad habits in foreign countries, without acquiring the necessary wisdom to realize that was where their bad habits should have been left — at least, when it came to displaying them in public.

This last type was what he half been expecting to meet. Someone elegant and urbane, if somewhat louche. Instead the young man opposite looked, sounded and smelled like an American hobo. He had ill-fitting clothes, his hair was twisted into ugly locks and his face was hidden by a long, matted beard. Luckily the General had visited West-Coast America enough to know that this was a look often adopted by the children of the very rich.

He hadn't introduced himself to the al-Mansur boy and didn't intend to do so. All the same, it would have been his signature that bounced the boy out of the country, had him sent to jail or even killed; if he'd followed the first instinct of a certain Colonel Gasparin, instead of doing what the idiot Colonel should have done right at the start. Place a call to Lady Nafisa at her madersa.

Besides, if his staff really believed it was coincidence that saw the General arrive at the airport at exactly that point, then they really were fools and he'd be replacing the lot of them. He had his own reasons for being interested in the family of Lady Jalila al-Mansur.

'You could formally complain,' said the General. 'You have that right.' He didn't say anything more, just cocked his head to one side and waited to see which way the boy would play it.

'Not worth it,' said ZeeZee, standing up. He was in a hastily-cleared VIP lounge at Iskandryia airport where Gasparin had escorted him as soon as the Colonel had been told ZeeZee's passport was genuine. The man was just playing his part ... That's all any of us can do.'

He smiled at the older man's sudden sideways glance.

The area around them was done out in ersatz Rococo Islamic, all mirrored arches, peacock-blue tiles, white marble slabs and a splashy alabaster fountain that sounded like a woman pissing.

ZeeZee got the feeling that the General couldn't wait to get away either.

Too close, thought ZeeZee as he headed for the exit. Way, way too close. He slipped the carte blanche into the breast pocket of his pug-ugly sports shirt and headed for a gap in the barriers.

Near the front of the barrier stood a chauffeur wearing peaked cap and polished boots, with a printed board that read Ashraf al-Mansur resting in the crook of his elbow. ZeeZee walked past the man without even breaking his stride.

First things first, and that meant hitting the local shops.

ZeeZee's other clothes were on their way to Zanzibar in an overhead locker, courtesy of Ottoman Airways. At least he sincerely hoped they were. He'd left his briefcase behind at Cairo aboard the Seattle/Zanzibar flight for exactly that purpose.

Everything he stood up in had been bought duty-free on the plane, paid for with a platinum HKS that had arrived along with his passport. And yellow shirts with beige elephants weren't his first or even second choice of clothing. The garment was what the Boeing's on-board boutique had had in his size.

Cairo was where he'd switched planes, to a Lufthansa local flight. There'd been one moment in a steel-and-glass corridor between Cairo arrivals and local departures when he'd been tempted to keep walking and lose himself in the chaos of the capital.

Quite why he hadn't was a question ZeeZee would ask himself later, when he finally stopped moving long enough to think. But first he needed new clothes and then he had to find the al-Mansur madersa, whatever that was ...