The Fierce and Tender Sheikh Read online

  Will we watch the fountains again? she had asked, and though her brother had not answered, she knew. They had stayed alone in the silent house, she didn’t know how long. One morning she had awakened to find herself in a strange place and her brother gone.

  You must be a boy now, they had told her. Your name is Hani. And when she protested that she already had a name, Forget your old name. That is all gone. Your brother is gone. We are your family now, we will look after you. See, here are your new brothers and sisters.

  And he had forgotten the name. He became Hani, a boy, without ever knowing why, and the old life faded. He had shared a bedroom with four others in a small, hot apartment that had no pool, no fountains, no rose beds. If he asked about such things, his stepmother first pretended not to hear, and then, if Hani persisted, grew angry.

  Who were the people he remembered? His heart said the tall man was his father, the smiling woman his mother, the other children his sisters and brothers, whose names he could, sometimes, almost remember.

  No. We are your family. Here are your sisters and brothers.

  Something about the stranger made him remember that life long since disappeared, that life that he had been forbidden to remember. The memory ached in him, as fresh as if the loss were the only one he had suffered, as if the dark years since had never blunted the edge of that grief with more and then more.

  The stranger’s voice had been like the voices he had heard long ago, like his father’s, summoning up another world.

  Don’t think about that, don’t say anything. You must forget….

  Was it a dream only? Had his childish, unhappy mind made it all up? And yet he remembered his father and mother smiling at him, remembered a cocoon of love.

  One day, when you are older, you must know the truth. But not now…

  And then it was too late. After the bomb, his stepmother had stared at Hani helplessly before she died, her eyes trying to convey the message that her torn, bleeding throat could not speak.

  Who were they, the people whose faces he remembered, the memory of whose love sometimes, in the bleakness of a loveless existence, had surged up from the depths of his heart to remind him of what was possible? Where was that home, that he could sometimes see so clearly in his mind’s eye, and why was it all suddenly so fresh before him now?

  In the nearest thing to a luxury hotel the town had, Sharif Azad al Dauleh stood on a darkened balcony, a phone to his ear, waiting to hear the Sultan’s voice. Although the desert air was cool, he was naked except for the towel around his hips. Above it the smoke-bronze skin, the long, straight back, the lean-muscled stomach, arms and chest gave him the look of a genie from a particularly beautiful lamp.

  “I offer you a mission,” the Sultan had said.

  The manservant had brought a tray of cool drinks as the Sultan bent over a document file and opened it. Tall glasses of juice had been poured out and set down, a dish of nuts arranged, invisible traces of nothing at all removed with the expert flick of a white cloth.

  On top of the thin sheaf of documents was the photograph of a young child, a girl. Ashraf slipped it off the pile and handed it to Sharif, then sat back, picked up his glass and drank.

  The Cup Companion examined the photograph. The child’s eyes gazed at him, trusting and happy, with the unmistakable, fine bone structure around the eyes that was the hallmark of the al Jawadi. Sharif knew that members of the royal family were still surfacing from every point on the globe, but this child he had never seen.

  “My cousin, Princess Shakira,” Sultan Ashraf had murmured.

  Sharif waited.

  “She is the daughter of my cousin Mahlouf. Uncle Safa’s son.”

  Sharif’s thick eyelashes flicked with surprise. Among the first of the royal family to be assassinated by Ghasib after the coup, it was Prince Safa whose death had prompted the old Sultan to command all his heirs to take assumed names and go into hiding. This was the first Sharif had heard that Prince Safa had left descendants, but anything was possible.

  “Safa had a child by his first wife—the singer Suhaila.”

  “I had no idea that Safa had been married to Bagestan’s Nightingale!”

  “Few did. It was an ill-fated, short-lived marriage, when he was very young. She left him while she was still pregnant. In later years, although a connection was kept up, the public was not aware that Prince Safa was Mahlouf’s father. But the files of Ghasib’s secret police prove that they knew. Mahlouf, with his wife and family, died in a traffic accident in the late eighties. We now learn that it was no accident.”

  A muscle tightened in Sharif’s jaw as he glanced at the document Ashraf handed him. By its markings, it had been culled from the files of the dictator’s secret police. Mechanically he noted the code name of the agent who had masterminded the assassination.

  “We have this man, Lord,” he said in grim satisfaction.

  “So I have been informed. But that isn’t the issue here. A child escaped. We had always believed that the whole family was killed in the accident. But these files suggest that we were wrong, and that Mahlouf’s youngest daughter, Shakira, was not in the car. The secret police got wind of this rumour, but apparently never managed to trace her.

  “We’ve now received independent confirmation of the rumour, from someone who says Shakira was secretly adopted by the dissident activist Arif al Vafa Bahrami.”

  “Barakullah!” Sharif sat up, blinking.

  “Yes, he was even more loyal than we knew. But we have no further information. Bahrami escaped to England, and the family was there for years, waiting for their appeal for asylum to be heard, before Arif was assassinated in the street,” Ash said. “If the story is true, Shakira should have been with them. But there’s no record of a child with that name.”

  “Would they have given her a different name?” Sharif suggested.

  “Maybe.” The Sultan leaned back in his chair and sighed. “But there are compelling arguments against the idea, Sharif. After Arif Bahrami’s death the British Home Office ruled that his wife and children were no longer at risk and must return to Bagestan. There was an appeal. We’ve now received the transcript of that appeal from the British government. Arif’s wife made no mention of harbouring a descendant of the Sultan. Yet such information would surely have strengthened the family’s case for being allowed to stay.”

  “The child would have gone straight onto Ghasib’s death list,” Sharif pointed out. “And not merely Princess Shakira—the whole family would have been in danger.” He paused and took a sip of juice, set down his glass. “What was the result of the appeal?”

  “It failed. The family were deported from Britain.”

  Sharif’s lips tightened into grimness.

  “They were accepted by Parvan, however, and went there—not long before the Kaljuk invasion.”

  The Sultan absently tidied the file, putting the photograph on top. He sat for a moment with his hands framing it, gazing down on his young cousin’s face.

  “Records from Parvan show the name Bahrami in a refugee camp that was bombed during the Kaljuk War. Survivors apparently went to an Indonesian refugee camp, but after that records are chaotic. Someone who might be one of the Bahrami children appears among the records of orphans there, but that camp was closed down.”

  He leaned back and rubbed his eyes.

  “The inhabitants were then shipped to camps all over the world. The trail goes completely cold.”

  Sharif picked up the photograph again. It showed a child four or five years old. Dark hair that tumbled down over her shoulders, glossy and curling. Rounded cheeks glowing with health and vitality, wide, thoughtful eyes, and a mischievous smile.

  If ever he had a daughter, he thought irrelevantly, he would like her to look like this.

  “How old is she now?” he asked.

  “If the records we have are correct, twenty-one.”

  “She has the al Jawadi look, all right.”

  Ashraf nodded. “Yes.”
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br />   The Cup Companion, still gazing at the child’s face, was suddenly conscious of a powerful draw. He wondered what kind of woman she had grown into. If she had lived.

  “You want me to find her?” he said.

  “Yes. Or, more probably, some evidence of what her fate was. And yet, if there’s any hope… God knows how many camps you’ll have to visit. It’s a nearly hopeless task, Sharif. I know it.”

  Sharif sat for a moment, accepting it with a slow nod. Then the two men got to their feet and embraced again. “Do your best. It may be impossible,” said the Sultan.

  The mouth that some people thought cold had stretched in a quick smile. His hand had formed a fist at his heart.

  “By my head and eyes, Lord,” Sheikh Sharif Azad al Dauleh had said. “If the Princess is alive, I’ll find her.”

  “Sharif.”

  “Lord.”

  “What news?”

  “Something’s come up here, Ash.”

  “You’ve got a line on her?”

  “Not the Princess,” Sharif said. “Lord, brace yourself for something strange. I’ve found someone else here. I thought—”

  “Someone else?”

  “A boy, about fourteen or fifteen.” Far out in the desert, a distant glow pinpointed the detention centre. “An orphan, I imagine—he’s attached himself to a family that’s obviously not his own. If he’s not an al Jawadi, Ash, then neither are you. Any idea who he might be?”

  There was the silence of shock being absorbed. Then he heard the Sultan’s breath escape in a rush.

  “Allah, how can I say? We know so little about some branches of the family, and yet…might someone have mistaken the name? Or could it be that two of Mahlouf’s children escaped?”

  “The boy speaks English, which would fit what we know of the Bahramis’ history.” Sharif hesitated. “He would have been a babe in arms at the time of the assassination.”

  In the shadows on the table behind him, the file on Princess Shakira lay open. Sharif turned and picked up the photograph. Somewhere along the line he had become committed to finding this child alive. To knowing the woman she had become. He didn’t want to accept that this delightful, elusive little spirit had been wiped from the earth without having the chance to flower.

  It was nothing but sentiment, and he knew well that he would have despised it in others. He despised it in himself. Many members of the royal family had been assassinated during the years of Ghasib’s rule, and countless other innocents. Why should he want to pull this one out of the darkness that had descended on his country thirty years before?

  If it was the boy who’d been saved…had he been looking for the wrong person all along?

  “What does the boy himself say?” Ash’s voice brought him out of the reverie.

  “I haven’t asked, Lord. He’s been deeply affected by what he’s been through.” The image of the boy’s face, so stamped with grief and suffering, rose in his mind. Apart from the al Jawadi characteristics the two shared, the contrast between Hani and the little girl in the photograph covered everything, Sharif reflected sadly—she was trusting, where the boy trusted none; she was happy, while the boy suffered; she was nourished, the boy starved; she believed, the boy had learned cynicism. And yet they were connected by that one thread, which seemed to overpower all the differences. The family resemblance dominated.

  “I’d like your permission to bring him home without first trying to establish his background. To raise his hopes and then leave him in these conditions because he proves not to be what I think—”

  “No, of course we can’t do that. Do whatever your judgement suggests, Sharif.”

  When he hung up, the Cup Companion remained where he was, staring out over the desert. Smoke trailed up from the thin cigar in his hand, its shape twisting and scudding before his absent eyes.

  Sharif Azad al Dauleh was variously said to be cold, cynical, selfish, too intelligent for his own good, but none of those accusations hit the mark. Sharif was highly intelligent, and proud of a noble lineage. He was also courageous and impatient of weakness or cowardice. Weaker men—and women—might well resent such a combination. But if his compassion was rarely roused, it was perhaps because he first had none for himself.

  He had seen a great deal of human suffering during the weeks of his fruitless search. And only now did he feel the weight of helplessness that he had been unconsciously carrying with him.

  Was it because the boy was so obviously an al Jawadi and Sharif’s loyalty was bred in the bone? Was it something in Hani himself? Or was this child—with his haunted eyes and his cynical understanding that he was destined to be one of the world’s dispossessed, a child who’d had nothing for so long he didn’t remember what something was—simply the last straw of weight Sharif’s spirit could bear?

  Was it that he was finally doing something, however small? He would save one soul, pluck one suffering child from the nightmare of wasted, desolate life he saw.

  Sharif suddenly felt how much of a toll the weeks of bearing witness to so much suffering had taken on his inner reserves.

  He was glad to be going home. He needed a breather.

  “Home?” Hani whispered. “Take me home?”

  The vision of the fountain trembled before his mind’s eye, and his heart thudded with hope.

  Sharif realized his mistake. This was the most difficult interview he had ever conducted, and he hoped he would never have another like it.

  “Home to Bagestan.”

  But the child was lost in a dream. “Is my mother there? My father?”

  Sharif swallowed. Allah, what had made him think he could handle this himself? “I don’t think so, Hani.”

  “They died,” Hani agreed, hollowly. For a long moment the boy gazed at him, with an expression almost of worship in the dark, hungry eyes. “Are you my brother?” he whispered.

  The question shook him.

  “No,” he said gently. “I am not your brother.”

  Hani bit his lip to hold back the sudden, urgent tears.

  “Who am I? Do you know who I am?”

  “I’m sorry, Hani. All I have are questions, like you. If there is anything you can tell me, it may help to find out who you are. Do you remember any names?”

  He hadn’t meant to start like this. His plan had been to say the minimum possible—only what was necessary to get the boy aboard the plane. But in the face of such a deep and urgent need to know, his resolve failed.

  The eyes were liquid with sadness as Hani shook his head. “I had to forget all the names, when I was very small. I don’t remember any, not even my brothers’ and sisters’. They said someone would kill me if I spoke the names. A bad man.”

  Sharif struggled to keep what he felt from showing on his face. Although there had been many victims, only one group of people in Bagestan had been in danger from Ghasib on the strength of name alone—members of the royal family.

  “Who said it?”

  “My—she said she was my mother, but I knew she wasn’t. I always thought of her, in my heart, as my stepmother. But I wasn’t allowed to say so.”

  A strange, powerful silence surrounded them. Outside the director’s office the usual sounds of the camp were dimmed, as though the air had become too thin to carry them.

  “What was your stepfamily’s name?”

  Hani was holding his breath. The world seemed to still its own breath with his. Somehow, even before he spoke the name, he sensed that this one word had the power to change everything.

  “Bahrami,” he breathed.

  The name fell into the silence like a cut diamond into a still pond.

  This time Sharif could not stifle his reaction, because every atom of body and soul was electrified. He could only stare at the boy.

  “Bahrami.” He repeated the word softly. “Arif al Vafa Bahrami.”

  “Yes!”

  Suddenly all the torment of his missing past boiled up in him.

  “Tell me! Tell me who they were! A man
and a woman, and other children, and a house with a fountain. Roses and…so many roses. Who were they?”

  Sharif swallowed hard. Pity, he found, tore at the heart with eagle’s claws.

  “Hani, I think—please understand that we can’t be sure—that your father might have been Mahlouf Jawad al Nadim. Does the—”

  His heart kicked so hard his body jerked. Shivers ran over his skin. “My father? Is that my father’s name? Is he—is he alive, then? Did he send you to find me?”

  “I’m sorry, Hani, no. He died many years ago. Does the name sound familiar?”

  He shook his head, half blinded by tears. Was that his name, his father’s name, words he didn’t know at all? “Why don’t I know it, if it was my father’s name? My own name,” he added softly, and then repeated it, as if to test the flavour. “Mahlouf Jawad al Nadim. My father.”

  “You must have been very young when they died,” he suggested consolingly. “Maybe you never knew it.”

  Sharif turned to his briefcase and drew out the Princess Shakira file. Watched by Hani with huge dark eyes, he opened it. “I want to show you a photograph,” he said quietly. “It may be that she was also living with the Bahramis. Do you remember this face?”

  He drew out the photograph and set it in front of Hani on the low table, watching the boy’s face closely, noting the terrible differences that hunger, horror and deprivation had created in two faces with such a strong family resemblance.

  The child was silent a long time, staring at the picture. Then one tiny jewel teardrop fell, and landed on Princess Shakira’s cheek. It lay on the photograph quivering and sparkling in a ray of sun. Hani looked up into Sharif’s face, swallowed, and wiped his cheek with one thin hand.

  “What was her name?” the boy whispered. “What was her name?”

  Sharif saw it then, finally. Not a strong family resemblance, no. Much more than that. Now that he saw it, it only amazed him that it had taken so long.

  He spoke very, very softly, as if the air itself might break.