Blood Rules Read online

  When she rose and moved across to the window of her suite set high in Bahrain’s Intercontinental Hotel, the creamy light of a Persian Gulf dawn greeted her without kindness. She was Lebanese by birth, her skin palest olive, allowing her to pass as European in Beirut or Arabian in Paris, whichever might prove expedient; but this morning it was greasy with the fatigue of long vigil. From her aerie she could just discern the beginnings of the sea. Ahead of her, beyond the desolate void of the largest parking lot she had ever seen, and one entirely empty of vehicles, lay the business and financial district, its glass skyscrapers unmarred by the dense mists of dawn that surrounded the island without encroaching on it. A spit of sand, its northern end smothered with concrete, the whole veiled in fog. If Bahrain had not already existed, God would surely have felt no need to fill the gap.

  She let the gauze curtain slip from her beringed hand, her mouth curling in contempt at the thought of the rowdy Europeans she had observed spilling out from the bar the night before. Yes, and there had been ghutras as well, red and white headdresses, Saudi accents, so many tomcats swarming down the causeway in search of outlets for their unsanctioned thirsts and lusts. Scum … but profitable scum, oh, very, with their never-ending willingness to pay for the death and destruction Leila dispensed, for a Saudi contract would always hold up.

  The Arabs in the bar were not the real ones, anymore than the pseudo-princesses who had haunted the Hamra shopping district of her Beiruti childhood represented the European aristocracy they so pitifully aped.

  The silver coffeepot felt cold beneath her hand. She dialed room service, making her request with the minimum of words. Because she had not spoken for over a day, her voice sounded alien to her.

  Those people were not the real Arabs. They were not even real people.

  There once had been a certain house, where real people lived and loved.

  Yarze, overlooking the whole coastal swath of Beirut, with its stunted skyscrapers, red-tiled roofs, and white walls amid the concrete. It was an L-shaped, three-story house called “Kharif,” Arabic for autumn, not far from the American ambassador’s official residence; you turned off the road, through high wrought-iron gates that were always left open, and climbed a steep drive that curved tightly around upon itself to reach the oak front door. Inside, coolness and peace. An expanse of exquisite mosaic flooring, leading you seductively onward, past

  doors, all open, ever open, to the French windows at the back and the garden.

  Leila, coming home from school, would run through the house, blind to all else, until she burst out into the sunshine again. But this was her own personal source of sun: Grandfather, sitting under the jacaranda tree in his wicker throne beside the marble pool, dozing, oblivious to the leaves as they shifted their shadowy lattice patterns this way and that across his pale face. “Grandpa!” she would shriek, and he would jump awake as if electric current had been passed through him, allowing the book (there was always a book) to slide from his lap, often as not colliding with his thick ebony silver-tipped cane; and he would reach forward to pick these things up, but Leila was there ahead of him, sweeping everything aside in her need to clamber onto the old man’s lap, put her arms around his neck, and nibble at his gray beard that smelled of latakia and Eau de Portugal.

  Then Azizza would come out, hands clasped in front of her as usual, Azizza the servant; perhaps there was a piece of paper somewhere—in a registry, say, or some ministry—that described her occupation as “servant,” because you couldn’t write down loved as a job. Maybe not. Leila hoped not. She knew that Grandpa would have had the tact to enter her as “aunty,” because that was his way. Azizza would come out, scolding across Grandpa’s pleas for a bowl of strawberries, or a piece of that wonderful Nestlé's Devon Milk chocolate that only he knew where to buy.

  “I hear she was terrible at school today,” Azizza would bark. “Three out of ten in English, mais, c’est affreux!”

  Then Grandpa would tilt his patrician head on one side, just five degrees, so, and look as if he wanted to burst into tears, and Azizza would unclasp her hands for long enough to throw them high above her head in a gesture of despair before retreating to fetch whatever treat the old man had requested.

  While they ate together—the three of them, naturally all three, Azizza as well—Halib might come back, and for a moment Leila could bring herself to abandon Grandpa while she rushed to be picked up by her brother and swung around. Afterward he would throw himself down at Grandpa’s feet, resting his head on the old man’s knee, while Grandpa told them one of his stories. About his youth, as a pirate in Malacca. Or when he was a merchant prince in Africa and the black men wanted to eat him, but he escaped, with the help of a beautiful slave, “Not as beautiful as Grandmother, but close, close!” And then sometimes they would hear the chimes of the front door and know they had a guest. “Stay there,” Azizza would say, “I’ll get it!” The old woman would trot through the house, eager to know who had come. And she would open the door. Yes. Azizza opened it, because that was the rule.

  A buzzer sounded; not in the house at Yarze, overlooking the blue Mediterranean and its Phoenician city of gold, but here in Bahrain, on a morning of damp mist and memory.

  Leila, caught between two worlds, remained immobile for an instant; then she walked over to the dressing table and picked up her handbag. She opened it to check that the P7 pistol was in its proper place before advancing, slowly, to the door.

  She hated opening doors, admitting people into her life. Even when—a peek through the viewer confirmed the fact—it was room service, bearing hot coffee: the only drug she permitted herself to take as antidote against a poisoned past.

  20 JULY: 0420: HEATHROW AIRPORT

  The check-in clerk saw father and son as two entries on a bar graph: side by side, one shorter than the other but wearing similar clothes (white top, dark trousers), connected and somehow absolutely relevant to each other.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said, “but we do sometimes get this overbooking problem. It does say on your ticket to arrive at the airport early, at least two hours before flight time.”

  She wondered what they would do next. She’d been trained to deal with all eventualities short of a homicidal attack with malice aforethought, and she liked to think she knew how individual passengers were going to react to the news that, thanks to her employer’s greed and indifference, they had been bumped. So it surprised her when Colin Raleigh said, “I’m afraid we got caught up in traffic, miss. I wonder, is there anything you can do to help us?”

  For he, too, knew a lot about people. He understood that the satisfactions of letters to the chairman, perhaps even a county court action, lay far in the future. What mattered now was getting them both seats.

  “You see,” he went on, “I’m a law tutor and I’ve been invited to Kuala Lumpur by some of their senior academics to give a talk. Look.”

  He produced a letter from his friends in K.L., putting his hand over the lower half and keeping up the patter while the clerk’s eyes flickered between him and the paper.

  “This is my son; he’s fourteen and he’s never flown before; they’re meeting the flight, bit of a delegation, actually"—winsome smile, self-deprecating gesture—"so it would be rather embarrassing if the British Council bod and the Dean of the Law School and so on all piled up at K.L. airport and I didn’t.”

  “But you’re on the flight, Mr. Raleigh.”

  “Ah, but I could hardly travel without my son. The house is locked up, we’ve nowhere to go and stay; I mean, what’s he supposed to do, check into a hotel for the next eight weeks?”

  “There might be a seat for him at the weekend—”

  “No, I’m sorry. Both or neither.”

  She gnawed her lip. Colin continued to smile at her in a way she appreciated. She knew that he knew none of this was her fault. “Let me have a quick word with my supervisor,” she said, slipping off her stool.

  Colin looked at his son. Colin knew that Robbie kne
w he was to blame for everything.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, laying a hand on Robbie’s shoulder. “They’ll sort something out.” Robbie shook off the hand, going to lean against an adjacent unmanned check-in desk so Colin couldn’t see his face.

  “Mr. Raleigh"—the clerk had come back and was leaning forward to invite confidential discussion—"I’d be awfully grateful if you’d keep this under your hat,” she said, “but we’re going to give one of you a seat in business class.”

  Colin nodded gravely, wondering if this girl knew of the irony whereby he’d cashed in his own business class ticket just so Robbie could fly. “Thank you, miss. You’ve been so helpful. Do you think I could have a note of your name?”

  “Patsy.” But by now she was in a hurry; it took her less than a minute to check their bags through to Kuala Lumpur before sliding two boarding passes face down across the counter as if they were dirty photographs and she wanted to be rid of them.

  Once in the duty-free shop Colin dithered over what brand of malt to buy for the Fadillahs, their hosts in Malaysia.

  “Honestly, what is it about you and these big decisions, Dad? First the roundabout, now the scotch.”

  “Yes, terrible. Deciding to have you was much easier—though that wasn’t so important, I suppose.”

  “Oh, you!” Robbie raised his fist shoulder high and brought it down on Colin’s forearm. Then he realized what he was being offered and quickly said, “Did you and Mother really decide to have me, or was it, just … you know?”

  “I think … the Glenlivet. Just a quick poke on a dark night?” “Dad!”

  “Whoops, sorry, I forgot.” They had nearly reached the cashier and Colin was fumbling for his boarding pass. “Never did get around to telling you about the birds and the bees, did I?”

  Then it happened. Two Arabs thrust their way past them, causing Colin to stagger. His heel slipped on the polished floor and he fell awkwardly. The bottle of malt fell from his hands, and although protected by a cardboard case he could tell from the sound that it had smashed.

  “Sorry,” one of the Arabs disdainfully offered, over his shoulder. “Plane to catch.”

  “And you think I haven’t?” Colin shouted as he hauled himself vertical again. “My God, you people should be lynched!” The Arabs, tossing large denomination banknotes at the cashier, paid no heed; until, that is, Colin raised the soggy cardboard case and said, “To the health of General Ariel Sharon.”

  The Arab who had pushed him swung around at that, and Colin read the murder in his eyes, but his companion clasped his arm and muttered in his ear, until the first Arab turned away, relegating Colin to a realm beneath contempt.

  Colin went to collect a replacement bottle. “That wasn’t like you,” Robbie said as he returned. “A bit … over the top, wasn’t it?”

  “A bit.” Colin heaved a deep sigh. “That’s how I met your mother,” he said. “In a roughhouse with Arabs.”

  Robbie, seeing the valley suddenly materialize before him, took one deep breath, spread his wings, and soared. “Tell me!”

  JULY 1969: OXFORD

  “FOREGONE conclusion,” Mark Stamford observed gloomily. “Don’t know why they bothered to viva you. You’ll stay on to do the BCL, of course?” “

  Haven’t decided.”

  Two young men were walking by the river near Oxford, up Marston way, on a weekday afternoon of sun and puff-ball cloud. There was no one else about. The bank became difficult here, overgrown with high reeds and prone to sink into bog where the ground looked firmest, but Colin Raleigh knew the path. A loner by nature, he’d often sought out this tranquil stretch of river. Mark was the nearest he had to a friend at Oxford, but even so, it was unusual for him to invite anyone on these solitary tramps. Today, however, he wanted advice.

  “I don’t know about staying on for a BCL,” Colin went on. “I buggered up the trusts paper in finals, you see. Completely misread one whole question.”

  “Oh, come on! You got a first! As everyone knew you would.”

  Colin shrugged irritably. He hadn’t dragged Mark up here to discuss what everybody knew.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I scraped through, and I’m fucked if I know what to do next.” He plucked a long reed and threw it on one side, as if it had offended him and he were obeying some hitherto unpublicized biblical injunction about it. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Oh, the higher degree, without question. Even if you opt for the bar later, it can only stand you in good stead. But you won’t, will you—you’ll teach.”

  “Christ. ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t—’ ”

  “Sit up half the night drinking vintage port, having no thought for the morrow. Let’s not be too quick to reject that, shall we?”

  “Yes, but imagine it,” Colin exploded. “Spending the next forty years stuck in the Bodleian Library, churning out textbooks.”

  “What do your parents think? Oh, your father’s dead, didn’t you once tell me?”

  Colin nodded. He’d scarcely talked about his parents to anyone since arriving in Oxford. “Do you know Andrew Smythe?” he asked.

  “History bod, isn’t he?”

  “That’s him. He was on my staircase for two years. About once a year he’d mutter something about going off to visit relatives in Winchester for the weekend; then one day I found out he meant his parents. Which about sums it up in my case too.”

  “Mother difficult, is she?”

  Colin just grunted. “At least she can’t stop me living my own life now,” he said after a while, as they continued to force a path through the weeds. “There’s a bit of cash, thanks to Father’s will and so on. Nothing much.” He glanced sideways at his companion. “No rich wife in the offing.”

  Mark laughed. He’d just become engaged to the girl he’d fallen in love with during his first week at Magdalen; her father owned casinos, a ceramics factory, and much else; soon, Colin thought privately, he would own Mark Stamford.

  “You’re priceless,” Mark said, still laughing. “You’d find life easier if you’d only stop fooling around and find the right person.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. There’s a place near here where we can get some tea…. ”

  When Colin deviated left, plunging into the meadow, Mark followed blindly, trusting his friend even though here the grass was chest high. On the other side of the copse that fringed the field lay an overgrown space, half public and half private, by the look of it; two overflowing litter bins suggested that Oxford City Council had a not very effective say in what happened here, but the single narrow outlet to the highway was blocked by a couple of oil drums and two logs laid to form an elongated X.

  “No girl’s good enough for you, that’s the problem,” Mark was saying as they entered the copse.

  “One might be,” Colin said. He stopped, causing Mark to cannon into him and half turned, laying a hand on the other man’s chest. “Don’t move.”

  For a moment, Mark could not make out what Colin had seen. They were standing about five yards back from the clearing, invisible to anyone in the open space. Then a girl crossed Mark’s field of vision. A turn of the head showed him a white Ford parked back from the road; evidently the girl must have driven in and then rearranged the barrier, for there was no other entrance.

  “Gosh.” The word escaped from Mark’s mouth in a dying fall. “Do you know her?”

  Colin pulled Mark back into the copse. “No,” he whispered. “But I’d like to.”

  The object of their attention showed no sign of having seen either of them. She was wearing a pair of clinging white pants and a dark blue tank top, not tucked in at the waist. As she walked up and down she kept her hands thrust deep into her pockets, stretching the material tightly over her bottom in such a way as to remind Colin of a peach. When she turned he caught a glimpse of her face, already familiar to him after many a surreptitious scan in the past; she was fair-skinned, but he would have known she wasn’t English even if he hadn
’t managed to discover her name through one of her fellow students at St. Anne’s. The girl with peach buttocks was called Hanif. Leila Hanif.

  Leila meant darkness, in Arabic, and hanif meant true believer. Or so the acquaintance said, claiming to have received this information from the mare’s mouth. Colin could believe it. This girl, glimpsed on the other side of smoky bars, at the next counter in Blackwell’s bookshop, in a punt going in the opposite direction, had started to come between him and his sleep.

  She was beautiful, not least because she so obviously cared about herself. She wore her wavy hair, black with the glossiness of a newly developed monochrome photograph, at shoulder length, with a hairband, or sometimes just white-framed sunglasses pushed back to keep the tresses from falling over her eyes: so unlike your typical female undergrad, with unkempt rats’ tails drooping to the waist. She wore clothes that amounted to a proper wardrobe too, discarding the uniform of faded jeans and baggy sweaters in favor of designer pants, like the ones she was wearing now, and tailored shirts; even the tank top she wore this summer’s afternoon was by Mary Quant.

  Leila’s cheekbones were high and ever so slightly concave, bringing out a sexy contrast with lips that tended to pout. Colin did not know about her eyes; he’d never gotten close enough to find out what color they were. All he knew was that when she laughed—she had an amazingly sexy laugh—her eyes squeezed shut, radiating a skein of premature laughter lines around their corners. A happy woman, then.