Blood Rules Page 4

“She’s Lebanese,” Colin muttered.

  “East of Suez, eh? Lucky coincidence, us running into her like this. Why are we lurking in the undergrowth, incidentally?”

  When Colin made no reply Mark looked at his friend in time to see him blushing furiously. “Ah. Not a coincidence.”

  “She comes here sometimes.” Colin’s tone was sulky. “This is the tearoom car park.”

  “Perfect opportunity: no one about, just barge right up to her and—”

  “Some people can do that,” Colin hissed. “It’s all right for them.” He clicked his teeth and sighed. “Besides, she comes here with friends.”

  “You’ve been watching her, haven’t you?”

  Colin made as if to hurl Mark a defiant look but narrowly failed to follow through.

  “Well, well, well. Anyway, Uncle Mark will ride to the rescue. Watch.”

  Before Colin could stop him he had marched forward, almost to the edge of the copse, when suddenly he came to a dead halt. “Oh, shit.”

  For another car, a black Mercedes-Benz, had silently driven up to the X-shaped barrier and someone was getting out to clear it aside: an Arab-looking man in his thirties, with a square head and thick black wavy hair and something about the hang of his suit to suggest he wasn’t comfortable in it. He pushed the logs away and waved the driver through before replacing them. As he straightened up, his right hand went to the waistband of his trousers, and for an instant the two young men watching from the cover of the trees shared a perception that each was unwilling to articulate for fear of being thought stupid: This Arab packed a gun.

  Without taking his eyes off the scene unfolding in front of them, Colin laid a hand on Mark’s chest and pushed him farther into the protective shadow of the copse. From the instinctive way in which Mark followed his lead, Colin guessed that he, too, was frightened.

  The driver of the Mercedes got out, straightening the jacket of a suit that looked identical to his companion’s, seam for seam, tint for tint. He, however, was an altogether leaner specimen; perhaps richer also, for gold glittered across the insteps of his black leather shoes, on several fingers, even in the smile he flashed at Leila Hanif as he went to kiss her on both cheeks, holding her at arm’s length like a long-lost prodigal daughter.

  The second Arab did not greet the girl. Instead, he donned a pair of dark glasses and began a survey of the rustic parking area. Colin and Mark retreated a few steps farther, although they knew that from the glade they must already be invisible. The second man kept adjusting the lapels of his suit while he wiggled his shoulders. Nervous, uncomfortable, armed: the composite impression forced itself on Colin like a physical assault, lashing his heartbeat up off the scale.

  The driver and the girl talked in low voices. At first the man continued to hold Leila as if she were a close friend. But then he began to draw her in to himself, and she resisted; not powerfully, not with violence, but with a tension that found expression in the rigidity of her shoulders. Suddenly her hands flew up, destroying his grip. The man stepped backward and surveyed her for a moment without ever dropping his golden smile. He spoke a few words; to judge from the look on his face, words of great tenderness and affection.

  He struck her on the side of the face, once.

  She staggered, recovered; for a moment she merely held a hand to the site of the blow, as if in stunned disbelief. Then she raised her own hand to retaliate. But the man was quicker, moving to one side and capturing both her hands in his own. He shouted some words while holding his face very close to hers. Then he transferred both her wrists to his left hand, and Colin knew he did that because he meant to hit her again.

  “I thought I’d come to blows with the senior examiner,” he said loudly. When Mark Stamford looked at him in petrified astonishment, he grabbed his friend’s arm and marched him forward, almost shouting. “I said I couldn’t see what—Leila! For heaven’s sake. Leila Hanif, my God.”

  Now everybody was looking at him, each coping with his or her own brand of fear: Leila, dreading the next blow; the two Arabs, aware only that they had been caught out in a crime, not yet realizing the weakness of the forces ranged against them; and Mark, who knew in his heart what Colin also knew: that the object they both had seen at the second man’s waist was in truth a gun. Colin had the initiative. It was for him to decide how the scene played.

  “Leila, we were talking about you only this morning.”

  As if through a fog Colin recognized Mark’s voice speaking those words, he knew his friend was recovering faster than the opposition, and his heart lifted.

  “Hi, youse guys.” Leila’s smile, unforced and serene, would have launched more ships than Helen’s. “Long time no see. Thought you must have gone down, or something.”

  Her contralto voice wrung something deep in Colin’s guts, but he could not concentrate on that, for pace and timing would dictate the outcome of this scene. He was director, star, and scriptwriter rolled into one. He called the shots, and if he called them wrong….

  “No, no,” he said confidently. “I’m staying up for the vac. Mark’s going home next week. Friends of yours? Hi… I’m Colin Raleigh.”

  He turned to the Arab who had struck Leila, offering his hand. The man stared at it, then his eyes flickered toward his companion. After what seemed an interminable pause, he said something like “ha.”

  “And this is my friend, Mark Stamford. He’s been to your part of the world, haven’t you, Mark?”

  The Arab’s hand briefly touched Colin’s before leaping away as if stung.

  “Oh, yes, absolutely,” Mark said. “Tabriz. Know it, do you? Persia, actually.”

  “Leila, can you do us a huge favor?” Colin smiled into her eyes, giving his co-star direction in the only way he knew how. “Mark and I’ve got an appointment with the Dean and we’re going to be hideously late…. ”

  “Of course, I can drive you back into town.” She shot a furious look at the two Arabs, whose livid faces were more than a match for hers. “The keys are in the ignition, Colin, why don’t you drive?”

  “Mark?” Colin nodded in the direction of the barrier blocking their exit to the main road and Mark hurried off to dismantle it. Colin took Leila’s arm—it was surprisingly muscular, for a woman’s—and escorted her to the car. He did not know what the two Arabs were doing behind his back.

  It seemed a long walk, the longest he’d ever taken. Don’t throw yourself on the door and wrench it open, he told himself; don’t look weak. But still his fingers crushed the handle hard enough to leave a bruise.

  The engine started first time; Colin heaved a short, jerky sigh of relief. Leila was in the front seat next to him. Ahead, he could see Mark standing beside the logs, their exit clear. Colin put the car into gear.

  He knew at once that they weren’t going to make it.

  The Arabs’ Mercedes was parked just inside the clearing, perhaps a quarter of its length still blocking the short driveway. Colin stared through the windshield at Mark, who raised both hands from his sides in a forlorn gesture of helplessness. Strain on Mark’s face…. Oh God, on mine too; relax!

  His brain wouldn’t work. He had a first in law and he couldn’t have told you his own name to save his life. Leila was staring at him. She expected him to come up with the solution. There was no solution.

  His hands tightened on the wheel. They were shaking. He banged the wheel in sheer frustration, then, very slowly, wound down the window.

  “Excuse me.” He forced himself to look at the Arab with all the gold. It amazed him to hear how confidently his clipped, assumed upper-class accent cut through the warm July air. “But would you mind awfully shifting your car? Just a few feet should do it.”

  He wound up the window at once. Don’t wait for an

  answer. Expect to be obeyed as a matter of course. Glubb

  Pasha, he thought savagely, that’s me; Lawrence of

  ArabiaHe put the car back into neutral and prayed.

  For a moment, neither Arab st
irred. Then the driver, the golden one, spoke a few words out of the side of his mouth. The other wanted to argue, but the first man cut him short with a chopping gesture. They got into the Mercedes. The driver started the engine.

  The Mercedes sat there, immobile and threatening. Seconds ticked by. Why the hell didn’t they move? The answer came to him along with a sick feeling in the base of his stomach. The Arabs were going to ram Leila’s car.

  A choky little moan forced its way through his lips. He heard Leila swallow; then she laid a hand over the nearer

  one of his, giving it a squeeze, and Colin, overloaded with inconsistent emotions, nearly fainted. He stared at her hand. Suddenly he heard a crunch of gravel, stones flew up to strike the paintwork of Leila’s Ford, and the lot was empty.

  Colin slumped back in his seat. “Thank God,” he was saying, over and over again. “Thank God, thank God…. ”

  He saw Mark stagger to his feet, dusting himself down. Why was he doing that? For a moment Colin refused to see it; then the truth burst in on him: The driver of the Mercedes had charged straight at Mark, heedless of whether he got out of the way in time.

  Colin turned to Leila. “Care to tell me what that was all about?”

  Mark came over to join them, sliding into the back seat. His face was the color of raw pastry.

  “They were … they claimed to be friends of my father.” Her voice, in contrast, was quite even. She had long ago removed her hand from his; the intimacy of that shared moment might never have been. “And it’s true I’d seen one of them about the house in Beirut, sometimes.”

  Colin waited for her to continue. When she did not, he prompted her. “We were standing in the trees, watching you. He hit you. We saw.”

  “They … “ She trailed off, staring at the dashboard, and he sensed she was thinking up some story that would satisfy them. The perception angered him. “They wanted me to go with them,” she said finally.

  “Why?”

  “They wouldn’t say. So of course I refused. That’s when he hit me.”

  “I see.” There clearly wasn’t going to be any further explanation, so Colin put the car in gear and drove off.

  For the first part of the journey back into Oxford he concentrated on keeping the car headed straight while he tried to master an irritation he knew to be pointless. If Leila chose not to confide, no appeal lay against her decision, even though he’d saved her life. Oh, childish, childish! he berated himself. Saved her life, what crap!

  After a while, however, the anger faded, to be replaced by a much more interesting set of feelings.

  It dawned on him that here he was, in the presence of someone he’d wanted to be close to for months now. As soon as he dared take his eyes off the road he began to glance in her direction. The white pants she was wearing stretched across the tops of her thighs in a way that made him long to reach over and stroke them. Her skin, what he could see of it, was moist with perspiration, and he thought how nice it would be to lick that, slowly, relishing each fricative stroke. But what got to him most was her smell.

  She was wearing a fragrance of some kind, but she also had an utterly distinctive body scent, rising above the artificial perfume while somehow combining with it to produce this magnificent aroma. He struggled to find words to describe it and failed. Citrus tartness was there, something herbal as well, musk…. Colin didn’t know what musk smelled like, but he knew this had to be musk from the way he kept taking deep breaths in an effort to absorb Leila through her scent. And from the way his jeans had grown tight at the crotch …

  She was looking at him too; not directly, not even often, but enough to let him see she was interested. Colin should have felt happy. He didn’t. He never knew what to do in these situations, which in any case had been few and far between for him. Did she want him to make a move? But how, with Mark in the back seat?

  Say something.

  What?

  Anything.

  “Where can I drop you?” he faltered. “I mean … oh, God, it sounds so silly, driving your car.”

  She laughed, a laugh with no shadows or reservations, and he shivered. “I want to go to the Randolph.” “The hotel?”

  “Yes. My brother’s arriving today; he’s got to know about what happened this afternoon.”

  “You’ll tell the police, of course?”

  “My brother will decide everything.”

  He felt disappointed in her. To let a man make up her mind for her, so … so … well, yes, nice—as long as you could be that man.

  Conversation languished. He glanced at his watch. At this rate, it would take no more than fifteen minutes to reach the Randolph Hotel. Then goodbye.

  He felt very strange. All his limbs seemed light. His vision was amazingly clear; he could hear every rustle of her clothes as she shifted position. She was wearing her severe look now, an expression suggestive of self-containment, hard work, proper self-esteem. It grew upon him with frightening intensity that this girl was right. The person he’d been waiting for all his life. The one.

  The cleanness of the perception was what astonished him most. There were no fuzzy edges to it. Not a single “but” marred the smooth surface of what he suddenly knew to be his rapturous love for Leila Hanif.

  Later he would tell people, “As the lights changed and I turned out of Cornmarket, I fell in love for the first time.”

  As the lights changed and he turned out of Cornmarket, he burst into peals of laughter, but when Leila asked what was funny he shook his head and replied, “Nothing.”

  It was because he’d fallen in love with a smell that he laughed.

  Mark Stamford left them at the hotel, muttering something about a stiff drink. But then Mark did not have the restorative power of love to help him. Colin and Leila stood beside the car in silence. He found himself smiling; that was because she had smiled first.

  She reached for his hand and shook it. “I haven’t thanked you properly,” she said. But her grave tone contrasted with the manner of her handshake; she was flicking his own hand up and down as if they were children at play. He read her eyes. They were brown, he discovered: dark, but shining as if with newly coated varnish, and now those premature laughter lines cut deeply into her face.

  “You should thank Mark too,” he said, remembering that Mark was no longer there.

  “No,” she replied. “I shouldn’t.” Before Colin could question that, she went on. “Come and meet my brother. You’ll like him.”

  Colin and Leila were shown up to a suite. The door opened to reveal the back view of a tall man wearing a dark coffee-hued jacket over pale slacks. He had the phone receiver to his ear and was carrying the other half of the instrument in his left hand. Hearing them enter, he swung around. He clapped eyes on Leila first and his face lit up; then he saw she was not alone and the expression of malice he turned on Colin was enough to make the young man shiver.

  “My brother, Halib.”

  Halib snapped a few final words of Arabic and reconnected the two parts of the telephone, dropping it onto a nearby table from a height.

  “Halib, I want you to be friends with Colin Raleigh. He helped me this afternoon. I mean, really helped me.”

  For a moment, Halib’s expression did not soften. Then, quite suddenly, his face broke into a beam and he came forward to embrace Colin, kissing him on both cheeks.

  “My very, very dear friend, it is impossible for me to know what to say to you. If you helped my sister, you helped me; if you helped me, you helped the Hanif family, which is in your debt forevermore. Sit down, tell me everything.”

  “There’s not much to tell.” Colin felt ill at ease. Halib spoke lightly accented English in a voice that, for all its softness, its almost poetic rhythms, troubled him. Perhaps it was too soft, too sibilant: the voice of a snake wrapped around a tree.

  “I was walking with a friend of mine, when—”

  Halib threw himself down on a sofa next to Leila, crossed his legs, and began a rapid speech in Arabic.
Colin stopped speaking, his mouth open while he waited for the interruption to cease. But it looked as though his contribution to this party was over, for by now brother and sister were locked in an animated conversation he could not hope to follow.

  Colin looked around the suite’s living room. Halib was, it seemed, a rich man. His clothes, the leather valise just visible through the half-open door to the bedroom, and, beyond that, the matching two-suiter stretched open on the bed—all these things spoke in muted tones of wealth. But the object that really caught his eye was Halib Hanif’s briefcase.

  It lay on an occasional table by the window: black calf edged with maroon, gilt reinforcements on all eight corners. A gold American Express tag hung from its handle. Colin could almost smell it. One day he would own a briefcase like that, he promised himself. What was inside? Papers, millions of dollars in treasury bills, drugs?

  Why did Halib make him think of illicit gains? Ridiculous! The briefcase was the perfectly normal accoutrement of a successful businessman.

  “My dear Colin.”

  He came to himself with a guilty start, realizing that Halib must have seen the direction his eyes had taken.

  “My dear Colin, now that Leila has told me everything, I can say, sincerely, that we are more than ever in your debt.”

  He rose from the sofa and came over to clasp Colin’s hand. He shook it several times before resuming his seat. Something about this curiously formal ritual touched Colin. He began to feel rather better about Halib.

  “I cannot offer you a full explanation of what happened, because I do not know myself. But you are entitled to share in our … our theorizing.”

  He emphasized that last word with a show of good humor, and Colin found himself softening further. Halib had his sister’s deep-set eyes, hooded by fleshy brows; when they were wide open, as now, and his lips widened in a smile, he took on something of her physical attractiveness. There was a definite family resemblance, though his skin was a deep brown, much darker than Leila’s.

  “Our family is very mixed, Colin. European and Arab blood. We settled in Beirut three generations ago. Our grandfather was a banker, like our father, like me. Leila is studying for her PPE, here in Oxford; when she goes home, it will be to join the family business. The situation in our country is complicated. We are prominent in business and in politics. We think the men you saw may have wanted to kidnap Leila.”