“Boys’ night,” she said, without looking round. “You’re lucky to find me.”
“Business is good?”
“Never better. There. How do I look?”
“Eye-catching.”
She turned her head this way and that, following her reflection the mirror.
“Not old?”
“Certainly not,” said Yashim quickly. Preen put her fingers to her cheek and gently pushed the skin up. She let it drop, and Yashim saw her look at him in the mirror. Then she smiled brightly and turned to face him.
“Fixing a party?”
Yashim grinned and shook his head. “Looking for information.”
She raised a finger and wagged it at him.
“Darling, you know I never betray a confidence. A girl has her secrets. What kind of information?”
“I need a quick line on the gossip.”
“Gossip? Why on earth would you come to me?”
They both laughed.
“Men in uniform,” Yashim suggested.
Preen wrinkled her nose and made a moue.
“The New Guards, from the Eskeshir Barracks.”
“I’m sorry, Yashim, but the thought revolts me. Those tight trousers! And so little colour. To me they always look like a bunch of autumn crickets hopping to a funeral.”
Yashim smiled. “Actually, I want to know where they
He left it hanging. Preen raised her eyebrows and touched her hand to the back of her hair.
“I can hear the girls now. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”
[ 22 ]
The room was tiny, more like a cell, sparsely furnished with a pine footstool, a sagging rope bed and a row of wooden hooks, from which hung several large bags, bulking black in the yellow light. The room had no windows and smelt fetid and damp, a queasy amalgam of scent, and sweat, and the oil that smoked blackly from the lamp.
The person whose room it was moved swiftly towards the bags and fumbled at the neck of the smallest, groping around inside until their fingers closed on another, smaller bag which they proceeded to pull out, plucking at the drawstrings. The contents fell onto the mattress with a soft, metallic chink.
A pair of glittering black eyes stared with hatred at the jewels which glittered back. There was a golden chain bearing a dark lapis. There was a silver brooch, a perfect oval, set with diamonds the size of new peas. There was a bracelet—a smaller version of the gold chain, its clasp hidden beneath a ruby anchored to a silver roundel—and a pair of earrings. There was no doubting where the jewels had originated. On every face, painstakingly inlaid into the lapis, between the diamonds, over the ruby, that loathsome and idolatrous symbol, Z or N, zigzagging back and forth, crooked as the man.
That was the way it had all begun, for sure. It wasn’t easy to follow the exact steps—those Franks were cunning as foxes—but Napoleon had been the author of it all. What was it that the French kept pressing on the world? Liberty, equality, and something else. A flag with three stripes. There was something else. No matter, it was all lies.
That flag had fluttered over Egypt. Men like scissors had gone about scratching, scraping, digging things up, writing it all down in little books. Other scissor men, led by a half-blind infidel, had burned their ships within the shadow of the Pyramids, and Napoleon himself had run away, sailed off in the night. Then those infidels had marched and starved, thirsted for water and died like flies in the deserts of Palestine.
