Alif the Unseen (13 page)

“What a bunch of
hagoo,
” muttered Alif, closing the book with a snap. The unsettling scent of the resin-covered pages wafted up toward his nose. He felt his face go red and
fumbled for his smartphone.

He powered down the device and pried off its outer shell, revealing the battery and SIM card. He slid the latter out with his thumbnail and bent it back and forth until it snapped in half. Then
he dug in a side pocket of the backpack, looking for the stash of spare SIM cards he kept hidden in an empty dental floss dispenser.

“Good morning,” said Dina, coming into the tent.

“Rosy morning.” The Egyptian response came to him automatically after years of listening to her dialect. “Give me your phone and I’ll swap out your SIM card. Safer for us
that way, since we’re obviously being tracked.”

He glanced up as she handed him her cell phone: she was wearing a blue cotton robe embroidered in geometric patterns of red and yellow yarn. Instead of her usual veil she had a black scarf wound
over her head and face. Her eyes were rimmed in thin lines of kohl.

“You look—” Alif struggled for a word that wouldn’t sound ridiculous.

“Like a film extra on the loose? I know. I feel silly.” Dina sat down slowly, favoring her wounded arm. “It was all she had, and I’ve been living in that abaya for two
days straight. It’s still got some of my blood on it. She offered to wash it for me. Your clothes, too, if you don’t mind borrowing some of her brother’s.”

“I do mind,” said Alif, shifting uncomfortably. “I’ll stick with what I’ve got.” He bent over the two phones—Dina’s was an older model, without a
touch screen, encased in one of the girlish pink skins that were fashionable—and installed a new SIM card in each.

“Dial seven eights,” he said when he was finished, handing Dina back her phone. “When you hear a beep, enter whatever phone number you’d like to use. Make it something
you’ll remember. Then hit
pound
and hang up.”

Dina made an incredulous noise. “How do you set all this stuff up?” she asked. “This is crazy.”

“This isn’t my grid,” said Alif. “I don’t do phones much. I just know people who do.”

He glanced at her again, furtively, as he closed his smartphone. Dina seemed unruffled in her borrowed robe, as cool and self-possessed as a native tribeswoman. Only her arm, held at a tender
angle against her body, belied the shock she had endured.

“How is it?” he said, gesturing to her right side.

“God be praised,” she answered. There was a half-note of exhaustion in her voice. It was enough to trigger all his protective instincts, and he made her sit down, fussing around her
with the blanket he had slept under until she fended him off with her good arm.

“I’m hurt,” she said, “not disabled. You make me feel like someone’s grandmother.”

“You were
shot,
for God’s sake. You’ve got to rest. I—”

He stopped when Azalel slipped in with a copper tray of tea things and bowls of minted yogurt. Her face was concealed beneath a cream-colored veil held in place by an elaborate chain circlet of
some dark metal; her robe, a pagan shade of saffron, failed to hide the curve of her hip. Unable to speak, Alif backed away from her without a word, ignoring Dina’s curious expression. Azalel
seemed amused by his discomfort. She turned and walked back through the tent flap, glancing at Alif over her shoulder with a look that went straight to his groin. He sat down hastily.

“Tea?” asked Dina, reaching with her left hand for the steaming kettle on the tray. Alif blessed her discretion.

“Let me get that,” he said. “You take it easy.” He poured two glasses and set one of the bowls of yogurt in front of her. They ate in silence punctuated by the sipping of
tea, staring pensively past each other into middle space. Alif felt as though he should take charge and announce some kind of plan that did not involve continued reliance on the hospitality of
Vikram the Vampire. He cursed Abdullah and his wild ideas. Clearly they had exchanged one kind of trouble for another. And Azalel—Alif banished her from his thoughts.

“Good, it’s awake.” Vikram appeared before them, framed by sunlight as he stooped to enter the tent. “How did it sleep? And how is little sister’s arm?”

“My arm is fine,” said Dina in a cold voice.

Vikram sat down next to Alif and helped himself to tea.

“Here is what we are going to do,” he said. “ We are going to take your copy of the
Alf Yeom
to a well-connected
gori
I know and see if she can trace it.
There aren’t many left, and how your woman came by it might tell you something about her motives. We’ll also shake off all the tails you have collected, one of which is even now
skulking at the corner of the alley, waiting for you to appear. Then we will talk about getting you and little sister safely out of the City.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Alif felt his face go hot. “I wasn’t consulted about any of this. What
gori
?”

“An American.”

“No. No way. I don’t want foreigners involved in my business. Djinn are one thing but I draw the line at Americans.”

“Foreigners,” snorted Vikram. “Neither of you are properly native. You are obviously a wretched mongrel, and little sister, unless I miss my guess, is Egyptian.”

“Whatever. The point is I don’t want to talk to this friend of yours, and I’m not leaving the City until I know Intisar is safe.”

“I don’t want to leave the City at all,” said Dina, clutching her bad arm. “This has gone far enough.”

“Suit yourselves. You’ll be in a State political prison within the week. And for little sister here, I think we know how particularly unpleasant that will be.” Vikram raised
one arched black brow. “She’ll wish she’d given it to me after all. At least I would have made it good for her.”

Dina gasped.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Alif snapped. “Don’t you dare talk like that in front of her.”

With a laugh, Vikram stood. “What a prickly little monk it is. I’m only telling the truth.” He stepped out of the tent into the intensifying sun. “Gather your things,
children, we’re leaving.”

Alif spat an insult at the tent flap. Dina was sitting with her knees drawn up and her eyes down, silent.

“I’m sorry,” said Alif, clenching and unclenching his hands. “We’ll get out of here. This was a mistake. He’s not a—he’s not—”

“No.” Dina looked at him. “We should do what he says. It’s too late to change the plan now.”

Alif jerked his backpack over one shoulder. “I just feel like this whole thing is getting out of control.”

“ We live in a city run by an emir from one of the most inbred families on earth, where a few censors can throw someone in jail for writing things on the Internet and falling in love with
the wrong person.” Dina reached out to be helped to her feet. “It went out of control a long time ago.”

Alif lifted her by the hand and held on as she got her balance. “It’s not like you to be so philosophical,” he said.

She tilted her head. “How do you know?”

An impatient growl from outside the tent made them both jump. Alif hurried out, inwardly chastising himself for failing to show Vikram more resistance, more nerve. Dina followed behind him.

“You can stay behind if you prefer,” Vikram said to her. “That arm is tender and we are going to do a lot of walking.”

“I do not prefer.” Dina’s chin shot up beneath her black scarf.

“Very well.” Vikram padded down the alley on his silent, unshod feet. “Stay close behind me. I am going to play a little trick on our friend in plainclothes up
ahead.”

Alif peered over Vikram’s shoulder: at the end of the alley was a short, husky man with a mustache, wearing a polo shirt that clung in the heat and slacks that poorly concealed the pistol
bulging in his waistband. To his horror, he saw the man turn and begin walking toward them, mouth set in a grim line.

“Vikram—”

“Calmly, calmly.”

The man’s hand went to the bulge in his slacks. “You two,” he said. “Stop there. Set down the backpack.”

Alif froze. Vikram loped straight up to the man, who did not appear to notice him.

“These are not the
banu adam
you’re looking for,” he said.

The man blinked. His face went placid and slack, as though he had recalled some pleasant memory. He smiled.

“Quickly now, children,” said Vikram, loping onward. “This trick wears off pretty fast.”

Aghast, Alif stumbled to obey. He heard Dina stifle a giggle. When they had turned the corner and emerged into a larger thoroughfare of the souk, she began laughing in earnest.

“Dina!” Alif had never heard her laugh in public; had, in fact, heard her censure women who did.

“I can’t, I can’t help it.” She bent forward, pressing the wounded arm to her midsection, her laughter ending in squeaks. Vikram looked pleased with himself. He began
humming a
raga
appropriate to the hour of the day, interweaving it with some strange feral tune Alif didn’t recognize, until the music was one hybrid melody, without form, without
origin, trailing along the street on motes of dust.

They were deep within the New Quarter before Alif thought about getting nervous.

“I don’t want to see this
gori,
” he said, lagging behind as Vikram galloped past the sterile edifice of a fast-food outlet. “Can’t we keep the book to
ourselves? You seem to know everything about it anyway. Why do we need to go dragging Americans into the whole thing?”

“A boy as stupid as you shouldn’t do so much thinking. I know plenty about the
Alf Yeom
but nothing about this particular copy. The American is a sort of book
scientist—if you’re serious about wanting to know where your lady friend got the manuscript, and where it originated, and you aren’t simply wasting my time, she may be able to
help. You’ll hate her. She wears the most awful-looking polyester robes, like a country housewife who has given up on herself. These western sisters never know how to dress. It’s all
exotic costumes to them.”

Sullen, Alif ground his molars, feeling too hot and too tired for such an early hour.

“Does this convert have a name?”

“Most probably.” Vikram halted in front of a trim, freshly painted apartment complex with wide glass doors, attended by a defeated-looking provincial man in a dirty turban.

“Here we are,” he said, and twisted inside as the turbaned doorman held the glass door wide for a girl whose black veil was patterned in rhinestones. Alif and Dina shuffled in after
him, flinching under the doorman’s malevolent squint. Inside was a cool marble-tiled lobby lined with a bank of elevators. The Arab residents who whisked in and out regarded Alif with blank
disregard, making him feel unwashed and shabby and too dark; the smattering of pale foreign professionals regarded him not at all, chatting to each other with dogged good nature in voices two
octaves too high.

Following Vikram with downcast eyes, Alif found himself in the entranceway of an apartment on the tenth floor—how, he was not entirely sure; Vikram had entered without appearing to produce
a key. Dumbly, Alif fixed on the one feature of the well-appointed living room that was most familiar: a Toshiba laptop, a three-year-old model by the look of it; probably no more than two gigs of
RAM. A vinyl decal of the crescent and star—something only a westerner could conceive of or get away with—was plastered on the lid. Alif gazed at the machine with mild contempt.

The woman sitting behind it seemed nervous, looking from Vikram to Alif to Dina with pallid, flickering eyes. She wore a head scarf rather than a veil. One lock of blonde hair had escaped it and
lay simmering against her forehead.

Vikram disconcerted her by asking for her hand in marriage as soon as they walked through the door.

“You could do much worse,” he was saying now. “And probably will. I know what happens to you foreign women—your own men have forgotten how to treat you, so you fall into
the arms of the first brown man who gives you a compliment. Since you are a converted sister, he will have to prefix that compliment with a
bismillah,
but otherwise he will be just the
same.”

“This is very rude,” said the convert. Her Arabic was foreshortened, accented. Vikram waved his hand dismissively.

“You enjoy it. Otherwise you would never allow me to drop in on you like this.” He ran a finger along the edge of her hand. Alif was shocked when she made no effort to pull away or
rebuke him. “I’ve made a study of you. A convert may be forgiven all her prior sins, but she does not forget them, does she. She still misses the feel of a man.”

“For God’s sake!” Dina’s eyes flashed. “Ridiculous animal! You’re not fit to be among people.”

The convert looked pained but said nothing. She seemed afflicted by a kind of ambivalence that Alif could not place, and it made him uneasy. He roused himself, realizing it fell to him to defend
the honor of this woman in whom he had no stake.

“Apologize,” he ordered Vikram. “You are deeply sorry, and you beg her forgiveness.”

“Thank you,” said the convert, without quite looking Alif in the eye.

Vikram grinned, leaning back in his faux-French brocade armchair, one of several that adorned the convert’s apartment. A bristling landscape of steel and glass was visible outside the
window behind him, stretching toward the oil fields in the west.

“I am deeply sorry, and I beg your forgiveness,” he said. “But I’ve only spoken the truth.”

The convert leaned against her desk, rubbing her temples like an old woman.

“What did you come here to ask me,” she questioned in a monotone.

Vikram gestured toward Alif’s backpack, which sat on the parquet floor near his feet.

“Show her,” he said.

Alif unzipped the bag and pulled out Intisar’s book, careful not to put stress on the binding as he lifted it free. The convert sat straighter.

“What’s that?”

“This,” said Vikram triumphantly, “is a genuine copy of the
Alf Yeom
. See, now you do forgive me.”

“Forgive you? I believe you not.” The convert stepped out from behind her desk and knelt to take the book from Alif. She opened it on her knees, skimming the text with a slim index
finger. Her nails, Alif noticed, were bitten raw.