Page 16 of Never

‘No bruises?’ Father ran a careful eye over him and looked relieved. Then he turned to Mother and they both stared at the still form of Nura.

Mother said: ‘I don’t think she’s breathing.’ She began to sob.

Abdul said: ‘What’s the matter with her?’ His voice came out as a high-pitched squeak. He felt very scared but he did not know what he was frightened of. He said: ‘She doesn’t speak, but her eyes are open!’

His father hugged him. ‘Oh, Abdul, my beloved son,’ he said. ‘I think our little girl is dead.’

***

It was a car bomb, Abdul learned years later. The vehicle had been parked at the kerb immediately under the living-room window. The target was the café, which was patronized by Americans, who loved its sweet pastries. Abdul’s family were merely collateral damage.

Responsibility was never established.

The family managed to move to the United States, which was difficult but not impossible. Father’s cousin had a Lebanese restaurant in Newark, and Father was guaranteed a job there. Abdul went to school on a yellow bus, muffled in scarves against unimaginably cold weather, and found that he could not understand a word anyone said. But Americans were kind to children, and they helped him, and soon he could speak English better than his parents.

Mother told him he might get another baby sister, but the years went by and it never happened.

The past was vivid in his mind as he drove through the dunes. America had not looked so different from Beirut – it had traffic jams and apartment buildings, cafés and cops – but the Sahara really was an alien landscape, with its scorched and thorny bushes dying of thirst in the barren ground.

Three Palms was a small town. It had a mosque and a church, a filling station with a repair shop, and half a dozen stores. All the signs were in Arabic except the one that said ‘Église de Saint Pierre’, Church of St Peter. There were no streets in desert villages, but here the houses were built in rows, with blank outside walls that turned the dusty dirt roads into corridors. Despite the narrowness of the streets, cars were parked along the sides. In the centre, next to the gas station, was a café where men sat drinking coffee and smoking in the shade of three unusually tall fan palms; Abdul guessed the trees had given the town its name. The bar was a makeshift lean-to at the front of a house, its palm-leaf canopy unsteadily supported by thin tree trunks roughly trimmed.

He parked his car and checked his tracking device. The consignment of cocaine was still in the same place, a few yards from where he stood.

He got out, smelling coffee. He took several cartons of Cleopatras from the trunk. Then he went to the café and switched into salesman mode.

He sold some single packets before the proprietor of the café, a fat man with a huge moustache, complained. After Abdul had worked his charm the man bought a carton and then brought Abdul a cup of coffee. Abdul sat at a table under the palms, sipped the strong, bitter coffee already dosed with sugar, and said: ‘I need to speak to a man called Hakim. Do you know him?’

‘It’s a common name,’ the proprietor said evasively, but the way he glanced reflexively at the garage next door was a pantomime giveaway.

Abdul replied: ‘He is a man of great respect.’ This was code for an important criminal.

‘I will ask one or two people.’

A couple of minutes later, the proprietor strolled, with a casual air that was not very convincing, to the repair garage. Soon afterwards an overweight young man emerged from the garage and walked towards Abdul. He shuffled like a pregnant woman, with his feet splayed, knees apart, belly forward and head back. He had curly black hair and a vain little moustache but no beard. He was dressed in Western sports clothes, an outsized green polo shirt with grubby grey jogging pants, but around his neck he had some kind of voodoo necklace. He wore running shoes, although he looked as if he had not run for years. When he came within speaking distance Abdul smiled and offered him a carton of Cleopatras at half the normal price.

The man ignored the offer. ‘You are looking for someone.’ It was a statement, not a question: men such as this hated to admit there was anything they did not know.

Abdul said: ‘Are you Hakim?’

‘You have business with him.’

Abdul was sure this man was Hakim. ‘Sit down, let’s be friendly,’ he said, though Hakim was as friendly as an overweight tarantula.

Hakim waved at the proprietor, presumably to indicate that he wanted coffee, then sat at Abdul’s table without speaking.

Abdul said: ‘I have made a little money selling cigarettes.’

Hakim made no response.

Abdul said: ‘I would like to go to live in Europe.’

Hakim nodded. ‘You have money.’

‘How much does it cost? To go to Europe?’

‘Two thousand American dollars per person – half when you board the bus, half when we reach Libya.’

It was a huge sum of money in a country where the average wage was about fifteen dollars a week. Abdul felt the need to quibble. If he agreed too readily, Hakim might become suspicious. ‘I’m not sure I’ve got that much.’