Florence of Arabia Read online

  Florence of Arabia

  Christopher Buckley

  Christopher Buckley

  FLORENCE OF ARABIA

  Random House New York

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters With the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. (Got that? Any questions? It's all made up. Okay? Whatever.

  Copyright © 2004 by Christopher Taylor Buckley

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House. Inc.. New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Random House website address: www.atrandom.eom

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  PROLOGUE

  The official residence of His Excellency Prince Bawad bin-Rumallah al-Hamooj, ambassador of the Royal Kingdom of Wasabia to the United States oi' America, perches expensively on $18 million of real estate overlooking a frothy rapid of the Potomac River a few miles upstream from Washington, D.C. The emblem on the front gate of the palatial compound displays in bright gold leaf the emblem of the Royal House of Hamooj: a date palm tree, a crescent moon and a scimitar, hovering over a head. Viewed close up, the head does not bear a pleased expression, doubtless owing to its having been decapitated by the above scimitar.

  Historically speaking, the head belonged to one Raliq "The Unwise" al-Sawah, who, one night in 1740 or 1742 (historians differ on the precise date), attempted to usurp the authority of Sheik Abdulabdullah "The Wise" Walfa al-Hamooj, founder of the Wasabi dynasty and future king. According to legend—now-taught as historical fact in the country's schools—Rafiq's severed head attempted to apologize to the sheik for its perfidy, and begged to be reattached. Sheik Abdulabdullah, however, was in no mood to hear these entreaties. Had he not treated Raliq like his own brother? He ordered the still-blubbering mouth to be stuffed with camel dung and the head tossed to the desert hyenas.

  The event is commemorated every year on the anniversary of the Perfidy of Raliq. Adult male citizens of the kingdom are required to place a token amount of camel dung on the tongue, as a symbol of the king's authority and a reminder of the bitter fate that befalls those who attempt to undermine it. In practice, only Hamooji royal palace staff and the most conservative of Wasabis re-enact the ritual literally. A hundred years ago. an enterprising confectioner in the capital city of kalla devised a nougat that gave off the telltale aroma of the original article, enough to fool the mukfelleen, the religious police who sternly enforce the precepts of the Book of Hamooj. Wasabis could pop one onto the tongue and walk about ail day with a showy air of piety. Alas, the trickery was discovered, and the unfortunate candy-maker forfeited not only his license to manufacture sweets but his tongue, right hand and left foot. On assuming the throne in 1974. King Tallulah decreed that a symbolic piece of dung would suffice. This caused much grumbling among the Wasabi mullahs and Mukfelleen but vast relief among the adult male population.

  A few minutes past midnight on the crisp fall night of September 28, the gates on which the royal emblem was mounted swung open and let out the car driven by Nazrah al-Bawad, wife of Prince Bawad.

  Nazrah's exit would have gone more smoothly had she spent more time behind the wheel of an automobile. Wasabi women were not permitted to drive. However, being both enterprising and spirited, Nazrah had, since she was a teenager, been begging various males, starling with her brother Tamsa, to teach her the mysteries of steering, brake and gas. Taking the wheel of their father's Cadillac in the open deserts of Wasabia was not so complicated. In Washington, she would importune (that is. bribe) reluctant Khalil, her chauffeur-bodyguard-minder, to let her drive on certain half-deserted streets, and in the parking lots of such royal hangouts as Neiman Marcus and Saks fifth Avenue. She had progressed to the point of almost being able to park a car without leaving most of the paint on the fenders of the ones in front and behind. Khalil had. in the process, earned a reputation within the residential household as a driver of less than perfect reliability.

  Here, tonight, Nazrah found herself maneuvering with difficulty. Exiting the gate, she sheared off the rearview minor and left a scrape down the side of the $85,000 car that would cause the most stoic of insurance adjusters to weep. Her intention had been to turn left, toward the city of Washington. But, seeing the headlights of a car coming up the country lane from that direction, she panicked and turned right, deeper into the deciduous suburb of McLean.

  In truth, Nazrah was not thinking clearly. In truth, she was drunk. Drunk, as one might explain to a magistrate, with an explanation.

  After more than twenty years in Washington, her husband, the prince, had announced his intention of returning to Wasabia. along with Nazrah and his three other wives. His uncle, the king, had decided to reward his decades of smooth service by annointing his nephew foreign minister. This was a big promotion that came with an even bigger palace and share of Wasabia's oil royalties.

  The news was less than joyous to Nazrah, the youngest, prettiest and most independent-minded of the prince's wives. She did not want to return to Wasabia. Her years of living in America—even under the watchful eye of Shazzik, Prince Bawad's stern, neutered (so it was rumored) chamberlain—had left Nazrah with an appreciation of the role of women in Western society. She was in no hurry to return to a country where she would have to hide her lovely features under a veil, and in even less of a hurry to return to a country where women were still being publicly (logged, stoned to death and having their heads cut off in a site in the capital city so accustomed to the spectacle that it had earned the nickname "Chop-Chop Square."

  Nazrah had been planning to inform the prince of her decision to remain in the United States that night after he returned home from his dinner with the Waldorf Group, a very influential group indeed, consisting of ex-U.S. presidents, ex-secretaries of state and defense, ex-directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, excellent folks, all—and what contacts they had! Since its founding ten years before in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Motel in New York City, the Waldorf Group had invested over $5 billion of Wasabi royal money in various projects. This made for close relationships all around. Many of the Waldorf's board of directors also sat on the boards of the companies in which all the royal Wasabi money was being invested.

  Today's Waldorf board meeting concerned a desalination project. Desalination was always a hot topic in Wasabia, owing to its geographical peculiarity. The country was entirely landlocked. Its lack of a single foot of shoreline was a grating historical vestige, the result of a moment of bibulous pique on the part of Winston Churchill when he drew up Wasabia's modern borders on a cocktail napkin al his dub in London. King Tallulah had been uncooperative during the peace conference, so with a few strokes of his fountain pen, Churchill had denied him seaports. Thus do brief brandy-saturated moments determine the fate of empires and the course of history.

  Wasabia's population was booming, owing to the fact that every man could lake up to four wives. You were hardly considered manly unless you had twenty children. As a result, it was an increasingly young and thirsty nation.

  At the board meeting, Prince Ba
wad told the assembled Waldorf directors, dear friends all, that the kingdom would be pleased to invest S1.2 billion with the group. The group would in turn hire the necessary Texans—kindred desert people—to build more desalination plants and the requisite pipelines into perennially parched Wasabia. At the critical moment during the meeting, the chairman of the board, an ex-president of the United States, would scribble a number on a piece of paper and slide it over to Prince Bawad. The number on the piece of paper represented Prince Bawad's "participation"—such a nicer word than "skim" or "take"—in the profits.

  This ritual usually went smoothly. But this time Prince Bawad, who was building a 150,000-square-foot ski lodge in Jackson Hole, felt that the sum was well, inadequate. He stared at the ex-president.

  They had a good relationship, the ex-president and Prince Bawad. The former had been a guest, while president, at Bawad's present hundred-thousand-square-foot ski lodge in Aspen. Normally, he would have scratched out the number and written a slightly bigger one on the paper. But this time he did not. There had been grumbling among the Waldorfians. The kingdom had been getting a bit frisky lately in its demands. Business was, after all. business.

  The ex-president merely smiled back, finally. Bawad, with a trace of a scowl, nodded his agreement to the number on the paper. The ex-president beamed and made a little joke about what a tough businessman the prince was. The meeting was adjourned, the doors opened and in came the refreshments, and such refreshments. It was a very pleasant group with which to be associated, the Waldorf. Never in the field of human profit was so much made by so few for doing so little.

  BACK AT THE RESIDENCE. Nazrah took a nip from the prince's bottle of 150-vear-old French brandy-. When, at eleven o'clock, the prince still had not returned, she took another nip. Then another. By the time the prince did arrive home at 11:40, she was feeling no pain.

  The speech that she had so carefully rehearsed tumbled off her benumbed tongue without eloquence or coherence, and heavily redolent of Napoleon branch-. The prince, moonfaced, goateed and imperious, and still fuming over his inadequate participation in the desalination project, brusquely ordered Nazrah to her room.

  A late-night argument between an indulged royal prince and a tipsy junior wife is not an occasion of ideal dialogue. It deteriorated into shouts and terminated all too quickly and dramatically with the prince dealing Nazrah a cuff across the chops with a meaty, cigar-smelling hand. With that, he stormed off, loudly cursing Western corruption, to the bedroom of one of his less troublesome wives.

  Nazrah, smarting and furious, went to her bedroom but not to bed. She hurled a few things into a Hermes overnight bag and made her way to the garage, where she could choose from eleven cars. (The prince loved to drive and was known personally to most of the Virginia state troopers.) She decided not to take the Maserati. Lamborghini, Maybach or Ferrari, these having too many buttons of uncertain provenance on the dash, and settled instead on the Mercedes in which Khalil usually chauffeured her, with whose controls she was quite familiar, including the special button on the walnut dash that overrode the guards' control of the front gate.

  So it was that Nazrah found herself roaring out the gates past alarmed guards, with the grim Shazzik and two of his men, fierce Warga tribesmen in blue suits, in hot pursuit.

  But where to go? She'd missed the turn to Washington.

  After nearly colliding with several trees and going through a succession of red lights, she found herself turning north on Route 123 at a speed triple the legal limit, a fact not lost on Virginia state trooper Harmon G. Gilletts.

  It was at this point, with Trooper Gilletts's red-white-and-blue flashing lights and urgent siren behind her. that she saw the sign announcing GEORGE BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE. Any port in a storm.

  The sight of a car approaching at high speed, followed closely by a state policeman in apparent hot pursuit, is not a welcome one these days at U.S. government installations. By the time Nazrah had reached the front gale of the CIA headquarters, a steel barrier had swiftly risen up from the cement. This abruptly and loudly terminated her forward progress, in the process activating so many airbags inside her vehicle that the princess disappeared from sight altogether, concussed into unconsciousness.

  As Nazrah dreamed of turquoise antelopes living over a boundless black desert, pursued by giant scarlet crabs with snapping golden claws—adrenaline, cognac and the punch of air bags produce the most vivid visions—the United States government was waking to the reality of an incident of epic dimension.

  FLORENCE of ARABIA

  CHAPTER ONE

  While Nazrah was still dreaming of psychedelic antelopes, the CIA guards and Virginia state trooper Harmon G. Gilletts, weapons drawn, examined their catch through the car's windows. All they could see, amid the myriad air bags, were two distinctly feminine hands, the one on the left bearing enough diamonds to put all of their children combined through Ivy League colleges and law school.

  Another expensive German car drove up, this one bearing Shazzik, looking even more grim than usual, and his two mukfelleen. The CIA guards and Trooper Gilletts noted the diplomatic license plate but did not holster their weapons.

  Shazzik emerged from the car and. in his accustomed peremptory manner—Hamooji retainers are not renowned for their courtesy to non-royals— announced that the vehicle contained a member of the household and asserted his rights of extraction.

  This was too much for Trooper Gilletts. As a Marine Corps reservist, he had spent time in Wasabia during one of America's periodic interventionist spasms in the region. As a result, he could not stand Wasabis (a common enough sentiment among foreign visitors). Six months at the Prince Wadum Air Base had left Gilletts, a reasonable man of no particular bias, hating even the name "Wasabi."

  He dispensed with the usual "sir," with which he addressed even the most wretched of his highway detainees, thrust out his impressive marine reservist pectorals at the chamberlain while tightening his palm around the grip of his Glock nine-millimeter, and counter-asserted jurisdiction on behalf of the sovereign commonwealth of Virginia. Stonewall Jackson at First Bull Run, just down the road from here, had been no less immovable than Trooper Harmon G. Gilletts.

  The CIA guards, meanwhile, had pressed buttons summoning backup in the form of an armored vehicle capable (should any gale situation deteriorate seriously) of launching missiles; also of passing impressive amounts of electrical current through the bodies of the undesirable. A helicopter with snipers was also put into play. Why take chances? Why screw around?

  Amid this bruit of riot vehicle, rotor blades, drawn guns, male barking and bantam outthrusts of chests, Nazrah's hallucinations ended. She stirred inside her bulbous polystyrene cocoon. The air bags deflated sufficiently to allow her wriggle room. She peered with horror at the standoff taking place outside her car windows and did what anyone would in such circumstances. She reached for her cell phone.

  FLORENCE FARFALETTI HAD been in the U.S. Foreign Service long enough to know that when a phone rings after midnight it is A) never a wrong number and B) never a call you want to get. But being a deputy to the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs (DASNEA), she C) had to take the call.

  "Farfaletti," she said with as much professional crisp as she could muster in the middle of a ruined REM cycle. Even though her last name had been spoken aloud for thirty-two years, it still sounded like too many syllables. But having changed her first name, she felt she couldn't change her surname. It would crush her grandfather, who remained defiantly proud of his service in Mussolini's army in Ethiopia in the 1930s. Perhaps after he died. He was in his nineties now. Or if she remarried. Meanwhile, she was stuck with the patronymic embarrassment of vowels.

  "Flor-ents!"

  Florence struggled against the glue of sleep. She recognized the Wasabian difficulty with soft C's. The voice was young, urgent, scared, familiar.

  "Nazrah?'"

  "It's me, Florents! It’s Nazrah!"

 
Florence flicked on the light, grimaced at the clock. What was this about?

  She knew Nazrah Hamooj. They had met back in Kaffa, the Wasabi capital, when Florence lived there. Nazrah was the daughter of a lesser sheik of the Azami tribe, quite lovely, intelligent, self-educated—the only education a Wasabi woman could acquire, since they were barred from schooling above age fifteen. Nazrah was irreverent about the other wives, whom she referred to with delighted sarcasm as "my dear sisters." During her dismal time in Kaffa. Florence heard the gossip: Prince Bawad had married the much younger Nazrah to annoy his snobbish second wife. Bisma, who fell that Nazrah was socially several rungs too low down the ladder.

  Florence and Nazrah had reconnected socially in Washington, at an embassy reception, one of the few occasions when Wasabi wives were on public display. They had managed to get together for a half-dozen lunches in French restaurants, where Nazrah ordered expensive wines in view of the frantic Khalil. Florence liked Nazrah. She laughed easily, and she was deliriously indiscreet. Nazrah knew of Florence's own experience with Wasabi princes and confided in her. Florence dutifully filled out the requisite State Department report after each encounter. Out of decency and respect for her friend, she left out certain details, such as those concerning Prince Bawad's amatory practices, If Nazrah had confided anything of strategic value or necessity to the United States. Florence would, of course, as an officer of the government, have vouchsafed it to the relevant authority. So why was Nazrah calling at this hour?

  "Flor-ents. You must help me—I need asylum! Now. please!"

  Florence fell her chest go light. Asvlum. Within the State Department, this was known as "the A-word." A nightmare term in a bureaucracy consecrated to stasis and inertia. "I want asylum" sent shudders down a thousand rubber spines. It summoned hellish visions of paperwork, cables, meetings, embarrassment, denial, restatement and—invariably—clarification. "I want asylum" ended in tears, approved or denied. Denied, it usually ended up on the evening news, a nation's shame, the anchorman asking, in tones sepulchral, disappointed and trochaic. "How could something like this have happened in the United States of America?''