Strangers. Danuta Reah

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ A square opened up in front of her, paved in patterned stone, surrounded by palm trees. At the far end was a low, flat building raised on pillars, and to her right a minaret reached up towards the sky. The shadows were solid and hard-edged. A white-robed figure stood in the shadow of the pillars, but otherwise the square was empty. It was shocking in its unexpected silence.

      She stood still, frozen in a moment of déjà vu. She thought she knew this place. Then Joe was beside her, his face tense with anxiety. ‘Christ, Roisin…’

      ‘Joe!’ She put her hand out to touch him, then drew it back, remembering where she was. ‘I’m sorry. I got caught in the crowd.’ She had been separated from them by a few yards.

      Damien O’Neill was looking at her assessingly. ‘Are you all right?’

      ‘Yes. I’m fine. It was my fault. The crowd took me by surprise.’

      ‘I’m sorry. I should have warned you about that.’ He turned to Joe, who had fallen silent and was staring at the square in front of him. ‘Come on. We can get back this way.’

      Moving quickly, he led them away from the market and suddenly the old town and the crowds were behind them. Roisin’s head was spinning in confusion. She was an adult woman in one of the major capitals of the world. She’d taken care of herself alone in a hundred cities and yet this place had rendered her helpless, had changed her status, just like that, to that of a child.

      The sun was almost directly overhead. The Arab city had vanished. They were walking through a street that could be in Anycity, Anyplace, past high glass blocks of anonymous business space where the noise and smells of modern urban life surrounded her. By the time they reached the car park, she was glad to get back into the air-conditioned interior of the car.

      She was starting to flag. She’d tried to push herself straight into local time, the only cure for jet lag that worked for her, but all she’d been able to do when the taxi driver had dropped them at the hotel shortly after five the evening before was fall on the bed and sleep.

      She’d woken in the small hours. The green light of the clock said 3.10. She knew that she wasn’t going to be able to sleep again and sat up carefully. The blinds weren’t closed and the moonlight illuminated the room with a cold radiance.

      Slipping out of bed, careful not to disturb Joe, she’d pulled on her robe and got herself some fruit juice from the mini bar. Then she went and sat by the window, looking out across Riyadh, her home for the next year.

      The cityscape had blazed out in millions of lights. Skyscrapers, impossibly slender and fragile, thrust up towards the sky, and the highways bound them together with loops of light. It was as if someone had asked the designers and architects to build a stage set for a city of the future and they had created this edifice, a city that rested uncomfortably on the desert and on the customs of the people who inhabited it. She remembered what Joe had said when they first met. It’s like one of those optical illusions. If she sat here watching for long enough, would the illusion fade? And if it did, what would she see?

      Now, in the centre of the city, the broken night was catching up with her. The furnace blast of the air was sapping the vitality out of her, and she sank back into the car seat, enjoying the cool of the air-con. Her annoyance at Joe faded. He’d been right. She was tired. She could feel the sweat between her shoulder blades, and her hair felt damp. ‘What was that place?’ she asked, adjusting her scarf to stop it slipping off her head.

      O’Neill steered the car into the stream of fast-moving traffic. He still looked cool and untouched by the heat. ‘It’s as-Sa’ah Square,’ he said, his voice expressionless as he gave her the careful non-information. She wondered what he wasn’t telling her. A car cut in from their right and he switched lanes smoothly to avoid a collision. ‘You were based in one of the villages before?’ he said to Joe. Joe didn’t seem to hear. A truck careered towards them and swerved away at the last moment.

      ‘Someone should tell them that they drive on the right here,’ Roisin observed.

      O’Neill glanced at her in the mirror. His mouth twitched in a sudden smile. ‘It’s optional,’ he said.

      Encouraged by the first sign of warmth, she tried again. ‘Tell me about that square. It was so…’ She searched for words. The cathedral-like silence had caught her imagination. Despite the hard glare of the light, she could imagine banks of candles lit for the souls of…who? She tried to catch Joe’s eye, but he was staring out of the window, lost in his own thoughts.

      O’Neill glanced at her again before he answered. ‘It’s known colloquially as Chop-Chop Square,’ he said.

      ‘Chop-Chop Square?’ For a moment, she didn’t understand what he was talking about, then she realized. The bright square with the blue patterned stones and the palm trees was the place where malefactors against the rigid laws of the Kingdom were dealt with. The place of punishment. The place of execution. All the impulse to laugh drained out of her. People had died on those sun-dazed stones, close to the place where she had been standing.

      O’Neill had observed her reaction. ‘It’s part of what this place is,’ he said. ‘I give it a wide berth. Some Westerners go. For them it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a tourist attraction.’

      Joe’s voice cut into the exchange before she could respond. ‘Have you seen that, Roisin?’

      She leaned across the car to look out at the building they were passing. A tower of reflective glass rose hundreds of feet above them, ending in a parabolic curve beneath a fragile arch where the structure had been cut away forming a needle reaching up into the sky. She twisted round in amazement as the road swooped away.

      ‘It’s called the Kingdom Centre,’ O’Neill said. ‘Office space, conference centres, hotel, stuff like that. After 9/11, a bad joke went round Riyadh that they used it to train the hijackers. There’s a mall.’ He switched lanes and pulled away as a car drew level with them, almost boxing them in. ‘With a floor for women. You don’t need to wear a veil. A lot of the wives go there.’

      No one spoke for a while. She watched the traffic as they sped along the six-lane highway. The cars were all moving at high speed, and the drivers wove recklessly from lane to lane with little apparent regard for the danger. She looked at O’Neill’s profile, watched the way his hidden eyes observed the traffic, watched the way he anticipated the actions of the other drivers with the coolness of a chess player studying the board. He was a man who would fit in here. He was someone who knew how to become part of the background, who knew how to camouflage himself from the edginess and the tension that she could feel in the air around her.

      He swung the car along the road that ran through the outskirts of the city, further away from the lights and the noise and the bustle. Roisin had seen maps of Saudi–a vast desert that would swallow up western Europe, with cities emerging from the wilderness almost at random, a country created in a brief space of time from disparate groups of nomadic people, a country where the beliefs and alliances were complex and alien to outsiders like her and Joe.

      The road vanished into a hazy distance. It was lined with apartment blocks, stark and ugly after the beauty of the old city and the futuristic spires of the modern. They were on the outskirts now, with car parks, shacks and industrial complexes. Then a fence appeared on the horizon, dancing slightly in the heat haze. Roisin watched it as it emerged from the urban wasteland through which they were driving. It looked high and formidable, like a prison camp or a high-security installation. She found herself looking for the watch towers.

      But she could see trees and buildings behind the fence, СКАЧАТЬ