Free A Foreign Affair by Stella Russell Page B

seriously out of joint. Who could blame him for being in love with the stranger? ‘Of course I want to know how you found me, Aziz!’ I said, patiently. ‘I should have guessed you’d do your best to because, after what you told me about your father, I knew you’d have to get the car back. What a pity we couldn’t manage that, but I’m sure your father will understand when you tell him to the whole story, about how much danger we were in and how Mohammad died...’
    ‘But he will get the car back,’ interjected the stranger, ‘you must understand how things are in Yemen. One day soon, perhaps as early as next week, men from Mohammad’s tribe will go to the new sheikh of the bin Husi tribe – not the old sultan, you understand - and demand compensation for Mohammad’s death. They will ask for the usual 50 guns stipulated by tribal law, but the tribe will prefer to return the car but that will cost them nothing. So they will agree on that. Of course, Aziz who employed Mohammad to assist in your rescue will already have compensated Mohammad’s tribe, the Bani Walids, with an agreed number of guns – probably 25. You see how this way everyone wins? The bin Husis do not have to buy guns, your kidnappers are rightly punished for their infamy with a few deaths in the family, Mohammad’s tribe is properly compensated and Aziz’s father gets his car back!’
    ‘I see now!’ I breathed, dazzled by the speed and symmetry of his problem-solving. But Aziz was not: ‘Everyone’s a winner, as you say, except for Mohammed’s wives and twelve children and me, because guns don’t grow on trees and I’ll have to borrow to buy that many.’
    Once again I sensed a touch of the green eye. The top note of bitterness in Aziz’s voice was sharp enough to stop me gazing up at our friend in frank and curious admiration. I offered to help foot the bill, ‘It’s the least I can do, Aziz, but there’s something else I don’t quite understand,’ I said, turning the full beam of my attention back to the stranger, ‘We must have killed at least three of those brothers in the fire-fight, so why won’t the sheikh of their tribe approach the sheikh of yours and demand even more compensation?’
    I could tell by his smile that I’d asked an intelligent question and felt as pleased as a schoolgirl who’d got all her sums right. I might even have blushed.
    ‘Why? Because that al-Amra clan of the bin Husi tribe was recently outlawed by the other clans in the tribe for dealing in faulty guns, claiming they were British-made and charging for that quality of merchandise when they were old Russian rubbish. The al-Amras will be very happy to ingratiate themselves with their sheikh again by handing over the car and will not make further trouble.’
    ‘Oh, I see!’ I said, giving him another lingering look. I was beginning to glimpse the depths of my ignorance about Yemen. If I was to have a chance of surviving, let alone, thriving there I could do with an interpreter. What was needed was what people like Sir Harry travelling in the Ottoman Empire in the mid 19th century would have called a ‘dragoman’ or what foreign reporters these days call a ‘fixer’; Aziz would do, but I was beginning to covet the stranger’s high-end range of services more than I could say. More curious than ever to know more of him, I nevertheless held back, knowing that Aziz would resume his none too subtle work of sabotage if I did not. ‘So how did you manage to find me so quickly?’I asked Aziz.
    He launched into a tale about how a LandCruiser as expensive as his father’s, only six months old, was naturally fitted with a micro-chip that rendered it traceable anywhere in the world using GPS. Apparently, all the owner of a car as snazzy as that LandCruiser needed was a code for his laptop or his mobile phone which would link to that chip and show him an image of the car’s location. Unfortunately however, since Aziz’s politician of a father was