Chapter 36: A Different Tack

The only possible answer was that she had, as Kâtip had claimed, been sold in one of the slave markets of North Africa where young and beautiful girls of every skin hue changed hands for sizeable sums of money. By dint of persistence and by paying out bribes to many men, he eventually traced her, after several false alarms when he found women of similar descriptions in some very odd places performing some very outré services for their owners, or their owners' clients. Normally he left them there, as he did not wish to buy women and he had no quarrel with these men, for they were not those who had stolen or bought his wife.

He even bought one Italian woman who fitted her description and the date of sale perfectly, but it proved not to be his Rubina, so she was shipped to Naples to work in one of the brothels there. It was luck and persistence that finally traced her for Ernesto. He was using a slightly different approach and had men going the rounds of the auction houses with a photograph of Rubina and saying that their master wished to buy a woman looking more or less like this. One man said he might be able to help.

Under closer questioning, the man, an Arab brothel keeper, said, "I had one such some time ago. It might have been the same woman, but she was useless. We could not train her, so in the end I cut my losses and sold her again."

It took all of Ernesto's self control not to kill the man outright, for Rubina would have fought against the type of 'training' a brothel offered, fought perhaps to the death. He questioned the man closely, indicating that a woman of spirit was what he wanted, and the brothel-keeper said that he was sure he had sold her through the slave market at a small oasis not far from the city. Ernesto followed up the trail to the auction house, where the auctioneer remembered her from the photograph and because she had fought his men every waking moment. Again, Ernesto had to control himself as he was told of Rubina's ordeal, being held naked in a cage and raped repeatedly by the guards. However, he had learned that asking questions of a buyer just after the seller has been murdered is not as productive as straightforward inquiries.

When he finally knew definitely who had purchased her and where and when, he arranged for the man to be enticed into a meeting and he interrogated him for hours. It transpired that he was a eunuch employed by the Chieftain of a group of Bedouin tribes who bought women for his employer to use to entertain visitors. He too had a very clear memory of the woman's resistance to all attempts to 'persuade' her to obey the lawful commands of her owner.

"We were lucky," the eunuch told him, "There was a new Emir to whom we were duty bound to send a gift on his accession to the throne. He is a European so we sent him this woman. It satisfied the debt and a European would probably get on better with her; he might understand her language and be able to explain that she was now his property. Also Europeans are much less choosy about the level of obedience their women show."