Arabesk (119 page)

An intense, neatly dressed Arab woman with scraped-back hair, still not yet out of her teens and with perfect, almost American teeth. Thinner than she used to be if not as slim as she wanted. Unmarriageable, way richer than could be justified and very much alone. Zara swept tears out of her eyes with a furious hand, only to wince as a thousand doubles made the identical movement.

First Raf had gone, then Hani. So she was here to take Hani back, while there was still time. As for Raf…

“My lady.”

“I’m not…”
She turned to where a man in major’s uniform stood by the open door, his sudden appearance and the opening of the door having rendered the room small again.

“His Highness is busy welcoming his mother, Lady Maryam. So he sends his apologies. When this is done, His Highness requires a word.”

“About what?” Zara demanded. Only too aware that her eyes were red.

Major Jalal shrugged. “I’m only Kashif Pasha’s
aide-de-camp
,” he said modestly. “But these are difficult times so I imagine His Highness is worried for your safety.”

Tuesday 8th March

“Okay, let’s try that again.”

Eduardo spun the knife in his hand and tossed it at a door scarred by more cuts than it was possible to count. At least, impossible to count without taking the offending object off its hinges, having the thing carried to Police HQ and getting someone to shoot it, resize the photographs and cross off the cuts one at a time.

A lifetime’s worth of staff at Maison Hafsid had stood in a short corridor outside the cellar kitchens and honed their throwing skills or taken out their frustration on that cupboard door.

“You know what’s really interesting?” Eduardo said.

No one answered, but then that wasn’t surprising. He’d recognized them all. Not the names and not even the faces, but the types. Loners and misfits. The usual scum found working in kitchens. And they’d recognized him. As one of them.

Besides, the knife he threw was the one found plunged into the heart of Pascal Boulart. In the alley behind Maison Hafsid.

“What’s really interesting is that the killer left no fingerprints on his blade…” There were, in fact, dozens of fingerprints on the blade, but all of them belonged to the coroner, his assistant or members of the police who’d processed the knife later, when it was being bagged for evidence.

“Why do you think that is?” Eduardo asked.

A boy shrugged.

“Because he wore gloves?” The man who spoke was tall and dark-faced, his hair grey with age. A heavy bruise ripened over one high cheek and his mouth was split. According to a report recently filed by Kashif Pasha’s
mubahith
, Chef Edvard could be a difficult and sometimes violent man. So far there had been nothing to suggest that either of those statements was true.

“Gloves? Possibly,” Eduardo admitted. “But then there are none of the victim’s fingerprints on the blade either. Which is very odd, because Pascal was stabbed five times…” He paused and was disappointed to realize they didn’t all immediately see the implication. “Have you ever been stabbed?”

Only Chef Edvard nodded.

“Show me your hands,” Eduardo demanded.

There were faded slash marks across one palm and a long cicatrix that vanished beneath his sleeve. In return Eduardo showed the chef his own hands with their wounds from days Eduardo did his best not to remember.

“There were no defensive cuts on the hands of Pascal Boulart. His fingerprints were missing from both blade and handle. Do you know what this suggests to me?”

Ripping the knife from battered wood, Eduardo walked ten paces to the far end of the corridor and threw again. Another bull’s-eye. Straight into the middle of the door, where it joined a hundred other cuts.

Behind him, where the corridor gave way to the kitchens, someone clapped, probably mockingly but maybe for real. That was Eduardo’s tenth throw and the tenth time he’d put the knife in the door exactly where he wanted it.

A misspent childhood had its uses.

“You try.” He pointed to the boy who’d been clapping. A thin youth with a rash on his chin hidden beneath what looked like blusher. “Come on…”

Reluctantly Idries stepped forward. Well aware that he had no choice.

The first thing Eduardo had done on entering the cellar was flash his shield. This was gold, maybe real gold, in a crocodile-skin case with a top that flipped up, like one of those little vidphones. It had been left for him at Police HQ, in his office, along with a matte black .45 paraOrdnance and a scribble pad of notes covered with Ashraf Bey’s writing.

Eduardo hadn’t even known he had an office until a fat man with sweat stains under his arms, a man who wouldn’t meet his eye, silently offered him the key. Concerned with trying to make sense of His Excellency’s terrible writing, it took Eduardo until the next morning to realize his scowling deputy with the striped shirts and perspiration problem was the old Chief.

In the end, unable to translate Ashraf Bey’s notes into any language he understood, Eduardo stored them for safety in the top drawer of his new desk and turned to the files he’d asked Alexandre to bring him. Sometimes in life it was just easier to start over.

And he was right; the files were much more interesting.

“Find me the man with stripy shirts,” Eduardo demanded. He had a box on his desk that let him talk to a serious-looking woman in the office outside without having to get up and open the door.

“You wanted me?”

Eduardo indicated a seat without looking up from his files. “You used to run this place?”

The man’s nod was sullen. Although he added, “Yes, sir,” when Eduardo raised his head from a folder.

“You can have it back once I’m done,” Eduardo said. “I don’t imagine I’ll be staying. In fact”—he stared at the unhappy man—“assume you have total autonomy in everything except the Maison Hafsid case, but first find me…” Eduardo glanced down at a crime report. “Ahmed, cousin of Idries, who worked at the Maison Hafsid.”

At first Chef Edvard felt sure Eduardo was there to shut down his restaurant. Given the disaster at Domus Aurea and the fact he’d put an Egyptian deserter on the staff list as Hassan, because that was the only way to get the man through security clearance, Chef Edvard could hardly have been surprised if this was true.

Mind you, if the
mubahith
had even suspected that second fact he’d already be dead. Chef Edvard’s position, held to under questioning, was that he’d assumed the thin-faced blond waiter was just another undercover police officer providing protection.

Neither he nor his staff had ever seen the man before.

“Throw it,” Eduardo told the boy.

“What about prints?” Idries glanced back at the others, looking for support. At least that’s what Eduardo assumed he was looking for.

“I don’t want to trick you,” Eduardo said. “I just want to see you throw the knife.” Pulling a pair of cheap evidence gloves from his suit pocket, he tossed them across. “Wear these.”

The boy threw as expertly as Eduardo had expected. Without even bothering to heft the knife to find its balance.

“Now you,” he told a girl hovering silently near the back.

She struggled with the gloves, finally throwing with the latex fingers only half over her own so they flopped like a coxcomb. The knife bounced off the door.

“Try again,” said Eduardo as he handed Isabeau the knife and a clean tissue, something Rose insisted he carry. “Get rid of the gloves,” he said, “then wipe down blade and handle when you’ve finished. I don’t mind.”

She stared at him.

“Throw,” said Eduardo.

Without the gloves to hamper her, Isabeau put the blade straight into the door.

“I don’t understand,” Chef Edvard said into the silence that followed the thud of the blade. “Are you saying Ahmed flung this knife at my pastry cook? That was how Pascal was killed?”

“Of course not,” said Eduardo. His tone of voice made it clear he’d never heard anything quite so ridiculous. “Wipe the blade,” Eduardo told the girl, “and give it to someone else.”

They all threw after that. Taking the handkerchief and carefully wiping clean the knife before passing it to the next person. Even Chef Edvard, his throw little more than a dismissive flick of the wrist that buried the blade in the door at throat height.

“Right,” said Eduardo. “Only two more questions and we’re done.” Plucking the blade from the door one final time, he wiped it on his own shirt and dropped it back into its evidence bag. The stain on its steel blade was rust not blood and its edge was blunt. The only thing this knife had ever been good for was throwing at a door.

“Where’s the fat boy?”

Eduardo had read the files, seen the photographs and memorized the names. But just to be safe he’d had the serious-faced assistant at his office type out a list of everyone working at Maison Hafsid and then he’d read them off at the beginning, like doing a roll call at school. He knew who was missing. Ahmed, obviously. Also Hassan.

“Gone,” Chef Edvard said flatly.

“Where?” Eduardo demanded.

“We don’t know. He just didn’t show up today. And he missed his shift at Café Antonio last Friday.”

“Let me know if he appears,” said Eduardo. “Okay, final question. Where
exactly
in the alley was Pascal Boulart’s body found? I want each of you to show me in turn.”

Back at his office desk, a plate of
droits de Fatima
lifted from Maison Hafsid already reduced to a blizzard of pastry flakes, the new Chief of Police drew up his own list of clues, using a fountain pen he’d found in the drawer.

Blunt knife, broken handle, rusty blade; no fingerprints; damaged door; empty corridor; clean steps. A body that changed position. And finally, most bizarrely, one misplaced murderer.

Eduardo drew circles around each and joined them together as he’d once seen Ashraf Bey do, but because his clues were written in a list one under the other, the links just sank, like lead weights on a fishing line. So Eduardo wrote his clues out again, arranging them in a circle and joining them with new lines. And then, because it looked so good, he wrote it out a third time, folding one copy to put in his pocket and leaving the other on his desk for everyone else to see.

It was only when Eduardo reached the end of the street, still surreptitiously brushing flakes from his pastry-stained fingers that he realized his detective work would go unappreciated. He was the boss. The only person remotely likely to go near his desk was Marie, who stood up every time he came into her outer office. She seemed far too nervous to take such liberties.

He’d just have to show his clues to Rose instead. Then he’d tell her the answer, maybe. Licking his fingers, Eduardo wiped them afresh on his trousers and went to buy Rose some chocolates. Somehow eating always made him hungry.

Friday 11th March

“Your Excellency.”

Given that someone had stolen all three door knockers, the barefoot Nubian in the white silk robe had little option but to hammer ever louder on the door of Dar Welham. As a method of attracting Ashraf Bey’s attention it proved surprisingly unsuccessful, all but the final knocks being drowned out by the thud of ancient and unserviced fans inside.

Until he made his stop at Kairouan the previous week, Raf hadn’t even realized he owned a house in Tozeur, let alone one in the oldest district; but the tall dar with its ochre, geometrically laid brickwork and dark interior had been a wedding present from the Emir to his mother, apparently.

Un présent de mariage.

Isaac & Sons’ files were dust-buried on the shelves of their deserted walk-up when Raf and three uniformed officers cut the padlock on the rear and kicked in a door at the top of the stairs.

All it took was Raf presenting himself at Kairouan’s Police HQ and demanding the loan of three good officers, bolt cutters and a hydraulic battering ram, one of the small handheld versions. His name alone had been enough to turn his wish list into reality. The officers were uniformed, respectful and obviously experienced. And the really terrifying thing, at least the thing that Raf found really terrifying was that at no point did anyone ask him for any form of identity.

He went looking for a wedding certificate and came back with copies of a deed of ownership, which did just as well. The date he wanted was at the top. While his mother’s signature and that of Moncef were at the bottom. Fifty years earlier, on the day after they were married, Moncef had presented his mother with a house in Tozeur and another in Tunis. Fifty years…

Lady Nafisa, his aunt, had known this because it was for her that the copies were made by notario Ibrahim ibn Ishaq. Thanking the police officers, Raf had taken one copy of the deed and ordered the men to remove all other documents from the office and have them shredded, then burned. He made the most senior officer repeat that order, all documents, all shredded, all burned.

When Raf left to find Hani, Murad and the Bugatti, the officer was already radioing for backup while the other two had begun to arrange the files into dusty piles on the floor.

Dar Welham, his new house, stood behind the main road from the Palm Groves to Zaouia Ishmailia, on the right, halfway down an alley too old and narrow to merit a name. One side of his street had already been partly rebuilt using traditional yellow brick. Raf’s side remained a mess of crumbling façades and locked doorways, with most of the houses obviously empty. Almost all of the triple door knockers, which allowed long-gone inhabitants to know if the person calling was a man, woman or child, had been stolen. As had a number of the old iron locks and the door handles themselves.

The private courtyard of Dar Welham still stank of cat’s piss and sewage, although Raf had slopped it down at least three times and tipped buckets of rusty water through the open grilles of the drains. Hani and Murad had concentrated on the inside of the dar, sweeping floors and scrubbing at mineral deposits that had leached up through the floor tiles.

That the dar had electricity to drive its fans at all was a miracle. One involved twisted flex glued direct to rough walls and fed through a large hole into next door’s cellar, where Raf jammed open the trip switch of a junction box with half a clothespin. Air-conditioning would obviously have helped. Although being somewhere other than Tozeur at the start of a
khamsin
wind might have been better.