Arabesk (19 page)

The first time that ever I saw your face…

“Her mother still believes she spent the evening with a work friend,” said Hamzah. “The kid works at the library you know…” Even when facing embarrassment full-on the man couldn’t keep his pride in Zara out of his voice, and he
was
embarrassed. “Thinks she got shellfish poisoning too. But I know a hangover when I see one and wherever Zara spent the night I’m damn sure she didn’t sleep over with…”

The sentence trailed away as Hamzah forgot how he’d intended it to end. “Don’t entirely blame you,” he said finally, his voice blunt. “You can have the pick of North Africa. Why go for trouble? But she’s a good kid for all that.” He bit on his cigar and then considered the smoke for a minute as it eddied towards the distant ceiling.

“Can’t tell her mother why you rejected her, obviously.”

“Wait,” Raf held up his hand. “That had nothing to do with it,” he said. “How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

“Fine,” said Raf. “I’m twenty-five. I don’t intend to get married to some stranger. And nor, I imagine, does she…”

Hamzah’s answer was a laughing bark. “That’s exactly what her mother’s afraid of,” he said.

There wasn’t much Raf could say.

“Now,” said Hamzah, “you didn’t come here to discuss my daughter. So what do you want?”

“First off, to ask you a question.”

“Then fire away.” The man looked darkly amused.

“Okay,” said Raf, watching a pulse point on Hamzah’s temple, the man’s mouth, his eyes. “Did you kill my aunt?”

“No,” said Hamzah. “I didn’t.” His dark pupils remained exactly the same size, neither expanding nor contracting. The corners of his mouth remained firm and the pulsebeat on his temple stayed regular as a metronome. Raf didn’t need access to a polygraph to be certain the man hadn’t killed Lady Nafisa.

“Of course,” Hamzah added, “I could always have hired someone else to do it for me…”

They sat in a panelled study overlooking the Mediterranean. Waves broke on a headland away to the right, ancient blowholes spewing white plumes high into the air: while on a beach below the window, waves just lapped against the sand and then retreated, soft as a caress.

The coffee they drank was laced with cognac. Raf could taste it on his tongue, though the alcohol wasn’t mentioned when a uniformed maid brought in a silver jug on a heavy silver tray. Raf refused the offer of a cigar, waiting while his host bit off the end of a fresh Partegas only to swear when he remembered he was meant to be using a cigar guillotine.

“So,” said Hamzah, trimming the ragged edges of his cigar into a crystal ashtray. “What else do you want to know?” Smoke swirled around his head like evaporating dry ice around some pantomime devil. The effect was studied, Raf understood that. Everything he’d seen told him Hamzah was making a Herculean effort to be something he wasn’t—quiet, urbane and softly mannered. What interested Raf was
Why?
He was already impressed: the house and its very location saw to that.

“Well,” Hamzah growled, “you going to ask? Or just sit there and look at my decorations…?” A flick of his hand took in the dark oak panels and carved marble fireplace, the polished floorboards and Art Nouveau windows that stretched from ceiling to floor.

“It’s about my aunt…” Raf drained his cup and sat back in a red leather chair. Intelligence told him to approach the matter obliquely, so he did. By asking a direct but different question.

“What did she hope to get out of my engagement?”

“You’re a bey,” Hamzah said flatly. “I’m rich. What the hell do you think she got out of it?” He was no longer smiling.

“But the dowry gets held in trust,” said Raf, trying to remember what he’d learned from an afternoon in front of Hani’s screen, skimming legal sites. “To be returned in case of divorce, if the marriage is unconsummated or not blessed with children. All that’s on offer is interest and that would have gone to me…”

“She had heavy expenses.”

“You paid her?”

“In this city,” said Hamzah, “everyone takes commission.” He stubbed out his cigar and took another one from the mahogany humidor. This time, though, he remembered to remove the end using his little gold guillotine. “She took two and a half million US dollars.”

“Two and a—What proportion of that was her commission?”

Hamzah Effendi just looked at him. “That was her commission. The dowry itself was a billion…”

Raf whistled. As responses went it was entirely instinctive.

“And you,” he asked. “What did you get out of it?” Given the massive villa, the Havana cigars, the uniformed maid and frock-coated bodyguard, it seemed extremely unlikely that Hamzah’s need was anything physical.

“Respectability,” Hamzah said bluntly. “You’d be surprised what a title can do…”

No, thought Raf, thinking back to Felix’s reluctance to let the coroner-magistrate sweat him properly, he wouldn’t be surprised at all. “The khedive can’t take the
effendi
back?”

Hamzah’s grin was wolfish. “I’d like to see him try…”

Raf nodded, slowly, carefully considering his words. “I’ve got a problem,” he said, “and so have you. Actually, I’ve got two problems, both complicated. But yours is worse.”

“Tell me mine first, then.”

“The police. Khartoum heard you threaten Lady Nafisa.”

“I threatened you, too,” Hamzah reminded Raf. “That was my daughter you rejected.”

“But I’m still alive,” said Raf. “And Nafisa’s not. The police are going to pull you in at dawn tomorrow. See what they can pin on you.”

“How do you know?”

“Chief Felix told me.”

“And now you’re telling me…” The man paused to stub out his second cigar and didn’t light another. “You’re certain?”

Raf nodded.

“Get me Sookia, Son and Sookia.” The order was barked at a Sony unit on a table by the wall. Seconds later a little flat screen flickered into life. The conversation was short and one-sided, and ended when Hamzah clicked his fingers so the screen went dead, cutting off a pyjamaed young lawyer in mid flow. The man would arrive at the villa within the next half-hour as Hamzah had demanded, Raf had no doubt of that.

“What will you do?” Raf asked.

“Go down to the station tonight, with my lawyer, and sort this out. What do you think… Okay,” said Hamzah. “Now it’s my turn. You’ve got thirty minutes to tell me your two problems and if I can help I will, whether my wife likes it or not.”

“First off,” said Raf, “do you know if Lady Nafisa had debts?”

“No idea. Why?”

“Because her account is empty.”

Hamzah blinked. “Gone?” he asked. “Two and a half million just gone?”

“One million in and out on the same day, according to her notebook…”

Through a one-use-only blind account?

Yeah, according to Nafisa’s book that’s exactly how it was done.
Raf nodded his agreement. Not stopping to wonder what Hamzah knew about one-use accounts because he’d realized instantly that it was probably rather a lot.

“And the other one and a half?” Hamzah asked.

“Not even mentioned.”

The industrialist nodded. “Those were drafts from Hong Kong Suisse,” he said. “Redeemable anywhere.” And for a few seconds they both thought about redeemable bankers’ drafts and didn’t like where it was leading.

“What was your other problem?”

“Can you recommend a good builder?”

They talked for the remaining ten minutes about what Raf wanted done in the
qaa,
which was to get rid of Nafisa’s office altogether. For all its smoked-glass pretensions it was no more than an expensive prefabricated hut dumped down in one corner of a large living space. He’d like to have got Hani out of the madersa completely but Felix thought that would look bad. Besides, Raf had another problem that made it a bad idea.

When it came down to it, Raf’s salary from the Third Circle was no more than token. He had no money and owned nothing except the suit he wore: at least, not until the will was granted probate and, even when that went through, all he’d have would be a ramshackle house and no means to maintain it.

None of which he mentioned to his host, the man who’d put the price of a billion dollars on his daughter’s dowry. With Hamzah, he stuck to practicalities like explaining what he wanted doing with the
qaa,
and why…

So when Hamzah suggested getting the
qaa
blessed and then immediately amended his suggestion to getting the whole house blessed, Raf was surprised. He didn’t have the industrialist pegged as religious. It turned out that Hamzah wasn’t, but it was a good point all the same.

“My mother died in a fall,” said Hamzah. “It was only after a mullah blessed the site I could bear to go back into the garden. I was nine. At nine you can see things that aren’t there.”

And at twenty,
thought Raf ruefully,
and twenty-five.
And, for all he knew, thirty… Maybe for life. Maybe with some things, once they were in there, they were in there for ever, like Tiriganaq. Further conversation was cut off by a distant bell. The lawyer had made it from one side of the city to the other inside twenty-five minutes.

“Look,” said Hamzah, “I can’t pretend I liked your aunt but Hani’s okay, so here’s what I’ll do for you…” He smiled at his own words. “I’ll get a team over there tonight. Because what’s the use of owning a construction company if you can’t rustle up a few builders?”

Walking over to a pair of French windows, Hamzah shot two bolts, then neutralized an alarm by tapping five digits into a small keypad next to the window frame. Raf’s time was up. “Leave this way,” he said, opening the door to let in a warm night wind. “You’ll find the walk more interesting.”

7th July

For the girl in the water, illumination came not from the
city lights strung out along the shore nor from far-distant stars whose distance was measured in countless millennia, because those were half hidden behind fat clouds. No, illumination dribbled from her fingertips in fractured Morse and spun in nebular swirls around her feet. Whole constellations burned around her shoulders and flowed over her skin like glittering smoke in a high impossible wind. She was the night and the night was her.

Zara had been coming to this beach to swim at night since she was seven, though it wasn’t until three years ago she’d started smoking blow to make the liquid constellations come closer.

She’d brought Avatar out here once, one evening just before she went to New York. Some ideas needed to be left as ideas and that was one of them. He’d hated the water, he hadn’t wanted to get undressed in front of her and one of his new ear-studs had rusted and given him an infection. And later, when she was on a plane and it was too late to say sorry, she realized he’d resented being asked to come out to the villa anyway. So would she, if she’d been born in a slum and Villa Hamzah was where she wasn’t allowed to live.

So Zara went back to only coming here late and only coming alone.

Getting here from her room was easy. A short drop from her window, little more than her height even back then, five easy paces across a strongly made tiled roof, then down a short length of heavy iron drainpipe, the old-fashioned kind complete with regular brackets bolting it to the wall. Chance worked in her favour sometimes.

Swimming like this had been the one thing she’d missed while living in New York. No pool came close. As a child, she used to believe that she’d have been happiest being a street kid, if she could still have come here at night. Now she knew it was only money that gave her the freedom to swim like this, in the salt dark, alone, naked… But even money had its flip side, though you probably had to be there to believe that.

This was her world. Alone, untroubled, with the whole amniotic Mediterranean as an immersion tank. Her mother hated the sea.

Zara sank under a wave, letting warm blackness close over her head as air dribbled from her lips, and felt herself slip slowly until her toes touched the bottom. The rocks were velvet with algae, seaweed flicked around her calves and ankles like sharp grass.

Raf was shouting, only he didn’t shout, he never shouted… He stopped, thought about that for a split second and then started shouting again. Waves lapping dark rock were his only answer.

Triangulation:
he had the concept before he had its name. Noting where he now stood, Raf next glanced back to where he’d been standing, triangulating the position of the head when he first saw it.

It should be…

Eyes skimmed the dark water until they saw a figure break surface. Somewhere nearby the shouting started again. And inside his head came a rolling litany, mostly composed of
Oh, fuck, shit
and
God…

“Present and correct,” said the fox.

Raf’s suit ripped across the shoulder as he yanked off his jacket, sleeves revealing red silk as they turned inside out like snake skin. Kicking off his shoes Raf pulled the black tee over his newly cropped head, dropping cloth onto wet rock without thinking. His heart was a steady hammer.

“Chill,” ordered the fox and Raf’s cardiac rhythm steadied. He couldn’t see the animal but it sounded near. Sounded full-size, too, as tall as he was, with a voice that stuck its claws into his memory and ripped.

“Nictate your inner eyelids.” Raf did what the fox suggested. Experience showed this was usually safer. “Now get out there.”

The water was warmer than Raf expected, salt like blood, and phosphorescence clung to him as he swam. The swimmer was further out than Raf had thought and the heavy cloth of his trousers dragged Raf back like a chute, slowing him down. But he swam steadily, closing the distance between them.

Clear the mouth of vomit, lift the chin…pinch the nose, take a deep breath and blow…take your mouth away and watch the chest fall…

He was pretty sure he could do mouth-to-mouth. Resuscitation too, if necessary.
Find the top of the arch of the ribs…two fingers on it and heel of the hand on breastbone…press hard on the lower half of breastbone…
The number of apparently random facts Raf could pull out of his head always surprised him. Not least because he’d never been that good at turning up to lessons.