Arabesk (21 page)

Then he left.

8th July

Hamzah kept his promise. The builders arrived at five
the next morning in a Mack diesel with
HZ Industrial
logoed down the side. They parked up in the Rue Sherif and a Taureg foreman in a striped jellaba walked round to the back where he hammered on the door until Raf appeared, bleary-eyed and squinting.

Khartoum should have gone but he sat unmoving in one corner of the courtyard, not far from where Hani slept. From what little he’d said, Raf gathered he was terrified the killers might come back.

The young Taureg glanced doubtfully at Raf’s tattered dressing gown, which came from an old wardrobe on the second floor and was a testament to the late Lady Nafisa’s private frugality. Anyone else would have thrown it in the bin. “Your Excellency?”

Raf smiled. “Ashraf al-Mansur,” he agreed. “Hamzah Effendi sent you?”

“Yes, Your Excellency…” Shrewd eyes glanced over Raf’s shoulder at the madersa’s narrow entrance with its porter’s bench and traditional blind ending. Getting building supplies in that way would be next to impossible. As for removing the walls of an upstairs office once it had been taken down…

“Does Your Excellency…”

“On Rue Sherif,” said Raf. “Bricked up.”

Five minutes later, the foreman came back with two workmen who looked even younger. Each carried nothing more sophisticated than a crowbar.

Next to arrive were the police. Two officers came at dawn. Stepping over rubble to pass through the freshly opened front door. No one had reported noise or called in with suspicions about a truck parked on Rue Sherif. And they didn’t come to check that builders were meant to be ripping out a wall to make space to remove bits of a crime scene. They came for Raf. And it was a measure of Felix’s fury that he didn’t come himself.

Five minutes after the two officers appeared, Madame Mila arrived in a long blue Mercedes, with tinted windows. The kind of car that screamed
important government official.
Raf could put the sequence together in his head. Hamzah had turned up at the precinct with his lawyer, quoting Raf as his reason for being there. Hamzah had left the precinct. In a fury, Felix had woken the Minister to get permission to bring in Raf.

The only thing Raf didn’t understand was why the Minister had immediately called Madame Mila or what Madame Mila could want from him. It turned out to be his signature.

“Sign here.” The woman thrust out a notepad and a stylus.

Raf glanced at the screen and shook his head. “Not without knowing what it says…”

“You can’t read?” The woman’s voice was incredulous.

“Not Arabic,” said Raf, “though I can speak it… How well do you speak English?”

The woman said nothing.

“Well, then…” He reached for the pad and passed it to Hani. “You tell me,” he said. “What does it say?”

The girl skimmed the swirls of Arabic, then read them again slowly, her lips twisting as she mouthed the words to herself. “I don’t want this,” she said to Raf, her eyes suddenly enormous with fear.

“Why not?” he demanded. “What does it say?”

It was Madame Mila who answered. “An order is being issued for Hani to be made a ward of my office and given into protective custody.”

“An orphanage?”

The coroner-magistrate looked at him as if he was mad. “Lady Jalila has offered to stand guardian to this child.” She glanced at Hani. “You are a very lucky young lady.”

“If that’s a court order,” Raf said slowly, “why do you need my signature?”

“A formality,” said the woman.

“And without my signature…?”

“The girl will still be taken.”

“Just not yet,” said Raf, nodding to himself. He handed her back the pad. “I’m afraid I can’t sign this… The child will stay here with her nanny.” He pointed to where Donna hovered in a courtyard doorway, scowling at the noise. The old woman was cook, housekeeper and mopper-up after Ali-Din. Being the child’s official nanny should add no extra burden.

“So,” said Raf. “Am I under arrest?” He fired off his question at the elder of the two police officers. “Well?”

“Of course not, Your Excellency, but we have been told to bring you in for questioning.”

“In that case,” Raf said. “I’ll be with you as soon as we’ve all had breakfast.” He paused, to look at their doubtful faces. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You can get on the blower and tell Felix I’m not going anywhere.”

The meal Donna provided was simple:
’aish shamsi
bread warmed on an oil-fired range in the kitchen, which was where they ate. It was served with a thin dribble of sweet butter and a large mug of chocolate dusted with cinnamon. Donna also made chocolate and warm bread for the builders, then carried another tray out to the waiting police car.

“Woman’s gone,” Hani told Raf, translating from Donna’s Portuguese without missing a bite. The child looked less frightened now that daylight had arrived and she had a plate of warm food in front of her, but she was still obviously worried. “Do you really have to go?”

Raf nodded.

“But you’ll come back?”

“Of course,” Raf said firmly. “They probably just want to talk about the stuff I did in America.”

“When you were an assassin…?”

“I wasn’t an assassin.”

Hani actually smiled. A faint flicker as if she was the only one to get the punchline to a particularly obscure joke. “Of course not,” she said. Grabbing a whole slab of
’aish shamsi,
Hani started peeling off strips. “I’m off to feed Ali-Din,” she announced and slipped from the table. Seconds later, Raf heard Hani’s feet clattering on the stairs up to the
qaa
. It was the first time she’d stepped inside the house since her aunt was murdered.

Raf was distraught, apparently… Having missed out on Tuesday’s murder
and
Wednesday’s autopsy plus funeral, Thursday’s tabloids had decided to make up for missing time by running the killing, autopsy and funeral as one breathless story, with endless sidebars of comment and very few facts. Actually, it was mostly comment or conjecture, with little blind URLs at the end of each paragraph to remind readers that they could always download more of the same.

He was also desolate, missing and strangely unmoved, Raf discovered. A little-known figure in Iskandryian society, rumour now had him as one of the most-influential fixers in North Africa. His work in America was so secret that every justified request to the Minister of Police for official information had been met with an impenetrable wall of silence.

There was a long-lens grab of him sitting on the gravel next to Hani outside the al-Mansur mausoleum and a standing shot taken at such an extreme angle it had to have been lifted from a spysat.

“Lies,” snarled Felix, sweeping the papers from a table. “Like most of the crap you’ve told me.” Felix jerked his head at the officer standing beside Raf and the man stepped backwards, looking doubtful. So Felix jerked his head again and the officer scuttled from the room.

That left Felix and Raf together in a cell no more than ten paces by ten paces. All the light was artificial, glaring down from a single strip crudely screwed to a filthy ceiling. Blood—or what looked like blood—was splattered up one wall and around the chair in which Raf sat. A relic of earlier encounters.

The fat man’s bunched fists were shaking with anger.

Raf stood up and stepped away from the table.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Felix said bitterly, “No one would dare get heavy on
your
ass. We’re not that stupid.” He slammed a file on the table and nodded to Raf to open it. Inside was a single sheet of A4 paper. At the top was a pixelated mugshot of Raf, still wearing dreadlocks and beard.

“We received this while you were on your way in,” said Felix. “Only it was crypted so we couldn’t immediately get it open. But that was okay, because five minutes after you arrived we got sent a neat little 4096-bit key. Nothing too complicated, right? Because we’re police and we’re stupid…”

Felix pulled a packet of Cleopatra from his pocket and tapped loose a cigarette. Ignoring the “No Smoking” sign glued to the door, he lit up with an old 7th Cavalry Zippo and dragged carcinogenics deep into his lungs. “You know, it’s hard to believe anyone of twenty-five could have built up this kind of record.”

Raf ran his eyes down the sheet with rising disbelief. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have that record, full stop… Personal envoy from the Sultan in Istanbul. Weapons training at Sandhurst. A spell in Paris, counter-intelligence at Les Halles. A level of security clearance so high its name was blanked out because no one at the precinct had authority to know it existed. Throw in genius-level IQ, eidetic memory, weapons-grade negative capability and it read like a biofile straight out of…

“Yeah,” said Raf, “I find it hard to believe myself.” Every year of his life was covered, from leaving school to arriving in Iskandryia: he just didn’t recognize any of it.

“Mind telling me why you warned Hamzah?” Felix ground his cigarette butt out on the table top and promptly lit another one, inhaling hard. His jacket stank of cigarettes, whisky and disappointment. “Unless, of course, it’s a secret.”

“No secret,” said Raf. “He just didn’t do it.”

“And you know who did?”

“No.” Raf shook his head. But he did know it wasn’t Hamzah.

“Let me see,” said Felix. “Your aunt arranges a marriage that comes apart before it happens. Hamzah threatens to kill her. She dies. We decide to bring him in for questioning. With me so far…?”

Yeah, he was.

“And then, very strangely, you tip him off and a few hours later his boys are demolishing large chunks of the al-Mansur madersa. Conveniently destroying a crime site in the process.”

“It gets worse,” said Raf. “My aunt took Hamzah for $2,500,000 in commission on that deal. It’s missing.”

“Sweet fuck.” The fat man’s cigarette went head first into the table, dying in a shower of sparks, and out came a hip flask. Felix examined the thing as if he’d never seen one before and thrust it angrily back in his pocket. “You wanna coffee?”

An old Otis hauled them up to ground level and they left together, walking under the oppressive grandeur of the precinct’s entrance portal. On their way through, every officer at the front desk stared at Raf until he stared back and ten people looked away at once. “Get used to it,” said Felix. “Where do you want to go?”

“Le Trianon.”

“Should have guessed,” said Felix and clicked his fingers for a taxi. It was only 9:30 in the morning, but the fat man still recognized when he was right over the limit.

Raf was shown to his table only seconds after two Americans were ejected to make space. The New Yorkers stood on the other side of the red silk rope, glaring and muttering until Felix went to talk to them. They left quickly after that.

“What did you say?”

“Me…?” Felix waited until the maître d’ had finished arranging his plate so one octagonal edge exactly aligned with the table.

“Which one would Sir like?” The man asked, nodding to a trolley filled with pastries.

“All of them,” Felix said bluntly. “But I’ll take those three.” He pointed out three pieces of baklava dusted with crushed almonds. “And bring me a proper-sized cup of coffee…”

“Well?” Raf asked.

Felix looked down the street as if he might still see the departing New Yorkers through the press of bodies filling the sidewalk. “Said you were the Khedive’s personal hit man and they’d been hogging your table… You’re not, are you?” Before Raf could answer, Felix flipped up his hand. “Don’t feel you have to answer that, obviously.”

Huntsville had been simple. Raf had understood the rules. Most of which he’d kept and a few of which he’d broken. He’d taken who he’d become on remand and kept the identity, because it worked. The freaky hair and biker beard had been good protective camouflage. But trying to understand his new life was like pushing water up a hill. Every time he got near the top the fox curled up inside his head warned him it was the wrong hill or the water was gone. Raf was tired, more scared than he dared admit and he was alone in a city that got more, not less weird the more he knew about it. And then there was Hani…

“Look,” said Raf, “can I tell you something?”

Felix bit off another chunk of baklava and Raf took this for assent.

“That piece of paper,” said Raf, “it’s crap, all of it. I don’t have weapons training. I’m not in the Sultan’s employ. I’ve never even been to Stambul…”

“Yeah, right.” Felix asked, swallowing his mouthful. “So what
were
you doing in America?”

Raf didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Felix sighed, but whatever he wanted to say was cut dead by a sudden buzz from his watch. “You’d better get home,” he told Raf as he tapped the
off
button. “Madame Mila’s turned up again.”

“She
called
you?”
It sounded unlikely even as Raf said it.

“No, that was Hani.”

“How did she know I was with you?” Raf asked.

The fat man scooped up the last sticky crumbs of baklava and stuffed them into his open mouth. “More to the point,” he said, “how did the kid get my number?”

Seattle

“And where do you think you’re going?”

ZeeZee paused on the steps while a doorman raked him with the gaze that hotel staff everywhere reserve for tramps, hawkers and delivery boys who’ve come to the wrong entrance.

“Got this.” ZeeZee lifted the cardboard crate a little higher and waited. What people expected to see was usually what they saw: it cut down on thinking time. ZeeZee had been about five when he’d worked that out. The doorman expected elegant diners and the occasional delivery boy too idiotic or ignorant to find his own way to the service entrance at the rear.

Which was what ZeeZee gave him.

“Where do you want it?” ZeeZee might sound stupid but he was being intelligent, more than intelligent… Unintelligent people who disappointed Hu San usually ended up having accidents. While people intelligent enough to be disappointed in themselves mostly decided to suck on a gun barrel, to save Hu San the trouble.