Arabesk (26 page)

It rained…and then it rained some more. Fresh clouds rolling in over Iskandryia to replace those that were empty. Until they too were spent. By the time the storm had burnt itself out, four carpets were clean and two wall hangings were refreshed enough for the dark smudges across their middle to be revealed as mounted archers chasing what might have been antelope.

“It’s over,” Hani said, looking up at the clearing sky.

Raf nodded. The air was cool—and smelt completely clean for the first time since he’d arrived in El Iskandryia. The pressure was gone, too, the city’s headache lifting, with the storm clouds. Above the street swallows swooped, nymphing on newly hatched insects. Coming in low and fast, flying in formation, their shrill cries rising and falling as they swept by.

Felix rolled up the next evening in his Cadillac and dumped the car with its keys in the ignition, two wheels on the road and two on the sidewalk.

“You trying to get it stolen?” Raf demanded, opening the new front door to greet the fat man.

Felix glared at the nearest fellaheen who stepped into the road rather than try to push past the fat man or his car. “No one would dare,” he said. It took Raf a moment to realize Felix wasn’t joking.

“We’ve got a problem,” said Felix. He dug his hand into a pocket and pulled out a black G-Shock special, the kind people bought on planes. “This yours?”

Raf nodded. Anything else seemed pointless.

Thought it was hideous enough. Want to tell me when and where you lost it?

“I didn’t even…”

“…Know it was gone. So I take it you don’t admit to making a quick trip to my HQ in the last twenty-four hours?”

Raf just looked at him.

“We’ve lost some plastique,” Felix said flatly. “It happens. Someone at the precinct cuts a block in half, amends the evidence docket and usually sells it back to one of the crime families. Or to someone with a grudge…”

He was speaking openly, Raf realized, because the reality of who Felix saw was obscured by a fantasy CV that let the fat man treat Raf as more than equal.

“The problem is the plastique was lifted from Mushin Bey’s office.” Felix paused, long enough to let that sink in. “And your watch was found in the corridor outside.”

“Shit.”

“Oh, it gets worse,” said the fat man as he pushed past Raf and started up the recently uncovered stairs. Raf was still wondering how everyone who came in knew exactly where to go when the answer hit him in the face. All large houses of a certain period followed a rigidly defined floor plan. There was nowhere else those stairs could go.

“Coffee?”

Felix grunted, which Raf took for
How kind. Yes, please…

“Got any cake?” Felix demanded when Raf put a tray in front of him. By the time Raf had returned with baklava, Felix was emptying the last drop from his biggest flask direct into the brass coffee pot.

“You’re going to need it,” he said, seeing the look on Raf’s face. “You’re officially off the hook regarding this.” He tossed the G-Shock onto a table. “Though privately General Koenig Pasha himself says tell you not to be so bloody careless. And to listen very carefully to what I’ve got to say before you go take a private pop at the
RenSchmiss
brigade…”

Raf sighed.

“You remember the broken mashrabiya?” Felix said.

Yeah, he remembered it.

“We took a couple of bits off Hamzah’s boys and ran them under an electron microscope. The carving was ripped apart from inside. Not smashed from the outside. You understand what that means?”

Raf had a pretty good idea, and he didn’t like it one little bit. “That I’m back to being the main suspect?”

“No,” the fat man shook his head. “Not with polygraph readouts as flat as a boy’s tits…” He pulled out a leather-bound notebook and flicked it on, buying himself time as he pretended to read off the results. He could actually recite them from memory and had, in fact, only just done exactly that over his mobile to the Minister for Police.

“The mashrabiya was destroyed from inside. There were no fingerprints other than Lady Nafisa’s on the pen. The scrapings from under her nails contain skin, but it’s her own, and that bruise on the palm of her hand…”

“Matches the missing top for that make of pen.”

Felix nodded.

“And the stigmata on the other palm?”

“Is an impression left by the diamond ring on her other hand.”

Raf lifted his right hand and put it over his chest, then placed his left hand over the top of that, trying to imagine jerking down so hard that the sharp edge of a ring on his right hand sliced into the hand above as he drove a pointed object into his own heart. He couldn’t.

“And I know there were no hesitation cuts,” added Felix. “But there were no defensive cuts, either—no stabs into her hands, no slashes between thumb and fingers. And her shirt was open…”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Murderers usually stab through cloth. Suicides don’t… I’m really sorry.” Felix looked from the coffee cup in his hand to the newly cleaned
qaa.
There was a freshly washed carpet on the wall. A recently polished leather Ottoman in one corner. Donna had even put a vase of wild roses on a marble side table. He could recognize an exorcism when he saw one. Even when it was all for nothing.

“I don’t know how to say this… But in Iskandryia suicide is a crime. One with severe penalties.”

“She’s already dead,” Raf said flatly.

“I know,” said Felix. “By her own hand. And that means her entire estate becomes forfeit. This house now belongs to the Khedive. By law, you have thirty days to make other living arrangements.”

“No,” Raf said.

“That’s the law. But I’ve discussed it with the Minister and the Minister’s discussed it with the General. We’re prepared to say it wasn’t suicide if you’re willing to back up an announcement that your aunt’s will names the Khedive as sole heir.”

“I mean, no, she didn’t kill herself.” Raf knew his voice was shaking but, try as he might, it was impossible to keep it steady. “She didn’t kill herself… She wouldn’t… Why break the mashrabiya, why use a pen?” More to the point, why bring him over from Seattle if she planned all along to kill herself?

“Distraction, maybe?” Felix shrugged apologetically. “Someone decides to off themselves, who knows what goes through their mind?”

“She was murdered,” Raf said firmly. “You tell your Minister that.”

“That’s what Mushin Bey told me you’d say,” Felix muttered.

“Yeah? Well, you tell him I’ll nail the killer…”

Felix looked deeply unhappy.

“He said you’d say that as well.”

TWO
 
 

28th July

Club CdH was hidden at the bottom of a well.

And on clubnite its crowded spiral staircase stank of cheap lager, expensive scent and musty groundwater. This last was because the shaft fed down to a vast cistern strung with steel walkways and ratchet joists, with a bar and JVC sound system at one end, both on a raised area where half the water-filled cistern had been paved over centuries before with stone slabs.

Underwater lights, sunk to the bottom of the cistern, up-lit swimmers so that they cast huge black shadows onto the vaulted ceiling overhead. Only a few clubhards swam naked. They went naked not because it was that kind of club but because public nudity was banned in Ottoman Africa and even being at CdH made a political statement.

That, at least, was how Zara justified it, if asked. Besides, everyone knew
E
=
MC
²
was a cuddle clone. It made danceheads love each other. It also made them way too chilled to be able to do anything about it…

The electrics were working, the bar was stocked with Star, memory on the sound system had been loaded for tonight’s mix. Come midnight the place would be rammed to the rafters, the crowd split unevenly between the majority on the dance floor and those, like her, who would be swimming. Zara grinned and adjusted an earbead, scanning bands until she found the voice for which she’d been searching.

Av was out there, spreading the good word.

“That was Vertigo Voudun, the Blue Ice mix. And don’t forget tonight—CdH goes naked.” He spoke through a button mike slicked to his throat. Inside his helmet Avatar had true quadsound, aural grooves cut into the lining to channel music to his ears. Stacked into one of the drag-resistant side panniers on his cut-down Yamaha DarkStar Racer was a hit-and-run sound system. The other pannier held kit that uploaded to a pirate satellite channel.

It was an old Balearic cliché to wire the bpm of a mix to the DJ’s heart rate but Av didn’t do cliché or tradition. He had the bpm wired direct to the engine of his bike. Every blip of the throttle upped tempo, every increase in tempo upped speed. And hard/Trance didn’t even kick in until his speeds were strictly illegal.

“This is LuxPerpetua with
Escape Velocity,
the FNM 90-2 mix… And remember, naked at CdH… Enjoy.” Avatar slammed opened his throttle and blasted the DarkStar and himself clear over the red line.

Zara locked the door behind her.
Danger
read a rusted sign.
40,000 volts. Keep out.
Avatar had lifted it off a substation at the North End of Rue Ras el Tin and Zara had epoxied it to the door hiding the way into the well. So far, no one from the city’s electricity board had turned up and tried to read their meter.

Known as
CdH,
the
Club des Hachichins
could only be reached by the red spiral behind that door. The staircase was six months old and ceramic, bolted together with green screws, each one the size of someone’s finger. Rumour said Av had stolen it from a hotel in Shatby that was looking for it still.

Zara had no idea of the age of the stone-lined shaft behind that door but she assumed it was at least five hundred years. Anything younger than this in Isk was regarded as almost new. Besides, newer than that and she’d have been able to find it on the city maps at the Library.

Zara was the club’s promoter, organizer and owner. That was, she owned it if anyone did, inasmuch as the medieval cistern was below a multi-storey car park owned by HZ International—which was her father by another name.

Once there had been hundreds of cisterns below the city, with arched roofs and stone-lined holding tanks. Every important family, every mosque or madersa had had one. Sometimes they had even been owned by individual streets or one of the souks. Most had dried up, collapsed or been forgotten. Of those that were known still to exist, twelve were mentioned in Fodors. CdH occupied the thirteenth.

She’d found the cistern before she went to the US but she’d only started up CdH on her return. And already Avatar and a posse of doormen were having to turn punters away. Clubnite ran one day each month, the date chosen at random by software on Zara’s notebook. All clubs went out of business eventually, but she and Avatar were doing their best to lower the odds against theirs doing the same.

And though Av was pretty freaked about not being followed, Zara knew that was just kiddie shit. Meanwhile, tonight was another clubnite and it was her job to go collect the brain candy.

28th July

“Find the man. Deliver the package. Do it on time…”

This was his first day in the job and Edouard wanted to get things exactly right: because that way he’d have a better chance of getting chosen again tomorrow. Employment in Iskandryia was difficult. Upset one man and ten potential employers could slam their doors in your face. Edouard spent a lot of his life trying not to upset important people who might one day employ him. And the important person he’d visited this morning ran a courier service out of an office above a haberdasher’s at the back of the tram station on Place Orabi.

Now Edouard had a day’s work, with the chance of more work tomorrow if he was efficient. And he hadn’t even had to do this first day for nothing to show he was adaptable.

What he had to do was deliver a package, but not until 11:30 a.m. Edouard pulled his old Vespa back onto its stand and waited. He’d found the right café, on the edge of Place Gumhuriya just as he’d been told, and had spotted the man in the photograph. Now he just had to wait for the right time…

“And that was LuxPerpetua and this is Isk’s own Ahmed Shaabi with
Jules&Jeel
…” Slap bass began to stumble in and out of a drum track that sounded more Bedouin than anything else. To Raf it was just weird-shit music from a radio taped to the seat of some scooter parked up at the lights. Three weeks had passed since his aunt had been found dead and in one week’s time he would have to move himself, Hani, Donna and Khartoum out of the madersa.

He was doing his best to think about something else.

On the notebook in front of him was a list of names. The notebook was the old-fashioned kind with paper pages because that was safe. Short of looking over his shoulder or using a seriously hiRez satellite, no one could see what he was writing and he was secure in the knowledge that no pet geek of the Minister’s was sitting five tables away with a hidden Van Eck phreaker, recording everything he put up on screen.