Arabesk (27 page)

Most of the names were crossed out, but half of them had then been written in again. In the centre was his aunt, circled heavily. Radiating out from Lady Nafisa were lines leading to Hamzah, Jalila, the General, Mushin Bey, Zara… Lines from these names led to other names until the page was a matrix of connections—all leading nowhere.

What he had was a diagram as hermetic as any kabbalistic chart and about as informative. Because, when it actually came down to it, Raf had to admit what he’d been avoiding admitting even to himself: he couldn’t prove for certain it was murder. And even if it was, what chance was there that he could solve a crime from scratch and with no obvious clues.

He’d followed them all except the General, who hadn’t left his house in weeks. Bought himself a digital scanner he couldn’t really afford in Radio Shack and fed it Zara’s number and then, in desperation, the number of the Minister and finally of Felix. The Minister hid his calls behind heavyweight crypt, Felix seemed to leave his mobile off most of the time and from Zara, once his scanner had cracked the crypt, he’d learned only that she ran a club and the GSP coordinates she gave out to selected punters indicated it was in a multi-storey garage. Which was vaguely interesting, if not helpful.

It was Wednesday, 28 July, 10:48 a.m. and his heartbeat, blood pressure and alpha count were almost normal, if maybe a little on the high side. No one at the office had yet tried to call him and he’d sat outside the Gumhuriya café for thirty-five minutes—which, in direct sunlight, was thirty-five minutes too long for his genetic make-up. The heat was thirty-four degrees and for once humidity was low. All this he read off from the face of his watch. None of it really interested him.

Missing from the report was a record of the complex organic molecules gating through myriad alveoli in his lungs, flooding his blood system each time he sucked the plastic mouth piece of a small sheesha.

Tetrahydrocannabinol…

The brass water pipe had bright edges. As if someone had traced neatly round its undulating body with light. The trunk of a eucalyptus, in whose shade Raf sat, was split in two at head height, then split again and again, time branching, until it ended as a luminous three-dimensional schematic, the answer to some important question no one had ever remembered to ask. He had a feeling the “no one” might have been him.

Raf wasn’t sure if he should have accepted the water pipe or not.

“Fuck it.”

A minute or so later, Raf repeated himself.

Later still, he rested the sheesha’s purple tube and mouthpiece on the café table in front of him and checked his wrist. Not as much time had passed as should have done.

Swirled a glass of cooling tea with a spoon, Raf watching its brief vortex slow and die. Entropy. He was hot, his shirt was sticky and a thumb print smeared the lenses of the shades that kept the city at bay.

He was breakfasting at a felah café on Place GH, incongruous among thickset moustachioed men wearing striped shirts or long jellabas. Everybody in the place was male, apart from an elderly Tunisian woman in black who appeared every few minutes carrying plates from the kitchen, which she left at one end of the counter for a waiter to deliver. It was a face of the city he hadn’t seen, where full breakfast cost half the price of a croissant at Le Trianon and the first sheesha came free.

The only reason they accepted Raf at all was because of what he wore. Though it had taken him several mornings to understand that. The jacket was long and black, and it came from the back of a cupboard on the men’s floor at the madersa. It was old and had a collar of the kind that turned up rather than folded down. People glanced at him oddly in the street whenever he went out, but they still moved politely out of the way.

New clothes.
The thought was random but true. However, thinking it and achieving it were different matters, because his credit card had expired along with his aunt. A fact he’d only discovered when he had tried to use it in the French boutique near Place Orabi. What little money he had was borrowed against his salary from the Third Circle, which was looking more token by the day. Apparently working for S3 was an honour; it was just a pity it wasn’t one Raf could afford.

Of course, he could always ask Hamzah for a job.

Or not.

The kif in his pipe tasted sour, even though it had been cured in honey.
But that’s just me,
thought Raf. The whole of life had turned sour the moment Felix barged into the madersa more than a fortnight back, dropped his bombshell and then gone, leaving Raf with the job of telling Hani she’d lost her aunt and now she was losing her house. Which wasn’t a good thought, because it just made Raf remember that he still hadn’t told her. And he really should have done.

God help her.

He couldn’t eat for worrying and he didn’t want to drink, no matter that spirits could probably be found in half a dozen illicit bars within five minutes’ walk of somewhere like Le Trianon. As for drugs… Leaf cured with molasses or honey was hard to avoid in this part of the city. Kif was sold ready-rolled by hawkers on every street corner and as huge, wood-stamped blocks in the
suqs
around el Magharba. But despite today’s sheesha, dope had never really been his style and when he did break with the fox’s good intentions, he used amphetamines. The basic kind cooked up in basements. Speed made him feel the fox more strongly.

But Isk ran at the wrong speed for sulphate. And while coke could undoubtedly be found behind the black glass doors of expensive nightclubs, just as dance drugs could be had in the tourist haunts, which filled nightly with German kids whacked out on substances a mere molecule away from MDMA, finding fuel to feel the fox had proved more difficult.

Besides, the fox was dying. Raf was pretty sure of that. It spoke less and less often and mostly after dark. It didn’t talk to him the way it used to and it had offered no advice on how to find his aunt’s killers, not even bad advice. Most of the time, when Raf went looking inside his head for the animal, he found only flickering facts and an emptiness where the voice used to be. And all taking the sheesha had done was add an echo to that emptiness. An echo of silence at odds with the street noise around him.

To Raf’s right was the neo-baroque monstrosity of Misr Station, terminus for the A/C turnini that ran through from Cairo. From above, the tracks looked toylike and the dusty square seemed small, crowded and dirty, set between an overflowing taxi rank and a sprawl of flat roofs broken occasionally by the spiky minaret of a mosque, the breastlike dome of a Coptic basilica or the spire of a Catholic church.

Higher still, the individual buildings blurred into a street plan that revealed only roads and blocks of solidified city life. The darker alleys, where the sun daily lost its battle against shadow, faded out until even el-Anfushi’s widest streets showed only as hairline cracks that finally blurred and vanished. Raf’s throat was too tight and getting tighter as he fought against the thinness of atmosphere, fought for breath.

“Your Excellency?”

The city span up to hit him, hard and fast. And Raf had to slam one hand on top of the other to stop both from shaking. He didn’t feel very excellent about anything.

“You all right?” The boy’s voice faltered as Raf glanced up. “I’m sorry, sir. I mean, can I get you anything else?”

A new life, a proper childhood, the answer to who really killed his aunt because, sure as fuck, she
didn’t
do it herself…

“Felix,” Raf told his watch, popping in an earbead in time to hear the number being dialled. There were things they needed to talk about. Like the fact Raf had recently warned Mushin Bey that Lady Jalila and he would have to take Raf to court before they could get their hands on Hani.

“Get me some fresh tea,” said Raf, peering at the waiter. “And take this away.” He pointed to the sheesha, now growing cold on the table in front of him.

Felix arrived just after the tea. Running his pink convertible up onto the sidewalk and stepping straight out to stand beside Raf’s table. “You look like shit,” he said, as he yanked out a chair. “But I imagine you know that.”

Without asking permission, he lifted the notebook out of Raf’s hand and snorted at the chart. “Very pretty,” he said, about to hand it back. Then he paused, and jabbed his finger at one of the names. “We’re raiding her dance club tonight,” he added as an afterthought. “You might want to come…” The gravel in his voice was a legacy of too many cigarettes, years of alcohol and the fact Felix regarded anything before noon as early morning.

The fat man ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream and two almond croissants. “Falafel or cakes,” he said to Raf in disgust, when the waiter had gone. “No one in this godforsaken pit knows how to cook proper food.”

“Why stay, then?”

Felix looked surprised. “You think anyone else is going to employ me on that salary?” he asked. “Anyway, I’m too old for Los Angeles and too high-rent for some burb. And besides…” The fat man paused, choosing his words with care. “There’s fuck all real crime here.”

Raf wanted to laugh. Or maybe cry. Or just go to sleep… He wasn’t certain which. Maybe all three.

No crime…

“Oh, sure,” said Felix. “Twice a year the winds come and the murder rate doubles, but that’s keep-it-in-the-family stuff. The odd drunken Russian gets rolled, but only occasionally and then only if he’s stupid. There’s rape, but no more than anywhere else, the occasional mugging, the odd drugstore heist, predictable low-level stuff. But the real shit? Forget it.”

“Gangs,” said Raf. “Drugs running, organized crime…”

“What about it?”

“…It must exist…”

Felix smiled. “You want to know what my boss does about organized crime? He invites the heads of each family to dinner once a year and reminds them—politely—to keep paying the General their taxes.”

The fat man shut up after that, but only because his chocolate had arrived in a cup the size of a bowl. When Felix resurfaced, the bowl was empty and cream ran across his upper lip in a tide mark.

“Message direct from the General,” he said. He picked up a croissant, looked at it and then put it down again, carefully dusting sugar from his fingers. “He thinks it would be nice if you gave back the plastique.”

“Didn’t…” said Raf, “…take any explosive.”

“Then who did?”

“How the…”Raf couldn’t remember the rest of that sentence so he finished the next one instead. “Who…stole…my…watch?”

Who…stole…my…? Felix leant in close and lifted the dark glasses from Raf’s face. Swearing in disgust when the bey threw up one hand to protect his eyes from the sudden light. The pupils gazing back at him were vast and empty, black as dead stars.

Fucking terrific: he was Chief of Detectives. He was meant to notice these things. “Get trashed, why don’t you…” Flipping open his briefcase, Felix reached inside for a Bayer-Rochelle inhaler and went back to swearing. His police issue THC inhibitor was almost empty.

“Use the rest of this,” the fat man told Raf. “And then go to the pharmacy…”He pointed across the square to a neon green cross. “And buy another. Then we’ll talk.” He tossed Raf the empty inhaler, sighing as Raf fumbled the catch.

“A package for Ashraf Bey.” Edouard stood at the fat man’s elbow, shuffling nervously. Despite the heat he was dressed in a cheap Kevlar one-piece and wore a smog mask. His one-piece had
atlas cares
scrawled across the shoulders in a kind of casual, outdated corporate scrawl that fifteen years earlier had probably taken some account exec three breakdowns and most of a week just to brief.

Edouard was worried. He’d been told to follow his instructions exactly. And it was unquestionably noon, because the square echoed with the cry of a muezzin, and he definitely had the right café—but now the right man wasn’t here any longer. Edouard had decided he’d better deliver the package to the right place at the set time and then wait for the right person to return.

“I’ll take it.”

Edouard was about to protest when Felix flicked open his wallet and flashed his gold shield. “I said, I’ll take it…”

“You’ll still have to sign.”

The fat man scrawled his signature across a pad and reached for the fat envelope. “Go,” he said and Edouard went. Unhappy but resigned. A second day’s work looked increasingly less likely every time he ran what had just happened through his head.

Glancing across the square to the apothecary, Felix checked Raf was still out of sight and gently shook the envelope which was brown, padded and looked very much like government issue. From habit, the fat man held the envelope by its edges, so as not to leave fingerprints. The only obvious anomaly he could see was that its flap was tucked in rather than glued, as if the sender had been too lazy to gum the thing shut.

“What the hell.” Felix rattled the package until a flat box slid out into the table. It wasn’t like he’d actually opened the thing. What he got was a chocolate box, the expensive kind. Charbonel & Walker. Stuck to the top was a small white card with kittens on the front and a laser-printed message.

“If you get this, I’m already dead—Aunt Nafisa.”

Which wasn’t what Felix had expected the card to say. For a split second he almost slipped the chocolate box back into its envelope. That way he could watch Raf’s face for surprise or horror, for any clue at all as to what was going on. Because, as far as Felix was concerned, liking Raf and trusting the guy were two separate things entirely.

But not even taking one peek was asking too much and, besides, knowing exactly what was inside put Felix in a still stronger position. Particularly if it was letters, maybe a diary, even photographs…

Felix lifted the lid and a sweet smell grew. Not flowers, chocolate or marzipan. Something he knew so well the stray hairs had risen on the back of his neck before his brain even made the connection. RDX/C3. High-brisance
plastique
explos—

Glass into diamonds, shattering.

But by then a hundred eight-millimetre ball-bearings had already taken off half of the fat man’s face and removed his right arm at the shoulder, though Felix hadn’t yet grasped that. Where his cheek had been was living skull, yellow and glistening, one eye socket a smear of beaten egg white. A fist-sized hole in his temple exposed his brain and across his upper chest wounds had blossomed like blood-red poppies. The blast area was both precise and limited: the chocolate box little more than housing for a simple claymore.