Arabesk (29 page)

“Ashraf…” Zara’s voice shook. “Don’t…”

“I didn’t kill Lady Nafisa,” Raf said slowly. “And I didn’t murder Felix.” He was talking to the officer, but Zara was listening and so was the kid; so really he was talking to them too. “But I’m sure as hell going to hunt down whoever did. And I’ll shoot anyone who gets in my way. You make sure everyone gets that message.”

Lifting the gendarme’s Colt from her lifeless fingers, Raf tossed it after the watch and then walked her to the rear of her van, with the two squaddies following meekly behind. She climbed into the riot van without being asked.

“Now you,” he ordered and the squaddies scrambled inside, jostling each other in their haste. They stank of sweat, fear and kif. Which was what you got if you conscripted
fellah
who just didn’t want the job. Still smiling, Raf slammed the rear doors, locked them and dropped their electronic key through the grille of a storm drain.

“Coming…?”

Watchful and unhappy, Zara shook her head. “No,” she said. “Running away only makes things worse.”

Raf’s laugh was sardonic. “You obviously never tried it.”

29th July

Sudden and abrupt, Raf’s kick echoed off the side of a
derelict Customs shed, booming out over rusty tracks to the night-time emptiness of the docks beyond. No lights came on anywhere, no security guard ambled out of the darkness to find out what was going on.

The stretch of crumbling tenement south of Maritime Station was that kind of area. Low concrete housing with rusted bars for shutters and blank squares of chipboard where glass should be. Cancerous enough to make every project block Raf had ever seen look suddenly rich.

“For me…” Raf announced, as he kicked again at the steel door of the deserted warehouse, under a peeling signboard that read
Pascarli & Co, Cotton Shippers
, “Aunt Nafisa’s timing makes no sense. That’s the problem.”

He’d talked his way through the first two diagrams in his notebook, skipped the autopsy data as being much too upsetting for Hani, and was back to chasing timescale round in his head. Who was where, when?

He was talking to Hani because it beat bouncing ideas off thin air and the fox was back in hiding, or dead. Or both. At least the kid had Ali-Din to talk to, not that she spoke much to her rag dog either these days.

Hani was worried about something but asking her directly about it hadn’t worked. Though he’d tried that several times, starting when he’d got back to the madersa after Felix flatlined. All he’d got in return was sullen silence.

Back then, Raf hadn’t told the small girl the fat man was dead: any more than he’d told her they had to leave the house. Just asked his question and regretted getting no answers. But scaring kids wasn’t his style. And besides, Raf could remember a time when he too had shut right down, until the adults round him began to say his lights were on but no one was home. And he
had
been home, of course—he just wasn’t answering the door…

“You see,” Raf said. “Aunt Nafisa went to a committee meeting at C&C at 10 a.m.” He used
a.m.
because that was what Hani knew. Lady Nafisa had thought the 24-hour clock vulgar. “She left her meeting at eleven, but didn’t get home until one. So where was she…?

“Now,” said Raf, answering his own question. “She could have been shopping.” He kicked one last time at the door and it flew back to reveal damp-smelling darkness. “But then, what happened to her parcels?”

But it wasn’t shopping, because Lady Nafisa didn’t buy things when other people were about. She made stores open for her specially, at night, when she could count on the manager’s full attention.

“Through here,” Raf told the girl and stepped into a musty darkness, nudging the door shut with his heel. Her fingers in his hand felt as fragile as twigs and almost as dry. She hadn’t yet asked Raf why he’d really shot the fat man. But as she’d trotted through the night towards the docks, the child had tossed possible answers around in her head and not liked most of them.

It had been Ali-Din’s job to find the warehouse. And the way it worked was that every time a crossroads appeared, Hani would stare at the eyes of her rag dog and then nod left or right depending on which eye blinked. If neither lit then the route was straight ahead. The puppy ran on some kind of satellite positioning system matched to a template of Iskandryia.

Hani’s slight thaw had lasted until they reached the end of Fuad Premier, where a narrowing boulevard intersected with Rue Ibrahim and rattling midnight trams ran south-west from Place Orabi towards a rail terminus and the Midas Refinery stockyard.

The address Zara had given Raf was on the far side of the tramline, in an area where ramshackle souks gave way to near-derelict tenements before ending in a stink of sewage, rotting fish and diesel that leached from rusting dockside cranes dotting a cancerous concrete wilderness at the south-east end of Western Harbour.

It was dog-shit city.

A whole area of festering poverty that the
Rough Guide
didn’t mention, other than to suggest that visitors should keep to the main routes during the day and avoid the place altogether at night. The official city guide omitted any mention of the area.

And, in a sense, the tenements and sprawl of empty warehouses
didn’t
exist for most people in Iskandryia: for them, the slums were invisible and unnoticed, except by
felaheen
who didn’t vote or would only have voted the wrong way if they did. America might stack its urban poor one family on top of another in high-rise blocks but in North Africa the poor were marginalized in a more literal sense… They lived at the barren edges of its cities or in occupied unwanted spaces like this one—which existed between a tramline and the dockside railway, was edged along its third side by a canal and slid, on its one good side, from squalor through poverty to the almost picturesque as it finally meshed with the souks of the El Gomruk…

“Up here,” said Raf, reaching a ladder. His voice echoed inside the empty warehouse the way kicking down its door had echoed off derelict buildings outside.

Above was a prefabricated office, slung between two steel girders originally added to strengthen the brick walls of the warehouse. The spiral staircase that should have led up to it was missing, so maybe Zara’s tale of an upset hotel was untrue.

“Can’t see,” Hani protested. She sounded cross and upset, but at least she’d started talking.

“I can,” said Raf. “I’ll go first and you follow after.” Part of him wanted to do it the other way round—so that he could catch Hani in case she slipped—but it was impossible to know what he might find in the office, so he went first. He could have made her stay below, of course, but he knew the child would like that even less.

“How can you see?” Hani asked scornfully. “It’s dark.”

“Ali-Din can see in the dark.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because Ali-Din is only…”

Her voice trailed away and Raf started climbing. Left hand pulling him up the ladder, his right tightly gripping the fat man’s revolver.

The prefab was empty of people and full of kit. Each wall was smothered with cheap Ikea shelving, the bolt-together kind. Metal tables were pushed hard against the shelves. The only gap on the walls was a window, that would have looked north along the dockside towards Maritime Station if someone hadn’t covered it over with tar paper and taped along all the edges. There was a sourly mechanical, almost chemical stink to the place, underlaid with stale tobacco.

Most of the kit in the room was instantly recognizable, like two stand-alone Median PCs and an Apple laptop with a fold-out satellite dish, which was definitely illegal. Plus a stack of vinyl piled next to a Blaupunkt mixing desk. The rest of the apparatus was far weirder. Starting with a full scuba suit, matching quadruple oxygen bottles and a shrink-wrapped box of sterile 1000ml beakers stacked next to the entrance hatch.

And someone had gone to the trouble of dragging plastic drums of distilled water up to the office. But that was the least of it. In one corner was a Braun freezer, wired to a bank of car batteries. In the opposite corner, a cupboard made of glass had an extractor hood taped and double-taped to its top, with a duct leading straight out through an outside wall.

On a table by the cupboard a long glass spiral of tubes fed down to a sealed beaker and every ring in the spiral was joined to the next with a ground-glass joint. Jammed between two of the rings was a half-smoked packet of untipped Cleopatra, while a battered paperback copy of
Uncle Fester’s Organic Chemistry
leaned against the beaker. The
Fester’s
was the edition with a skull on its cover.

Inside a medical chest placed on the floor next to the table were bandages, burn salve, spray skin, surgical glue, a small canister of Japanese oxygen and a box of surgical gloves. There were also a dozen more packets of untipped Cleopatra.

“What have you found?” Hani demanded.

“A kitchen,” said Raf as he returned to the trap door and put out a hand to help her up, “but not the kind you know.” He tried not to mind that the child flinched away from his grip.

“Wake up,”
said Hani.

Raf came to on his feet. Banging into shelving as he spun, hand going for his shoulder holster before he remembered he didn’t wear one these days and the gun was in his pocket.

Instinctively, he checked the fat man’s revolver, fast-flipping the cylinder. Out and in. The weapon was one shot light—as if he could forget.

Still, with luck, whoever Ali-Din said was coming wouldn’t know that.

“Ali-Din…?”

Raf stopped.

“How does Ali-Din know someone’s coming?”

In answer, Hani put her puppy on a table by the taped-over window. The rag dog shuffled round and swung its large head until its eyes stared at where the tenements would be visible in the early-morning daylight, if only plyboard and tar paper hadn’t replaced the glass. When its head stopped swaying, its blue-buttoned tail started to wag, like a faulty metronome.

“Don’t tell me,” Raf said. “The nearer the person, the faster the wag?”

Hani nodded.

“So it’s a friend?”

Hani’s eyes went wide, impressed at his grasp.

“A friend?” Raf stressed, even though he already knew the answer.

Whoever had given the toy to Hani had chosen an expensive model. Though the mechanics couldn’t be that difficult. To greet or growl the unit wouldn’t even need satellite tracking—not the visual kind, anyway. Simple band scanning could check numbers on a mobile against basic visual recognition software and have the wag or growl defined either by how the child had reacted visually to that person before, or else, if the unit was really expensive, by reading off stress levels or beta waves.

There’d be a time lag of a few seconds but nothing too difficult to hide.

“Tell me,” said Raf, as he pocketed the revolver and headed for the trapdoor. “Wag or growl? Which did Ali-Din do when he saw Aunt Nafisa?” Hani still hadn’t answered when he reached the bottom of the ladder…

“Sweet fuck.” Raf forgot all about saying hello to Zara. Instead he stepped out into the morning glare, scrabbling for his dark glasses. He still couldn’t get used to the North African sun, not after the grey skies of Seattle and the equally soft skies of Switzerland and Scotland before that.

Zara was dressed in tight black jeans, matched with a white silk shirt with long sleeves, no bra and only flip-flops on her feet. But it was her split lip he noticed.

“Leave it,” she said, when he tried to check the swelling. She stopped outside the warehouse door, refusing to go any further. “I want to know why you shot Felix…”

“He was already dying. I just speeded it up.”

Zara sighed. “How very macho.” She pulled a print of
Iskandryia Today
from under her arm. “You sure it wasn’t because he told the truth about Lady Nafisa’s suicide?”

“How do you…?” Raf demanded.

“The whole city knows,” said Zara and shoved the front page in his face. Felix stared out, looking fifteen years younger and a hundred pounds thinner than when Raf had last seen him. There was no picture of Raf, though the words
Suicide, Lady Nafisa,
and
Ashraf Bey
made cross-heads down two columns on the right.

“Nafisa didn’t commit suicide,” Raf said flatly. “She was too devout, too
respectable.”
He put heavy stress on the last word, and knew it to be true. Delete and discard were functions his unconscious had never had to master. He could actually
see
Lady Nafisa, alive inside his head, retiring to her room five times a day for prayers. See her reprimanding Hani for playing with Ali-Din that first Friday when the child should have been reading quietly or practising needlework.

Suicide was a sin.

Besides, she was too selfish, too in love with who she was to throw over worldly grandeur without a fight. Lady Nafisa didn’t cast herself into darkness. Someone forced her through that door…

“There’s been a couple of people on the radio who agree it wasn’t suicide,” said Zara. “They say it was you.”

“Me?” Raf stopped, shook his head and stared at the picture of Felix. He hadn’t murdered the fat man and he hadn’t killed his aunt. And Raf didn’t need to stake his life on it, because he already had.

The raid on CdH also made the front page, but much smaller. And the picture of Zara was a paparazzi shot, snatched outside the Precinct as she clambered from the back of a riot van.

The copy didn’t actually need to say she’d been naked beneath her coat when arrested, because the valley of shadow just above where the
faux
ocelot buttoned told its own story. Which hadn’t stopped the paper stressing her nakedness three times in three paragraphs.

“What did they do to you?” Stepping forward, Raf took Zara’s chin gently between first finger and thumb and turned her cheek to the light. A heavy bruise could just be seen beneath carefully applied concealer. One eye was also bruised and bloodshot, though Zara hadn’t bothered with belladonna drops. No amount of eye brightener would be enough to hide her puffy eyelids or the redness where tears had dried.