Arabesk (3 page)

He just wished he could remember at what point the fox had disappeared. He was pretty sure it had been there right up to the point they hit Immigration. And ZeeZee always hated it when the fox went invisible on him. It was like suddenly not being able to see in the dark.

29th June

Tiri had definitely been there when ZeeZee first landed
in Iskandryia, twisting itself in and out of people’s legs, sometimes so thinned by distance that ZeeZee lost track of everything but the fox’s silver tail and hacking cough.

Too many cigarettes,
a biology master had told him years before, when ZeeZee had asked why a cub stood choking in a distant field, shoulders hunched as it tried to throw up a splinter of bone. The other men present had laughed and one had rumpled the small boy’s blond hair.

My own little wild animal, the visitor called him. That was just before ZeeZee decided to fail all his exams…

“Read this.” An immigration officer in khaki thrust a green embarkation card into ZeeZee’s hand and waved him towards the end of a queue. There were several queues, all moving inexorably towards a row of desks where simple polygraphs stood waiting, their guts exposed to the air. A golem-featured man from the line alongside glanced over and ZeeZee thought for a moment he was going to nod or say something. But he just stared at ZeeZee’s matted hair and then looked away.

It was one of those evenings.

On the card was a list of statements to be read aloud, in a choice of French, Arabic, German or English…

He wasn’t a drug addict.

He wasn’t infectious.

He didn’t plan to overthrow the khedive…

So far so good. ZeeZee skimmed his eyes down the next three prohibitions against entering El Iskandryia.

He wasn’t planning to purchase for export any classical or Pharaonic artefacts.

He didn’t belong to a proscribed fundamentalist group.

He’d never been charged with murder.
Except he had…

It might have been the last prohibition that made ZeeZee sweat, or it could have been the lack of air-conditioning. Whatever, he was still sweating when he reached the head of his queue to find himself facing a middle-aged man who wore a fez, an oiled moustache, a gold lapel pin shaped in the name of God and a rectangular tag that announced he was Sergeant Aziz.

“Where did your journey begin?” demanded the sergeant.

“America,” said ZeeZee and Aziz nodded. Given the bleached dreadlocks, hobo beard and beige elephants stampeding across an ill-fitting sports shirt it was unlikely the thin man came from anywhere else.

“Make your declaration,” the sergeant said. So ZeeZee put his hand on the plate and let Aziz click shut a wrist band. Then he swore his beliefs away, only stumbling when he reached the final prohibition.

“Again,” demanded the sergeant.

“I have never murdered anybody,” said ZeeZee flatly and every diode on the cheap Matsui lie detector stayed green. On the far side of the desk the fox grinned like the fox he was and, without thinking, ZeeZee grinned back.

Drugged or drunk, Aziz decided, his eyes flicking from the passenger’s darkened armpits to his bead-slicked forehead. Either way, he was suspect.

“ID card?” Irritation made the sergeant snap his fingers.

“I’ve got this,” ZeeZee said apologetically. The document he proffered was unmistakable, its cover pure white and hand-stitched from Moroccan leather softer than velvet.

“Excellency…”
In place of a sneering NCO stood a man in shock, career options cashing themselves in right in front of his own eyes. The diplomatic pass he now held was registered to a
pashazade,
the son of a pasha, senior grade. Basic survival instinct made Sergeant Aziz forget everything except his need to make the sweating tourist someone else’s problem.

Not even bothering to stamp the
carte blanche,
the sergeant clicked his fingers for a jellaba-clad orderly and ordered the underling to escort the important pasha to the fast-track desk and quickly.

Eyes like a maniac, beard like a dervish and a pair of combats that were way too long in the leg…plus the man kept looking round for something he obviously couldn’t see. Captain Yousef was worried. He had an apartment in a block off Rue Maamoun that needed repairs to its balcony, he’d only just made Captain and—God be praised—his wife was pregnant for the third time. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

But which would be the mistake? To hold a notable with a
carte blanche
for questioning or to let through someone who couldn’t look less like a real bey? The call was impossible to make and the implications of getting it wrong were horrific—for himself and his wife, for his children, his home…

“Sir…” Captain Yousef’s accent was elegantly Cairene. His words those of someone born not in El Iskandryia but in the capital. All the same, his voice shook as he asked his question. “Do you have some secondary form of identity?”

The notable in the elephant shirt and shades said nothing and did nothing except shrug. It was obvious that his answer was no.

Looking from slumped man to the elegant Ottoman diplomatic passport, Captain Yousef had real trouble reconciling the dishevelled mess in front of him with the photograph encrypted on the
carte’s
chip that gave his family as al-Mansur and his place of birth as Tunis.

The passport was five years old, almost expired. The encrypted picture showed someone clean-shaven, neatly dressed, who stared hawk-eyed at the camera. While this man looked like the worst kind of American, the poor kind.

And yet.

And yet…

“Ashraf Al-Mansur?”

ZeeZee began to shrug, caught himself and smiled for the first time since he’d entered the airport. It was a rueful, what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here smile. Not the kind that the Captain had ever seen from a real bey.

Casually Captain Yousef adjusted his red fez with one hand, while touching a discreet buzzer on the underside of his desk. Trying to enter El Iskandryia on a fake passport was a serious crime. Pretending to be a notable was even worse. And when that passport was a diplomatic one, then… The Captain didn’t waste time worrying about it further. No point. His decision was a good one and besides, it was no longer his business. Orders specifically said to pass this kind of problem straight to the top.

29th June

“Merde, merde, merde…”

The dark-haired girl hit a key and switched search engines. Looking for one that worked. So far she’d spent twenty highly illegal minutes learning precisely nothing about her future husband, who was probably even now at the al-Mansur madersa, delivered there from the airport in some smoke-windowed Daimler stretch.

al-Mansur

Nothing.

Ashraf Bey.

Nothing.

Pashazade Ashraf.

Nothing.

It was enough to set off another litany of swear words. Zara bint-Hamzah spoke Arabic but swore in perfect Cairene French for the simple reason, established in childhood, that neither of her parents understood it.

She also spoke English, as did her father, though she spoke hers with a New York twang. Two years studying at Columbia did that to you. Only that bit of her life was dead now and she was back home. And didn’t she know it.

Ashraf Bey might as well not exist for all the record he’d left of his life to date.
“Putain de merde…”
Without thinking, Zara gulped the last of her slimmers’ biscuit—rolled oats, rolled wholewheat, glycerol, sorbitol and xenical—total calories fifty-seven—and ruined any calorific benefits by pouring herself another coffee and mixing the liquid with a large teaspoon of what looked like dirty diamonds but was really raw sugar.

Just looking at the ragged crystals made Zara long for a few good old-fashioned pop rocks of freebase, something to heighten her courage or stupefy her nerves: because misusing the Library’s LuxorEon3 terminal didn’t come easily—not to her, anyway. Only these days she was clean, had been since she was fifteen, and all she had for courage was a Sony earbead. So she upped the volume on DJ Avatar and went back to her flat panel.

The fact that Ashraf couldn’t be found on the empire-wide voting list held at the Library of Iskandryia Zara put down to his rank as a bey. Sons of emirs were probably too rarefied to be recorded on an openly accessible database. More puzzling was his complete absence from the Library’s proscribed database and from the web itself. Out there Ottoman law meant nothing. So, on the web at least, there should have been some ghost of a record.

This was a man who’d spent seven years in America. That was the point her father had used to sell the marriage: how much they’d have in common. (By which he meant they’d both been corrupted by the same culture.)

But according to every credit agency she’d accessed, the bey’s rating wasn’t so much bad as simply non-existent. No charge cards, no bank account, no mortgage had ever been issued in his name. More bizarrely still, he’d never posted to any internet newsgroup, never chatted, never had an e-address—at least, not under his own name. The man to whom she was days away from becoming very publicly engaged had left no trace of his life to date, no shadow. Not out there in what Zara now thought of as the real world, and not in the Ottoman world, either.

It wasn’t a good feeling.

Her own entry in the city register was brief, short and depressing. Though flesh would be added to its bleak bones at the end of the week when data was updated to take account of her father’s new rank.

Zara had no illusions about how he’d attained the rank
effendi.
A bey could not be expected to marry the granddaughter of a
falah.
So her elderly, half-blind grandfather was to be moved from his mud-brick home in Siwa to a new house on the outskirts of Isk. With the new house were promised orange trees he couldn’t see, irrigated lawns he’d consider a criminal waste of precious water and the honorific
effendi.
The fact that
his
father was now effendi made her father effendi, which made her respectable enough to marry.

Zara was the price and her dowry was the prize. Love didn’t enter into it and nor, for once, did complicated family alliances. The only alliance that interested the bey’s aunt was with her father’s money. The deal stank and was morally wrong; but as her mother had angrily explained, this was how things were done. And the very fact that—for once—her mother managed to keep her hands to herself told Zara just how worried the woman was that her daughter might do something stupid, like refuse.

Mind you, first off, they’d been worried that if they let her go to Columbia she wouldn’t return when her two years in New York were over. Then they’d been worried she might
disgrace
herself while over there. Now…

Merde
indeed.

A mouthful of now-cold coffee warned Zara that she’d overrun her own safety margin. It was time for her to log off and go pack up her little cubbyhole before Zara’s boss realized what she’d been doing with her last day in the department: breaking every regulation she could find, starting with unauthorized use of a LuxorEon3.

There was only one computer matrix in the city: IOL. Available through subterranean snakes of optic that crawled in conduits beneath the sidewalks to feed everything from cheap edge-of-network devices in local schools to the complex hierarchy of information appliances used in the Library itself.

The network was wired with optic rather than relying on radio because cable withstood EMP and those inconvenient, mujahadeen-inspired charged-particle things that scrambled radio signals elsewhere in North Africa. The wiring of the city had been done in record time, with roads ruthlessly ripped up, rivers drained and inconvenient buildings bulldozed. What Ove Arup had insisted would take twelve months minimum had been finished in six and even then General Koenig Pasha, the city’s governor, hadn’t been happy: he’d wanted it done in three.

And though the city streets were an open and fluid mass of architectural styles, crammed with all races and religions, the network running beneath those streets was anything but… It was utterly hermetic, completely sealed. Only the room where Zara sat, a cupboard-like alcove of the Library, acted as a node for those with permission to swim in the wider, wilder waters where information apparently wanted to be free but mostly seemed to expect you to buy it.

Zara clicked her way out of a credit-check site that kept demanding an account number for a charge card she no longer owned and shut down the connection.

If she was traced then Zara could undoubtedly count for help on the fact she had no previous record. Besides, the new marble floor of the triangular foyer below came directly out of her father’s pocket. Disgrace her, and the director definitely wouldn’t get his new roof.

Money was power. Zara was about to add
Even dirty money,
then amended it in her head to
Especially dirty money.
Dirty money carried with it the threat of unpredictability. Of course,
dirty money
eventually turned into
new money,
with all the scrabble for respectability that the term suggested. And
new money
lay on its back and opened its legs,
or did it by proxy.

Zara shuddered.

Somewhere out of sight, beyond the sweep of the Eastern Harbour and beyond where the peninsula of the old Turko-Arabic quarter jutted into the sea to separate the Eastern Harbour’s elegance from the warehouses and squalor of the West, somewhere out there flames lit the approaching evening like dancing devils, signature of the Midas Refinery.

A $1.8 billion complex that processed 100,000 barrels a day.

Out there on the edge of the desert, low-value heavy oil got an upgrade to petroleum gas, naphtha, aviation fuel and diesel for export to Europe. Though the public face of Midas was a minor Napoleonic princeling, her father owned 27.3 per cent through a holding company. It was more than enough.

Reaching into her bag, Zara pulled out a page torn from an American student magazine and began to read it for the fifth time. This was how she had to erase her traces from the network to become a ghost. There was much talk of command lines, Linux and Mozilla which she ignored, skimming down the page until she got to a paragraph for users prepared just to do what they were told.