Arabesk (31 page)

“What?” Zara asked quickly. “What did she shout?”

“To get a doctor—and to leave her alone.”

“So what did you do?”

Wide eyes regarded Zara. “I shut the door and locked it… She was drunk. It’s wrong to be drunk.” Hani nodded intently, reassuring herself. “When Donna got drunk Aunt Nafisa slapped her and said next time she’d call the police…”

So
you didn’t call a doctor,
thought Zara,
because you didn’t want the police to come. And then your aunt was killed and the police came anyway. No wonder you’re traumatised.

“Honey,” said Zara as she stroked Hani’s cheek, “it’s okay. You did right. And I promise we won’t let anyone know she’d been drinking.”

The anger coming down the line was almost palpable. Hamzah’s fear finally finding a target it could hate. “I will kill you if you’ve hurt her… Do you understand?”

“Me, hurt Zara? I thought that was your wife’s job.”

That earned Raf stunned silence. Raf could do misdirected hatred too, better than most. Raf and Hamzah were two minutes into what passed for a conversation and were already headed for a brick wall.

“You shot Felix Bey,” Hamzah said finally. As if that was proof Raf intended to slaughter his daughter as well.

“News travels…” So did a memory, sliding out of the past. Felix discussing the General. Felix bad-mouthing the Minister. Felix talking about skimming his percentage off men like Hamzah, but still not looking the other way. In a city like Iskandryia anyone could have sent that bomb.

Raf ran tired fingers across his scalp, feeling stubble. It needed washing along with the rest of him. He felt old and tired, centuries older than when he had first arrived in the city. His face was narrower, his dark blond beard made his lips look thinner and chin more pointed. There was a vulpine cruelty to his own face that Raf didn’t recognize.

The prince must make himself feared in such a way that, if he not be loved, at least he escapes being hated.

An old memory.

Well, okay, if the fox said so.

“Let me tell you about Felix,” said Raf angrily. “He had cancer of both lungs and a liver with more holes than a sponge. He drank a bottle of whisky a day and had a daughter he hadn’t seen in years. What he didn’t have, when I last saw him, was medical insurance covering lifestyle choices or losing half his head…”

The words were ice-cold, burning with blue fire. Raf didn’t really know the person who spoke them or recognize the anger that shot them out of his mouth and down the line to the suddenly silent industrialist. He only knew that, this time, that person was him.

“He told me he was the only really honest cop in that place and I believed him. And, yes, I shot him,” said Raf. “I put a gun to what was left of his head and pulled the trigger. And I’d do it again. Right now, tomorrow, next year, whenever… He was the closest thing I’d found to a partner in this stinking sewer of a city and I owed him. What part of all this don’t you understand?”

The man on the other end broke the connection quietly. Seconds later the windows darkened to an impenetrable black, the interior of the boat brightened as bulkhead lights came on and the dashboard lit with a dozen different read-outs. Over on one wall a window came to life, revealing a rolling news programme.
Ashraf Bey trapped.
Below it, a wall-mounted keyboard beeped once to show it was live.

A tiny voice from the VSV’s console announced the craft was shielded, operating fooler loops and running overlapping stealth routines. It also told Raf that he had visitors.

“Well, now,” Zara said, as he opened the door to her and she saw the live array of the console beyond. “You want to tell me exactly how you managed that?”

30th July

The aged
felah
behind the make-shift counter looked as
old as a twisted olive tree until one noticed his eyes. Then it became obvious that although hot summers and wild winter storms had beaten his face to the colour and consistency of cheap leather, the man’s eyes revealed his true age: which was still old enough to have seen almost everything the city could offer, except the sight of police openly surrounding the madersa of a bey.

And he knew it was Friday afternoon and his street licence banned working but the crowds were out—and when the crowds were out they needed feeding.

“Taamiya…”
Falafel. On the cart in front of him was a stack of aluminium bowls, three wine bottles now filled with some kind of sauce and a ladle. The wide neck of a metal jar stuck through the flat top of his cart. Inside the jar, already-cooked falafel were slowly cooling.

On a separate cart, in a huge metal container of bubbling oil, bobbed more taamiya ready to be scooped out and transferred to the main cart. Next to the bobbing taamiya was a smaller bowl of beaten egg into which they’d been dipped, before being rolled in bread crumbs ready to fry. Here too were kept piles of pitta, which a slash of the knife converted from simple flat bread into a pocket waiting to be filled with taamiya, chopped salad and sauce.

The younger man took the food he’d asked for and gave the cart owner a handful of change, half of it adorned with the profile of the Khedive, the rest featuring His Imperial Majesty. Only the poor still used small change and it didn’t matter to them whose head was on the coins, so long as agreement existed how much each little circle of metal was actually worth.

“La.” Raf waved away an even smaller coin the falafel seller offered as change and bit into his warm pitta bread, tasting fresh coriander and feeling oil run into his beard. He hadn’t felt hungry when he ordered the pitta, had merely needed something extra to help him blend with the restless crowd gathered around the taped-off entrance of Rue Cif. But now, with his striped and tattered jellaba—that cloak of invisibility worn the length of the North African littoral by the dispossessed—and taamiya in his hands, Raf felt ready to begin fighting his way through the crush.

There was a knot in his stomach and it wasn’t all hunger. Although more than twenty-four hours had gone by since he’d last eaten, maybe longer. Raf wasn’t sure, because he wasn’t wearing a watch, and that was part of blending in too. If he could find a street stall he’d pick up a
faux
Rolex, something obviously cheap and not real.

What he needed was something suitable for a jellaba-wearing felah, like a cheap Thai fake or the kind of flamboyant G’Schlock copies garages gave free with gas… Just as he’d needed the budget wraparounds he’d picked up from a 24/Seven in Place Orabi which made the people he was pushing through look amber and ghostly. Some of the crowd had been brought here, like him, by newsfeeds or radio. Most had just followed neighbours or stopped off on their way back from a mosque.

“What the fuck happened?” Raf asked, offering a tiny coin to a woman hawking plums from a woven satchel. “An accident?” For all he knew the felaheen used ornate politeness when talking amongst themselves but, if so, the woman didn’t seem to notice. And if she looked at the stranger with the torn jellaba in surprise it was at the fact he even had to ask.

“They’re searching Ashraf Bey’s house.”

“He won’t be there…”

The woman spat. “Of course he won’t. He’s under arrest. They’re looking for proof the pig killed his aunt for the money…”

“What money?”

“There was money,” she said shortly. “And there’s a reward for information. That’s what I heard.” The next time Raf looked, the woman was shuffling towards a uniformed officer, ignoring outstretched arms that offered coins for her remaining fruit.

“Out of there.”

Raf was moving in the opposite direction before he realized what the fox had ordered his body to do.
Too fast,
the fox told him, its voice faint. And Raf halted his panic-driven trot to a slow stroll, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. He was helping kill off the fox, by making it appear in daylight. They both knew that. But the fox had never said anything about it, never criticized.

“Head for Mushin.”

The man he’d come looking for stood like a poisoned dwarf just inside Rue Cif, staring hard at the rear door to the madersa. What did the man hope to find? Raf had no idea. Unless the Minister was just there to be seen by the news ’copters overhead and the ground crews.

“Shield,”
whispered the voice in his head and then it was gone, fading to static that fizzled and died. Raf was alone again.

Tossing his half-finished pitta into the dirt, Raf flashed Felix’s gold shield at a surprised police sergeant and stepped over the tape before the man had a chance to check the name or protest. The fact that Raf headed straight for Mushin Bey was enough to make the sergeant step back, muttering bitterly about plain-clothed shitheads.

“Hey, you,” said the Minister. “Back behind the line.” The small man didn’t just look like a cinema usher, he sounded like one too.

Raf grinned and flipped open Felix’s pass to show the shield and then as the Minister’s eyes widened, rammed the barrel of the fat man’s revolver hard into the small man’s thigh. “I’ve got his gun, too,” said Raf, relying on their distance from the crowd and the long sleeve of his own jellaba to keep the revolver hidden.

“You won’t…”

“I just did,” said Raf. He nodded towards the middle of Rue Cif, where the closed-off street stood dark and empty and the crowd and police looked very far away. “Take a walk.”

Mushin Bey wanted to complain, to threaten, to promise Raf that he’d be hunted down like a dog—but one look at the hard edge to the young bey’s face told him not to waste his breath. This man would kill him if necessary. And all that Raf knew about the Minister, he read written in fear on a weasel face and deduced from panic rising from the man’s skin, unsweetened by courage.

He was no more a real head of police than Raf was a real bey. Mushin Bey was a politician, which put him off the list where killing Felix was concerned. The man had needed Felix, rotted liver and all.

“Okay,” said Raf. “It’s murder now you think you can pin Nafisa on me, but it was suicide when you couldn’t. So tell me, who are you protecting?”

“No one,” said the Minister. “As you well know.” He sounded like he believed it. And he tried to stare back, but his pale eyes slid away from the wraparounds bisecting Raf’s face, fear subverting any real anger.

It was a feeling Raf suddenly recognised. Already there was a fragment of worry inside his head telling him to put down the gun and surrender. To give himself up to authority as he always did eventually, once the brief flare of anger had burned out to leave only the taste of failure in his mouth. A death penalty existed in Iskandryia as it did in all Ottoman cities, even the free ones, but he could cut a deal. He didn’t doubt that…

“We know about Felix fixing the autopsy,” the Minister said flatly. “What did you have on him? Little girls, drugs, payoffs…?”

“No one fixed that autopsy,” Raf said crossly, jostling the Minister further back towards an empty area of the street. “Unless it was you?”

Without intending to, Mushin Bey answered with an instinctive shake of his head so minute it was almost subliminal. Raf believed him. What he found impossible to believe was that the man wasn’t covering up for someone else.

“Tell me,” said Raf, “when did you switch from being certain it was suicide to being certain it wasn’t?”

“When you had Felix killed. I assume you suddenly realized he’d stuffed you up with that suicide verdict.”

“When I…? He was dying,” said Raf. “It was a
coup de grâce.”

And then the Minister explained something that stood Raf’s day on its head and made a mockery of the scribbled and intricate chart of connections carried deep in Raf’s pocket. Mushin Bey wasn’t talking about the shooting. He meant the bomb. They’d found the man who’d delivered it and he was happy to help. The Minister paused for a second and amended that to
very
happy to help. And what really impressed the Minister, and he was prepared to admit this, was Raf’s idea of arranging for the bomb to be delivered to himself. What better way to divert guilt…

“It was meant for me?”

“Don’t…” The Minister didn’t get to the next word because by then Raf was bringing up his gun.

“You know what I think?” Raf said as he flicked back the hammer and positioned the muzzle carefully under the Minister’s chin so any bullet fired would be guaranteed to remove most of the back of the man’s skull. “I think you know who killed Lady Nafisa.”

“Me?” Anxiety shrivelled Mushin Bey’s face. Panic blossoming until it was only a matter of seconds before the Minister either soiled himself or else started pleading for his own life. And every emotion inside the man was stripped naked except for the one that Raf actually sought.

Guilt would have been enough to make him pull the trigger.

“I didn’t murder Felix and I certainly didn’t murder Lady Nafisa.” Raf’s voice was hard. “I’m not so sure you didn’t, but you get the benefit of my doubt…” That was the kind of crap Dr Millbank used to speak all the time. “But
someone
killed them, and if that turns out to be you…

“Remember,” Raf told the man, “I trained in places that wouldn’t even let you through the fucking door.” And with that, he leaned forward and dropped something soft into the Minister’s pocket, smoothing the jacket neatly into place.

“The remains of that plastique I didn’t take,” Raf said simply. “Take you off at the hips, no question.” He thrust one hand into his own pocket and kept it there, closing his fingers round a tube with a spring-loaded button on top. “I’m going to walk out of here. You cause me
any
problems and I’ll leave you as chopped steak all over the street. You understand me?”

The minister did.

Idly clicking the button on a breath-mint dispenser as he walked away, Raf wondered how long it would take Mushin Bey to discover that the object burning a hole in his pocket was actually one uneaten plum.

“Yes, I shot him…”

Two wheels bit and the bike was flying. Hot summer wind rammed its way through ventilation ducts cut into the bike’s aero dynamically perfect fairing, cooling the Japanese v-twin as DJ Avatar red-lined his whole way down the sweep of the Corniche.