Arabesk (39 page)

Staring straight ahead, the boy wrapped the struggling fox tight in his arms, buried his cheek into hot fur and walked across the remaining stretch of beam onto the front page of next morning’s papers.

Fox Saves Boy—only the
Enquirer
got it right.

Fear, shadow and tears gave his childish face the tortured beauty of an El Greco saint. No one mentioned that he owed the anguish which twisted his mouth to a terrified fox cub chewing chunks out of his shoulder.

By the time a tee-shirt was being faked in sweatshops in Karachi and sold on street stalls in London and Paris, he was gone. No longer aware of the fuss, no longer watching the screens. He had more important things to talk about—his mother was coming herself to collect him.

She flew into Zurich first-class on Lufthansa and the ticket was free, like the cars and hotels. Reporters met her at Kloten and photographs of him being hugged by a thin woman in a long black coat with shades, were syndicated worldwide. There were some long-lens pap shots from a brief stay-over at the George V in Paris—all flat surfaces and squashed depth of field—but no one got real access until London.

A man Raf didn’t recognize—who called his mother Sally a lot and looked at her ankles—sat on a chair in a BBC studio on the outskirts. Hot lights blazed above the boy, raising beads of sweat under his newly cut hair. The fox cub sat on his lap, pinned by his hand to the grey flannel of his school trousers.

The trousers and tweed coat were a compromise. He wore school uniform for the interview and the school in Zurich didn’t charge a term’s notice for removing him as a pupil.

Everyone won except Raf.

On the studio wall was a bare blue screen. On it the people at home would see whatever the producer wanted them to see. Mostly this was a long shot of the boy balanced high on the iron beam, his face raised to heaven.

When the man had finished asking his mother how she felt about having a child who was a hero…

She was glad he’d rescued the fox.

What was she photographing now…

An endangered seal colony on the Falklands.

What would she and Raf be doing next…

Spending some quality time together at a friend’s apartment in New York.

When all that was over, the man who called his mother Sally turned to the boy and, pasting on a sympathetic smile, asked how he’d felt up there on the beam.

The man wasn’t happy with the boy because the producer had already halted the interview once, after a sound man complained he kept unclipping the button mike fixed to his school collar.

“Well?”

What had he felt? He wasn’t too sure he’d felt anything at all. Mostly he’d been busy keeping his head empty.

“Were you scared?”

Only of having nearly killed the fox. Despite himself, despite not allowing himself feelings, the boy’s eyes misted and for the first time since he’d reached the top of the fire truck’s ladder, his mouth trembled.

It was like punching a button. Repressed irritation segued into instant sympathy as the interviewer’s face softened. The man rephrased the question, glancing only once at the camera.

The boy thought about it. He still didn’t know how he felt but now everyone was waiting, his mother’s pale eyes fixed on him, her face tense.

“I can’t sleep,” said the boy finally. That at least was true. Always had been. Darkness unravelled in front of his eyes in minutes that ticked by so slowly it was like living inside freeze-frame.

“Dreams,” said the interviewer. “I can understand that.” He glanced at Raf’s mother, his look conveying just the right amount of compassion mixed with an unspoken question.

“He’ll be seeing the best child therapist in New York.”

The interviewer nodded. Debated the propriety of asking his next question and asked it anyway. “When you do sleep,” he said, “what exactly do you see?”

Nothing, that was the real answer. A brief darkness that swallowed emotion, fear and guilt. But, glancing round the studio, Raf knew that wasn’t the right answer and he was learning fast that “real” and “right” were different things.

“Flames,” he said simply. “I see flames.”

The producer brought the interview to a quick halt after that. Time was needed in the cutting suite and they had an actor from the National standing by to voice-over the links needed to tie the interview into existing footage of the fire.

In the hospitality room afterwards, hardbitten hacks wrapped heavy arms round the boy’s tense shoulders and told him how brave he was. And all the while, the boy stood clutching a glass of orange juice and wondering why none of them had thought to ask him how the blaze got started in the first place.

1st August

Some sense of meaning was there, just about. Hidden
beneath animal howls that ended in choking silence.
Stb pzzz.
But the German ballerina had no interest in stopping, not yet. Not until Madame Sosostris told the ballerina why she’d been hired. Only Madame Sosostris wasn’t saying, because refusal was the only thing keeping her alive—although that definition was becoming increasingly loose.

Sighing, the ballerina lit another Cleopatra and inhaled deeply, letting the smoke dribble from her mouth. Then she inhaled again, and stubbed the cigarette out in the screaming woman’s navel.

Zara put her hands over her ears.

Ashraf was dead. Someone she knew and liked had been murdered. Maybe more than liked, if she was honest. Now she’d walked Hani straight into a trap. Zara had brains, she had courage, she should have been planning their escape but somehow…

All she wanted to do was cry. Zara was disgusted at her own cowardice. The kid, on the other hand seemed almost oblivious, only glancing up from where she squatted beside Ali-Din whenever another cigarette went out.

Outside, late evening leeched daylight from the sky. Lights would be coming on along the Corniche, the fish restaurants shuffling tables as tourists finished their supper and locals arrived to eat, children in tow. And, sitting alone in his study, nursing an illegal whisky, her father would be checking his messages and trying not to worry. She could look after herself, that was what he would tell himself because that was what she’d spent the last five years telling him, every opportunity she got.

She was sorry to have let him down.

“It’s okay.” Hani squeezed Zara’s hand. “Raf will be here soon.”

“Raf’s dead, honey.”

“No,” said Hani, as she tucked her wriggling rag dog tight in her arms and stroked its ears. “He’s just late, as usual…”

They both waited at one end of a spice-drying attic, or maybe it was a mezzanine. Whatever, it filled a third of the length of the building and was a simple platform, hung under the roof and anchored to an end wall. Slit windows in that wall let in air and would have looked down onto a street if only the street hadn’t been so narrow or the windows set so high. That was the end where rickety stairs led up from ground level. At the other end of the platform, a simple rail separated the edge from a drop to the floor of the warehouse far below.

Light came from a single bulb that hung like a fat water drop at the end of an age-blackened twist of flex. The room it revealed was functional. A place of sour-smelling leaves drying on canvas tarpaulins, of peppery herbs hung from crude beams, each brittle bunch lashed together with rough string. The same type of string that bound the elbows of Madame Sosostris tight behind her as she lay quivering face up on a medical couch, knees wrenched back and ankles lashed to her elbows so that her arched body was taut beneath a short Muji vest which was all that she now wore, hi Berlin that position was called “Teasing the Rat”.

The more Zara tried not to think about what that couch was actually doing there, the nastier her suspicions became. Full pharaonic circumcision, which used to be called female infibulation was illegal in Iskandryia. But then, so was abortion and the little silver trolley with the surgical trays could have been for either—or even for both.

Beside her, Hani suddenly sneezed at the dust in the air.

The ballerina paused.
“Gesundheit”,
she said, sounding distracted. And then went back to heating the tip of her flick knife with a Zippo.

Black carob, henna and oregano, chilli and ginger. Their scents clashed with each other and with the smell of cumin, coriander and frying garlic that drifted up from a distant street stall. But rich as the mix was it wasn’t enough to hide the stink of fear that rose from the tethered herbalist.

“Tell her,” Zara pleaded.

The ballerina smiled.

“Please.”

“Ja,”
said the blonde German, as she pressed red-hot metal into the inside of the bound woman’s thighs. “Explain who really hired me and maybe I’ll let you live… But then again, maybe not.” She jerked the blade sideways.

Blood ran between Madame Sosostris’s legs in a trickle like scarlet tears.

“Tell me,” suggested the ballerina.

“What’s to tell…?” The question bubbled between bitten lips. “I hired you. I didn’t know he was dangerous… I made a bad mistake.”

“No,” said the ballerina. “Not you. Someone else ordered you to hire me.” She pivoted on her heel and buried rigid fingers into the side of the arched woman, ignoring piss that spread across wipe-clean leatherette and dribbled floorwards, following blood down a crack in the boards. And in the silence between falling drips Zara heard a knock at the door below and then the sudden jagged trill of a bell, so loud that even the ballerina jumped.

“Expecting someone?” she demanded, holding her blade close to her victim’s eye. Madame Sosostris shook her head.

“Well?” The question was shot behind her, at Zara.

“No,” said Zara.

The ballerina turned back to her victim. “Well, now,” she said, listening to a second, more impatient ring from below. “Maybe we can kill you, after all. Okay,
you…”

Zara nodded.

“This is how it works… You answer the door and the child stays there. Any problems and…” She flicked her knife sideways, leaving Zara no doubt what would happen to Hani’s throat.

Zara went. Walking slowly down the ancient stairs until she reached the main door to the spice house. A big part of her wanted to keep walking, out of that door and into a world where upstairs wasn’t happening. But she knew, stupid or otherwise, she’d probably die rather than leave Hani.

“Who is it?” she demanded.

“Me.” Lady Jalila’s voice was scared or furious, but through an inch of sheet steel it was hard to tell which.
“Now open up, quickly…”
She pushed at the door, then visibly jumped when she saw it was Zara. “Where is Madame Sosostris?”

Zara pointed to the ceiling.

“And you brought Hani?”

Of course she’d brought Hani. This was where the message had told them to come. Zara nodded.

“Good.” The woman pushed past Zara and headed towards the stairs without needing to be shown the way. “I’ll be taking her with me.”

“Lady Jalila…”

“What?”

What indeed. Zara thought of Hani upstairs and the blonde woman with her cold northern eyes and hot blade and said nothing. Besides, something was wrong. What did Lady Jalila mean, asking if Hani was there? Here, still? Here, now? Where else would the child…

“Lady Jalila.”

“Well?” The woman’s eyes flicked from Zara to dark drips on the floor behind her. And when she stayed silent, Lady Jalila sighed. “Leave it to me,” she said, reaching into her pocket. “Just leave it to me.”

The rest Hani and Zara reconstructed from memory. Remembering most a
pas de deux
faster and more intricate than any they’d seen on a newsfeed.

Sound travels relatively slowly but, being cool-loaded and thus subsonic, Lady Jalila’s first bullet travelled more slowly still, which meant it wasn’t quite the surprise to the ballerina that it might have been. Though by the time Hani looked up, the German’s blonde hair had finished streaming out behind in a sticky white, grey and red plume.

The .38 hollow-point entered the ballerina’s head just below the jaw, passed through her soft palate and removed what had until then been the back of her skull, sucking out blood, bone fragments and grey jelly to splatter them over the brick wall behind.

A split second after her head flicked back, the woman’s bowels and bladder loosened and her body stepped back, exploded blue eyes staring blindly at nothing. The crash the ballerina made as she hit the boards was loud enough to echo through the almost empty building.

“Mid-period,” muttered Lady Jalila, surveying the wall. “Maybe mid-to-late…” Her eyes swept over the attic to take in Hani with her rag dog, the dead ballerina and finally, scornfully, Madame Sosostris hog-tied on the couch.

“Murderer.”

Before Zara could protest, Lady Jalila brought up her gun and yanked the trigger three times. Hollow-points took Madame Sosostris in the upper body, splintering ribs into bone fragments. Lungs collapsed as the first two bullets blossomed into sucking wounds in her side, the final shot taking Madame Sosostris sideways through the heart and blasting her off the couch onto the floor.

The gurgling stopped.

“She hired the German to kill Ashraf,” Lady Jalila said as if that explained everything, though whether it was said to Zara or herself wasn’t clear. Walking over to the dead woman by the bed, Lady Jalila lifted a scalpel from a metal dish and slashed the twine binding her arms and feet. Then she rolled the sticky twine into a neat ball and dropped it into her pocket. She placed her own .38 in the dead herbalist’s hand.

“We’ll tell the police they shot each other.”

It wasn’t a suggestion.

“Just leave the official stuff to me,” said Lady Jalila. “Okay…?” Without waiting for Zara’s answer, Lady Jalila walked across to where Hani sat, hugging her knees and clutching her rag dog.

“Time to take Ali-Din home.”

Hani shook her head. “You killed her,” she said, voice empty.