Arabesk (4 page)

Zara did exactly what it said. If the article was right she was now in the clear. If not, well, too bad… Did they want a new roof or didn’t they?

When she returned to her job—if her new husband ever allowed her back—it would be to a different department of the Library. None of her male bosses would talk to her, except to give orders or collect information. Most of them would not even look in her direction in case their glance was seen and misinterpreted.

She’d made plenty of mistakes in her nineteen years, but the biggest by far was ever turning up at the airport in New York. Her parents had been right to be worried, whereas she was just naive for not wondering why they wanted her home for the summer. Leaving Columbia for Isk because she was touched they’d been missing her was about as stupid as anyone could get.

Now she was stuck with an arranged marriage and Zara could just imagine to what… Some spoilt, prissy little coke-head dressed in PaulSmith International. She’d watched enough episodes of
Rich & Famous
to know what to expect.

29th June

First isolated as a pure chemical in 1820 but sourced
from shrubs long before that and spread across the littoral a thousand years earlier by the armies of Islam, caffeine was the North African drug of choice and something of a local vice. Which was fine with ZeeZee. He’d spent time at both Scottish and Swiss boarding schools and could think of worse ones…

Lifting the airport cup to his lips, ZeeZee winced as the scalding black mud burnt his lips. The taste was of sweetened silt and
arabica
beans that hadn’t been gently roasted so much as charred to death in their very own
auto-da-fé.

“Best let it cool,” announced an elderly, whipcord-thin man who was sat opposite facing him over a low table.

“Yeah,” said ZeeZee. “Thanks for warning me.”

General Saeed Koenig Pasha smiled and sipped from his own cup. Until thirty minutes ago the General had been bored. And then serendipity had seen him arrive at the airport just as all the fools on the scene started to panic about having breached diplomatic protocol.

Now he had the object of their worries in front of him, and the General had to admit he could see their problem. Not that he would ever, under any circumstances admit that to any of them. All the same, in his long and detailed experience as Governor of El Iskandryia, beys came in three types.

Old ones who lived in rambling palaces and wrote to him complaining about the laxity of the young.

Middle-aged ones who were too worried about their expanding bellies and nagging wives to have time to trouble him.

And young ones who drove too fast, lived hard and had acquired bad habits in foreign countries, without acquiring the necessary wisdom to realize that was where their bad habits should have been left—at least, when it came to displaying them in public.

This last type was what he half been expecting to meet. Someone elegant and urbane, if somewhat louche. Instead the young man opposite looked, sounded and smelled like an American hobo. He had ill-fitting clothes, his hair was twisted into ugly locks and his face was hidden by a long, matted beard. Luckily the General had visited West-Coast America enough to know that this was a look often adopted by the children of the very rich.

He hadn’t introduced himself to the al-Mansur boy and didn’t intend to do so. All the same, it
would
have been his signature that bounced the boy out of the country, had him sent to jail or even killed; if he’d followed the first instinct of a certain Colonel Gasparin, instead of doing what the idiot Colonel should have done right at the start. Place a call to Lady Nafisa at her madersa.

Besides, if his staff really believed it was coincidence that saw the General arrive at the airport at exactly that point, then they really were fools and he’d be replacing the lot of them. He had his own reasons for being interested in the family of Lady Jalila al-Mansur.

“You could formally complain,” said the General. “You have that right.” He didn’t say anything more, just cocked his head to one side and waited to see which way the boy would play it.

“Not worth it,” said ZeeZee, standing up. He was in a hastily-cleared VIP lounge at Iskandryia airport where Gasparin had escorted him as soon as the Colonel had been told ZeeZee’s passport was genuine. “The man was just playing his part… That’s all any of us can do.”

He smiled at the older man’s sudden sideways glance.

The area around them was done out in ersatz Rococo Islamic, all mirrored arches, peacock-blue tiles, white marble slabs and a splashy alabaster fountain that sounded like a woman pissing. ZeeZee got the feeling that the General couldn’t wait to get away either.

Too close,
thought ZeeZee as he headed for the exit. Way, way too close. He slipped the
carte blanche
into the breast pocket of his pug-ugly sports shirt and headed for a gap in the barriers.

Near the front of the barrier stood a chauffeur wearing peaked cap and polished boots, with a printed board that read
Ashraf al-Mansur
resting in the crook of his elbow. ZeeZee walked past the man without even breaking his stride.

First things first, and that meant hitting the local shops.

ZeeZee’s other clothes were on their way to Zanzibar in an overhead locker, courtesy of Ottoman Airways. At least he sincerely hoped they were. He’d left his briefcase behind at Cairo aboard the Seattle/Zanzibar flight for exactly that purpose.

Everything he stood up in had been bought duty-free on the plane, paid for with a platinum HKS that had arrived along with his passport. And yellow shirts with beige elephants weren’t his first or even second choice of clothing. The garment was what the Boeing’s on-board boutique had had in his size.

Cairo was where he’d switched planes, to a Lufthansa local flight. There’d been one moment in a steel-and-glass corridor between Cairo arrivals and local departures when he’d been tempted to keep walking and lose himself in the chaos of the capital.

Quite why he hadn’t was a question ZeeZee would ask himself later, when he finally stopped moving long enough to think. But first he needed new clothes and then he had to find the al-Mansur madersa, whatever that was…

29th June

“Now the graveyard was haunted by Ifrits who were of
the Only True Faith,” announced Hani. Her new uncle was late. Her aunt was furious about something, as always. So the small child was busy amusing herself.

“And in that night, as Hassan lay sleeping with his head leaning against his father’s grave, came an Ifritah who marvelled at Hassan’s loveliness and cried, ‘Glory to the True God. This is a creature from paradise.’ Then the Ifritah spiralled high into the dark firmament as was her custom and there met a Djinn on the wing who saluted her and she asked, ‘Where hast thou come from?’

“‘From old Cairo,’ he replied.

“‘Wilt thou come and look at the loveliness of the boy who sleeps in yonder graveyard? For thou wilt see no boy more beautiful.’

“And the Djinn nodded and said, ‘I will…’ And together they descended through the chill night sky to where Hassan…”

“Stop talking to yourself,” demanded Lady Nafisa, as she swept through the door of the haramlek’s nursery and frowned at the sight of a puppy sat in the middle of a spreading puddle. If there was anything she hated worse than Hani wasting her time on computer games it was that animal.

“I’m not talking to myself, I’m writing a story for Ali-Din.”

The child’s tone was scrupulously polite. But her dark eyes were defiant and she looked at her puppy with pride.

“And I’ve already warned you,” said Lady Nafisa firmly, “not to bring that thing up to the nursery.”

“But it’s my nursery and I always mop up after him.” At nine Hani already considered herself too old to beg, so she kept her voice steady, as if she really couldn’t see why there should be a problem. This was an old argument. One that had got her slapped at least twice and sent up to her room more times than she could remember.

“Ali-Din belongs in the courtyard and besides…”

“Yes, I know,” Hani said heavily, “Ali-Din is a boy dog.”

Nothing male was allowed on the third floor of the al-Mansur madersa, Aunt Nafisa’s house on Rue Sherif. In the five hundred years it had been standing no man had entered the haremlek. Now there was no one but Hani or her aunt to use the echoing rooms, where dust gathered in a dry fountain and geckos died and desiccated, unnoticed and unmourned.

“Disobey me again and I have him destroyed.”

“What if I change his name?” Hani demanded, not even prepared to acknowledge her aunt’s threat. “Then can he be female?”

“No,” Lady Nafisa hissed in irritation, resisting the urge to re-check her watch. A Cartier case with Swiss mechanical movement, it was elegant, tiny and unfailingly accurate. Which hadn’t stopped her checking it every five minutes for the last hour, ever since the driver she’d hired at unnecessary expense had called in to report that her nephew was not on the plane.

And when she told him firmly that Ashraf was very definitely on that flight because she’d had a call from the General himself, the driver had replied tartly that, in that case, perhaps the bey didn’t want to be collected and had put the phone down on her. No doubt he’d want paying, too, even if he’d failed in the job he was hired to do.

“Why can’t Ali-Din be female?”

“Because I say so,” Lady Nafisa snapped. “Now take Ali-Din down to the courtyard.” And she left before the child had a chance to defy her openly.

29th June

Between Iskandryia airport and Place Orabi ran a Carey
bus. It made stops on the way at Shallalat Gardens, Masr Station and the Attarine Mosque, but Place Orabi was the terminus and that was where all the remaining passengers but ZeeZee clambered off.

At least three conflicting varieties of Rai drifted in through the open doorway of the bus, blasting from cafés in the square. But ZeeZee couldn’t even recognize the instruments, never mind the styles. He was tired, cross and hot. He hadn’t slept since he’d snorted his last line of crystalMeth two days before and was trying very hard not to think about the approaching comedown, and that was making him more edgy still.

All he knew was that he needed to look his best.

A new identity needed a new look, because personality was a performance put on by the self for the self, or some such shit. ZeeZee felt much too wasted to remember the fox’s actual line.

In fact, ZeeZee would happily have stayed on board the bus and shuttled his way back to the airport. Only that didn’t seem to be an option. A recording in three languages was telling him it was time to leave. When that didn’t work, the driver took to turning the inside lights on and off to signal they’d arrived.

“Yeah, yeah,” said ZeeZee and levered himself out of a plastic seat, leaving sweat marks where his back and buttocks had been. “Where can I buy some decent clothes?”

The driver looked up from punching digits into a logbook but said nothing.

Wearily, ZeeZee peeled a $5 note from the roll in his back pocket. “Clothes?”

“Rue Faransa,” the man said, lifting the note from between ZeeZee’s fingers and making it disappear as if by magic. “Have a nice evening.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” ZeeZee told the man with the knife. In Iskandryia tourists had more chance of being run over by a taxi than being mugged. It said so in a travel short on ZeeZee’s internal flight. Though maybe that wasn’t such a comforting statistic, given that taxi accidents seemed to be a regular occurrence. And the golem-faced man from the airport certainly seemed to be real enough.

“Just give me your wallet.”

Golem features nodded down to a glass blade he was holding at his side. A deep groove ran along both sides, put there to help blood flow freely.

“I don’t have a wallet,” said ZeeZee, which was the truth. He had an iris-specific platinum HKS card in one back pocket of his combats and his
carte blanche
in the other. Other than that, nothing. No rings, not even a watch. Well, only the Omega he’d bought duty-free on the plane and the G-Shock in his pocket, and he wasn’t about to give up either of those. For the average mugger, ZeeZee was a big disappointment. Actually, as a mugger’s target he was bad news, full stop.

ZeeZee kept his voice soft, unthreatening. For good measure he tried a small half-smile. But darkness visible already drew an unseen circle around them both and inside his head the fox was smiling as it memorized the layout of a tiny alley, a street at the back of Rue Faransa, so narrow and insignificant it appeared on no maps and the panniers of long-dead donkeys had managed to scratch grooves into both walls at once.

“Wallet,” repeated the golem features. There was a dogged determination to his voice but his small eyes were clean. Whatever need he was feeding it wasn’t chemical.
“Now.”
He raised the knife slightly to show he was serious.

“And I’ve already told you,” someone said, using ZeeZee’s voice, “he doesn’t have one.” Most people would have stepped back, away from the sharp blade. ZeeZee stepped in close, until he could see tiny broken veins on the man’s nose and smell stale garlic on his breath. It was definitely the man from the neighbouring queue at airport, and he was still staring at ZeeZee’s hair.

“No wallet. No cash. And besides…” ZeeZee smiled. “If you need a knife, you’re batting in the wrong league…”

The man opened his mouth.

“No,” ZeeZee said firmly.

Golem features shrugged. “Too bad,” he said. And then his blade whipped up, aimed at a point behind ZeeZee’s diaphragm—except that ZeeZee was already some place else. Pain blossoming across his side as he pivoted sideways to let the knife scrape across his ribs.
Ugly but not life-threatening.
The status report concerned his wound, ZeeZee realized, not his opponent.

Dodging the next blow was easier. All ZeeZee had to do was pivot to take the putative knee to the groin on his hip.

“You’re going to die,” said the attacker flatly, seeing ZeeZee’s gaze flick round the deserted and darkened alley.