Arabesk (44 page)

Four years back—after Avatar had kicked her—Madame Rahina, the woman who very definitely wasn’t his mother, had made her husband promise never to let Avatar through the door of Villa Hamzah again.

So Hamzah hadn’t.

“Av…” Hamzah Effendi paused and picked a cigar. Remembering just in time to use a tiny gold guillotine to circumcise its end. A life’s worth of biting off the end and spitting was a habit he found hard to break. Hamzah wanted to explain to Avatar exactly why he’d sent the bey out of that door, down to where his daughter swam naked: but he couldn’t put
“needs must”
into words. At least not words he found acceptable. So instead, the big man took another pull on a Partegas and thought about his lawyer waiting nervously in the hallway.

He could wait. Whatever it was Avatar had come to say wouldn’t take long.

“You need money?”

Avatar grinned. Of course he needed dosh. Didn’t everyone? Apart from the industrialist who sat in front of him. All the same, that wasn’t why Avatar was there.

“Some journalist’s been asking about you…”

“A
nasrani
?” It had to be. Hamzah already kept most of the local press in his pocket, and the few who were not lapping up his hospitality missed out, not from any misplaced moral backbone but because he already had them by the balls.

“English. Well, probably. You know…”

Hamzah knew. It was unfashionable to say so, but telling one from another was difficult until
nasranis
started flashing round their passports or local currency.

“So let me guess.” The big man smiled and let cigar smoke trickle towards the ceiling, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes and a breeze through the open window dissipated the smoke before it reached the height of a picture rail.

“Organized crime the Ottoman way?”

Avatar shook his head.

“Well it can’t be the refinery because then they’d just go through my press office…” His refinery was situated to the west of Isk, at the point where slums met desert. In an industry working hard to improve its image, Midas Oil was an entire lap ahead. Bursaries, research grants, third-world scholarships, a whole marine-biology, antipollution programme at Rutgers.

Accidents got apologized for the moment they happened, critics were greeted with open arms, research papers were put to peer review and released, copyright free, straight onto the Web. It was a long-term game and, as Hamzah had hoped, it was driving even the softest ecological pressure groups insane.

“What then?”

“Your childhood…”

To the man’s credit, Hamzah did little more than blink.

“Think you can deal with this?” Hamzah asked Avatar.

“Sure,” said Avatar. “You want him killed?”

Hamzah raised his eyebrows, amusement driving out the last echoes of anger.

“No,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want him killed. Whatever you’ve heard, whatever the police whisper, that’s not how I do things.”

Avatar looked for a brief second like he wanted to disagree. Then he shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said. And left without glancing back, exiting through a window larger than the front door of most of the places in which he’d lived.

Sudan

“Safety off,” said the gun.

Standing beside Sergeant Ka, Zac said nothing. He’d spoken little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he talked even less…

Ka thought that strange, because Zac’s sister Ruth had also said little from the time she’d been captured to the moment she died. But now she talked so much that Ka couldn’t concentrate on watching the growling trucks that rolled across the scrub towards him.

“Distance?”

“Half a klick and closing…”

Status and range. That was all the plastic H&K/cw could manage. It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the boy with the bone cross, feather amulet and boots several sizes too big didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered.

There was meant to be some way to turn off the voice but to do that you needed to be able to read. So instead Ka had ripped the tail from his shirt and tied it to the stock, right over the little plastic grille behind which the speaker hid.

Before Ka began this mission, Colonel Abad had ordered him to be sure to check his weapons each morning. Then, when that was done, to inspect the weapons of the rest of his troop. Only there was no rest any longer. At least, Ka didn’t think so.

He was it.

So Ka inspected his own weapons, trying to remember what he was meant to be looking for… Dirt, maybe, and rust. Except rust wasn’t a problem because it hadn’t rained in a year in this part of wherever he was, somewhere between Bahr el-Azrek and the Atbarah. At least, that’s where he thought he was.

Untying the lanyard that fastened a revolver around his neck, Ka checked it. It was as clean as any weapon could be in a country where most of the earth had turned to red dust and half of that had been stripped away from the rock beneath. The revolver was his favourite. He’d have liked it even more if any of the bullets he carried in his truck had been the right calibre.

H&K21e clean and freshly oiled. Tripod fixed and belt ready. H&K/cw…spotless. His knife wasn’t clean but that was because Ezekiel’s blood had ruined the leather of its handle. Everyone had warned Ezekiel not to pick up bomblets, but the boy was six and the cluster bombs came in red, green and yellow.

Ezekiel had always loved bright colours.

Their most junior soldier had been left under a blanket of stones where he died, on the side of a hill just below the cracked eggshell memorial to where a functioning mosque once stood. Ka had refused to kill the boy until the others stopped talking to him. He was the sergeant, they said. Stuff like that was his job. In the end, Ka had given in, gone back to where he’d rested Ezekiel in the shade of a broken wall and found the small boy already dead.

But he buried the blade deep and carried it back to camp to show them the deed was done. Things had been different after that. They all wanted to be with Ka but he no longer wanted to be with them.

Now he was alone, with his back to the empty village. Well, it was two villages really. One built from grey brick that looked heavy but turned out to be solid froth, like ossified spit. That version had been constructed ten years before by the government and destroyed by them as well, a few years later.

The older village was behind the new one, jammed into a space between the start of a hill and a scar of rock. But most of its mud-walled huts had fallen in, from age this time. According to the Colonel, there was no water for miles, what with the wadis drying up and the nearest bore hole being both barren and filled with corpses from an earlier battle.

Ka lifted his H&K/cw and snapped free the lower clip. It was loaded with 5.56mm, each kinetic round dipped in holy water and polished with snakeskin. His old AK49 had been altogether better, less flashy. But an older boy had wanted Ka’s AK49 and given him the plastic gun in return. That boy was dead now. Ka didn’t feel too bad about it.

7th July

“You need to be here…”

Avatar’s call came through as Hamzah was getting ready for bed. His wife was upstairs sleeping, and his daughter… Wherever Zara had gone after her swim, she’d taken her little F-type Jaguar and left a wet towel on the hall floor by way of good-bye.

“Where’s here?”

“Sarahz… Corner of Place Gumhuriya.”

Hamzah knew exactly where the club was. There might be a dozen bars and restaurants he owned without knowing exactly where they were, but Sarahz had been one of his early acquisitions, maybe the first.

“I’m about to turn in.”

“Not now, you’re not… Believe me, I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”

Avatar put down the club’s pay phone and went back to his decks. Building on a breakbeat
sambassimba
anthem that cut the heavy overdub/techno fusion that was ol’sko drum’n’bass with lighter Sao Paolo rhythms, weirdshit polka, vicious Fender licks and syncopated snare.

“SpecialBeatService,” the near original PatifePorto mix.

He was working a late-Wednesday crowd, upstairs at Sarahz. Mostly poor little rich boys from St. Mark’s plus a handful of overdressed, hard-eyed kazuals from Moharrem Bey. The girls were tourists, mostly. A smattering of au pairs, exchange students, teenagers glad to get away from their distant families.

Avatar got the gig on merit. The manager didn’t know his new DJ was the bastard of Hamzah Effendi. Until ten minutes ago, Amici hadn’t known that his club was owned by Avatar’s father—and he was still getting over that shock.

Hamzah sighed and pushed himself up off his
bateau lit
… The mahogany bed had been imported eighty years earlier from Marseilles, found the previous year in a souk in El Gomruk and repaired for Hamzah by a sullen carpenter from Mali who spat, chain-smoked and forgot to wash but had the hands of an angel and the eye of an Italian polymath.

Hamzah forgave the carpenter his bad habits because he actually made things by hand, instead of using machines. Madame Rahina hated the
bateau lit
but that was fine. As Hamzah frequently pointed out, nothing required her to sleep in it.

Habit had made such things easy for them; and Hamzah’s practice of working late justified his need for a bed in the room off his study.

Within the standards set by culture and religion, he was a good husband and he tried to be a good father. He’d never once raised his hand to his daughter and had only occasionally slapped his wife, and that not recently.

It would never occur to him to hit his mistress, but then Olga used to assassinate Americans for a living, in the days before she came to work as his PA. Olga was
Organizatsiaya
and also a Soviet spy, but she knew that Hamzah knew, and they both understood that Commissar Zukov at the Soviet Consulate now required little more than a daily report on Hamzah’s movements.

Tomorrow she’d report that, after a good breakfast, he voluntarily presented himself at Champollion Precinct, the Police HQ in Rue Riyad Pasha, to be questioned about the murder of Lady Nafisa, aunt of Ashraf Bey. She’d mention that he’d taken his lawyer and been released without charge… Because Hamzah would be released, that was why he kept tame lawyers.

Quite apart from the fact that, for once, he was totally innocent.

Hamzah hit a button beside his bed and waited.

“Boss?”

“I’m going out.”

“Very good. I’ll get the car.”

It was obvious which vehicle Alex would select. Hamzah’s Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. Like Olga, Alex was Soviet and so, bizarrely, was the Rolls. At least its modifications were…

“If you’re ready, Boss.” The big man slammed shut the rear door and Hamzah felt, rather than heard, the solidness of bombproof steel and a thud as heavy locks slid into place. The car was originally built for Lenin, one of six that the revolutionary leader ordered from London when the fledgling Menshevik Alliance was at its lowest ebb.

With Cossacks advancing from the Crimea and Siberia already lost to Admiral Kolchak, Vladimir Illych had ordered his secretary’s secretary to write to Charles Rolls ordering six models of his latest car, the cars to be paid for in advance, in gold. Three weeks later, the British PM reluctantly agreed to the dismemberment of the old Tsarist empire… Prussia, France and America followed.

Hamzah had purchased the vehicle at Commissar Zukov’s suggestion during one of the CCCP’s habitual bouts of bankruptcy. And had spent the first six months having various illegal listening devices taken out. Alex had come with the vehicle.

“We got trouble, Boss?”

Good question. And if he did have trouble, was it the kind that mattered? Hamzah hired people to keep trouble at arm’s length but Avatar wasn’t one of them. The boy was grief of a different kind.

“Let’s find out,” said Hamzah and leant back against black leather, remembering the boy’s mother, a dark-skinned slip of a girl who spoke three languages and didn’t know her own age. Hamzah did, knew it to the very month, but never admitted it, except occasionally to himself.

Rammed was how tourists described Sarahz. Rammed to the rafters, to the gills, rammed tight. The same thing happened every Wednesday, the El Anfushi clubs closed up and hard-core clubbers headed south looking for the real thing. Sarahz gave it to them. Neo retro, classic house, random darkwave…even trance, so epiphanic it came with a built-in halo. Chemical sainthood.

And DJ Avatar bestowed the radiance, from battered Matsui decks that had been rebuilt so many times that the only original component left was a cheap plastic logo glue-gunned to the front. Av learnt fast. His first real sound system comprised a triple deck, reconditioned 303 and original theramin. The lot got ripped off his second week playing clubs, at some cellar behind Maritime Station.

Now he had a deck that looked shit and sounded like it was wired direct to God. And when he wasn’t riding his Wild Star, Avatar drove an old VW camper with one side caved in from front arch to rear fender. Prayer beads hung from the front mirror and the back window was stickered with quotations from the Holy Quran. No one looked twice. Certainly no one looked and thought, “Ah, there goes enough rare vinyl to open a shop.”

Which was the point, obviously.

Sarahz had an all-night licence. The result of astute blackmail, a little bribery and the impossibly convenient fact that it was directly opposite Misr Station, with a huge taxi rank to one side and Place Gumhuriya to the front. Since the nearest apartment block was a hundred metres away and inhabited by people who really didn’t matter, there were no complaints. At least none that made it onto the record books.

“D’bozzizzere…”

Which Avatar quickly translated as, “The Boss is here…”

Nodding, Avatar killed the lights in his booth and slid a disc into one slot and a slab of samples into another and put the deck on auto. He didn’t figure on being gone longer than it took to build up and break down and, to be honest, most of the floor were so caned it was doubtful they’d even notice.