Arabesk (48 page)

“Just how did you get a reservation?” Zara asked suddenly.

The next table stopped talking. Maybe they were interested or maybe she’d just interrupted their idiot conversation; Zara didn’t know and really didn’t care.

“I mean,” she said bitterly, “you couldn’t know I was going to be
rescued
by Ashraf Bey, could you? And it wasn’t like you knew he was going to turn out innocent.”

“I never believed that Raf…” began Madame Rahina.

Zara snorted.

Ignoring the look of outrage on her mother’s face, Zara turned to her father. “The table,” she reminded him, just in case he’d forgotten.

“I never,” repeated her mother loudly, “I never…” But she didn’t get to finish that sentence either.

“You did,” said Zara. “You told me execution was too good for him and that you knew, just as soon as you saw him, that he was an evil…”

“I got a list of everyone who had a table booked,” said Hamzah flatly, his voice cutting through the blossoming quarrel. Zara bet he pulled that trick at business meetings, not that he’d need to do it often. Most people he met owed him their living. “Then I called them up in turn and made one of them an offer.”

“Which one?” The major’s French carried a Cairene intonation that went with his hawklike nose and high cheekbones. His skin was as honeyed as her own was dark, and skilful tailoring on his dress uniform showed off his elegant figure. Zara reckoned she might even like him, if only he’d lighten up a bit.

“I mean,” he said, “how did you choose?”

Hamzah laughed. “Oh, that was easy. I told each one that I had every intention of eating here tonight and offered a token sum for his table to the one who sounded most horrified.”

Despite herself, Zara smiled, though it was obvious that the major was startled by the joke Hamzah made against himself. Which begged a big question, why was he really here? When she’d first walked into Maxim’s and seen his name on a place card, Zara was sure he’d be her new suitor. Some wellborn, near-bankrupt staff officer her mother had found to make her respectable… As if anything could make her respectable in Iskandryia’s eyes after Raf had publicly jilted her.

Her father’s money in return for social cachet. Class for cash, that was the deal Raf was offered. And it almost worked. Would have done in fact, if Raf’s now-dead aunt and her own decidedly undead mother had had anything to do with it. Only thing was, Raf had other ideas.

“Well,” said Zara, “you got the table. So when do we actually get to eat?”

“There’s plenty of time,” Hamzah said calmly.

“Really?” Zara looked at her watch. “Maybe my Rotary’s fast.” She tapped the side, shrugged and went back to staring out of the tram. So what if she was behaving badly? She’d said the meal was a bad idea when he first suggested it and repeated herself when her father announced he’d booked a table. Nothing had happened since to make her change her mind.

The ornate offices of Thomas Cook and the Olympia building slid past, Café Athinios and the stuccoed Palais de Justice following after. Place Zaghloul let her look out over a dusty square to the dark sea beyond, until the view was cut off by a bus station. They were still headed west, one block back from the Corniche.

Coming next was the tomb of the unknown warrior, where tramps slept against marble walls, tattered booths sold sticky almonds and foreign tourists walked hand in hand, seeing only beauty. Beyond that, the Corniche curved north towards the brooding weight of Fort Qaitbey.

Another road would herd the tram along the top of the promontory to Ras el-Tin, then steer south towards Maritime Station and the start of the old dockyards.

Seen on a map, the jutting promontory looked like a fat apple core. But the district’s rocklike solidity was an illusion. Once, the area had been mostly underwater. Then a causeway joined an island to the shore. Eventually the causeway had been thickened, then thickened again with rubble until finally El Anfushi was created, with its narrow streets and weird, inward-looking Turko-Arabic houses. Houses that must be…

“Why couldn’t you just invite Hani by herself?” Zara demanded suddenly. Hani might be nine but she could still date a building just by looking at it.

“Well?” Zara asked crossly.

“Perhaps she was the one who didn’t want to come.” Madame Rahina’s words were brittle. Her anger at Raf’s snub not quite offset by the pleasure she got from blaming Zara.

“You asked her?”

“No, of course I didn’t
ask
her. You don’t
ask
children. She was included on the invitation to Ashraf Bey.”

Terrific
. Zara’s glance slid to the empty chairs. Place names still showed who should have sat in them, though the maître d’ had insisted on whisking away the table silver when he realized that Hamzah’s missing guests were likely to remain that way.

“You didn’t really expect him, did you?” Hamzah asked his daughter gently. There was no anger in his voice, no accusation. Just the acceptance of basic facts. Chief among them was that the last time Ashraf drove out to Villa Hamzah, she’d flatly refused to see him. Actually, Raf hadn’t driven himself at all, Avatar was the one behind the wheel and she’d been cross about that too.

Expect him? She expected nothing.

That Av was missing was a given, Zara knew that. Her father only ever saw the kid if he knew her mother was busy elsewhere. And even that was a recent development, poor little bastard. Which was what Av was. In a city where polygamy was normal, to be illegitimate was by definition to be poor, one of the unwanted.

“Here,” said the major as he handed her a linen napkin, spotless and uncreased, “you might want this…”

Zara looked at him blankly.

“You’re crying,” he said.

She was too, which might explain the soft edges to the streets outside.

7th October

The girl at the window was unmistakable as the
restaurant car trundled by. Her desolation so real that Raf could almost taste it through glass.

Been there, felt that.

He wore dark glasses from habit, a leather coat lined with spider’s silk and boots with toe caps and black metal heels. Behind the Armani shades his eyes had four colour receptors, as they had done from birth, one more than strictly human. His fourth was in ultraviolet, though he could recalibrate across the entire spectrum.

Sound he adjusted by opening and closing his inner ear. So far, so predictable, if somewhat simplified. Unpredictability started with the fox, which now spat static, swore and raged inside his head.

The police bike on which Raf sat came with twin headlamps, featuring the very latest in multielement cluster/light guide technology, but he’d disconnected them at the same time as he cut the wires to the brake light and both sets of indicators. The reflectors he’d ripped off by hand. Matte black alloys went with a racer-noir engine cage and a light-swallowing paint job. The whole bike was gloriously transparent to CCTV.

The paint job was fresh and done by a garage at cost. A lot of people in the city suddenly wanted to be friends with the new Chief of Detectives. As it was, Raf practically had to order his local store to start charging full price for groceries and only the threat of taking his business elsewhere had convinced the manager Raf was serious…

“You certain some fuckwit intends to snatch her?”

Raf wasn’t sure whether to nod or cry, so he nodded. The fox might be back but it had rebooted to a default personality. And Raf had always thought the fox was the stable one while he suffered the glitches.

“Says who?”
demanded the fox.

Said every snitch on the precinct’s payroll, every cut-rate whore trying to cop a plea, even a few semihonest members of the public too afraid to leave their names. Rumour had hit the streets on steroids and been breaking lap records ever since.

The
why
changed with every telling, but the
what
was rock-solid, whispered from under veils and escaping like smoke in the cafés from between half-open lips; somehow, and it was a very indeterminate somehow, tables had been turned on Hamzah, the man himself had been made the proverbial offer that can’t be…only he had, and as of now, Hamzah’s kid was a walking target. Everybody but everybody who was anybody, who knew that kind of thing, already knew it. Hamzah included.

“Daddy’s rich?”

“Come on,” Raf muttered crossly.

For a while the fox said little, so Raf went back to worrying about Hani, because some days that felt like what he did best.

Just before leaving home, Raf had asked the kid if there was anything she needed, meaning toast or hot chocolate before bed, and she’d looked at him, her arms like sticks and small face serious, flicked her dark fringe from darker eyes and said,
“more time.”

So that was what he was trying to give her. Time and space. Life’s great shortage for those who already had the luxury of water and food. Since the incident at the warehouse, Zara hated him, fair enough. Raf could live with that, but Hani’s mistrust really hurt. He saw it in her every silence, her refusal to eat when he was in the madersa’s huge kitchen, in sideways glances and half-conscious flickers of fear.

Most of the time Raf managed to convince himself that it was just his imagination. And then he’d come home to some unguarded look or catch a muttered reassurance from Donna to Hani, as the kid was sent to kiss him good night before trundling off to bed.

Puddles,
Hamzah had said, surprising Raf, the one time they talked. Adults might labour upstream against their grief but children step in and out of sadness, trailing it after them in damp footprints. Only to step back into misery when the ground behind them begins to look dry.

7th October

“I’m fine,” Zara insisted.

“No, you’re not.” There was a determined expression on her mother’s face. “Major Halim’s absolutely right. What you need is some air.” Madame Rahina glanced at her husband for support but Hamzah was staring pointedly into the bottom of a brandy glass.

One of the advantages of dinner at Maxim’s was that it held an international drinks licence. Alcohol might be frowned upon, but it was not illegal.

“Air,” said Madame Rahina. “A good idea… Don’t you agree, my love?”

Hamzah pretended to wake with a start. He knew exactly what was going on and had done from the moment his wife first mentioned inviting the major, but he trusted his daughter to do only what she wanted.

“I think it’s up to Zara,” Hamzah said carefully. “Personally, I’m going to concentrate on pudding.” The thickset man picked up a leather menu and held it in front of him like a shield.

Despite herself, Zara smiled.

The major smiled back and inside her head Zara shrugged. He was handsome in a flinty, movie-star kind of way, what with his granite jaw, brown eyes and hair just a little longer than Army regulations allowed. And he probably hadn’t expected his off-the-cuff suggestion to be pounced on quite so hard by her mother.

Besides, some problems were best got out of the way.

“Sure,” said Zara, pushing back her chair. “Why not?” She waited for a second while the major tried to catch the attention of the maître d’, then shrugged. “No sweat,” Zara said. “I can stop it myself.” And with that she reached for the emergency chain, which looped its way down one wall, and yanked.

Crockery hit the floor. Some from their table or others, but mostly from the arms of a stumbling waiter who’d been stacking plates in an opposite corner.

A woman screamed.

The tram stopped.

“Is there a problem?” The maître d’ was white-faced with anxiety, his French accent as broken as the Limoges china around his feet.

“Of course there’s a problem.” Zara grabbed the menu from her father. “Look at this. You haven’t even got chocolate ice cream…”

“Cut his engines now.”

“No.” Raf shook his head.

“Come on.”
The fox sounded disgusted.
“It’s a clean shot.”

It was too. The man stepping down from the abruptly stopped tram had paused to scan Ibrahim Square, one of his hands on Zara’s shoulder, the other thrust deep in his jacket pocket. He said something to the girl and she nodded carefully, but moved away the moment he tried to take her arm.

What reassured Raf was that Zara looked irritated rather than afraid.

And yet Place Ibrahim Pasha was deserted, the restaurant car obviously planned to make good its escape and somewhere below Zara’s feet were catacombs, cut into limestone a thousand years before the birth of the Prophet. Rumour said they spread beneath Pharos in endless dark passageways, rough-hewn chambers and deep oubliettes. Had Raf been Zara, he’d have been terrified.

“Just do it,”
said the fox.
“Or maybe you’re afraid?”

Of killing if necessary? No, Raf shook his head. He didn’t think so… If it wasn’t necessary? Then yes, very. And something else was worrying Raf, worrying him enough to make him rewrite his plans on the fly.

“That uniform…”

“So?”

“You recognize?”

“Maybe it’s fake,”
suggested the fox.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Raf. Dress in the flashiest way possible. A bottle-green cavalry tunic with gold braid and sword knots to sleeves and collar. The kind of outfit guaranteed to make people look and remember. Rather than choose something anonymous like
sécurité,
whose black uniform made most people glance away, whether it was intended to or not.

Raf stood up, brushed dust from his knees and walked back to his bike.

“Where are you going?”
the fox demanded.

“To talk to Zara.” Breaking stock from barrel, Raf folded his borrowed police-issue nightSniper in two, twisting off the tiny laser sight and dropping that in his pocket. The rest he clipped into place down one of the Honda’s front forks.

“Very dinky…”

Ignoring the fox, Raf stalked across the square, a figure dressed in black moving across an expanse of unlit ground. He was impressed the major spotted him so quickly.