Arabesk (6 page)

ZeeZee could see the map clearly in his head, right down to the pink cross-hatching, but that meant nothing. There was very little from his life that he couldn’t see in his head once he’d remembered where it was filed.

The entrance ZeeZee wanted turned out to be a narrow arch between two shops, one of which sold beaten brassware, the other old computers in shades of pastel. Between them was a door without a knocker. At head height was a peeling sign that read
On ne visite pas.

Straightening his shoulders, ZeeZee rapped hard on the ancient door and then regretted it as noise crashed like thunder down both sides of the street. So he knocked again, more gently this time.

“What do you want?”

At least, ZeeZee imagined that was what the man on the other side of the door said, though he didn’t recognize the language.

“I’m looking for Lady Nafisa,” said ZeeZee.

Nafisa.
The voice turned the word over as if tasting it.

“Yes,” said ZeeZee. “My aunt.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” In the space where the door had been stood an old man, the stub of a cheroot gripped between his right thumb and skeletal first finger. Dark eyes examined ZeeZee’s face and then the man stepped to one side. “Our house is your house.” This time round he spoke in French, with a voice raw from a lifetime of cheap cigars.

There were five bolts on that door and the old man secured them all, including one that fixed straight up into the top of the arch and another that drove into the worn surface of a stained flagstone.

“This way.”

An arch in the side of the entrance room led left, followed by an immediate right turn through a second arch, which was when ZeeZee realized the shabby corridor he was in was really the start of a small, very simple maze leading to an ugly, obsessively-neat garden immediately beyond.

On either side of the garden stood open-fronted rooms, little more than flat roofs supported by sandstone pillars over a cracked terracotta floor. And at the far end of the garden was an ornate marble arch set in a simple brick wall. Once the formal garden had been naked to the sky but someone, years back, had roofed it over with steel and glass, panes of which were now cracked and dirty.

That the glass roof was old was obvious, because the frame supporting it was riveted to crossbeams that were held in place by cast-iron pillars, and a century’s worth of paint had crusted round the rivets and smoothed the Doric decoration on the plinths to a bland ripple.

“This way.” The old man vanished through the marble arch into a cavernous, empty room where water didn’t so much fall from a fountain as run bubbling down a free-standing slab of marble.

“Shazarwan,”
announced the man and ZeeZee guessed he was naming the strange object.

Open arches on the far side of the room led into an open courtyard, smaller than the garden and tiled with white stone. In the centre stood a fountain carved from a single block of horsehair marble. But what ZeeZee noticed was the impossibly ornate four-storey house that rose at the far end of the courtyard.

Soft uplights pulled detail from a carved balustrade and threw its huge arches into shadow. If the al-Mansur madersa was meant to impress, then it succeeded.

Jerking his chin towards stairs that started up the outside of the madersa, then turned in under an arch to continue inside, the thin man stood back.

“Nafisa…” He said simply.

ZeeZee went.

“You’re late,” said a voice that ZeeZee tracked to a small woman angrily pacing near the top of the stairs. Backlit by wall lights, Lady Nafisa looked thin and birdlike, a neat faceless shadow but an angry one.

“Am I?” ZeeZee’s first reaction was to apologize, then insist his flight was late, even though she’d know from her driver that this was untrue. But he didn’t let himself do either. Instead, he shrugged and kept climbing, as if not caring if he walked straight through her.

“Shit happens,” he said as he reached the top and stared round at a huge room, open to the night through its arches on one side. Since heights and he didn’t agree with each other, he didn’t go look at the view. “And besides, someone wanted a word.”

Lady Nafisa stopped suddenly. “You saw somebody you knew?”

“Other way round,” said ZeeZee. “He thought he knew me.”

They spoke French because that was the language Lady Nafisa had first used. Yet when it came, her switch to English was so fluent ZeeZee wasn’t even certain she was aware of making it.

“I sent a car for you. A stretch Daimler-Benz.” She was doing her best to smile but there was real anger in her eyes. Which was fine with ZeeZee because he was pretty sure that, behind the expensive anonymity of the Versace shades she’d unwittingly bought for him there was real anger in his too.

Families had that effect on him and no family more strongly than his own. If she really was family, which remained to be proved.

“I make my own way,” said
ZeeZee.

The woman stared at him. And behind the fashion-plate suit she saw ghosts of her husband backed up like reflections in a mirror. “Later,” she said hastily. “We can deal with this later…”

As iron cue, the skeletal porter from the rear entrance strode in clutching a brass tray that he placed on a three-legged wooden contraption which seemed to be waiting for it.

“This is Khartoum,” said Lady Nafisa, as if talking about a dog. “He’s from the Sudan so
you
can say anything you like in front of him.”

Meaning he didn’t speak English, presumably.

“Unless, of course,” said ZeeZee, “I say it in French, Arabic or whatever that other language was.”

Nafisa sighed. “German,” she said heavily. “I can see you’re going to be like your father.”

Father?
ZeeZee stared at her.

“Precise to the point of irritation.”

ZeeZee hadn’t meant to be precise, merely glib. And since he’d never met his father and the last time he’d seen her, his mother still regarded the truth as something so fluid that identical sentences could mean opposite things on different days, he had no idea if Lady Nafisa even knew who his father was. Somehow he doubted it. Some undiscovered theory of chaos seemed to be the only thing that made sense of his family life to date.

Aim to please, shoot to kill. That had been one of Wild Boy’s phrases back before Huntsville when he and Wild were still not quite enemies. “We aim to please,” said ZeeZee.

“We?”

Yeah, we
… ZeeZee clicked his heels and bowed slightly, almost as if he meant it.
Me and the fox.

“Stupid that is,” the sudden voice behind ZeeZee was cutting in its contempt. “Clicking your heels. No one really behaves like that in Iskandryia. I knew you’d be stupid.”

“Hana.”

“Hani,” corrected the girl.

Lady Nafisa sighed.

“Anyway,
Hani
what?” the child asked angrily, walking into the light. She had oil smeared across the palms of both her hands and bare ankles from where she’d slid down an elevator cable.

“You’ve got the floodlights on,” she said to Lady Nafisa and stalked over to a balustrade to examine the courtyard below.
“And
the fountain…” The small girl turned her head to stare at ZeeZee. “You’re honoured.” Her voice was bitter. “She doesn’t turn the lights on for anyone. She wouldn’t even turn them on for my birthday party.”

“They were broken,” Lady Nafisa said fiercely.

“And now they’re mended.” It didn’t look like she believed her aunt for a minute.

“I’m Raf,” said ZeeZee.

“Ashraf,” corrected the child, scornfully. “Don’t I know it. She’s talked of nothing else for days…”

“Hani.”
Lady Nafisa’s voice was hard.

“Yes, I know. Hani, be good. Hani, disappear…” The small girl turned round and stamped back towards the lift. “You don’t look like you’re worth all the fuss,” she said cuttingly and slammed the grille, leaving ZeeZee with the impression of a small, furious animal glaring through the bars of a cage.

1st July

Dawn came in low, the sky clear and turquoise blue.
And Hamzah Quitrimala knew exactly how it would look out on the water. The breaking light would catch one wave after another, until a ribbon of sun stretched from the horizon to the glass-sided cockpit of his 15,000bhp VSV. Fifty feet long, maybe ten at its widest, the boat was ex-police issue, chisel-prowed but flared at the stern. Stealth-sheeted and proof against infrared sensors.

It ran every month, midweek, without fail.

Diamonds carried to a pick-up point south of Iraklion/medical supplies brought back—Hamzah had captained the run himself when he was younger. Of course, in his day the boats had been nothing like as fast, but they had still done the job and been back before the second daybreak—which was more than Hamzah could say for his current crew.

He was going to have to find himself a new captain. But first he had a bey to see…

“Ashraf al-Mansur,” repeated ZeeZee. “Known to his friends as Raf.”

ZeeZee emptied his mind and let the name roll over him. When he opened his eyes five minutes later the change was made and he was someone else, though boiling fog still filled the
hamman,
making it impossible for whoever he was to see the door.

In fact, so thick was the steam that Raf could hardly see his own feet, which might also have had something to do with the slick of sweat running down his forehead to drip into his eyes.

He stank, though not as much as when he woke first thing the previous morning, in a pool of perspiration that smelled sweet as blood and sour as dysentery. That was twenty-four hours ago, when his piss had been black. Now the colour was nearing normal as his body began to adjust to its lack of crystalMeth. It was his mind that was still addicted.

Raf was naked. In a domed room filled with naked women. Except the women were on the walls—pictures only, depicting a dozen dancers, their breasts full and bare, each plump
mons
hidden behind a wisp of fabric fashioned from tiny tesserae, marble fragments glued into place more than a century before by some artist keen to preserve a slight air of decency.

In Huntsville, in the days before Dr Millbank, recalcitrant convicts were broken by being locked in a hot-box and broiled. In El Iskandryia, even first thing in the morning, people had to book for the privilege.

Raf wasn’t sure he understood why his aunt considered a Turkish bath the ideal place for him to meet Dr Hamzah Quitrimala Effendi. But here he was, still waiting for the man to show.

Sweat beads almost bubbled from his stomach and chest, and already he felt dehydrated.

“Your Excellency?”

Raf opened his eyes to see a man whose shoulders would make those of most sumo wrestlers look puny. A blue suit hung tent-like from his frame, its fabric already gone limp in the steam. In one ear was a gold Sony earbead, the kind you were meant to notice.

“Your Excellency?”

That was him, Raf realized. He nodded.

“The boss will be with you in a minute. He apologizes for being late.” Job done, the huge Russian took up position against the opposite wall, apparently impervious to the heat that soon had sweat rolling down his pink face.

“You Ashraf?” A thickset man strode in, hand already outstretched, gut protruding. “Good to meet you.” He too was unashamedly naked, his uncovered genitals at eye height to where Raf sat on a marble bench.

Raf stood.

“Dr Hamzah Effendi?”

A lightning grin flashed across the man’s face, then vanished, leaving only a wry, almost self-mocking smile. Lady Nafisa had insisted that Raf should remember to add the honorific to Hamzah’s name. It was a neat touch.

The newcomer had the kind of handshake Raf expected. Strong but slightly clumsy, and brief as if he’d finally learned not to grab the hand of every contact and wring it heartily. Heavy gold links circled one wrist and on his middle finger was a huge ring set with a cauchabon ruby. Both screamed money but neither said anything about restraint.

Reading people was one of Raf’s skills, like eidetic memory and night sight: he knew that and accepted it. It came from living in institutions… Swiss boarding school from the age of five, a Scottish school after that, three years working for Hu San in Seattle and then Huntsville. He’d been inside institutions all his life and only one of them had been a prison—the others just felt like it. They also felt safe. Raf wasn’t stupid enough to deny that.

“Nasty scar,” said Hamzah.

“Yeah.”

“Recent.” Hamzah added. It wasn’t a question. He examined the cut along Raf’s ribs with a practised eye, taking in the double strip of plastic skin.

“Slipped and cut myself,” said Raf. Which was possible. Not true, admittedly, but no less unlikely than being mugged by golem with a photograph of him that wasn’t. “My own fault,” Raf added. “Should have been more careful.”

“And that?”

Raf’s shoulder looked, at first glance, like a map of some capital city of damaged flesh, lines radiating out from a densely scarred centre. “Long story,” said Raf. “Maybe some other time.”

If the steam room was hot, the plunge pool outside was so cold that Raf thought his heart would stop and his lungs never unfreeze.

“Lovely isn’t it?” Hamzah said happily as they both bobbed to the surface. Raf scowled, but only because he had no breath left to speak.

“Strange,” said Hamzah as he kicked his way towards marble steps. “I would have thought your father had a dozen Turkish baths…” He let his words trickle into a silence that stretched ever longer—until Raf finally realized the man wasn’t just making conversation, he expected an answer.

Which was fair enough. Hamzah undoubtedly wanted to know what he was getting for his money. Raf’s big problem was that he didn’t have an easy reply.

“I lived with my mother,” Raf said, then stopped, because that wasn’t strictly true either… For a start she wasn’t really his mother and he hadn’t really lived with her. Or maybe she was. Her opinion on that changed with the wind. And maybe he had…

“I boarded at various schools. England, Scotland, Switzerland.”

“Your ma was American?”