Arabesk (61 page)

At 5.49
A.M.
Saturday morning. The Quitrimala Casino. The call to prayer had come and gone. It was time, more or less.

16th October

Dawn had broken by the time he locked the hut door
behind him.

Dawn had
…

Mike smiled tightly at his own joke and stretched the fingers of one hand, like a concert pianist doing postperformance exercises. Then he turned his head from side to side, trying to reach the pain in his neck.

In his other hand he carried a heart and two dripping lungs; they weighed more than he expected.

“Hey, dipshit…” The insult was light, contemptuous. The accent a mix of street rough and faux polite. What was most unnerving was that the boy behind him chose German, Mike’s original language.

Slowly, very slowly, Mike turned. As he did so, his free hand swung down, reaching for a holster hidden on the back of his belt.

“I don’t think so…” The boy with the magenta dreads jerked his own automatic and Mike’s hand froze. He was remembering.

“The club,” said the boy with the noisy gold earbead. “In the corridor.”

The man remembered. The group of students, with one lagging at the end. Their eyes meeting, that knowing nod. It hadn’t been about the girl, or rather it had, just not in the way he’d thought.

“And before that,” said Avatar. He popped silver contacts from his pupils and dumped them and a magenta wig onto the tarmac. “On a roof at Sarahz, remember? You were pretending to be English.”

Adjusting his earbead, Avatar faded out some weirdshit track about dogs, boats and guns.

“You’re not police?” Mike’s eyes widened.

“
Les merde?
You’d be so lucky…” Avatar’s smile was grim. “I command a brigade of
Action Directe
…”

“You’re military…?”

Avatar sneered, with all the arrogance of someone whose fourteen years had seen things that made growing up fast the only safe thing to do. “Anarcho-Marxist-Syndicalist. If anyone strips this city back to its machine code it’s going to be us…”

“You’re too late,” said Mike. “Another dead American. Another burst of outrage.”

Avatar’s gaze flicked towards the grisly relics in the man’s hand. He’d been working on the assumption that rape would precede killing, probably carried out slowly and methodically given the almost feline cruelty of the man’s earlier behaviour.

Making a wrong call wasn’t something Avatar liked.

“Drop the offal and empty your pockets.”

Avatar waited while the man took out a disposable camera, cigarettes, the flat electronic key, a cheap lighter and a small Japanese sushi knife that looked just like a child’s chopper.

“And the rest…”

“That’s it,” said the man, pulling his coat pockets inside out.

“Travel light, don’t you?”

Action Directe
approved of travelling light. No baggage, emotional, literal or political; all three were known to slow down the response time between opportunity and action. And yet, personal was political, according to Zara.

How was Avatar to know if his decision to act owed its driving force to the fact this man was obviously
Thiergarten,
and thus an enemy of progress, or to the fact that the girl butchered on the beach at Villa Hamzah had, in some way, been a warning to Avatar’s father, whose politics were definitely not Avatar’s own?

And then there was Raf, who was
merde
himself but who had saved Avatar’s life, something Avatar hadn’t yet admitted to the old man.

The boy shook his head.

“Just give me the pills,” said Avatar and waited for Mike to unbutton the first two buttons of his shirt. They both noticed that Mike’s hands trembled as he handed over his pouch.

“Open wide.” Avatar held out a tiny purple kite and raised his gun until it touched the underneath of Mike’s chin. The metal was cool against the German’s early-morning stubble.

The man swallowed his fate.

“Pick up the offal and walk,” said the boy.

The door to the cargo bay opened easily, though the man no longer had the capacity to be surprised when the boy produced a spare key from his own pocket and unclicked the padlock, sending the metal shutter scrolling skywards in a rattle of metal machine music.

“Rust Never Sleeps…”

Avatar had named his brigade after an ancient CD found in a market. Weird shit, of the best kind. He’d sampled the tracks he wanted and given the CD to Zara. She’d said nothing about it since, so he figured it just wasn’t her taste.

It took Avatar and the man more than ten minutes to find spare cylinders of butano and drag them from the kitchens up to the loading bay. There were seven in total. Each one large, orange and as heavy as Avatar, maybe heavier. After that came huge blocks of lard to be smeared around the casino, vats of margarine and a couple of industrial-sized containers of ghee. Then methylated spirits on the stairs, used to fuel fondue heaters, the flashy old-fashioned kind.

“You see those?” Avatar pointed to cans stacked against a kitchen wall, each one full of maize oil. The casino might boast two world-class chefs, poached from the SS
Jannah,
but half of the visiting punters still stuffed themselves with freshly cooked chips sprinkled with paprika. The Soviet half…

The German nodded.

“Pour them on the hall carpets and come back here when you’re finished.”

Avatar’s first idea had been to let the man do all the work, but carrying the butano had been a job for two and time was running out… For himself and the city, for his father, even for the General if the word in the alleys was true. And Avatar trusted what he heard on the streets because that was where he belonged, no matter how much Zara wished it otherwise.

As for this casino. He didn’t approve of casinos or the people they attracted. And he didn’t want it.

“…Finished now.”

Avatar smiled at the German and beckoned him closer. Childlike eyes looked into his as the man smiled back. He’d just gutted a girl, Avatar had to remind himself. A girl whose ripped-open corpse was in a hut not fifty paces from where he stood, probably with his father’s initials cut into her wrist.

“Here,” said Avatar as he passed over a bottle of cooking brandy. The name was French, the label printed in Isk and the grapes grown in Algiers. Ersatz identity. Coming from nowhere. As fucked up as the city. “Take a drink.”

The man did, gagging on the raw spirit.

“And again.”

When the bottle was almost empty, Avatar walked the man up the darkened stairs to the loading bay and stood him in the middle of a concrete floor that was by then awash with spilt oil, methylated spirits and smashed bottles of brandy. The gas cylinders stood like sentries around the edge.

Using coins, Avatar jammed open the butano valves and, as soon as the smell of gas was strong enough to overpower the stink of evaporating alcohol, he told the man to count down from a hundred and then, when he reached zero light himself a cigarette. The other thing Avatar did before he slammed the bay doors and hiked the volume on his earbead was skim the sushi knife across concrete so it came to a halt beside the bloody relics at the man’s feet.

It was only later, when Avatar was driving his camper van back to Club Neutropic, alibis already building in his mind, that he realized he should have questioned the German before killing him.

17th October

If anybody else in the computer room had been stuffing
their face with a Big Mac and large fries, chocolate shake and a side dish of onion rings, Madame Roden would have thrown her out, if not banned her altogether.

Because it was Hani, who’d knocked first, asked if she might come in and then smilingly thrust a carton of fries at the fastidious systems manager for the night shift, Madame Roden had politely taken a lukewarm reconstituted fry and chewed it as if sampling a priceless Perigord black truffle.

“Shouldn’t you be at home asleep?” No sooner was the comment made than Madame Roden winced at her own lack of tact. If she’d been recently orphaned like that, she’d have wanted to follow her new uncle everywhere too.

“Uncle Ashraf came back to get some papers,” said Hani, apparently oblivious to the woman’s
faux pas
… They weren’t really papers, of course. Most of the bey’s day-to-day files downloaded direct to his watch. But a few, the really important ones, he had to sign for with a handprint before collecting them from the precinct’s central datacore.

Madame Roden was responsible for the night running of the core, but it more or less ran itself and most of her shift was spent stopping uniforms from slopping coffee on their keyboards and preventing them from trying to reach unsuitable photographs archived by the
morales
.

Pictures snatched by police photographers played a big part in most immorality cases. Though, of course, to the
morales
the grabs were just evidence. Well, to most of them.

Madame Roden shook her head. She shouldn’t even be thinking such stuff with a small child around.

“Could I use a terminal?”

The elderly woman was doubtful. Nothing in police regulations actually forbade it, but then, nothing said it was all right either. As for previous precedents, nine-year-olds wanting to use her computer room were a novelty. Come to that, civilians this side of the front desk were a novelty, full stop. Children or not.

“I saw Kamila on the way in,” Hani said suddenly. “I told her I was coming up here and she said to say hello…” Hani grinned. “Hello.”

Madame Roden smiled. She could remember when Kamila was this age. More than ten years ago, though it seemed far less. These days her daughter was a pathologist, reporting
direct
to Madame Mila, unbelievable though this was.

“Can I?”

Madame Roden blinked. “Yes, of course,” she said, slightly bemused. Hani had that effect on her. Actually Madame Roden had noticed the child had that effect on most people.

“Thank you,” said Hani and scrambled up onto a seat to tap the space bar in front of her, waking the terminal.

“Do you want me to help you find something to play with?”

Hani shook her head. She liked the neatly dressed elderly woman, but that didn’t mean she felt guilty about tricking her. Life had long since taught her that all adults existed to be tricked, except maybe Ashraf, but her uncle was different.

“No, thank you,” Hani said politely. “I’m going to write another fairy tale.”

“Another?”

Hani smiled. “About Suliman the Magnificent and the angry djinn…”

As soon as she had the screen to herself, Hani went to her postbox, grabbed a half-finished story she’d started months before and pasted it into the precinct’s basic word-processing package over a scuzzy parchment background. Rubbish page texture and rubbish font. At home she had fifty-three kinds of illuminated capital alone, most of them lifted from a university archive in Al Qahirah.

Minimizing
Suliman’s Dream, trope III
and twisting her screen slightly so that it was no longer overlooked, Hani did a double log-in, remaining as a guest but adding a window that knew her as Mushin Bey, husband to her dead aunt Jalila, not to mention Minister of Police, thus Ashraf’s theoretical boss.

One rumour said Uncle Mushin was at home, sitting in darkness grieving for his dead wife, another had him in a clinic getting over a long-term alcohol habit. Hani preferred the second theory.

No one had thought to cancel Mushin Bey’s network access. No one had even changed his password, which inevitably was
Jalila.

Top access, obviously. Superuser status. Hani doubted her uncle even knew what that meant or entailed. Flicking her fingers from key to key, Hani called up a current crime list and highlighted only the ones that had been mentioned on the news by Ferdie Abdullah.

Then she decided to read about the girl found on Hamzah’s beach and changed her mind two paragraphs in. A lot of the medical words were strange to her, but enough of the others made sense enough for her to close the file.

“I wonder,” said a voice, “have you seen…”

“In the computer room, Ya Bey.” Madame Roden never quite knew whether or not to smile when she met Ashraf al-Mansur. True, he was her husband’s boss, which meant she should. But then there was all that sad stuff with his dead aunt. And Kamila’s boss Madame Mila apparently hated him. And it was said poor Mushin Bey couldn’t hear the name al-Mansur without falling into a rage. As if the bey could have saved everyone from those terrible assassins.

His Excellency looked positively ill with exhaustion, poor man.

At the door, Raf turned. “I should thank you,” he said. “For letting Hani use a machine.”

“A pleasure.” The small woman blushed.

“Do you know what she’s doing?”

“Writing another story, Your Excellency, so she says…”

“That sounds about right.” Raf nodded to Madame Roden and went to his office, where a black bakelite phone was trying to wake the dead. The telephone had to be some kind of joke. At least, Raf assumed it was. Felix had definitely been making a statement of some kind.

Raf had moved straight into the fat man’s office. Not bothering to get the place redecorated first. Claimed the man’s desk too. In the bottom right drawer, behind a box of nanopore gloves, was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, more than half-full. Four empty bottles occupied the drawer on the left. That seemed to be about the extent of the old Chief’s filing skills.

Raf was about to pick up the receiver when the phone went dead and a bulb lit, signifying that his assistant had finally arrived. He checked his Seiko—8.30
A.M.
, Sunday morning. Raf sighed.

“Caffeine,” he demanded, punching a button on a bulky office intercom. Another of Felix’s joke purchases, presumably. “Please,” Raf added as a belated afterthought.

“Your coffee, Excellency…” The thin girl put down a tray and straightened it, so that the marquetry along one rim aligned exactly with the edge of his huge desk. “And you have…” Her voice was nervous. “You have three calls to return.”