Arabesk (66 page)

Away to their right, arc lights bathed the vast neobaroque business that was Misr Station, its exuberance curtailed only by distance and intervening darkness. And somewhere nearby was a truck depot, where a diesel crunched its gears, but other than this, the only sound was of feet shuffling over gravel as the group left the tracks behind to slip through a hole cut in a link fence.

An unbroken line of blank-faced, five-storey tenements faced them across a deserted road, all that separated them from a small
zawiya
built in the courtyard of the tenement opposite. The
zawiya
’s minaret was little more than a squat tower. And Khartoum’s voice, when it echoed from the top, was thin and quavering against the amplified magnificence coming from grander minarets across the waking city.

The small mosque looked out of place but that was just appearance, reality was the other way round. The mosque had been there first. Once, in fact, it had been a Coptic church, home to a famous Gnostic, but that was before the armies of God burst out of the desert, bringing blood, coffee, decent cooking and the truth.

“In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate…”

The
Fatiha
gave way to other prayers, then a Bible story that Raf didn’t recognize from Sunday services at school. One in which Satan was cast out for refusing to bow down before Adam and in which Adam repented of eating the Apple.

Original sin did not exist.

Vicarious atonement was not required.

To find the law, logic had only to be systematically applied to situations not explicitly mentioned in the Holy Quran…
Hadith
and
Ijma’
… Raf pulled the terms from memory and meaning came tumbling after.
Hadith
was a database of oral law, second only to the Book and more important than
Ijma
’, agreed precedents. Together, with logic, they made up the four classical roots of jurisprudence, which all rulers must use…

Hunched on his heels at the back of the crowd, Raf understood instantly why he’d been brought. Why Khartoum was so insistent.

Raf dragged his eyes away from the cracked dome overhead with its constellation of tesserae broken by the tiny darkness of fallen stars. Stained glass filled with morning light at one end of the mosque and below the window was a wooden minbar, a kind of carved pulpit in which Khartoum now stood. To one side was a niche, richly decorated with polychrome marble and painted tiles. At the top of the niche were carved stones of alternate colours, dark red and pale sandstone. It was an ancient technique known as…

Ablaq,
Raf said to himself.

Next to him, a middle-aged man frowned, suddenly recognized Raf as the new governor and looked hurriedly away.

“This is the truth.”

Now Khartoum sat facing the crowd, telling them the story of a famous mystic who challenged a Caliph and was crucified, his ashes thrown into the Tigris. Somehow the tale of al-Hallaj developed into one about a mullah who rode his donkey backward, waving a lighter and a mug of water. When asked why, he announced that it was to ignite heaven and put out the flames of hell.

After that the stories became lighter. The poor mullah and the rich beggar. The night the mullah fell down a well. The time he announced, when presented with a pregnant woman, whose husband had died falling off a cart five years before, that the fault lay with the lazy foetus who’d been sleeping, not the mother. And then, while the men were still thinking about that, the stories ended…

“They are the city,” Khartoum said to Raf later. “You forget this at your peril. And besides”—he smiled—“what’s that phrase
nasranis
have…?
Seeing is believing
…”

“You wanted me to believe in them?”

Khartoum looked at Raf as if he was a complete idiot. “No,” he said heavily, “I want them to believe in you.”

22nd October

She wasn’t the first person to decide that Raf had
engineered the departure of Koenig Pasha… Dr. Kamila was just more obvious about her suspicions than most.

“A poison-induced heart attack?” Raf raised his eyebrows. “Who said anything about a heart attack?”

“The local news. Were they wrong?” Kamila kept her tone several degrees below comfortable. One degree above the autopsy suite.

“Yes,” said Raf, “undoubtedly… For a start, to have a heart attack you need a heart.”

Behind him a man snorted, but when Raf glanced round the General’s old bodyguard, Hakim, was busy staring straight ahead.

“I’ll be with you when this is done,” Kamila said stiffly and returned to her scalpel and a plump woman largely hidden under a green sheet.

It was three months since Raf had been in Kamila’s autopsy suite. Then there’d been two bodies, one of them a stranger unrelated to his own narrative, the other the woman he was meant to have murdered. Now there were half a dozen. In El Iskandryia these days, even death was suffering from inflation.

“That man I sent…”

“In a minute,” said Kamila crossly, turning back to where the plump woman’s scalp had been sliced around the hairline and pulled forward, so it hid her face. A section of yellow bone beneath had been cut away. Whatever was in the stainless-steel dish beside the half-empty skull might look like minced jelly but was, Raf decided, undoubtedly something nastier.

“Now,” said Raf.

“As soon as this is finished.”

Raf clicked his fingers and pointed to the electric scalpel. “Take that toy away from Ms. Kamila.”

“Sure, Boss.” Hakim squeezed between two trolleys and held out a meaty hand. “If you would, miss…”

Very carefully, Kamila put the bowl and her scalpel on the nearest table, the double clink of metal on metal momentarily drowning out Raf’s sigh. She obviously hadn’t forgiven him the last time they’d met.

“The scalpel…” Hakim’s hand was still outstretched.

“Let it go,” said Raf and the sergeant padded silently back to his place. Ahmed, Raf’s other bodyguard, waited at ground level, at the top of the stairs. In the street outside, his official driver stood by the Bentley. It seemed that the only place Raf was to be free of guards was on the loo. And even that had been a battle.

At the mansion itself, he had anxious secretaries, keen assistants, more staff than hours in the day and all awaiting orders, with only Hani willing to disagree with him if she thought his ideas were bad. Raf seriously doubted if an idiot supported by a nine-year-old was what the General had in mind when he resigned and appointed Raf in his place. So far, it seemed, his greatest successes had come from doing nothing… Zero-input shadow play.

“Hakim,” Raf said. “Go join Ahmed. Understand?” The big man nodded doubtfully, then looked at Raf and shrugged.

“Is that an order, Boss?”

“Whatever it takes,” said Raf.

Hakim gone, Raf turned his full attention to Kamila. He was pretty sure the pathologist’s face showed open contempt, though that could have been his imagination, given that she wore a green surgical mask over her nose and mouth.

“You know why the General appointed me governor?”

The shake of her head was quick, abrupt.

“You want to know?”

She thought about that. Her face tilted slightly to one side. Dark eyes flicked over his shoulder to the shut door beyond. No, she shook her head again, she didn’t…

“Good,” said Raf, “because I haven’t a fucking clue.”

“That makes two of us.”
He wasn’t meant to hear her aside, but he did. Just as he heard a raggedness in her heartbeat, the rush of her breath and the crackle of paper as she pushed her hand through a slit in the side of her surgical gown, searching for a cigarette.

Ignoring a dozen
NO SMOKING
signs, Kamila tapped a Cleopatra straight from its packet to her mouth and zapped the end, tugging smoke down into her lungs. She put the crumpled packet back without offering a cigarette to Raf.

Nicotine-heavy and carcinogen-free, the smoke mixed with formaldehyde and almost swamped the underlying signature of slowly decaying meat. And while a clock on the wall ticked off the seconds, an air purifier scrubbed at the smoke and a humming wall unit kept the tiled room not far above zero.

The morgue was fifteen feet below the sidewalk, soundproof, cut out of solid rock. Back times, before it was used for dead bodies, it had been a prison for live ones. Then the soundproofing had been more useful. Before this it was a charnel house for dry bones. Earlier still, Gnostic heretics had hidden there from the might of Byzantium.

History backed up inside Raf’s head like memory, ghost after ghost, silent and hopeless. Some days he could almost taste it.

“Ever read any Ibsen?” Raf asked.

She hadn’t.

“Small town gets poisoned, everybody wants to keep it quiet. I’ve forgotten the end…” Behind her mask, the girl’s face remained impassive.

Raf sighed. “Show me the bodies,” he said.

Kamila nodded. They were back to a relationship she understood. He gave orders, she quietly resented them. “This way,” she said, walking across to a trolley that was on its own. “This is the man you insisted we take…” Pulling back a body cloth, she indicated something with the stink of stale embers and the consistency of twisted bog oak.

Clothes had fused in places to flesh, where flesh was left, legs were bent at the knees, the body angled forward, fists raised, as if fighting an invisible enemy…

Occasional flakes of barklike flesh dotted onto the trolley’s top but mostly what remained of the man was polished anthracite. The thread of a toe tag had been looped round one ankle, the actual toes having fused together.

“PA,” said Kamila, indicating the twisted limbs. “
Pugilistic attitude,
it happens when strong muscles cook in the heat. Muscles tighten, spine expands, head goes back. You find it in everything from house fires to the dead at Pompeii. He got caught in a fireball, then fell beneath the worst of the flames. You got lucky.”

Raf looked at her.

“If the heat’s intense enough, the brain boils and the skull explodes…looks like a gunshot. Well, if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Instead,” said Kamila, “the skull’s in one piece and X-rays show not all of the fillings melted. And he did have fillings, rather than replacements. Which makes him a traditionalist.”

Or an idiot.

“And fillings will tell me what?”

“Country of origin, if God wills…” She shrugged. “I’ll take a look as soon as the surface work is complete.” Kamila stubbed out the remains of her cigarette and picked up a UV rod, flicking its switch.

“Forget that,” said Raf, quietly taking the rod from her hand. “I need his nationality now. Anything that’s not now is already too late.”

“Okay, you’re the boss,” Kamila said, the tightness around her eyes contradicting the politeness of her words. Picking up a scalpel, she hacked open one blacked cheek, swapped instruments and reached in with a pair of tiny snub-nosed pliers. “Already heat-cracked,” she said to herself. To Raf, she said, “We can do this professionally or we can do it fast.”

Not waiting for his answer, Kamila crushed the tooth and used the pliers to extract a minute shard of amalgam from deep inside. The fragment went into a glass dish, the dish into a little spectrometer and Kamila punched a button. Behind smoked glass, a laser vaporized the amalgam and data began to scroll down a tiny flat screen.

“Austro-Hungarian,” she said, “maybe German. Could be American, just about, though slightly wrong composition for US amalgam.”

“So he’s not Iskandryian?”

“I’m talking about the fillings,” said Kamila.

“I’m not,” said Raf. “What about the girl?”

“That’s all you want on this one?”

“It’s enough.”

It was too.
Tourists butchered by tourist
. The dead man was a foreigner. If necessary, he could be made into a tourist. That gave him something to give the newsfeeds. And the earlier deaths could also be put down to this man. Raf was still writing headlines in his head when Kamila walked over to another trolley and pulled back the sheet, exposing the face and shoulders of a blonde teenager.

She treated this corpse with more respect. Maybe because the victim was female or this was a victim, not a killer. Perhaps just because the body was more obviously human. A jigsaw of a human, true enough, with some pieces missing, but still more obviously like her, even when dead.

The dead girl looked unnaturally thin beneath the cloth, and then Raf realized why. Both her large and small intestines were already in a surgical chill bucket beneath the trolley. The bucket tagged and numbered. The more Raf looked at the corpse the more it reminded Raf of himself. He could swear there’d been one time he was across the other side of an operating theatre looking at his body as it lay on a table, figures in white coats standing around it.

“She’s American,” said Raf. “Nineteen, a politics major, doing well at university. Originally from Kansas City. Her father works for Hallmark…” Raf caught the pathologist’s look and held it. “I was talking to the poor bastard half an hour ago.”

And saying nothing of any consequence, obviously enough, the meeting brief and painful. A jowly middle-aged man, still jet-lagged and pale with shock, accompanied by a vodka-sodden woman whose anger was barely in check. First they learn their kid is missing, then—once they arrive where she’s meant to be—no one in authority will even take their calls. And then twenty-four hours later, just as they’re ready to flip, Iskandryia’s chief muckety-muck turns up at their hotel, accompanied by three armed guards.

In the end, Raf had apologized to the Haugers and left, trailing his guards behind him. And the parting glare from the dead girl’s mother made it obvious she held him personally responsible for every injury inflicted on her child.

Only manners and being in a foreign city made Mrs. Hauger swallow her words. On his way out of the hotel, Raf had met Senator Liz coming in. From the look on her face she also held Raf accountable.

All he’d learnt from his uncomfortable encounter with the Haugers was that their daughter Dawn didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs and wasn’t interested in boys…