Arabesk (8 page)

A sluggish breeze rolling lazily off the sea faded as Raf headed inland. Away from the Corniche the hot midday air was muggy, with humidity high enough to merit a warning on the local newsfeed. Common sense said grab the nearest air-conditioned taxi, but Raf ignored the sweat beginning to build under his thick beard and headed south on foot towards Lady Nafisa’s house.

Between Le Trianon and Rue Abu Dadrda, Raf found one
boulevard,
four
rues
and a quiet tree-lined
place
named al-Mansur, historical detritus of the family to which he now belonged.

And Raf was more than halfway across the
place
before he finally realized why Nafisa’s roofed-over garden inspired in him such hatred.

Seattle

Out at Huntsville the rain did more than merely drum
on glass: it fell like buckshot. But before there could be Huntsville, the city of Seattle had to exist—and the fox blamed that on a man called Asa Mercer.

On 16 January 1866, Mercer left New York with thirty-four unmarried girls bound for a new settlement at Puget Sound on the Pacific coast. He’d hoped to bring more than 700 but, all the same, it was an improvement on his first expedition to collect marriageable women. Then he had persuaded only eleven to make the dangerous trip. Maybe it had been the rumours of rain that put them off, maybe it had been the distance, or the fact that the war was only recently over… Whatever, that had been then and this was later.

It still rained though, because in Seattle this was what the weather did—even ZeeZee knew that. And the rain drummed off city sidewalks, or beat on sun canopies raised in hope over empty tables outside cafés.

But out at Huntsville the rain did more than merely drum, its buckshot fell on the glass roof of the jail, twenty-four/seven. At least, that was what it felt like to ZeeZee those first few months he was there. Until the snow came and with it silence.

A masterpiece of nineteenth-century iron and glass, built twenty-five years after Paxton first led the way by using prefabricated sections for London’s famous Crystal Palace, Huntsville Penitentiary was a monument to man’s ingenuity—and stupidity.

Not the stupidity of the convicts who ended up there but of the architects, philanthropists and politicians of Washington State. Men who wanted their names immortalized in a correctional glass cathedral that turned out, in practice, to function as little more than an ice house.

Two riots in three winters went some way towards convincing the governor that the design was not as humane as he’d been led to believe. But since five identical penitentiaries had already been built in other states to the same plan, and all had been unsuccessful, this didn’t come as a surprise to his critics.

By 1930, nearly sixty years later, all were ruins except Huntsville. In 1979 Huntsville was finally decommissioned. And then, in the final year of the twentieth century
,
Californian therapist Dr Anthony Millbank published his revolutionary work on lux therapy.

Crime, said Dr Millbank, wasn’t merely a matter of incorrect socialization, food allergy or genetic malfunction, which in animals was called bad blood. Therefore social therapy, healthy meals and carefully selected drugs were not the complete answer.

Most crime was urban. What most urban dwellers lacked was natural light. It was therefore obvious that light-deprivation was a contributory factor in crime. Since most of middle America believed that original sin rather than genetics, allergies or lack of breastfeeding led to crime, they paid little attention to the latest addition to the list of contributory causes. Though a teenage serial killer who drained, labelled and later drank the chilled blood of his victims mixed with Stolichnaya gained brief notoriety by claiming his murderous tendencies were caused by an aversion to food, shopping malls and daylight.

But Dr Millbank persisted, helped both by appearances on Oprah and data-showing that the gene cFos (a marker for the human internal clock) peaked only once—under artificial light, at dawn, but expressed at dawn
and
dusk in natural light.

There was, in Dr Millbank’s opinion, a
distinct and irrefutable correlation between artificial light and crime.

The gradual shifts in light-intensity and wavelength that caused humans to adjust peacefully to the transition between night and day were missing in urban society. And basic research showed that under the artificial conditions imposed by electric light, even lab rats and gerbils became restless and unsettled.

How much better, then, for naturally unsettled people—like prisoners—to benefit from lux therapy rather than live under a regime governed by harmful artificial light…

No state in the US would fund a new penitentiary based on the ideas of Dr Millbank so he applied for a private licence and founded his own prison, buying Huntsville cheap from the city of Seattle—which was delighted to offload its responsibility for a decaying Victorian masterpiece.

Dr Millbank’s price was that five miles of forest and scrub around Huntsville should officially be declared a dark-sky preserve, with light-pollution strictly controlled within this perimeter. Heating was installed, lifts, carpets
…a
gym, a weights room, an Olympic-size swimming pool.

Huntsville wasn’t just unique in being run according to the theories of Dr Anthony Millbank. It was the only penitentiary in the US allowed to charge its inmates hotel fees. To be incarcerated at Huntsville cost money: about the same as sending a child to a good Ivy League University. Everyone loved the place, except the police. The state saved money on prisoners, those incarcerated mixed with a better class of criminal and there was none of the gang violence endemic in most other American prisons.
The kind of people who belonged in gangs couldn’t afford the fees.

It wasn’t that the inmates were all white, all Anglo-Saxon or all Protestant. From the very start, right from the turn of the century, there was a rich mix of embezzlers,
capi di capi
and drug barons of every ethnic origin. The only thing they had in common was that they were all very definitely not poor.

Justifying the existence of Huntsville, however, proved a politician’s nightmare. Democrats hated the prison’s elitist credentials, Republicans loathed the softness of its regime: but when a senator from one party was caught bribing a congressman from another, Huntsville was where both elected to serve their sentences.

Statistics put inmate violence at almost zero and for once they were accurate. Violence happened, but not often, and violence between prisoners and staff was literally unknown. Which was why ZeeZee Welham’s unprovoked attack on the elderly, white-haired Dr Millbank sent shock waves through every elegant Huntsville walkway.

Merely punching any member of staff would have been horrifying enough. But to grip Dr Millbank himself by his scraggy throat and drag him across his own desk to plant a blow that split his lip as if it had been a ripe plum was beyond belief. So far beyond belief that Dr Millbank announced on the spot that what ZeeZee needed was not punishment but psychiatric help. His words left a fine spray of blood across his attacker’s tangled beard and broad chest, but even then he handed ZeeZee a Kleenex from a box by his desk.

It made ZeeZee want to punch him all over again.

All of which explained how ZeeZee found himself in the passenger seat of a Lincoln Continental coming off the 522 onto Interstate 5, with Lake Washington on one side and Puget Sound on the other, on his way to psychiatric assessment at a hospital in Tacoma.

The man driving him to Mount Olive Hospital was Clem Burke, a bull from a downstate prison who was undergoing compulsory rehabilitation at Huntsville after taking a nightstick to the skull of an inmate at his old jail. Making Clem Burke work as a warder at Huntsville was probably constitutionally illegal: he certainly regarded it as cruel and unusual.

“You know what I’d do with you?”

ZeeZee looked across as Clem swung the heavy Lincoln out into the fast lane and overtook an old Beetle, nudging so close the VW got almost buffeted off the freeway.

“Let me guess…”

“Nah,” said Clem. “Don’t bother. You couldn’t begin to imagine.” He shifted down a gear and slid past a truck on its nearside, angrily flicking it the finger when the Mack hit its brakes and flashed its lights.

“This Shitville do-gooding crap. It’s just toss. You don’t just hit the Governor and get away with it.” The Lincoln lurched forward, closing up a gap before anyone could pull into it.

“Rehabilitation not working, then?” ZeeZee asked innocently.

He enjoyed watching the veins stand out on Clem’s fat neck and his face turn an even deeper shade of purple.

“Solitary,” snarled Clem. “That’s what you need. Stripped naked in a sweatbox; till you as pink and pretty as a baby. Then I’d give your ass to some Boss Nigra… That’s what. That’s the way any real prison would do it.”

A real prison probably would, too. But then, someone was paying ZeeZee’s fees precisely to ensure stuff like that didn’t happen. And ZeeZee had a pretty good idea where that money came from. A Chinese woman who knew who
really
put a
.22 through the back of Micky O’Brian’s head and watched him crumple as the sub-sonic slug ricocheted around the inside of his skull, scrambling what was left of Micky’s brains after a $15,000-a-month crack habit had magimixed its share. And Hu San wasn’t someone ZeeZee wanted to upset. Not now, not ever…

Mentioning her name in public would have been a quicker way of committing suicide than standing up in court to claim he’d killed Micky, he’d meant to kill Micky and, given half a chance, he’d kill Micky again. And which way should he go for the electric chair?

All of which would have been a lie.

ZeeZee kept his eyes on the interstate. Watching the approach
signs for SeaTac Airport and the other cars. Which was more than Clem Burke did.

“What do you think of that, then?” Clem asked. He was chewing the inside of his lip at the thought of ZeeZee pegged out in some sweatbox or on his knees tossing salad for a war daddy.

“Well?” Clem demanded.

“It’s not going to happen,” said ZeeZee. At least, not now. He’d spent a lot of time in the remand centre worrying about what came next. Wondering what the rippers inside might have in mind for a polite blond boy with a nice English accent.

So he did his own attitude adjustment, before anyone else got the chance. Within a month his prissy accent was gone—still obviously English, but flatter and harder. He took up exercise in his cell. And then, when his shoulders had developed and his arms had grown stronger, he braved the gym. In the weeks that followed he let his hair grow, gave up shaving and stopped washing until his skin finally found its balance.

His life was a Xerox, a copy. And the original wasn’t his. Never had been. He was a mirror, in which people saw what they wanted to see; and in him they soon saw a J-Cat, ready for the Ding Wing, walking the very edge of psychosis.

He took up tai chi—minus the sword, obviously. Volunteered to act as kick bag to a hard-ass elderly rasta with a thing for Capoeira. He learned ginga, rabo de arraia and queixada as well as esquiva and a few other basic defensive moves, but mostly he learned blade technique, though to the badges and white-shirts it just looked like dance. But then that was the whole point of a martial art which had survived by disguising itself as something else.

“Do your own time,” warned the rasta and ZeeZee did. He kept himself to himself, didn’t pry, didn’t boast, lost the fights he couldn’t win or absolutely couldn’t avoid, until one week he won, then won again, earning himself space. And when the rasta nicknamed him after some hick redneck band, ZeeZee took it as a compliment and waxed his own matted hair into embryo dreadlocks.

But as age nineteen slid into twenty and a date still wasn’t set for his trial, ZeeZee kept on fretting, right up to the morning a suited lawyer turned up in his holding cell at Remand3 and put the basis of a cast-iron insanity plea in front of him.

It was elegant, it was sweet and all ZeeZee had to do was agree: but it was only when the lawyer mentioned ’ville that ZeeZee nodded and reached for a pen.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he told Clem suddenly.

“Yeah,” Clem hawked out his window, just missing the windscreen of a passing saloon. “That’s something else I’d kick out of you cons at Shitville, All that ‘Poor me, I’m innocent’ shit. If you weren’t guilty you wouldn’t be there. How fucking simple do you want it?”

ZeeZee silently shook his head. In his case guilty didn’t come into it. He was either innocent or mad, not that Dr Millbank used such words.
Hysterically amnesiac was
what had made it onto ZeeZee’s files. He knew: the doctor had powered up a screen just to show him.

The insanity plea on offer was simple. ZeeZee couldn’t be convicted of murdering Micky O’Brian because he didn’t know he’d done it. His fingerprints might be on the Wilson Combat thrown down by Micky’s body, they might also be on a couple of .22LR in its magazine and all over the conversion unit that had replaced the Wilson’s usual .45 barrel, but ZeeZee genuinely didn’t know he’d fired the shot.

Even though the police had found him in O’Brian’s house overlooking Puget Sound, standing in the hallway with Micky dead in the gallery at the top of the stairs.

Every lie-detector test ZeeZee took came up clean, and he’d taken five, three of them in sterile-lab conditions. He’d had CT and MRI and, according to the expert witness lined up for his trial, the scans revealed fear and anxiety but absolutely no guilt. At the demand of the police, he’d undergone full hypnotic memory-recall. He recalled nothing.

The defence was simple.