The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (19 page)

The wrought-iron gates were already open. And there was no sentry box, bulletproof or otherwise for a smartly uniformed guard, which surprised Raf even more. Flipping off his shades, Raf adjusted his eyes and ran the spectrum from infraR to ultraV, but got nothing unusual. So far as he could see, security was completely lacking. No linked web of laser sensors, no bank of infrared cameras, not even a single starlight CCTV mounted on one of the huge pillars.

Hamzah was either very trusting or his reputation was all the protection he needed. Which wasn’t as unlikely as it sounded. Three years back, while Raf was in Huntsville, a Seattle street kid on Honda blades had put a cheap Taiwanese rip-off Colt against Hu San’s head and taken her bag. From start to finish the heist took less than thirty seconds and no one got hurt. Fifteen minutes later the kid turned himself and the bag in at the precinct on 4th Street and made a straight-to-video confession.

Hu San still had his legs broken, but cleanly, and the blue shirt who took the contract doped the kid up with ketamine before he began.

Gravel crunched under foot as Raf walked to the front door and knocked hard. “I’d like to see Hamzah Effendi,” Raf said to a sudden gap, which would have been backlit if the Russian bodyguard standing in the way of the hall light hadn’t taken up the whole doorway. Raf kept his voice bored, like a man who knew he would be seen.

“I see,” said the bodyguard. “Is he expecting Your Excellency?” It was obvious he already knew the answer.

“No,” said Raf. “But tell him Ashraf Bey would like a word.”

The Russian grinned, the first sign that he had more than iced water in his veins. Until then the man hadn’t recognized Raf, not minus dreads and beard. “Right,” he said. “I’ll just see if the Boss is in…”

Stepping inside the door now being held open, Raf waited politely next to a portrait of Hamzah so new Raf could smell paint drying while the big man walked solidly away across a vast chessboard of a hall paved in white and black marble.

“Ashraf!”

Raf opened his ears a little wider, jacked up his hearing or whatever he was meant to call what happened when he turned the volume up in his head. The outrage was Madame Rahina’s and he heard Hamzah’s answering growl, but not Zara… Voices blossomed into a brief argument that many would have missed. But Raf followed it just as he followed the Doppler effect of footsteps approaching down a corridor.

The man approaching stank of cigars and Guerlain aftershave, too much of it. His brogues had hand-sewn leather soles that creaked on the tiles. In the painting, he wore impossibly shiny black boots and stood against a balustrade, the background behind him an out-of-focus blur of green and blue. A gold Rolex was recognizable on one wrist. The little finger of his left hand sported a red-stoned, high-domed signet that could have been mistaken for a graduation ring. He wore a frock coat that reached the top of his boots and carried a rolled blueprint, signifying his profession. On his head was the red-tasselled tarbush of an effendi.

“Karl Johann,” announced a deep voice behind him. “He was due to paint a Vanderbilt but I made it worth his while…”

“It’s good,” said Raf.

“Given what I paid him it should be.” The industrialist glanced round his hall, checking it really was empty. Or maybe he was listening to the sound of breaking glass echoing up a corridor. If so, he seemed resigned to the damage.

“My wife wants you killed,” he said. “Or maybe your balls removed.” Hamzah shrugged. “I’ve explained you don’t do that to beys. Not openly, anyway, unless you’re very stupid. But that’s not the reason I refused her demand…” Shrewd eyes watched Raf and when Raf didn’t ask
What is?
the man nodded slightly, as if he expected no less.

“My daughter told me about the tram.”

What tram?
Raf almost asked. But he kept his mouth shut and after a second the man twisted his heavy lips into a slight smile.

“Discreet, aren’t you? Well, it probably goes with the job.”

Which didn’t answer the question.

Through the haze of that morning’s funeral and yesterday’s murder appeared the chill ghost of a memory. Zara with the flowers. Zara vomiting neatly onto a rocking wooden floor, the worried black kid with the nose piercings who’d reached for her hand, then noticed Raf’s open gaze.
That tram.

The first time that ever I saw your face…

“Her mother still believes she spent the evening with a work friend,” said Hamzah. “The kid works at the library you know…” Even when facing embarrassment full-on the man couldn’t keep his pride in Zara out of his voice, and he
was
embarrassed. “Thinks she got shellfish poisoning too. But I know a hangover when I see one and wherever Zara spent the night I’m damn sure she didn’t sleep over with…”

The sentence trailed away as Hamzah forgot how he’d intended it to end. “Don’t entirely blame you,” he said finally, his voice blunt. “You can have the pick of North Africa. Why go for trouble? But she’s a good kid for all that.” He bit on his cigar and then considered the smoke for a minute as it eddied towards the distant ceiling.

“Can’t tell her mother why you rejected her, obviously.”

“Wait,” Raf held up his hand. “That had nothing to do with it,” he said. “How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

“Fine,” said Raf. “I’m twenty-five. I don’t intend to get married to some stranger. And nor, I imagine, does she…”

Hamzah’s answer was a laughing bark. “That’s exactly what her mother’s afraid of,” he said.

There wasn’t much Raf could say.

“Now,” said Hamzah, “you didn’t come here to discuss my daughter. So what do you want?”

“First off, to ask you a question.”

“Then fire away.” The man looked darkly amused.

“Okay,” said Raf, watching a pulse point on Hamzah’s temple, the man’s mouth, his eyes. “Did you kill my aunt?”

“No,” said Hamzah. “I didn’t.” His dark pupils remained exactly the same size, neither expanding nor contracting. The corners of his mouth remained firm and the pulsebeat on his temple stayed regular as a metronome. Raf didn’t need access to a polygraph to be certain the man hadn’t killed Lady Nafisa.

“Of course,” Hamzah added, “I could always have hired someone else to do it for me…”

They sat in a panelled study overlooking the Mediterranean. Waves broke on a headland away to the right, ancient blowholes spewing white plumes high into the air: while on a beach below the window, waves just lapped against the sand and then retreated, soft as a caress.

The coffee they drank was laced with cognac. Raf could taste it on his tongue, though the alcohol wasn’t mentioned when a uniformed maid brought in a silver jug on a heavy silver tray. Raf refused the offer of a cigar, waiting while his host bit off the end of a fresh Partegas only to swear when he remembered he was meant to be using a cigar guillotine.

“So,” said Hamzah, trimming the ragged edges of his cigar into a crystal ashtray. “What else do you want to know?” Smoke swirled around his head like evaporating dry ice around some pantomime devil. The effect was studied, Raf understood that. Everything he’d seen told him Hamzah was making a Herculean effort to be something he wasn’t—quiet, urbane and softly mannered. What interested Raf was
Why?
He was already impressed: the house and its very location saw to that.

“Well,” Hamzah growled, “you going to ask? Or just sit there and look at my decorations…?” A flick of his hand took in the dark oak panels and carved marble fireplace, the polished floorboards and Art Nouveau windows that stretched from ceiling to floor.

“It’s about my aunt…” Raf drained his cup and sat back in a red leather chair. Intelligence told him to approach the matter obliquely, so he did. By asking a direct but different question.

“What did she hope to get out of my engagement?”

“You’re a bey,” Hamzah said flatly. “I’m rich. What the hell do you think she got out of it?” He was no longer smiling.

“But the dowry gets held in trust,” said Raf, trying to remember what he’d learned from an afternoon in front of Hani’s screen, skimming legal sites. “To be returned in case of divorce, if the marriage is unconsummated or not blessed with children. All that’s on offer is interest and that would have gone to me…”

“She had heavy expenses.”

“You paid her?”

“In this city,” said Hamzah, “everyone takes commission.” He stubbed out his cigar and took another one from the mahogany humidor. This time, though, he remembered to remove the end using his little gold guillotine. “She took two and a half million US dollars.”

“Two and a—What proportion of that was her commission?”

Hamzah Effendi just looked at him. “That was her commission. The dowry itself was a billion…”

Raf whistled. As responses went it was entirely instinctive.

“And you,” he asked. “What did you get out of it?” Given the massive villa, the Havana cigars, the uniformed maid and frock-coated bodyguard, it seemed extremely unlikely that Hamzah’s need was anything physical.

“Respectability,” Hamzah said bluntly. “You’d be surprised what a title can do…”

No, thought Raf, thinking back to Felix’s reluctance to let the coroner-magistrate sweat him properly, he wouldn’t be surprised at all. “The khedive can’t take the
effendi
back?”

Hamzah’s grin was wolfish. “I’d like to see him try…”

Raf nodded, slowly, carefully considering his words. “I’ve got a problem,” he said, “and so have you. Actually, I’ve got two problems, both complicated. But yours is worse.”

“Tell me mine first, then.”

“The police. Khartoum heard you threaten Lady Nafisa.”

“I threatened you, too,” Hamzah reminded Raf. “That was my daughter you rejected.”

“But I’m still alive,” said Raf. “And Nafisa’s not. The police are going to pull you in at dawn tomorrow. See what they can pin on you.”

“How do you know?”

“Chief Felix told me.”

“And now you’re telling me…” The man paused to stub out his second cigar and didn’t light another. “You’re certain?”

Raf nodded.

“Get me Sookia, Son and Sookia.” The order was barked at a Sony unit on a table by the wall. Seconds later a little flat screen flickered into life. The conversation was short and one-sided, and ended when Hamzah clicked his fingers so the screen went dead, cutting off a pyjamaed young lawyer in mid flow. The man would arrive at the villa within the next half-hour as Hamzah had demanded, Raf had no doubt of that.

“What will you do?” Raf asked.

“Go down to the station tonight, with my lawyer, and sort this out. What do you think… Okay,” said Hamzah. “Now it’s my turn. You’ve got thirty minutes to tell me your two problems and if I can help I will, whether my wife likes it or not.”

“First off,” said Raf, “do you know if Lady Nafisa had debts?”

“No idea. Why?”

“Because her account is empty.”

Hamzah blinked. “Gone?” he asked. “Two and a half million just gone?”

“One million in and out on the same day, according to her notebook…”

Through a one-use-only blind account?

Yeah, according to Nafisa’s book that’s exactly how it was done.
Raf nodded his agreement. Not stopping to wonder what Hamzah knew about one-use accounts because he’d realized instantly that it was probably rather a lot.

“And the other one and a half?” Hamzah asked.

“Not even mentioned.”

The industrialist nodded. “Those were drafts from Hong Kong Suisse,” he said. “Redeemable anywhere.” And for a few seconds they both thought about redeemable bankers’ drafts and didn’t like where it was leading.

“What was your other problem?”

“Can you recommend a good builder?”

They talked for the remaining ten minutes about what Raf wanted done in the
qaa,
which was to get rid of Nafisa’s office altogether. For all its smoked-glass pretensions it was no more than an expensive prefabricated hut dumped down in one corner of a large living space. He’d like to have got Hani out of the madersa completely but Felix thought that would look bad. Besides, Raf had another problem that made it a bad idea.

When it came down to it, Raf’s salary from the Third Circle was no more than token. He had no money and owned nothing except the suit he wore: at least, not until the will was granted probate and, even when that went through, all he’d have would be a ramshackle house and no means to maintain it.

None of which he mentioned to his host, the man who’d put the price of a billion dollars on his daughter’s dowry. With Hamzah, he stuck to practicalities like explaining what he wanted doing with the
qaa,
and why…

So when Hamzah suggested getting the
qaa
blessed and then immediately amended his suggestion to getting the whole house blessed, Raf was surprised. He didn’t have the industrialist pegged as religious. It turned out that Hamzah wasn’t, but it was a good point all the same.

“My mother died in a fall,” said Hamzah. “It was only after a mullah blessed the site I could bear to go back into the garden. I was nine. At nine you can see things that aren’t there.”

And at twenty,
thought Raf ruefully,
and twenty-five.
And, for all he knew, thirty… Maybe for life. Maybe with some things, once they were in there, they were in there for ever, like Tiriganaq. Further conversation was cut off by a distant bell. The lawyer had made it from one side of the city to the other inside twenty-five minutes.

“Look,” said Hamzah, “I can’t pretend I liked your aunt but Hani’s okay, so here’s what I’ll do for you…” He smiled at his own words. “I’ll get a team over there tonight. Because what’s the use of owning a construction company if you can’t rustle up a few builders?”

Walking over to a pair of French windows, Hamzah shot two bolts, then neutralized an alarm by tapping five digits into a small keypad next to the window frame. Raf’s time was up. “Leave this way,” he said, opening the door to let in a warm night wind. “You’ll find the walk more interesting.”

CHAPTER 28