The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (52 page)

Which, at least, would give Raf one sensible suspect. Provided the boyfriend could be shown to have nerves of steel and a reasonable grasp of anatomy.

“The trouble,” Raf told Hani, “is in realizing when facts aren’t related…”

He halted himself there, wondering whether to begin again and decided not to bother with the talking. With luck, sitting next to Hani would be enough, because when he was a child, the point at which adults started in on explanations was the moment he stopped listening.

“Everything is related,” said Hani. And glancing sideways, Raf realized her face was screwed up in thought. “That’s what Khartoum says…”

The kid was nine, whipcord thin, with the body of a child younger still and eyes old before their time. Lack of sleep, bad dreams and night sweats, he remembered them all well. Although, these days, if Raf worked at it, he could go for months without recalling them once.

“Maybe he’s right,” said Raf finally. “Maybe everything does connect.”

“You don’t know?” Hani looked interested.

“No.”

“I thought spies knew everything.”

“Not me.” Raf shook his head. “Me, I know nothing, except that I’m not going to send you away, I’m not going to leave you and nobody is going to kill me…”

“Aunts Jalila and Nafisa were killed…” She waited for Raf to nod, which he did. “But the reason’s a secret…”

Raf nodded again.

“Why?”

“Because…” Raf stopped. “Because that’s the way things work in Iskandryia.” He ignored the doubtful expression on her face. “What can I tell you? What the General says goes.”

“Koenig Pasha?” Hani looked suddenly relieved. “Not Zara’s idea? Not yours…”

Raf shook his head, his half smile a reflection of hers.

Hani nodded. “I was worried,” she said, “that it was Zara. If it’s Koenig Pasha who says we must lie, then that’s different…” Her shrug was almost comically adult. “Lying is his job.” For a second, she sounded almost exactly like her late unlamented Aunt Nafisa.

There were, it turned out, two entirely separate levels of morality in Hani’s world. One occupied by those, like him, her and Zara, who weren’t meant to lie, and another given over to those destined to massacre the truth.

Pushing himself to his feet, Raf wondered what would happen when the child finally realized that if he was a spy, then she’d got him filed under the wrong group.

“Where are you going?” Hani demanded.

“Out,” said Raf.

“The murder?”

Raf shook his head. “Something else…”

Hani regarded him carefully. “I thought you were going to leave finding Avatar to someone called Eduardo?”

“Hani!”

“So I listened,” said the child. “Anyway…you need me to help with the search.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes you do,” said Hani.

“There is no way,” said Raf, his voice firm, “that you’re coming with me.”

“Who wants to come with you?” Hani said dismissively. Scrambling to her feet, she waved one hand in front of her screen and watched it blink back to life. A pass of her thumb over a floating track ball and the active window closed, revealing an aerial shot of the city.

“He’s locked in a cellar,” said Hani, voice casual. “There’s stale water outside.”

“What kind of stale water?”

“So you
do
want my help?”

Raf sighed.

“Ali Bey ordered the Mahmoudiya Canal built in 1817,” Hani said carefully. “On the far side, a green tram comes towards the window, then turns left…”

“Anything else?” Raf didn’t know what else to say.

Hani nodded. “Turbini. No.” She stopped, correcting herself. “Not turbini. Freight trains, long ones that rattle, somewhere behind the room. Which means he’s…” She touched the picture, pulling up a tight lattice of streets, where tramlines ran south along Rue Amoud, before turning into Avenue Mahmoudiya. At the bottom of the picture, on the other side of the canal, a fat ribbon of track ran towards a rail yard. “Somewhere round here.”

“And you know this how?”

Hani nodded to a toy tortoise gathering dust in one corner of her bedroom. It was old, with overrounded edges and what proved to be fractal patterns playing constantly across its shell, like swirling clouds. Someone had applied a sticker of a cartoon rabbit, then tried to peel it off sometime later, leaving a sticky patch and half a smug, bucktoothed face.

The tortoise was so ancient that it connected by cable to the wall feed, with another cable run round the edge of Hani’s room to her screen.

“I used Herbert,” said Hani.

It was possible… In theory, CCTV cameras covered all the main streets in the city. Trams, trains, even licensed taxis carried vidcams by law. Face recognition software was notoriously flawed, but could probably just about pick a dreadlocked DJ with facial piercings from the crowd of suits or jellaba-clad market traders.

“Really?”

Hani turned away, killing her terminal with a snap of her fingers.

Conversation over.

“Hani.” Raf dropped to a crouch in front of the small girl, and she let him take her pointed chin in his hands and turn her face back, so they stared straight into each other’s eyes. Dark brown and palest blue. Strange cousins.

“I need to know, honey. Please?”
Honey
was what Zara had taken to calling Hani, before Zara and Raf’s quarrel meant Hani stopped seeing the older girl.

“Not fair,” said Hani, her voice suddenly cross. She shook free her head. “Do I ask you about the fox? No, I don’t. Ever…” The child was unmistakably upset.

“Sorry,” said Raf, backing away. It looked like an impasse, pure and simple, except that nothing would ever be pure in Hani’s life, or simple. And they both knew she’d already answered him, in her own way. What Hani saw when she looked inside her head was not what he saw, obviously enough, but it was not what anyone else would expect to see either.

With one final apology, Raf left Hani to her tight and angry silence.

CHAPTER 15

9th October

Eduardo was worried about his Vespa. It was genuine
Italian and had belonged to his uncle. The torn seat had only just been replaced with a new one made from red leather, while the old two-stroke petrol motor had been swapped for a Sterling unit that ran on pretty much anything. Mostly, Eduardo had been feeding his Vespa with the cheapest grade of
jaz,
a brandy so rough that even Frisco refused to drink it, but the unit seemed happy to work with anything vaguely flammable.

He’d left his bike near the canal, watched over by an urchin in a blue jellaba who squinted badly and carried a stick too small to frighten away anyone. Five lila, the boy had asked.
Five.
Grandly Eduardo had offered him ten to keep an extraspecial watch and the small boy’s smile had been vulpine, as if seeing straight through Eduardo’s generosity.

This was the first time that Eduardo had visited a proper brothel and it wasn’t nearly as grand as he’d been hoping. For a start, the huge entrance hall tickled his nose with dust and carpet cleaner, rather than with rose petals or expensive Parisian perfume. There were no chandeliers, few paintings and the Iskandryian rugs were old but not valuable. Though there were looking glasses, great big gilt ones on the walls, but these just showed Eduardo back to himself, a small man in a too-big leather coat.

At least the small cubicles above the bus station were easy to reach. Even if the beds were dirty and bare. Maison 52, Pascal Coste, was so out of Eduardo’s way that he’d got lost just getting there.

“Excellency.” The voice came from a narrow doorway, one Eduardo had dismissed as belonging to a cupboard. In it stood a blonde woman with a face so white she could have walked out of one of those Japanese pantomimes. Her mouth was a slash of Chanel, red as a wound. Behind her shoulder bobbed other heads, fair-haired and fair-skinned and way, way younger.

“Our girls, Excellency.”

He wasn’t an
excellency
and it seemed cruel to Eduardo to keep calling him one. True he wasn’t exactly a
felaheen,
but neither was he rich or well connected. No one called on him for patronage. He was just some
pied noir
who’d recently found work and been told by the man to come to 52 Rue Pascal Coste.

“I’m due to meet…”

“All in good time, Excellency.” The old woman swayed into the room, her feet compressed into tight pumps and her body wrapped in a fringed cocktail dress nearly as old as she was. A matching shawl hid most of the crêpe lines that marked her shoulders, chest and neck. “First you need to choose one of our delightful girls…”

They trooped silently into the hall. A few looked at him with vague curiosity but most just stared at the carpets or examined their nails. There were ten in total. Blonde or brunette. Two of his age and five somewhat younger. The last three were almost children and the prettiest had a dark frown on her face and a bruise across one soft cheek that no amount of makeup could hide.

All except the youngest were bare-breasted, two of them completely naked, the rest wearing thin pants or white petticoats, mostly with tight elastic that cut into their middles. The youngest was dressed in a white nightgown with Maltese lace round the neck. Eduardo could recognize the stitching—his mother had worked in a sweatshop for most of his childhood. And when she wasn’t at the machines, she sewed at home at a window until the light faded.

The young one in the nightdress glanced up, scowled at Eduardo and Eduardo quickly looked away. Straight into the resigned face of a brunette.

“That one,” said Eduardo and the chosen woman looked surprised at his choice. She was not quite the oldest, with heavy hips, small breasts and full derrière. A half-smoked Ziganov hung from between her fingers, its gold band stained pink from the lipstick she used. English, Eduardo decided, that was how she looked…

“I’m Rose,” said the woman.

Eduardo gave his card to the waiting Madame without being asked. The gold Amex was only to be used in emergencies or when so ordered by the man, like now.

He signed with a flourish, not bothering to look at the amount.

“Excellency.” There was new respect in the old woman’s voice; and for the first time since she’d started using the honorific, it sounded like she might mean it.

Taking back his card, Eduardo smiled and started up the wide stairs. Then stopped to indicate that his choice should go first. He wanted to look at Rose’s buttocks as she walked. She climbed slowly, apparently only too aware of his gaze. And at the top she paused, as if trying to remember which chamber the Madame had told her to use.

“This one,” she said, opening a battered door.

“Eduardo,” said a voice Eduardo recognized. It was the man, dressed in black and wearing shades even though the chamber was shuttered against the evening light. Behind him sat a short-haired girl in a white shift, her breasts full enough to be obvious beneath the cloth and tipped with nipples that showed like shadows.

“Boss.” Eduardo bowed, feeling stupid. Nothing about the man suggested he wanted Eduardo to shake hands, but bowing still didn’t feel quite right.

“Come in and lock the door behind you,” ordered the man. He said something in a language Eduardo didn’t understand and Rose went to sit quietly on a large
bateau lit
beside the other woman.

“You made it,” said Raf.

Eduardo looked puzzled. Of course he’d made it. 52 Pascal Coste was where the man had told him to come.

“And you bought the things I asked for?”

Eduardo nodded and pulled a heavy package from under his coat. For extra safety he’d tied it tight with string, which suddenly seemed unwilling to untie.

“Later,” said Raf. “Put it down there for now.” The chest of drawers he indicated was cracked on one side and scratched across the top. “No, even better, put it in a drawer.”

Eduardo did what he was told.

The chamber was the largest in the brothel by far, with two leather divans and a big
bateau lit
filling most of its space. Most of the
maison
’s other rooms featured narrow single beds to discourage lingering. It had taken Raf nearly forty-five minutes of trawling the datacore at Police HQ before he finally found a brothel within easy distance of the corner of Mahmoudiya and Rue Amoud el-Sawari. Hani could undoubtedly have done it in a fraction of the time, but Raf just hadn’t felt right asking her.

This room had been the choice of visiting couples, back in the days before the General did his deal with the Mufti and the
morales
suddenly became a problem. It was somewhere wives could buy their jaded husbands a whore or two for their birthday, to do things that didn’t get done at home. Most of the visiting women just watched, a few joined in. All were married, rich and decently connected. Respectable members of the kind of families who donated funds regularly to the police.

The
accord
had changed all that.

For the first time in a hundred years girls from poor families returned to wearing the
hijab,
while Iskandryia’s
mesdames
made do with headscarves and dark glasses, altogether more elegant and not remotely to the Mufti’s liking. The property laws were revised to exclude female heirs, driving alone after dark became a criminal offence for women, and to go out with bare arms was to invite some fanatic to scratch his disapproval into your skin with a metal comb…

Raf had heard Zara on the subject. She was old enough to remember the city before it started to change. Felix too, the old Chief of Detectives, had been less than impressed with the General’s decision to sign an
accord
.

All trades had been hit, brothels included. Not that they actually closed. The brothels of Iskandryia were both an institution and tourist attraction (which was altogether more important). Along the Corniche several could be found in the grander houses, where chambers were by the night, cash was forbidden and anything less than a gold card strongly discouraged.

Of course, visiting tourists were billed variously for cultural excursions, theatre groups or an art exhibition. That way everybody was kept happy, from the punters to the card companies and the brothels. Especially the brothels, because embarrassed punters had a habit of getting home, then denying they’d ever visited the place that billed them and that made the card companies very unhappy.