The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (53 page)

This
maison
was different, though… Somewhere for Iskandryia’s own residents. It paid its local taxes, plus a little extra to Police HQ and in return found itself on the police database as an information source, which gave it some protection should the
morales
decide to call. The fat man had approved identical deals with brothels all across the city.

Raf and Eduardo were lovers, at least they were according to the Madame downstairs. That was how she’d explained Raf’s request for a double chamber to her girls. Officially, of course, homosexuality didn’t exist in Ottoman North Africa. In practice, it was almost universal, if staunchly illegal: a society that placed a premium on female virginity, made premarital sex a killing matter and then made it too expensive for most men to get married before their midtwenties was bound to need an easy acceptance of the inevitable, whatever the law said. And that was quite apart from the one in ten men born with little physical interest in women.

“What do we do now?” Eduardo asked.

“We fill the time,” said Raf. “Until it gets dark.” Walking over to the window, he examined the chamber’s mashrabiya, which looked out over the canal, taking in its two sets of shutters. One set closed it off from the street directly below, the other closed off the actual balcony from the room in which he stood.

“You,” said Raf, pointing to the girl he’d selected at random when he first arrived. “What did you say your name was?” She didn’t, or he’d have remembered it.

“Justine.” It was meant to sound French, Raf guessed. From her skin and the black roots to her short hair, he’d have said
moriscos,
but he’d been in Isk less than four months and he wasn’t Felix. His predecessor had been famed for his ability to read origins at a single glance.

“Can you get me a drink?”

She looked doubtful. “What would Your Excellency like?”

“Wine,” said Raf, “white and chilled, something dry.”

Justine looked more doubtful still.

“Anything you can find,” Raf said and she fumbled at the lock, then scurried from the room.

Raf sighed. He was tired of people being afraid of him. Maybe she was afraid because in her terms he was rich… To be honest, in Justine’s terms he was probably beyond rich. Even though he could barely afford Donna’s and Khartoum’s wages and repairs to the al-Mansur madersa were beyond his wallet. Maybe she realized he was police. Or perhaps it was just that he dressed in a suit and wore dark glasses indoors.

Probably it was all of those things. The girl was afraid of everything—of the punters, of her Madame and of time’s winged chariot—he could see it in her eyes. If he asked, she’d say she was seventeen, but Justine had a good ten years on that. She was older than he by maybe three years, older than she could afford to be in her trade.

“Will this do?”

Justine held up a dusty bottle of Cru de Ptolémées, two tooth mugs and a handful of ice cubes. Her breathing was ragged from having run upstairs.

“Thank you.” Raf smiled at her and nodded towards the balcony. “We’re going out there,” he told Eduardo. “I’ll see you in an hour or so.”

“What do I do?”

Raf glanced round the chamber. “Whatever.”

The wine tasted as sour as Raf expected, but all the same he smiled as he poured some for Justine.

“Salut.”

“I can try again?” Justine suggested, having tasted it.

“No.” Ice cubes clinked as Raf dropped a few into her glass. “Who knows?” he said, giving her mug a quick swirl. “This might help.” In fact, chilling it made no difference, but Raf finished his glass anyway and, when the sourness was gone, refilled. When that was done, he drank most of hers as well.

Sitting back against a shutter, the one he’d told Eduardo to bolt from inside the chamber, Raf examined the balcony, as he examined everything…

Straight ahead, beyond an intricately carved screen could be seen fragments of the darkening city; while folded back, against the sidewalls of the mashrabiya were plain shutters that could be used to close off the screen against afternoon heat or cold night air.

He sat in a little world, boxed in on all sides.

“Your turn,” said Raf, handing back Justine’s glass.

She drank a little and gave him back what was left. “You can tell me,” she said finally, when the weight of his silence got too heavy for her to bear. “Some men find it easier to talk.”

He was not
some men,
Raf wanted to tell her. He was
him,
however unsatisfactory that was. And there were days when he wasn’t even sure he was that. When the noise inside his head reached out for the rest of him and his fingers froze and his neck ached and a knot that writhed like an injured snake appeared in the pit of his stomach, leaving him breathless and filled with dread.

Those were the days he needed the fox most. And now the fox was dying and it looked like for good this time.

“Tell me,” Justine said, taking the empty glass from his fingers to put it carefully on the floor. “What’s troubling you?” Her question was as practiced as the butterfly touch of her fingers on his wrist. Even the slight tilt of her head looked like something she’d learnt. All the same, Raf felt a need to answer.

“I’m going to kill someone,” he said flatly.

“When?” Justine kept her expression masked and her question simple.

“Tonight,” said Raf.

“Me?”

He shook his head and felt a single tear slide under his shades. “Not you, not me. Not those two.” He nodded his head backward to the room behind. “Just a man.”

“One man?”

“With luck…”

“Without luck?”

He thought about it. “Several,” Raf said slowly, “maybe more.”

Justine nodded as if this was to be expected. “And this makes you sad?”

Raf shrugged.

Later, when he’d finished staring through the carved screen at the canal which ran wide and slow between concrete embankments, Justine helped him remove his jacket. And then, having folded that and placed it carefully beside his empty glass, she pulled up her slip and straddled him.

She turned away when he folded his fingers into her pinned-up hair to pull her forward into his kiss, then let him turn her back. They tasted the sourness on each other’s lips, their kiss slow, almost thoughtful. Not what she was expecting and not what Raf had intended. Putting up one hand to hold a breast, he felt Justine overflow his fingers.

A boat low in the water. A girl with her shirt undone. The salt of tears and the sea on her lips…

“Your Excellency’s paid for me,” Justine said, seeing his sudden hesitation. “You might as well have your money’s worth.”

And he’d paid for Zara too. Or was it that her father had paid for him? Either way, breaking the deal had cost Raf almost as much as it had cost Zara. Which was too much. And how could he tell himself his choice of Justine was random? She had the same dark skin and eyes, the full breasts and smooth shoulders.

“Fuck me,” he said. So she did; her fingers reaching down to undo his old-fashioned fly. Over her shoulder, Raf could see a boy fishing in the shade of a felucca. A makeshift house had been built on the felucca’s deck out of sheets of galvanized iron, laminated cardboard and what looked like the remains of a plywood tea chest. A scar on the trunk of a squat palm nearby, where it had almost closed round the felucca’s mooring rope, said the boat had been there a lot longer than the boy.

Occasional barges piled high with hessian sacks slid in front of the felucca, obscuring it. Perhaps cotton from the fields or a date crop. Raf hadn’t yet read up on the seasons in the Delta, what got gathered when.

“What’s in the boats?”

Justine stopped moving on his lap.

“The barges,” Raf said, nodding towards the canal behind her.

“Cigarettes,” Justine said without looking. She named two brands of cheap cigarillo made from a dark locally grown tobacco, then shrugged. “Why sell to the kiosks when you can sell at three times the price to tourists?”

Wrapping her arms round Raf, she pulled him in close, so he could no longer see the canal over her shoulder. And rocking gently, she pushed down against him, and pushed and pushed, until she finally came, or at least pretended to…insides tightening as she ground her face into the side of his neck.

“Enough.” Raf slid hands under her buttocks to help her off him. She was breathing swiftly and he could hear her heart pound against her ribs. The sudden satiety seemed real enough. As did the musklike stink of her body.

“What about you?” she asked eventually, sitting back on her heels.

“I’m okay.”

She smiled. “You don’t look like a man who lies.”

Raf’s grin was foxlike. “I seldom do anything else.”

Justine raised a carefully painted eyebrow. “As Your Excellency wishes.”

Bending forward, she took one of his nipples between her teeth and bit, then released it and backed away until she lay almost flat. After a while, Raf forgot everything except the ache in his groin and a building tightness as her mouth opened, swallowed him and withdrew, time and again. She was good, better than good. Experienced.

He came hard and fast, his fingers reaching out to grab her head as he emptied his fear into her mouth.

“Sorry,” he said, letting go.

Justine’s shrug said it all. He wasn’t the first to grab her like that and wouldn’t be the last. He was a man, her expectations of the breed were no higher.

“I mean it,” said Raf. Over her shoulder, he could see that someone had lit a hurricane lamp aboard the felucca and that the boy with the fishing rod was gone.

Eduardo sprawled, snoring soundly while Rose stared at the cracked ceiling, her slip rucked up round her wide hips. She heard Raf use a knife to lift the bolt on the shutter and turned her head, but other than that she made no attempt to move.

He nodded and Rose nodded back. Watching as he walked slightly unsteadily across to the battered desk to take Eduardo’s parcel from its top drawer. Cutting the string with a single swipe of a black glass knife, Raf returned the blade to the scabbard Velcroed to his ankle and spread the contents on the nearest Ottoman.

One automatic, one spring-loaded cosh, one chilli spray, taken from a thin man with a head wound found floating in the hyacinth-infested shallows of Lake Mareotis. Also found on the man was a small pouch, impregnated with the residue of what looked like a dance drug, and a razor-sharp knife. The pouch was still with toxicology, but the knife was the black one Raf had just been using.

The pistol was a clone of a Sturm/Ruger KV95d, a ten-shot, 9mm double action with manual safety, weighing in at twenty-seven ounces and featuring a matte blued finish and black rubber grips. It had one bullet missing. The element that interested Raf was not that the KV’s serial number had apparently been filed off, but that it had never been there in the first place, according to the armourer at Champollion. Best guess was that the gun had come out of a black weapons factory somewhere Soviet, without undergoing any of the internationally prescribed security checks. Given this, it was no surprise that the history chip embedded in the handle had never been initialized.

As for the cosh, it was a basic model of a type found in souks across North Africa, only this one had been machined with a titanium spring and shot-heavy neoprene head. The chilli spray was mass-produced in Morocco and sublicensed from the US. It could have come from a corner shop almost anywhere.

The body itself had been dragged from Mareotis by a netsman, who dumped his unwelcome catch in the reeds on the bank rather than deal with the police. The old man had only retraced his steps after a local station reported that the German Consulate was offering a reward for information on a missing second secretary.

Sometime between then and the body being delivered in a handcart to the gates of the German compound every one of the dead man’s possessions went missing. Raf knew this because a furious liaison officer had put a call through in person to find out what Ashraf Bey intended to do about the outrage.

Raf’s promise to have a uniformed officer add the crime to that day’s roster just as soon as someone came in from the Consulate to fill out the requisite forms didn’t improve matters.

Eduardo had tracked down the old fisherman to a café at the end of a narrow main drag in a marsh village too poor to have more than one street anyway. Eduardo might have suggested he was from the police, though he never actually said so. He did, however, say there was a reward for the return of anything taken from the dead German’s body. Since the sum Eduardo mentioned was significantly higher than any sum the fisherman might have got selling the dead man’s possessions, the deal was swift and satisfactory on both sides.

Since then the package had been where Raf had told Eduardo to put it, sitting in a desk drawer in Eduardo’s walk-up office above the haberdasher’s, waiting for a use.

“How do I get onto the roof?”

“First left,” said Justine, “then up the stairs.” She glanced at Rose, then at the sleeping Eduardo and back at Raf. “What about him?”

“Let him be,” said Raf, and the woman beneath Eduardo nodded, like she expected no less.

“This is for you,” Raf said to Justine and peeled off twenty hundred-dollar notes. “And this for Rose.” Raf handed across another ten. It was more money than either would earn in a year. When he turned back, the money had vanished from Justine’s hand though she stood exactly where she’d been standing before. “If I don’t come back,” said Raf, “then I threatened to kill you both if you dared tell the Madame I was gone… Which is what I will do,” he added, as an apparent afterthought. “And if I return, then none of us ever left this chamber, understand?”

Both women nodded.

Justine did one final thing for Raf. She opened the chamber door, looked round to check that the passage really was empty, then walked to the women’s bathroom, flipping the bolt on the roof door as she went past. She bolted it again on her way back, returned to the chamber and locked its door behind her. Then, job done, she lay back on one of the leather ottomans and listened to the silence overhead that said His Excellency had already left the brothel roof.