Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

“Hani,” corrected the girl.

  Lady Nafisa sighed.

  “Anyway, Hani what?” the child asked angrily, walking into the light. She had oil smeared across the palms of both her hands and bare ankles from where she’d slid down an elevator cable.

  “You’ve got the floodlights on,” she said to Lady Nafisa and stalked over to a balustrade to examine the courtyard below. “And the fountain…” The small girl turned her head to stare at ZeeZee. “You’re honoured.” Her voice was bitter. “She doesn’t turn the lights on for anyone. She wouldn’t even turn them on for my birthday party.”

  “They were broken,” Lady Nafisa said fiercely.

  “And now they’re mended.” It didn’t look like she believed her aunt for a minute.

  “I’m Raf,” said ZeeZee.

  “Ashraf,” corrected the child, scornfully. “Don’t I know it. She’s talked of nothing else for days…”

  “Hani.” Lady Nafisa’s voice was hard.

  “Yes, I know. Hani, be good. Hani, disappear…” The small girl turned round and stamped back towards the lift. “You don’t look like you’re worth all the fuss,” she said cuttingly and slammed the grille, leaving ZeeZee with the impression of a small, furious animal glaring through the bars of a cage.

  CHAPTER 10

  1st July

  Dawn came in low, the sky clear and turquoise blue. And Hamzah Quitrimala knew exactly how it would look out on the water. The breaking light would catch one wave after another, until a ribbon of sun stretched from the horizon to the glass-sided cockpit of his 15,000bhp VSV. Fifty feet long, maybe ten at its widest, the boat was ex-police issue, chisel-prowed but flared at the stern. Stealth-sheeted and proof against infrared sensors.

  It ran every month, midweek, without fail.

  Diamonds carried to a pick-up point south of Iraklion/medical supplies brought back—Hamzah had captained the run himself when he was younger. Of course, in his day the boats had been nothing like as fast, but they had still done the job and been back before the second daybreak—which was more than Hamzah could say for his current crew.

  He was going to have to find himself a new captain. But first he had a bey to see…

  “Ashraf al-Mansur,” repeated ZeeZee. “Known to his friends as Raf.”

  ZeeZee emptied his mind and let the name roll over him. When he opened his eyes five minutes later the change was made and he was someone else, though boiling fog still filled the hamman, making it impossible for whoever he was to see the door.

  In fact, so thick was the steam that Raf could hardly see his own feet, which might also have had something to do with the slick of sweat running down his forehead to drip into his eyes.

  He stank, though not as much as when he woke first thing the previous morning, in a pool of perspiration that smelled sweet as blood and sour as dysentery. That was twenty-four hours ago, when his piss had been black. Now the colour was nearing normal as his body began to adjust to its lack of crystalMeth. It was his mind that was still addicted.

  Raf was naked. In a domed room filled with naked women. Except the women were on the walls—pictures only, depicting a dozen dancers, their breasts full and bare, each plump mons hidden behind a wisp of fabric fashioned from tiny tesserae, marble fragments glued into place more than a century before by some artist keen to preserve a slight air of decency.

  In Huntsville, in the days before Dr Millbank, recalcitrant convicts were broken by being locked in a hot-box and broiled. In El Iskandryia, even first thing in the morning, people had to book for the privilege.

  Raf wasn’t sure he understood why his aunt considered a Turkish bath the ideal place for him to meet Dr Hamzah Quitrimala Effendi. But here he was, still waiting for the man to show.

  Sweat beads almost bubbled from his stomach and chest, and already he felt dehydrated.

  “Your Excellency?”

  Raf opened his eyes to see a man whose shoulders would make those of most sumo wrestlers look puny. A blue suit hung tent-like from his frame, its fabric already gone limp in the steam. In one ear was a gold Sony earbead, the kind you were meant to notice.

  “Your Excellency?”

  That was him, Raf realized. He nodded.

  “The boss will be with you in a minute. He apologizes for being late.” Job done, the huge Russian took up position against the opposite wall, apparently impervious to the heat that soon had sweat rolling down his pink face.

  “You Ashraf?” A thickset man strode in, hand already outstretched, gut protruding. “Good to meet you.” He too was unashamedly naked, his uncovered genitals at eye height to where Raf sat on a marble bench.

  Raf stood.

  “Dr Hamzah Effendi?”

  A lightning grin flashed across the man’s face, then vanished, leaving only a wry, almost self-mocking smile. Lady Nafisa had insisted that Raf should remember to add the honorific to Hamzah’s name. It was a neat touch.

  The newcomer had the kind of handshake Raf expected. Strong but slightly clumsy, and brief as if he’d finally learned not to grab the hand of every contact and wring it heartily. Heavy gold links circled one wrist and on his middle finger was a huge ring set with a cauchabon ruby. Both screamed money but neither said anything about restraint.

  Reading people was one of Raf’s skills, like eidetic memory and night sight: he knew that and accepted it. It came from living in institutions… Swiss boarding school from the age of five, a Scottish school after that, three years working for Hu San in Seattle and then Huntsville. He’d been inside institutions all his life and only one of them had been a prison—the others just felt like it. They also felt safe. Raf wasn’t stupid enough to deny that.

  “Nasty scar,” said Hamzah.

  “Yeah.”

  “Recent.” Hamzah added. It wasn’t a question. He examined the cut along Raf’s ribs with a practised eye, taking in the double strip of plastic skin.

  “Slipped and cut myself,” said Raf. Which was possible. Not true, admittedly, but no less unlikely than being mugged by golem with a photograph of him that wasn’t. “My own fault,” Raf added. “Should have been more careful.”

  “And that?”

  Raf’s shoulder looked, at first glance, like a map of some capital city of damaged flesh, lines radiating out from a densely scarred centre. “Long story,” said Raf. “Maybe some other time.”

  If the steam room was hot, the plunge pool outside was so cold that Raf thought his heart would stop and his lungs never unfreeze.

  “Lovely isn’t it?” Hamzah said happily as they both bobbed to the surface. Raf scowled, but only because he had no breath left to speak.

  “Strange,” said Hamzah as he kicked his way towards marble steps. “I would have thought your father had a dozen Turkish baths…” He let his words trickle into a silence that stretched ever longer—until Raf finally realized the man wasn’t just making conversation, he expected an answer.

  Which was fair enough. Hamzah undoubtedly wanted to know what he was getting for his money. Raf’s big problem was that he didn’t have an easy reply.

  “I lived with my mother,” Raf said, then stopped, because that wasn’t strictly true either… For a start she wasn’t really his mother and he hadn’t really lived with her. Or maybe she was. Her opinion on that changed with the wind. And maybe he had…

  “I boarded at various schools. England, Scotland, Switzerland.”

  “Your ma was American?”

  “English, living in New York.”

  Hamzah shrugged as if it was all the same. Which it probably was to him. “I’m told her name is well known…”

  “Not unless you’re a fan of the National Geographic channel,” said Raf. “She campaigned for animal equality and worked on documentaries. Remember that film about meerkats?” Hamzah looked blank until Raf put his hands up like paws and swung his head from side to side, as if watching for danger.

  Hamzah nodded.

  “She did the camera work,” said Raf, clambering out of the water ah
ead of Hamzah. “Syndicated in six continents. You can still get the screen saver. She took a flat fee of $1,500 and used it to fly down to Brazil to film vampire bats. Remember the baby panda trying to eat bamboo…? The young fox playing in the snow? The white tiger cub with the empty Coke bottle? Well, she did camera on those, too.”

  Animal porn, just a different kind. Cuddly images for a cold planet, used to fund the stuff that really interested her, like filming predators. Not that he was bitter or anything. “She did a lot of the work for love,” said Raf, forcing himself to be fair. It had to be for love, because, God knew, there’d been little enough money in it. And it probably wasn’t her fault the only way she could cope with a damaged world was by examining it through a lens or the bottom of a vodka bottle. But then, nor was her life his fault either, whatever she might have said…

  “Let’s go back to the steam room.”

  Hamzah smiled. “Getting a taste for it, eh?”

  Sitting side by side and naked in the boiling mist, both men knew the real interview was beginning. But Lady Nafisa hadn’t made clear to Raf who had final approval. All she’d said was that he shouldn’t commit to any fact that could be checked, that he should keep answers vague and always return a question with a question.

  She might know that Raf had spent years locked in a Seattle jail but there was no reason why Hamzah had to know too.

  “You’ve been in America?” The industrialist’s voice was studiedly relaxed, almost urbane. He hardly glanced at an ugly slash of scar tissue above Raf’s right hip and when he did it was fleeting. Raf could have told him about the operation he’d had at five on a kidney but that story was as boring as the month he’d spent wired to machines.

  “Were you working over there?”

  “Something like that.” Raf stood and stretched, twisting his head to one side like a man with a bad crick in his neck. It fooled neither of them.

  “Lady Nafisa mentioned that you were an honorary attaché.”

  Did she? Reluctant to lie outright, Raf retreated into something close to the truth. “To be honest,” he said, “most of my time was spent on a doctorate.”

  Behind bars, with limited web access and no on-campus visits.

  “Finance?” Hamzah asked, looking suddenly interested.

  “No,” said Raf. “Alternative timelines. They’ve very big in the US right now.” That, at least, was true. “It’s a way of understanding what happened by looking at what didn’t but quite easily might have done… You know, say America had actually joined the Third Balkan War…”

  “They stayed neutral. So did we.”

  “Not the 1966-75 conflict,” said Raf, “The Third Balkan, 1914-15. Say Woodrow Wilson hadn’t cut a deal between Berlin and London but had sent in troops on Britain’s side. London might have been victorious. The Kaiser might have been fatally weakened…”

  “The Kaiser was always going to win,” Hamzah said flatly. “History is what God writes.”

  Raf sighed. “Just imagine,” he said. “The Prussian empire breaks up in 1923, just as the Austro-Hungarians almost did. Might the Ottomans have fallen? What would have happened to Egypt’s Khedive?”

  “The Khedive…” Hamzah knew better than to accuse a bey of treason. Especially not one who was about to marry his daughter. And no doubt, all this what if was merely some sophisticated game played by people without real jobs. But it sounded like treason to him.

  Besides, Hamzah knew what had happened. Every schoolboy across North Africa knew that Islam had trampled colonialism into the ground. On Suvla plain, the English king’s own servants from Sandringham had been killed to the last man. The slaughter at Gallipoli broke the warmongers’ spirit.

  Fatally weakened, the British were driven from Egypt by General Saad Zaghloul. Having stolen Libya in 1911, Italy was forced to give it back six years later, and the French relinquished Tunis.

  Fifteen years of smouldering unrest followed. Nationalists, fundamentalists, Bolsheviks…but money from the Arabian oilfields bought them all off in the end. Mosques were built, hospitals erected and schools set up to educate the children of the poor. His grandfather had been one of them. The child of a felah who sharecropped a single strip of Nile mud far to the south of Iskandryia and resented bitterly the interference of effendi who demanded his child attend class when there was bersim to gather and irrigation channels to be kept open with a broad-bladed hoe.

  From felah to effendi in three generations. That was worth something. And Hamzah’s doctorate was in engineering. Which was worth something too. The industrialist nodded to his bodyguard and stood up to go. He had bribes to pay, building contracts to negotiate, a new captain to find for the Iraklion run.

  Olga, his PA, would be waiting at the office with a long list of people to see and calls he should make. Most of which he would ignore.

  “Where were you an attaché?” The final question was asked from politeness alone. Beys were obviously different and Hamzah made no pretence of seeing any value in the theories expounded by his future son-in-law.

  “Seattle,” said Raf.

  Hamzah sat down again. This time when his gaze flicked to the slash across Raf’s ribs they stayed there. And when he looked back again there was something in his eyes that looked very like guilt.

  One heavy hand came up to rest briefly on Raf’s shoulder. “I had no idea. No one told me.”

  Raf said nothing because that was what someone who’d worked unofficially at the Seattle consulate would have said.

  “That’s confidential, obviously,” Raf muttered finally. “So please don’t mention it to anyone.”

  “But I have to tell…”

  “No,” said Raf, looking Hamzah straight in the eyes. “What I did was insignificant. An honorary attaché is just someone’s unpaid assistant.”

  “And the person you worked for is dead.” It wasn’t a question. Hamzah had watched the official broadcasts. And even if he hadn’t, the bombing of the consulate in Seattle by Sword of God fundamentalists had filled the world’s newsfeeds, swamped the radio stations and briefly turned even pirate TV into rolling 24-hour news channels.

  Image after image had been bounced round the planet. Bodies being pulled from the wreckage of a concrete building with heavy balconies. Viewers only knew the consulate once had balconies because CNN researchers had found “before” shots to emphasize the horror of what came after.

  One car bomb alone would have caused structural damage. But the consulate had main streets on three of its sides and the delivery trucks had been perfectly synchronized, their drivers in constant communication. The police deduced that the suicide bombers had been in regular radio contact from several charred fragments of circuit-board and the say-so of a thirteen-year-old band scanner, who’d been irritated to find crypted static where he was expecting juicy neighbourhood gossip.

  CHAPTER 11

  3rd July

  The free city was not just built on the rubble of its own history, it used that rubble in the rebuilding. Greek columns reshaped by Roman artisans now formed part of mosque doorways, having been ripped from an earlier Byzantine church. So, too, the cultures had mixed. Until the rich mix became its own culture.

  Berlin thought El Iskandryia barbarous, the White House feared it and Baghdad dismissed the metropolis as decadent and forgotten by God. But realpolitik demanded a Mediterranean free port where oil, cotton and particularly information could be traded. And El Isk got the job.

  Roman, Byzantine, Coptic, Muslim… If ancient Babylon was the whore, then El Iskandryia had long been the courtesan: though for Islam’s conquering army she was a sister to be brought back into the family. Napoleon called the city five shacks built over a dung heap. Nelson, being British, couldn’t even get the sex right and dismissed the city as a crippled dog. But the insults meant nothing to Isk…

  For Isk was hermaphrodite, ageless. A vampire of a city. Venerable and elegant, with a taste for fresh blood—a taste that it kept hidden behind stately boulevards a
nd impeccable manners, in daylight at least. Night-time found the city stretching itself and yawning to reveal ancient fangs. Though the half-smile never left its face and the dark glint never left its eye.

  And to assume Isk had a single identity was to misunderstand the Gordian complexity of its personality. The vampire existed parallel to the blonde innocent-eyed victim, the virgin inside the whore. There never had been only one city at any time in El Iskandryia’s history. And for all its ancient glory, there were days when Isk was afraid of its own shadow, of the tarnished side of the mirror it held up to the world.

  Days like now, when all that showed inside on Le Trianon’s bar screen was a rerun of that morning’s executions in Riyadh. A Saudi paedophile and a Sudanese found guilty of sorcery, both losing their heads in the flash of a sword blade, then losing them again in slow motion.

  Family.

  Ashraf al-Mansur, who was doing his best not to think of himself as ZeeZee, rolled the word round his mouth and spat it out. He’d never had one and wasn’t sure why he’d want to start now. As a child, in Zurich, he’d known boys at the Academy with families. Seen the strange effect it had on them. They cried from homesickness at the start of term and then no longer felt at home when they went back for the holidays. Their parents were worse. The kind of people who talked about roots and forgot those were what kept vegetables in the ground.

  Besides, Raf didn’t need roots. He came with a 8000-line guarantee that promised his genetic heritability would always outweigh social calibration. Whatever the fuck that meant.

  At first, given the number of zeros after the first number in the price, Raf thought that his mother must really love him… But later, when he looked at her accounts for the year of his birth, he found that ninety-five per cent of the cost of the genetic manipulation had been met by Bayer-Rochelle and the rest she’d written off over five years against tax.

  Oh, and the pharmaceutical company had totally funded her next three expeditions and made a sizeable one-off donation to a pressure group for which she was official photographer. It was around that time she’d stopped campaigning against non-transparent genome research.