Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Trudi looked hot and tired, so he’d written back saying he hoped she was taking vitamins and that if she had to go out like that in public he hoped she was wearing lots of sun cream. That earned him a postcard of a tram. Only three scrawled lines on the back but one of them was her new e-address. They wrote to each other now, not often but a couple of brief paragraphs once every few months. And she sent him more photographs of herself, fully clothed this time, with one of the cats sitting on her lap.

  There’d been a time of no photographs at all, when Trudi was in her early teens and her mother was going through a religious phase, if that was what you could call moving state and announcing to her new neighbours that no, she wasn’t divorced, her husband was dead. It had taken the ghost cancelling her alimony for five months to start the pictures flowing again. Before they did, he got a stiff letter from her attorney to which he’d had his own reply in Arabic. The photographs had restarted pretty soon after that.

  “It would be best…”

  “No,” said Raf. Not waiting for Felix to finish the sentence. There were a number of reasons why he didn’t want to leave the crime scene and go back to his office, only one of which he could tell Felix.

  “I can’t just leave Hani.”

  That, at least, was true. Without Lady Nafisa the girl was a scrawny nothing. She wasn’t pretty, she was way too young to be married off and, anyway, the kid was without a dowry. She had to be: Islamic law said girls couldn’t inherit in their own right. So unless Lady Nafisa had left everything to a favourite charity someone other then Hani was going to inherit and the chances were it was him. And that wasn’t what Raf wanted either.

  A murder, money, the recent appearance of an unknown heir. Arrange into a winning combination…

  Before the murder, RenSchmiss was just one middle-aged woman’s obsession. Now it would be debated in drawing rooms and cafés across North Africa.

  If the fat man wanted to keep talking about Thiergarten killers, that was fine with Raf but he knew what conclusion most people would draw from the evidence. And that was before he factored the press into account. The press were there to service the newsfeeds, which meant pictures, syndicated to local feeds all round the world, including Seattle.

  Raf sighed.

  The beard, hair and any thought of polarized contacts would have to go and the shades make a long-term reappearance. It was just a pity he didn’t have time for a completely new face to go with his new name and nationality.

  “I’ll stay…” He held up one hand, stopping Felix in his tracks. “Lady Nafisa was my aunt…” He was about to say something crass, like duty demands it, when the fat man’s mobile started beeping.

  It kept beeping while Felix searched his trouser pockets and finally tracked the watch down to his jacket, which was upstairs in the qaa, slung over a silver chair.

  “What?” Felix demanded. He made no attempt to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  The Minister was on the other end again. Raf knew that from the way the Chief of Detectives suddenly straightened up, pausing mid-stride. One hand came up to smooth his hair, thick fingers once again slicking sweat across his scalp.

  “Yes, sir. I’m glad your wife got home safely. I sent one of my best men with her…” If the Minister noticed the criticism implicit in the fat man’s words it didn’t stop his list of questions.

  “Exactly when did it happen?” Ripping aside the tape that closed off the study door, Felix walked over to the dead woman’s desk and half closed her paper, making sure the sticky pages didn’t actually touch. It was the midday edition. “So far all I can say is that it happened after twelve noon,” said Felix. “Yes,” he said, “I can state that categorically.” Felix listened to the next request and instinctively shook his head, sending sweat trickling down the bridge of his nose.

  “No, Your Excellency. I don’t think we should turn the site investigation over to Madame Mila.”

  “Yes, I know the General is…”

  “No, I’m not…”

  “If I can just…”

  “Yes, he’s still here…”

  It was a one-way conversation after that, Felix’s protests fading into silence, broken only towards the end when he nodded abruptly.

  “Whatever you want, sir…” Felix tapped a button to end the call, scowled balefully at his watch and stabbed a switch that put it back on standby.

  “You should have got out when you had the chance,” he told Raf. “The Minister wants you as my official witness.”

  “Which means what?” Raf asked, pushing back his own hair. The wind that seeped in through the smashed mashrabiya was hot and sticky, and Nafisa’s precious air-conditioning unit would probably have been reaching meltdown, if someone hadn’t already ripped its thermostat from the wall, leaving wires trailing.

  It might have been Raf’s imagination but he was sure her body had already begun to smell.

  “What does it mean? It means you stand in that doorway and watch me commit professional suicide. You don’t come in the room, you don’t interfere and you definitely don’t talk while I’m working. Understand?”

  No, he didn’t. “What am I witnessing?” Raf demanded.

  “Me. While I do this.”

  On the marble table where Lady Nafisa had given her lunch for the parents of Zara bint-Hamzah, Felix dumped a battered leather case with reinforced corners and a webbing strap to hold the top tight shut. The words on the strap read Property of the LAPD—do not remove without authorization. Yanking off the strap, Felix waved his hand in front of something that might have been a human head, had it not been made of clear perspex and filled with jumbled electronics. Chunks of crystal memory had been crudely glued to the back.

  Its eyes briefly lit red.

  “Meet Dr Dee,” said Felix. From the other side of the case Felix pulled a battered camera, a Speed Graphic digiLux so old it had a separate flash unit and came minus a removable memory dump, which was where Dr Dee came in…

  “First off, I’m going to sweep the scene, do crime-scene shots, then body shots. And finally I’m going to examine the body… Your job is to see I don’t plant or remove evidence and that I don’t molest or defile the woman’s corpse. You got any problems with that?”

  Silence.

  “Good, then let’s get started…” Felix slid out his hip flask, flipped its lid and downed the flask in one. “Beats holding your nose or saying prayers every time,” he added sourly, noting Raf’s undisguised shock.

  Only when Felix was certain that the tiles directly in front of him were clear of clues did he lie flat and sweep the floor with the beam of a tiny maglite. Two blouse buttons showed up immediately, both near the wall. Other than that, there was only debris from the mashrabiya. Lady Nafisa had been as fanatical about outer cleanliness as she had been about the inner kind.

  “Why aren’t I surprised?” Felix asked, but he was talking to himself. Lifting both buttons using tweezers, he dropped them straight into separate evidence bags, carefully dating and labelling each bag.

  It took him no more than fifteen minutes to take positioning shots, with another ten for body shots and five for close-ups of the wound itself. In that time he stopped twice to drink from a second flask and when that ran out he calmly switched to a third and used that instead.

  Perspiration rolled from the fat man’s face as he worked, and the air around him stank of whisky and sour sweat. But never once did he stumble or even look drunk. He just snapped off each shot, checked the quality on the little screen at the back of the Speed Graphic and moved on, looking for the next angle, his next shot. He had a professional’s tolerance for the drug of his choice. Raf had seen it before, up close and way too personal, every single day of the year he had spent in New York with his mother.

  CHAPTER 19

  Seattle

  Hitting America aged fifteen was different. So different as to be unforgettable in a life where everything was unforgettable. No flight attendant held his hand on the trip out
and he travelled regular, legs cramped into a tiny gap between the edge of his seat and the sloped chair-back of the passenger in front.

  Next to him sat a black-eyed girl wired into a Sony Dance-Master, the thud of Hold Me Down hissing from earbeads as her long fingers danced over the touchpad of a Nintendo to an entirely different beat. She smelled of toothpaste and a cheap powdery scent. Beyond her was a window seat, empty except for a Tibetan bag with an untouched magazine poking out of the top.

  ZeeZee desperately wanted to ask if she’d mind if he took the window seat but didn’t know the words… It wasn’t that she didn’t speak English. She did. Confidence was his problem. His school outside Edinburgh was strictly single-sex. Which meant tarting the smaller boys was a regular pastime for most of his year: talking to girls wasn’t.

  PanAmerican called the seats regular but most of the regular passengers were further forward, drinking free vodka shots and eating complimentary cashews while watching Hollywood’s finest on the screen in the wall of their bunks.

  The seats at the rear of the Boeing were for students, casual workers, girls hoping to find work as nannies: the kind of people who didn’t travel often, bought their own tickets and couldn’t believe just how few US dollars they got in exchange at the bureau de change. Not that ZeeZee had forked out for his own seat.

  Providence had paid for it.

  Providence in the form of a man in the Lyons Coffee Lounge at Heathrow who walked away from his table and forgot a leather pouch he’d put on the chair beside him. Until then ZeeZee had been running away to Paris to find bar work. By the time the man hurried back to where he’d been sitting. ZeeZee’s plans had changed and Seattle was on the cards, almost literally.

  While the man filled out a form to reclaim his pouch from Lost Property, where ZeeZee had left it, ZeeZee was off buying dollars from a FirstVirtual auto-teller in Arrivals, using a deposit card he’d extracted. Selling half those dollars back to a different machine in Departures took him a minute and gave ZeeZee enough paper money to buy a cheap, one-way ticket to Seattle-Tacoma. He had to show the girl at PanAmerican his permanent US visa. But once she’d swiped his passport through a reader and the visa came up valid she was all smiles, even when he bought the cheapest stand-by she had.

  The deposit card he flushed away in a men’s room on the way to his gate. Some kind of warped morality made him buy a cut-price ticket. And it was only after take off that he realized the owner would just claim a full card against insurance and ZeeZee could have travelled first if he wanted.

  “You wanna borrow this?” The girl was holding out her magazine, one hissing earbead carefully cupped in her hand where she’d half unplugged herself from the music. He didn’t recognize the accent.

  “Hold Me Down,” ZeeZee said, nodding at the bead, “the ice-hot FP remix…”

  She looked at him then. Glanced, without realizing it, at his white shirt and grey trousers. He’d ditched the jacket and striped tie but nothing could make what he was wearing anything other than what it was, half a school uniform.

  He didn’t mention that he only recognized the mix because some jerk in his common room had downloaded the Belize Sleez compilation and had played it to death.

  “End of term?” she asked.

  ZeeZee shook his head. “Just had enough.” He took the offered magazine and was surprised she didn’t immediately pull away when his fingers accidentally brushed her hand.

  “What about you?” ZeeZee tried to make it sound like he always talked to strange girls on planes.

  She smiled and named some city he didn’t recognize, except to realize it was probably in the neutrality corridor between the Soviets and the Berlin alliance. “I’ve got a student visa,” she added, “but I intend to find work in Seattle. You don’t know anywhere?”

  He didn’t, but she still told him her name and lent him a spare set of earbeads, toggling the DanceMaster onto split so they both got the full mix. Twenty minutes later, when the lights dimmed and an attendant came round with covers and all the couchettes tipped back, ZeeZee and Katia ended up under the same blanket.

  The blanket was PanAmerican blue, logo-laden along all edges, with holes all over to trap air. It came vacuum-wrapped in foil and it was only after they had both struggled to rip open her packet that Katia discovered the easy-release tab.

  “Dumb,” said Katia and ZeeZee smiled slightly nervously. He kept on smiling as he pulled the single blanket over both of them. And if Katia noticed his fingers shaking she didn’t let him know. Instead she just rolled onto her side, facing away from him, and curled up with her head rested on her arm.

  “Listen,” she whispered.

  So ZeeZee did.

  The new track was like nothing he’d heard before. A young boy’s voice soared in a language he didn’t recognize above a famine-sparse synth line that bled into a gull’s cry and ended with a softly-building loop of whale song. Baghavad Gita. Not his taste, but it went with the yin/yang tattoo on her wrist and the grey titanium stud piercing the bridge of her nose.

  Settling down, the girl shuffled herself backward until her bare heel just touched ZeeZee’s ankle. And it seemed natural, somehow, for him to rest one hand on her leg and gently stroke the brushed surface of her chinos, feeling her warmth beneath as he moved his hand in time to the music.

  When she didn’t complain he kept going. And the next time she shifted, he suddenly found it easier to reach the seam that his finger had been tracing along the inside of her knee.

  “That’s neat…”

  He wasn’t sure that was what she actually said, but he muttered agreement anyway and shifted his fingers higher. He didn’t quite have the nerve to trace the seam all the way to the top, so he settled for smoothing his hand gently up over her hip.

  “No.” She tensed as his fingers reached the softness of her very slight stomach, only to breathe out again as ZeeZee hurriedly moved his hand, finding instead the swell of one breast through her thin green T-shirt.

  She wore no bra.

  She didn’t move and nor did he, seemingly flash-frozen to the spot. Then, infinitely slowly, she moved his hand softly, letting her suddenly erect nipple write a line of fire across his palm.

  ZeeZee started to breathe again.

  Gently he reached under the cloth of her T-shirt to find a breast that was full and warm, smooth to the touch. Close to, her long dark hair smelled of resin and oil, unwashed and almost animal.

  “God.” ZeeZee sucked in his breath as he found her nipple with his thumb and first finger.

  “Softly,” she said over her shoulder and he nodded, even though he knew she couldn’t really see him.

  Much later, when the Boeing was halfway across the Atlantic and most of the other cabin passengers were sleeping, ZeeZee smoothed his hand back across her hip and ran his fingers gently up that seam. And only the fact she opened her knees slightly told him that she wasn’t also asleep.

  One button fastened the band of her cheap chinos and the fly was a simple nylon zip, nothing fancy or expensive like tiny straps, toggles or invisible velcro. Katia couldn’t afford designer clothes, even if they’d been available in whichever unpronounceable city it was she came from.

  Terrified she’d say no, ZeeZee began to ease the zip, as if undoing it extra slowly meant she might not notice. Then he popped the single button at her waist. When she still didn’t protest, he let his fingertips creep gently down her abdomen, reaching for the waistband of her knickers. What he found was tight body hair, then dampness and finally heat.

  Katia wore nothing underneath, not even a basic thong…

  She wouldn’t look at him when the cabin lights came up. Her jeans were already buttoned and zipped, her T-shirt smoothed down. She’d rearranged both herself about an hour earlier, just before she drifted into sleep.

  ZeeZee was more relieved than hurt by her sudden distance and put the earbead he’d borrowed politely but silently into her hand. Despite himself, he was grinning as he left the Boeing.r />
  He was fifteen. He’d never yet kissed a girl—but he’d had one tighten frantically around his fingers and then, when her gasps were safely swallowed, push her hand back into the waistband of his trousers to squeeze until her wrist was sticky with his release.

  Seattle was definitely the right place for him to be.

  CHAPTER 20

  6th July

  “Guard the door for me,” Felix told Raf, resting his Speed Graphic on Lady Nafisa’s desk and pulling a foil packet from his hip pocket. Ripping open the foil, he pulled out what looked like a large condom, shaking it between first finger and thumb until a tissue-thin glove was revealed.

  “Surgical,” Felix told Raf, ripping open a second packet. “Nanopore latex, anti-static. I get them from the hospital. The standard-issue stuff round here is crap.” Felix shrugged. “I could always change manufacturers, but they’re probably paying kickback to the Khedive’s second cousin…”

  “What am I guarding against this time?” Raf asked as he watched the fat man struggle to force his thick fingers into the tight gloves.

  “The coroner,” said Felix cryptically and knelt beside the seated body. With his fingers out straight, he ran his right hand over Nafisa, never quite letting his fingertips get close enough to touch either flesh or clothes. It was as if he was feeling for something that wasn’t there.

  Taking his tiny maglite, the fat man swept its beam across Nafisa’s skin as she sat in the chair. “No fibres, no animal hair…” He was talking to his watch, to Raf and to the weird back-up device in the room outside, but mostly he was talking to himself. Getting himself ready for the bit the coroner wouldn’t like.

  The leather case Felix took from his pocket contained a Saez scalpel, the old-fashioned titanium-edged kind, a handful of glass thermometers, tiny combs, surgical swabs and glass holding tubes that could freeze themselves. He only planned to use the first two.

  Lifting the edge of Lady Nafisa’s skirt, Felix checked the dark bruises on her buttocks and lower thigh.