Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Obvious lividity…”

  He pushed the bruising and watched the skin go pale beneath his fingers as the blood that gravity had pooled in the tissue moved aside. Within another couple of hours that would be fixed in place.

  “…lividity still blanches.” That confirmed his time frame.

  All he needed now, for thoroughness, was a core temperature reading. The simplest way of getting that was use a rectal thermometer, but Felix knew better than to even consider the idea. Instead he reached for his Saez scalpel, moved the skirt higher still and punched his scalpel through the skin of Nafisa’s abdomen. Extracting the blade, Felix took a surgical thermometer and worked it deep into the tiny wound. Ninety seconds later he broke the red tag off the top of the thermometer to fix the temperature and withdrew the sliver of glass and silicon, dropping it into an evidence bag, which he initialled.

  A human body lost roughly one-point-five degrees an hour, depending on surrounding temperature. The reading was within the limits he’d expect.

  “Initialling postM wound…”

  Using his pen, Felix drew a circle around the wound on Lady Nafisa’s abdomen, signed his initials and added the date and time. The coroner-magistrate would have a fit about it, there’d be another strong memo to the Minister mentioning desecration of the dead and Felix would get told not to do it again.

  Again.

  To which he’d reply, as he always did, that if he wasn’t allowed to use the orifices that Allah provided, then he’d have to make his own. As yet Madame Mila hadn’t come up with an answer that… Mind you, she hadn’t forgiven him either.

  “Toxicology report…” Slamming a sterile plastic reservoir into a syringe, Felix picked a vein in Nafisa’s wrist and drew blood. Circling and initialling the puncture mark. Let them complain about that, too.

  The corpse felt warm through the latex of his glove as he lifted a breast to examine the pen buried beneath it. He felt for the edge of her ribcage and then counted up, already knowing what he was going to find.

  “Penetrating wound to chest, between third and fourth…” The blow was perfectly placed to puncture her heart. And it was a single stab wound, highly professional. Amateur assassins often missed. Suicides left hesitation cuts, little lacerations and half-hearted weals while they jabbed or slashed at themselves to see how much it was going to hurt.

  Yet no defensive wounds were present to indicate that Lady Nafisa had even tried to fight for her life. And this was a woman notorious for fighting for everything she considered her due.

  Lifting her right hand to recheck unbroken skin between the woman’s thumb and first finger, Felix almost hissed with irritation. “No defensive cuts to finger web, nor across palm or wrist…” He stopped, turned over the hand to look at her nails. The cuticles were still manicured and immaculate, that morning’s lacquer as dark and glossy as a blood trickle but the nail ends were badly chipped and ripped back, all of them.

  If she’d been a girl locked in a cellar to starve to death, then that was what he’d expect her fingers to look like at the end of the first day, before they stopped being something used to scrabble at a locked door and became food instead. And it did happen, even in El Iskandryia—but only among the poor, out in the slums, to daughters and sisters who hadn’t been as careful as their fathers or brothers expected. It didn’t happen to the middle-aged and rich.

  Besides, her office wasn’t a cellar and her door had been found open.

  Felix shook his head, thought briefly about starting his fourth hip flask, the emergency one, and rejected the idea. Every year new morality laws made his life that much more difficult. It was hard enough being Nasrani in a North African city, even worse to be so obviously fat and pink in a country full of elegant Arabs, rugged Berbers and sophisticated Levantines. And his own Catholicism might now be almost residual, but it still made for difficulties in an Islamic metropolis where a male officer wasn’t supposed to touch a female corpse.

  But then, this was a city where the police test for rape in the outer boroughs was to sit the victim on a rough wooden stool to see if she squirmed with pain. If she didn’t, she hadn’t fought back and it wasn’t rape. Most fought back. Many died rather than submit. Not surprising when most felaheen still chose to kill their daughters for being disgraced rather than kill the rapist and risk starting a blood feud.

  Screw it. Felix took the swig anyway, aware without looking that the nail of the thumb he used to flip up the top was bitten to the quick, just like all his others. He’d have to go back on the Sobranie soon, whatever the medics said about ghostly shadows haunting his lungs. Logical deduction was hard enough without self-inflicted nicotine withdrawal.

  So what had he got?

  At first glance the attack appeared frenzied. But any attacker in a real frenzy would just have punched the pen straight through whatever clothes Lady Nafisa wore, which meant the open blouse signified something. Unless, of course, what it signified was not frenzy but passion and the stabbing came later, when the widow’s defences were down.

  That wasn’t an avenue Nafisa’s cousin Jalila or her husband would want explored with too much thoroughness… Or any thoroughness at all, come to that, Felix decided sourly as he listened to heels that clicked regular as a metronome across the courtyard outside. That would be Lady Jalila’s friend, the new coroner-magistrate.

  Felix waited for the sound of her and Hani’s footsteps on the stairs. Then, when they didn’t come, he tuned out the distant chatter of Hani’s voice and went back to examining the body, using his last few seconds of peace to search for anything he might have missed. Something obvious.

  There was a tiny stigma right in the centre of her left hand, a dark crater-like indentation that bled slightly along one edge. Significant? Possibly. He grabbed a shot anyway and hurriedly thrust the dead woman’s hand back in her lap where he’d found it. Then Felix smoothed the skirt down round her knees and stepped back. He left the blouse as he’d found it, torn open at the front. He didn’t want anyone saying he’d been messing with the evidence.

  “Chief Felix…” The coroner-magistrate’s greeting was borderline polite, but brittle. “No one told me you’d be here.”

  “Didn’t they? Then you’ve been talking to the wrong people.” The fat man took his time to straighten up, rolling his heavy shoulders to ease their stiffness. And then, when he could put it off no longer, he turned to face the ebony-skinned woman who stood glaring from the doorway.

  Madame Mila, with her hair pulled back, her nails worn short and unvarnished, her black trousers and coat cut from local cotton, not even off the peg but off the shelf from Wal-Mart.

  Word was, Madame Mila dressed simply because of her job. Felix’s view was that she’d dress like that no matter what job she did.

  “We’ve done everything according to regulations,” said Felix. “His Excellency here is my witness to that…”

  The woman raised her eyebrows but didn’t bother to reply. Instead she stepped over to the body and touched her finger to the throat of the stabbed woman, checking that there was no pulse.

  “Dead,” she announced. Felix nodded. The official time of death was now, not when Felix estimated she was killed but when the death was formally recorded by a medical officer.

  Carefully, Madame Mila closed the open blouse. Then she stooped for the tissue-thin modesty shroud Felix had earlier discarded and spread it over the dead body. Only after that did she turn back to the door, nodding for Felix to follow her.

  “Body’s released,” Felix said to his watch. Formalities complete, the corpse could now be removed and the fingerprinting brigade sent in. Felix took a last look round the crime scene, a token glance for anything he might have missed.

  “Chief…” The voice was unnecessarily impatient.

  “What?” Felix demanded. “What’s your problem this time?”

  “The pashazade.”

  “Using him as my witness was the Minister’s idea,” said Felix flatly. “You got a
problem, take it up with Mushin Bey. Ashraf and I are out of here.”

  Madame Mila shook her head. “He goes nowhere,” she said. “At least not with you. As of now, he’s under arrest. Suspicion of murder.” She tightened her grip on the shoulder of the small girl stood beside her. “And this is my witness.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Seattle

  Red on white inside, grey on grey without, where the Pacific beat on jagged rocks and gulls circled like sailors’ souls over a stark concrete bunker that made the work of Mies van der R look soft and fluid.

  Micky O’Brian lay inside on a white silk carpet that cost $340 a square yard and could only be ordered over the web from Beijing, cash in advance. Outside, through a long window that ran the length of his precious first-floor art gallery, gunmetal waters could be seen lapping the shore of Puget Sound. Drizzle made the sky as dull as the sea and reduced visibility to a few hundred paces.

  The jetty in front of Lodge Concret was bare. A thin strip of factory grating held above the rocking waves by anodized posts. The clinker-built pleasure boat that should have been there was long gone. So was a Matisse nude, a Christo abstract and one of the most important early works of Cézanne still to be in private ownership… Farmhouse at Auvers had been painted in 1873, the year after Cézanne moved to Pontoise to be close to Pissarro.

  White on red.

  Seepage from a bullet hole in the back of Micky O’Brian’s head had formed its own abstract, more Rorschach blot than Rothko. A vivid red splash that would fade to black as blood soaked into silk and eventually dried. There was a message in the colours, and the message was that the man wouldn’t be testifying to anything.

  At first glance it looked like Micky was grabbing a nap, half curled on his side in slacks, gold slippers and a Chinese dressing gown with a five-toed Mandarin dragon on the back. But that was only at first glance. His wide-eyed glassy stare told a different story. One that ZeeZee picked up only in fragments, as he checked the long gallery and found it empty of any killer, with its picture lights turned down to “dim” and a still-chilled bottle of Mumm Cordon Rouge open on a side table.

  There were macadamia nuts and chilli olives in little bowls alongside the bottle. An open but untouched box of Partegas corona had been placed nearby, along with a neatly rolled spliff placed ostentatiously on a silver ashtray. A very Micky O’Brian touch. The air in the gallery was heavy with scent from a huge vase of black tulips. Debussy drifted from flat wall speakers. Clair de Lune or something similar. Something lightweight, in keeping with Micky’s acting abilities.

  The visitor Micky O’Brian had been expecting was ZeeZee. But someone else had definitely got here first.

  ZeeZee carefully put the fat manila envelope he’d been delivering on the arm of a white leather sofa and considered his options. He could call the police or he could just leave, quietly and quickly. Returning the way he’d come, on the back of his 650cc Suzuki. And why not? He now had no one to meet. No reason for being there.

  “Shit.” ZeeZee picked up his envelope and headed downstairs, the Debussy nocturne looping in his head. He made it as far as the sand-blasted glass front door before someone yelled his name.

  “Hey, ZeeZee…” The amused shout came from behind him. “Going somewhere?”

  He turned to see two bulls he knew in SPD jumpsuits flanking a woman who wore a black Chanel suit, black shoes and Shu Uemura make-up. Not that she needed it: even naked, her face would have been flawless, her eyes bright, brown and hard as glass. He had no idea who she was.

  All he knew was the woman had to have practised that contemptuous, deadpan stare. It was too convincing to be real. The grins on the faces of the uniformed officers were something else entirely. Certainly not real smiles, more grim-faced got-you-you-bastard kind of expressions.

  “Micky O’Brian…” ZeeZee began, breaking the silence.

  “Yeah,” said the woman. “Why don’t you take us to meet him?”

  “He’s… When I got here… I didn’t know…”

  She looked at ZeeZee without saying anything. Just waited until his words stumbled to a halt and then kept waiting while the English boy skidded around in his head for the right approach to take to what was about to happen—and realized there wasn’t one.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said finally. “You got here a couple of minutes ago and found the front door open. You knocked but no one came, so you went inside. And guess what, you found Micky O’Brian shot through the skull… Or was it the throat?”

  “A head shot,” ZeeZee said, without thinking.

  The two uniformed officers looked at each other. As if that only confirmed what they expected.

  “And you were on your way to call the police?”

  ZeeZee nodded.

  “So why didn’t you use the hall phone?” The woman nodded to a Sanyo fixed to the wall by the front door, its screen black but one diode flashing lazily in the lower left corner, to signal the system was set to standby.

  “I didn’t see it,” said ZeeZee hastily. “I was too shocked.”

  “Which is why you were whistling…” She hummed back at him the main motif from Clair de Lune. “I can see the headlines now. The whistling hit man…”

  “I haven’t killed anybody,” ZeeZee protested.

  “Of course you haven’t,” she said sourly. “So why don’t you come and show us the person you didn’t kill?”

  Micky O’Brian’s body was where he’d left it. The blood seemed a little darker, Micky a little more obviously dead. Other than that, walking into the gallery could just have been a bad attack of déjà vu.

  “So you found him lying there like that?”

  ZeeZee nodded.

  “And you touched nothing?”

  He shook his head, then hesitated.

  “Yes?” she said, drawing out the word until it ended with a hiss.

  “I touched the wine bottle. To check how cold it was… And I turned off the music.”

  “How thoughtful of you.”

  “But I didn’t touch anything else. I didn’t kill him. And I didn’t take the paintings,”

  The detective flicked her gaze to a blank space on the wall. Then back to the body. So far none of them had checked Micky for a pulse. But maybe they’d decided it wasn’t necessary, given the very final expression on his face.

  “So you’re trying to shift the blame to an accomplice, right? He shot Micky, took the paintings and left you to lock the front door… Yeah, I know,” said the woman, as she held up her hand to still ZeeZee’s protest. “You didn’t kill him and you don’t know who did.”

  Shrugging, she walked over to Micky and looked down for a while, then bent to free something trapped under him. “Here,” she said, tossing it to ZeeZee. “You left this behind.”

  The fat envelope he’d been carrying hit the floor as ZeeZee fumbled to make the catch. And then, while he was still worrying about what he’d dropped, ZeeZee realized what he’d just caught. What he’d just tagged with his sweat, fingerprints and oil. An old Wilson Combat, its usual barrel replaced with a .22 conversion. The deep scar of an acid etch where the barrel’s identification number should be.

  “Ditch the gun.”

  ZeeZee heard her words but he wasn’t really listening. Had he always been the patsy: or was he only now surplus to requirements? He looked in disbelief at the weapon in his hands, knowing exactly who it belonged to…Wild Boy had just, very firmly, taken him out of the loop.

  “Drop it.” The woman nodded to the man beside her, who flipped his service-issue Colt out of its holster and trained the sight on ZeeZee’s chest before the English boy realised what was happening.

  “Put it down real slow.” The man holding the revolver had a Southern drawl and a liking for theatrics. The trigger on his gun was already pulled, his knuckle white from depressing the trigger to its fullest extent. Only his thumb was holding back the hammer.

  “Your choice,” the woman said coldly.

  Wasn’t it always?<
br />
  ZeeZee kneeled slowly and placed the Combat flat on Micky’s white carpet, muzzle pointed safely towards the wall. He didn’t want any misunderstandings.

  “I didn’t kill Micky O’Brian. I didn’t…”He wanted his voice to sound decisive and confident but instead it sounded shrill, as if he was trying to convince himself.

  “Switching to .22 was a good move,” said the officer with the gun. “But, you know what…?”

  ZeeZee shook his head.

  “You really should have used a silencer. We got a call about the shot right after it happened…”

  ZeeZee looked through the gallery’s long window, taking in the rugged coastline, the choppy grey waters, the sheer isolation of this stretch of Puget Sound. Yeah, he’d bet there’d been a call, but not made from around here. There was no other house within miles. He couldn’t wait for the part where they looked in the envelope and discovered Micky’s delivery: half a kilo of uncut coke.

  CHAPTER 22

  6th July

  300-3500 Hz (with harmonics peaking above 3500), is an average frequency-range for the human voice. And the sensitivity of human hearing is pretty smooth between 500-5000Hz, with 110dB being usually as loud as a voice gets.

  The prisoner in the next cell was breaking 120dB, his screams emptying in a single breath that ended as swallowed, choking sobs. And though the air in Raf’s small room now stank of sweat, everyone was being positively polite.

  The bey was good—Felix had to give him that. He hadn’t tried to claim immunity or demanded to talk to the Minister. He’d even allowed an embarrassed sergeant to wire him to a polygraph, fastening the band round his own wrist and placing his right hand completely flat on the plate. Not that the bey was exactly cooperating, either.

  He hadn’t yet removed his black jacket, which still looked immaculate after hours of questioning: and he’d only just taken off his dark glasses, after Madame Mila finally agreed to lower the brightness of the overhead lights.

  It had been hypocritical of the fat man to have put on record at the outset that he hoped the coroner-magistrate knew what she was doing—because he didn’t hope that at all. What he actually hoped—very much—was that Madame Mila was making the worst mistake of her short but impressive career.