“Ashraf,” hissed Lady Jalila, materializing beside him like a bad smell. “You have to lead.” Dark patches of sweat showed under the arms of her white linen suit, but her make-up was still immaculate and the few strands of hair that escaped from under her Hermès scarf glinted prettily in the sunlight.
“Come on,” Raf said and turned to Hani. Only to stop at the sight of her face.
The child had her legs set apart, her heels dug deep into the grit of the path. Everything about her body language roared defiance except for the hurt in her eyes. Raf recognized that, the exploding bleakness, which wasn’t the same as remembering it. Though he remembered well how hard he’d had to learn to forget.
“We need to move,” Raf said softly.
Hani shook her head. No question of compromise.
“Hani.”
Heads flicked round at Lady Jalila’s rebuke, until most of the mourners were gazing at the child. There was something hungry about the gathering. Lady Jalila held out her hand to Hani and waited.
Nobody moved.
“You lead,” Raf suggested, taking in the crowd of strangers and knowing they listened to his every word. “You were her closest friend and you found her. Besides, you can see the child is terrified.”
He dropped to his knees on the gravel path. “We’re staying here, aren’t we?”
Night-black eyes stared back at him, then arms thin as sticks fastened themselves tight round his neck as Hani clung to him and her butterfly trembling exploded into full-blown shakes. Sobs shook her body but Raf had no need to look to know the child was crying: the tears were trickling into the collar of his shirt.
When he looked up, a good half of the onlookers were gazing sympathetically at them both. The Minister of Police even had a sad, tolerant smile on his face.
“If you insist.” Something ghost-like flitted across the face of Lady Jalila as she turned to face the mausoleum door. And she walked away without waiting for her husband.
“Poor child,” said Mushin Bey sadly. “Such a loss.” Raf figured the Minister of Police was talking about Hani and not his wife, but it was hard to tell.
One by one, the other mourners followed Lady Jalila and the body until they were all swallowed by darkness and the necropolis suddenly felt empty. From a nearby bush came the bubbling call of a common bulbul and beyond a high wall cars could be heard grinding gears at distant traffic lights.
“About goddamn time,” said Felix, with feeling. The flask was out, flicked open and tucked safely back in the fat man’s jacket in an instant. “Needs must,” he said, looking oddly shamefaced. “It’s either grab the odd refuel or not turn up at all…” He glanced towards Hani—folded into Raf’s arms, her eyes screwed tight, her face buried in his shoulder—and nodded thoughtfully. “Good man,” said Felix softly. “Now find out what she really knows…”
The al-Mansur mausoleum was elegantly simple. Its very simplicity a sign of the design’s antiquity, which easily predated both the city’s invasion by Napoleon in 1798 and an earlier seventeenth-century plague that had swept the streets of life and briefly reduced Isk to a handful of dilapidated dwellings occupied by obese rats.
A low door, cut into the side of a marble base, led down to a deep crypt. Rising up from the square base, basalt pillars at each corner supported a roof that rose, in its turn, to meet at a point in the very centre. A short metal spine that jutted from this point ended in a simple crescent. Though it was difficult to see from the ground what material the crescent had been hammered from, as winter storms had weathered the metal to a deep black.
Under this roof, centred on the base itself, was a simple memorial. A rough-hewn slab of stone, balanced on its side and apparently held upright at either end by a short square pillar, one of which had once been broken and repaired with stone of a slightly poorer quality.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at the building,” said Raf, slowly stroking the child’s hair. She didn’t quite pull away, so he stroked again, more slowly still. Years back that had worked for a different animal, a wounded one, when no other boy at his school could get near it.
“It’s a kiosk,” Hani said. She nodded to the mausoleum. “And that thing’s a cenotaph and those are stelae.” The upward jerk to her chin told him she was talking about the narrow pillars.
“Yesterday I was as you, tomorrow you will be like me…” Hani recited from memory the inscription on the base. “How old do you think it is?”
Raf looked round at other, more ornate tombs. A few of which had similar square roofs, though most had little domes, cupolas of stone decorated either with starburst motifs, herringbone patterns or intricate, intertwined arabesques. Even the newest ones looked as if they’d been there for centuries.
“I’ve no idea,” he said, “tell me.”
Hani’s lips twisted. “Twenty years… Donna told me. My aunt built it for her husband. The pillar broke in the first year and she made the builders replace it for nothing.”
“But the site…” Raf scanned the necrotic jumble that crowded in on itself, bent by age and gravity, some of the funerary monuments so close to collapse they looked as though they were trying to shoulder neighbouring tombs out of the way.
“Bought an old tomb and pulled it down.” The child shrugged. “Of course, she had to pay someone to carry away the old bodies.”
“Of course…”Raf nodded at a heavily bent cork tree nearby. “It’s too bright for me,” he said. “Are you all right with moving?”
They walked over to the shade together, Hani never once releasing her grip on his hand. She’d been holding on without break from the point they stepped into Rue Cif and climbed into the back of Felix’s open-top car. Quite what she thought would happen to her if she let go Raf had no idea, but it was equally obvious Hani didn’t intend to find out.
Just getting her out onto the street had been difficult enough. Getting the kid into the car had taken a major miracle. Though it wasn’t until Hani had appeared in a dress, her straight black hair carefully tied back, that Raf even realized he had a problem.
She’d walked easily enough from the qaa through the courtyard, and less easily from there into the oven-like heat of the covered garden, which was already beginning to wilt after only one day without Lady Nafisa’s attention. But by the time she’d reached the madersa’s final squat passage out onto Rue Cif, Hani was shaking with fear.
“Come on,” Raf had said, tugging slightly on her hand. Her answering yank almost took his arm out of its socket. And as he stared down to where her face was setting into a mask of stubbornness made flesh, realization hit.
He didn’t hear her whisper first time so she said it again.
“I’ve never…” Hani’s voice trailed away into silence.
“You’ve never left the house?”
The truth was confirmed in the eyes of the old Sudanese porter who stood watching the anxious girl stand frozen on his doorstep. Self-imposed boxes, that was what life produced, thought Raf bleakly. Simple and basic or complex and jewelled, it made little difference. Prison was still prison and exile was exile, internal or not.
“Are you afraid?” he asked Hani.
Her answer was a fierce scowl.
“Well,” said Raf, “are you?”
“No. Of course not.” She bunched her fingers into fists and pressed her hands hard at her side. “I’m never afraid.”
He would be. Nine years without leaving the madersa where she’d been born. Without stepping beyond the rear door into Rue Cif, never mind using the carved front portal that led from the house to the busy mayhem that was Rue Sherif. Not that anyone still used the Rue Sherif portal, of course. The sun-blasted street doors might remain in place, but the actual archway behind them had been bricked up ten years before Hani was even born, on Lady Nafisa’s orders. The few visitors Lady Nafisa had allowed into the madersa since her husband’s death use the entrance in Rue Cif.
Dropping to one knee, Raf forgot about his new
suit. “Not afraid?” he said. “Everyone’s afraid…” He was aware of Felix watching him from the waiting Cadillac. “It’s what keeps us alive.” He’d almost said human.
Hani looked doubtful.
Raf sighed. He didn’t want to run the duty routine, but he was going to anyway, because that was what would work. He and the kid shared a number of the same buttons in common.
“She was your aunt…”
“Your aunt too,” Hani said sullenly.
Yeah, right. That was somewhere he didn’t plan to visit. “But you knew her properly. Much better than I did.”
The nod was tiny.
“And everyone will expect you to be there…”
Hani looked doubtful.
“I’m sorry,” Raf said softly. He stood up, slipped on his dark glasses and struck a pose, one hand tucked into his silk jacket, as if holding a gun. Imperial Assassin V.
“Hey,” he said, “Stick with me. You’ll be safe.”
Hani’s lips twisted. Only the briefest twitch, but it was almost a smile.
CHAPTER 25
Seattle
The long blade shone silver. Not as bright as sun on the water in the harbour beyond the shop window where a new Japanese super-yacht sat looking smug and sleek, but bright enough to make the newly arrived English boy glance away.
Behind a wooden counter at the back of the shop was a Chinese woman hard at work removing a scratch from the mirror-black lacquered scabbard of a Honshu wakizasi. Her shop mostly sold reproduction Japanese swords because that was what tourists in Seattle seemed to want and could afford. The sword held by the boy was real, a fact reflected in its price.
Cotton bound the ray-skin hilt, its tsuba was pierced and simple, the scabbard was lacquered wood with traces of crazing, where an under-lacquer showed through. But it was the shinto blade that made that particular sword special. Even the fact her great-grandfather died at Nanking wasn’t enough to stop her appreciating the katana’s stark beauty.
Hu San Liang had already decided the young tourist would walk out empty-handed. He liked the sword but couldn’t possibly afford it. If he’d had that kind of money the boy would have bought the weapon already.
Instead he was taking a last, regretful look. A few more minutes and he would be gone. Buying a coffee at Starbucks next door, most probably. Some small consolation for not being able to afford what he really wanted.
Hu San was used to it. The prices in her shop were higher than elsewhere. Partly that was because harbour-front sites in Seattle were expensive, occupied mostly by hotels, franchise chains and exclusive bars. The other reason was that Hu San didn’t sell rubbish. She shipped the reproductions from Osaka to Seattle through her own small import/export company. Cheaper reproductions could be bought from Spain or Taiwan for a fraction of the price but she had her own motives for sourcing material from Osaka. Quite apart from an obvious one, which was that her lover was Japanese.
“How old is this?” The boy’s voice was polite, his accent definitely not local. Hu San had watched him come into her shop every day for a week and silently pick up the same sword and pull it respectfully from its simple scabbard to examine the hamon: that wavy temper line where the blade was coated with clay before firing, so that variations in heat would produce a hard but brittle cutting edge, backed by softer but more flexible steel.
It was the best sword in the shop. Hu San suspected the English boy knew that. She also knew the boy had blanched the first time a price was mentioned, but still kept coming back.
“How old? Three-fifty years, maybe a bit more.” Hu Son’s voice placed her as second-generation Chinese-American. More Seattle than anything else.
“And the scabbard?”
“What do you think?”
The boy picked up the scabbard thoughtfully. When he thought Hu San wasn’t looking he flicked a thumbnail across a gold man on the scabbard’s side. The circle peeled rather than flaked away.
“New,” said the boy, looking at the handle. It was all new except the blade.
“The blade is the sword.” Hu San said shortly. She waited for the question but the boy just nodded.
“Beautiful,” said the boy. Then, to Hu San’s relief, he put the blade back in its scabbard, put the scabbard back on its daisho stand and left her shop. Which was as well, because the Chinese woman was expecting a visitor. And not one she looked forward to meeting.
Taking a pen from its tray, Hu San moistened a block of ink and began to practise writing her name. She’d practised every day since she was four, which was now just over thirty-five years ago. One day she would get it exactly right, but hopefully not too soon.
Her Korean visitor wore a dark suit, white shirt and red tie. The uniform of money-men or gangsters. He came in just as Hu San finished her third attempt. Neither bowed to the other and the Korean made no effort to hide his contempt at the smallness of the shop or at how Hu San was passing her time.
“Try writing an epitaph,” he suggested, “if you must do that ethnic crap.”
But Hu San had no intention of dying. At least, not that day and not to any timetable worked out by a Korean. She knew the Korean’s name, of course, but wasn’t prepared to do the man the honour of using it, not even in her head. She’d known his father and that one had also been stupid.
“You know why I’m here?”
Hu San gave the briefest nod.
The Korean put his hand into his jacket pocket. “Agree our terms,” he said, “or else…” The rest of what he planned to say was lost in the ring of a bell as ZeeZee walked back into the shop and headed straight for the sword. Hu San had been right. The boy had gone next door to Starbucks and nursed a regular latte—at the shelf by the window—while he came up with his proposal. He would put down a deposit on the katana, pay every week and collect the sword when its price had been met.
He wasn’t about to mention that he didn’t yet have a job.
Taking the sword from its rack, ZeeZee slid free the blade and held it out in front of him, feeling the perfection of its balance. Only then did he notice Hu San was not alone and that her visitor was gaping bug-eyed at him like some fish out of water.
“Go,” ordered Hu San. “I’m shut now. Come back tomorrow…”
“You heard her,” said the suit. “Move.”
ZeeZee was never quite sure why he didn’t just walk out of the shop. Stubbornness, maybe. Disappointment at not being able to make his eminently sensible proposal. Sheer chance, perhaps. Some half-remembered butterfly stamping its foot way back when he was born. Although, later, the fox told ZeeZee it had snapped awake, sniffed the air and tasted something sour. Tiri was like that, unpredictable. Whatever the reason, ZeeZee lowered the blade and started towards the counter. There was something he really needed to discuss.
“Out,” said the Korean, jerking his head towards the door. He had a gun in his hand that hadn’t been there a second before.
Inside the boy’s head an animal growled and ZeeZee heard a low whisper that hadn’t spoken since he was seven.
Raise the sword…
Without pausing to think, the boy lifted his blade, cavalry-sabre-style, and stepped forward. “Are you being robbed?”
Hu San glanced from the boy to the Korean and then nodded.
The growling got louder.
“Call the police,” ZeeZee’s voice was hoarse, way too high. He took a slow breath to steady himself. “Call them…”
Most of his weight ZeeZee rested on his left heel, leaving his right leg forward and heel slightly raised, as he took up the two-handed position taught at school. Man with gun versus man with sword. In theory it was a straight stand-off, but the idea he might actually have to use his blade raised questions of the kind the boy didn’t want to answer.
“Fuckwit,” the Korean said flatly. He was talking to ZeeZee, or rather he was talking at ZeeZee, because his hand was already bringing up the revolver.
Sun flashed on metal, time slowed, and a katana blade slid thro
ugh flesh and bit through bone showering the boy with hot rain.
“Bow,” ordered Hu San.
For a second the Korean’s severed head remained on his neck. Then it tipped forward and fell to the floor. Death smoothing away the man’s sudden expression of disbelief.
The Korean would probably have crumbled forward anyway, though to ZeeZee it looked as if the blood pumping from the man’s neck was what forced him to his knees. It rained down around ZeeZee as he stood staring in shock at the razor-sharp blade resting unused in his hand.
“Could you have killed him?” Hu San asked as she wiped her own blade on a comer of her jacket.
Could he? ZeeZee didn’t find the question odd. But then there was very little in life that he found odd. And it was a good question, even if he didn’t yet know the answer. He’d never killed anything, not a fish from a lake or a sparrow with a BB gun, and yet…
He shrugged.
“No matter.” Hu San, elder sister of the Five Winds Society, pulled a tiny Nokia diary from her blood-splattered jacket and flipped it open. Her conversation was soft, unhurried and authoritative. ZeeZee didn’t understand a word. Just as he didn’t really understand how a middle-aged Chinese woman could manage to vault a counter and unsheathe a sword in less time than it took the Korean to raise his gun.
Stepping round the blood-splattered boy, Hu San walked to the shop door and flipped round a simple sign, from open to closed. Then she pulled down two bamboo blinds and locked the door. “Shut for stocktaking,” she announced lightly.
CHAPTER 26
7th July
Lady Jalila blinked as the crypt’s darkness gave way to sudden daylight. Beside her walked Madame Mila, head turned slightly towards the older woman. There was probably only five years’ difference in their ages, but the Minister’s wife had a confidence that came with money, good clothes and power, even if that power was vicarious and by right belonged to her husband.
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