By contrast, Madame Mila felt ill at ease and bitterly resented the fact. She had intellectual brilliance, striking looks and an unbroken run of victories in court from her recent career as a public prosecutor. What she lacked was connections. Lady Jalila knew that. They talked, or rather the Minister’s wife talked and the younger woman listened intently, occasionally nodding.
Both of them were headed towards where Raf and Hani sat in the shade of their borrowed cork tree, backs pressed hard against another family’s tomb. Reluctantly Raf climbed to his feet and brushed gravel from his suit. Hani clambered up after him.
She didn’t look at her aunt or the coroner-magistrate.
“You have my sympathy,” Lady Jalila told Raf. “And, of course, if there’s anything I or the Minister can do to help…” She smiled, then shrugged as if to stress she wished there was more she could offer. But Raf still caught the point when her eyes slid across to Hani and noticed that the child was clinging to his hand, her fingers glued firmly inside his.
“Thank you,” Raf said politely, nodding first to Lady Jalila and then at the stony-faced woman stood beside her. “I’d better get Hani home…”
“Your Excellency…”
He was the person addressed, Raf realized, turning back. The coroner-magistrate was staring after him, her elegant face at once flawless and utterly cold. Her eyes between darkness and a void.
The woman was attractive and regretted it. Her brittleness a warning at odds with the warmth of a perfume that featured musk mixed with some botanical element so elusive Raf decided it had to be synthetic. Chemical analogues that fell midway between spices and fruit were big business, even in a city that prided itself on having the finest spice markets in North Africa. He’d seen the hoardings on his way through Place Orabi.
“…Yes?” Raf said finally.
“You didn’t know your aunt very well, did you?”
“I hardly knew her at all.” Raf kept his voice cool, matter-of-fact. “Why?”
“Madame Mila was just wondering,” Lady Jalila said.
The younger woman nodded. “She must have been surprised when she first heard from you. Pleased, obviously…”
“She didn’t hear from me,” said Raf. “Until last week I didn’t even know she existed…” And here came today’s understatement. “My father’s family isn’t something my mother talks about…”
“So how did your aunt know where to find you?”
How indeed?
“Good question.” Raf let his gaze flick over Madame Mila, taking in the neat row of tiny plaits, her perfect skin and her scrupulously simple suit, which was immaculately pressed but nothing like as expensive as Lady Nafisa’s outfit or the suit he was wearing. It was a gaze Raf had watched Dr Millbank use at Huntsville to bring unexpectedly difficult inmates into line. And the beauty of it was that its effect was almost subliminal.
“I believe my father keeps an eye on my progress.”
This time when Raf walked away no one called him back.
Felix offered to drive them home from the necropolis. But his drive home turned out to be an extended tour of the city that involved a slow crawl along the Corniche, beginning at the crowded summer beaches at Shatby and taking them past the grandeur of the Bibliotheka Iskandryia (where a rose-pink marble façade hid 125 kilometres of carefully ducted optic fibre) round the elegantly curved sweep of Eastern Harbour so Hani could see the fishing boats and horse-drawn caleches and then north along the final stretch of the Corniche towards the new aquarium and out along the harbour spur towards Fort Qaitbey, which had once been the site of the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world.
Pointing with one hand and steering with his other, the fat man kept up a running commentary that made up in jokes for what it occasionally lacked in historic accuracy. He didn’t stop or even suggest they stop, except once on the return trip, when he pulled over an ice-cream van and Hani was given her first ice cream.
Heading south down Rue el-Dardaa at the end of Felix’s impromptu tour they hit afternoon traffic. Squat, brightly carapaced VWs, sleek BMWs, the odd Daimler-Benz mixed in with an occasional bulbous-headed Japanese vehicle, apparently designed around some idealized memory of a Koi. By then, the kid was asleep on the back seat, her head against Raf’s side, and Raf was running over his future options and getting nowhere fast.
There’d be a will to be read. Legal requirements to be observed. But he already knew from something the fat man had said that he was the sole heir. The house was his and so, it seemed, was responsibility for Hani.
“Sweet Jeez.” The fat man grabbed a hip flask, gulped and put it back under his seat. “Can’t be doing with this.” He spun the wheel hard and Raf suddenly found himself out of the crawling traffic and cutting the wrong way up a one-way route. The fish van headed in the other direction very sensibly mounted the sidewalk and scraped a wall rather than tangle with Felix.
The fat man was right. The traffic really was tight as a nun’s ass.
“Which reminds me,” said Felix. “You saw who else was there?” He tossed the words over his shoulder.
“No,” said Raf. “Tell me.”
Felix grinned. “Quite pretty, very rich, spent most of her time glaring at you…”
Oh, her. “Hamzah’s daughter?”
“Yeah,” said Felix. “I wondered who’d show.” He glanced in his rear-view mirror, catching Raf’s eye. “All respect to your late aunt and everything, but that was the real reason I went. It’s the old dog-to-vomit syndrome. If killers can’t manage a nostalgia trip to the crime scene they sometimes attend the funeral.”
“Zara?”
Felix sighed theatrically, shook his head and flipped his vast car into Rue Kemil, then hung a right into Rue Cif, completely blocking the narrow street as he killed his engine outside the nondescript madersa door. “Not Zara. The man who wasn’t there, her father. We’ve wanted to rattle Hamzah’s cage for months.” Felix grinned. “I’m going to be bringing him in personally first thing tomorrow. See what happens if I poke him with a stick…”
CHAPTER 27
7th July
“We’re here…”
Situated out beyond Glymenapoulo in a formal garden that ran down to a rocky beach, the Villa Hamzah was a bastard cross between the Parthenon and a Sicilian palazzo. Only three storeys high, but each one heavy with grandeur, colonnaded and porticoed like a riotously expensive wedding cake baked in brick and iced with grey stucco.
At its back stood the sea. At its front the Corniche…though an expanse of expensive lawn and a short length of drive kept the villa and road separate. Steps led up to a huge portico that rose two full storeys, with the portico’s flat roof forming the floor of a balcony that jutted from the front of the house as proud and heavy as any conquistador’s chin.
Double columns on either side of the balcony rose higher than the balustraded roof of the house itself, to support a smaller portico decorated at its centre with an Italianate and recent-looking coat of arms.
The windows at ground level were small and rudimentary, in keeping with Iskandryian tradition that put serving quarters on the lowest floor rather than in the attic. It was the windows of the second and third floors that were grand. Each one peering imperiously at the world from under a colonnade that ran round both sides and the rear of the house.
Villa Hamzah was the house of an industrial conquistador. Arrogant and assertive, but also bizarrely beautiful and with proportions so perfect the plans had to have been drawn up using the golden mean. Not at all what Raf was expecting—though he wasn’t too sure what he had been expecting, except that it wasn’t this.
“You want me to wait?”
Raf glanced both ways along the Corniche, seeing cruising cars, noisy groups of expensively dressed teenagers and an endless row of street lights flickering away into the far distance. It was late but there were empty yellow taxis every seventh or eighth vehicle and he was unlikely to be at the villa long enough for the traff
ic to die away completely.
“No, it’s fine.” Raf peeled off an Iskandryian £10 note and then added £5 as a tip. He could always call the driver back if he needed to, and besides, it was still cheaper than having him wait.
“I’ll take your card.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.” The cabbie pulled a crumpled rectangle from his pocket and handed it to Raf, who immediately scanned both sides to check that a number was given in numerals he could understand. It was.
The wrought-iron gates were already open. And there was no sentry box, bulletproof or otherwise for a smartly uniformed guard, which surprised Raf even more. Flipping off his shades, Raf adjusted his eyes and ran the spectrum from infraR to ultraV, but got nothing unusual. So far as he could see, security was completely lacking. No linked web of laser sensors, no bank of infrared cameras, not even a single starlight CCTV mounted on one of the huge pillars.
Hamzah was either very trusting or his reputation was all the protection he needed. Which wasn’t as unlikely as it sounded. Three years back, while Raf was in Huntsville, a Seattle street kid on Honda blades had put a cheap Taiwanese rip-off Colt against Hu San’s head and taken her bag. From start to finish the heist took less than thirty seconds and no one got hurt. Fifteen minutes later the kid turned himself and the bag in at the precinct on 4th Street and made a straight-to-video confession.
Hu San still had his legs broken, but cleanly, and the blue shirt who took the contract doped the kid up with ketamine before he began.
Gravel crunched under foot as Raf walked to the front door and knocked hard. “I’d like to see Hamzah Effendi,” Raf said to a sudden gap, which would have been backlit if the Russian bodyguard standing in the way of the hall light hadn’t taken up the whole doorway. Raf kept his voice bored, like a man who knew he would be seen.
“I see,” said the bodyguard. “Is he expecting Your Excellency?” It was obvious he already knew the answer.
“No,” said Raf. “But tell him Ashraf Bey would like a word.”
The Russian grinned, the first sign that he had more than iced water in his veins. Until then the man hadn’t recognized Raf, not minus dreads and beard. “Right,” he said. “I’ll just see if the Boss is in…”
Stepping inside the door now being held open, Raf waited politely next to a portrait of Hamzah so new Raf could smell paint drying while the big man walked solidly away across a vast chessboard of a hall paved in white and black marble.
“Ashraf!”
Raf opened his ears a little wider, jacked up his hearing or whatever he was meant to call what happened when he turned the volume up in his head. The outrage was Madame Rahina’s and he heard Hamzah’s answering growl, but not Zara… Voices blossomed into a brief argument that many would have missed. But Raf followed it just as he followed the Doppler effect of footsteps approaching down a corridor.
The man approaching stank of cigars and Guerlain aftershave, too much of it. His brogues had hand-sewn leather soles that creaked on the tiles. In the painting, he wore impossibly shiny black boots and stood against a balustrade, the background behind him an out-of-focus blur of green and blue. A gold Rolex was recognizable on one wrist. The little finger of his left hand sported a red-stoned, high-domed signet that could have been mistaken for a graduation ring. He wore a frock coat that reached the top of his boots and carried a rolled blueprint, signifying his profession. On his head was the red-tasselled tarbush of an effendi.
“Karl Johann,” announced a deep voice behind him. “He was due to paint a Vanderbilt but I made it worth his while…”
“It’s good,” said Raf.
“Given what I paid him it should be.” The industrialist glanced round his hall, checking it really was empty. Or maybe he was listening to the sound of breaking glass echoing up a corridor. If so, he seemed resigned to the damage.
“My wife wants you killed,” he said. “Or maybe your balls removed.” Hamzah shrugged. “I’ve explained you don’t do that to beys. Not openly, anyway, unless you’re very stupid. But that’s not the reason I refused her demand…” Shrewd eyes watched Raf and when Raf didn’t ask What is? the man nodded slightly, as if he expected no less.
“My daughter told me about the tram.”
What tram? Raf almost asked. But he kept his mouth shut and after a second the man twisted his heavy lips into a slight smile.
“Discreet, aren’t you? Well, it probably goes with the job.”
Which didn’t answer the question.
Through the haze of that morning’s funeral and yesterday’s murder appeared the chill ghost of a memory. Zara with the flowers. Zara vomiting neatly onto a rocking wooden floor, the worried black kid with the nose piercings who’d reached for her hand, then noticed Raf’s open gaze. That tram.
The first time that ever I saw your face…
“Her mother still believes she spent the evening with a work friend,” said Hamzah. “The kid works at the library you know…” Even when facing embarrassment full-on the man couldn’t keep his pride in Zara out of his voice, and he was embarrassed. “Thinks she got shellfish poisoning too. But I know a hangover when I see one and wherever Zara spent the night I’m damn sure she didn’t sleep over with…”
The sentence trailed away as Hamzah forgot how he’d intended it to end. “Don’t entirely blame you,” he said finally, his voice blunt. “You can have the pick of North Africa. Why go for trouble? But she’s a good kid for all that.” He bit on his cigar and then considered the smoke for a minute as it eddied towards the distant ceiling.
“Can’t tell her mother why you rejected her, obviously.”
“Wait,” Raf held up his hand. “That had nothing to do with it,” he said. “How old is she?”
“Nineteen.”
“Fine,” said Raf. “I’m twenty-five. I don’t intend to get married to some stranger. And nor, I imagine, does she…”
Hamzah’s answer was a laughing bark. “That’s exactly what her mother’s afraid of,” he said.
There wasn’t much Raf could say.
“Now,” said Hamzah, “you didn’t come here to discuss my daughter. So what do you want?”
“First off, to ask you a question.”
“Then fire away.” The man looked darkly amused.
“Okay,” said Raf, watching a pulse point on Hamzah’s temple, the man’s mouth, his eyes. “Did you kill my aunt?”
“No,” said Hamzah. “I didn’t.” His dark pupils remained exactly the same size, neither expanding nor contracting. The corners of his mouth remained firm and the pulsebeat on his temple stayed regular as a metronome. Raf didn’t need access to a polygraph to be certain the man hadn’t killed Lady Nafisa.
“Of course,” Hamzah added, “I could always have hired someone else to do it for me…”
They sat in a panelled study overlooking the Mediterranean. Waves broke on a headland away to the right, ancient blowholes spewing white plumes high into the air: while on a beach below the window, waves just lapped against the sand and then retreated, soft as a caress.
The coffee they drank was laced with cognac. Raf could taste it on his tongue, though the alcohol wasn’t mentioned when a uniformed maid brought in a silver jug on a heavy silver tray. Raf refused the offer of a cigar, waiting while his host bit off the end of a fresh Partegas only to swear when he remembered he was meant to be using a cigar guillotine.
“So,” said Hamzah, trimming the ragged edges of his cigar into a crystal ashtray. “What else do you want to know?” Smoke swirled around his head like evaporating dry ice around some pantomime devil. The effect was studied, Raf understood that. Everything he’d seen told him Hamzah was making a Herculean effort to be something he wasn’t—quiet, urbane and softly mannered. What interested Raf was Why? He was already impressed: the house and its very location saw to that.
“Well,” Hamzah growled, “you going to ask? Or just sit there and look at my decorations…?” A flick of his hand took in the dark oak panels and carved marble
fireplace, the polished floorboards and Art Nouveau windows that stretched from ceiling to floor.
“It’s about my aunt…” Raf drained his cup and sat back in a red leather chair. Intelligence told him to approach the matter obliquely, so he did. By asking a direct but different question.
“What did she hope to get out of my engagement?”
“You’re a bey,” Hamzah said flatly. “I’m rich. What the hell do you think she got out of it?” He was no longer smiling.
“But the dowry gets held in trust,” said Raf, trying to remember what he’d learned from an afternoon in front of Hani’s screen, skimming legal sites. “To be returned in case of divorce, if the marriage is unconsummated or not blessed with children. All that’s on offer is interest and that would have gone to me…”
“She had heavy expenses.”
“You paid her?”
“In this city,” said Hamzah, “everyone takes commission.” He stubbed out his cigar and took another one from the mahogany humidor. This time, though, he remembered to remove the end using his little gold guillotine. “She took two and a half million US dollars.”
“Two and a—What proportion of that was her commission?”
Hamzah Effendi just looked at him. “That was her commission. The dowry itself was a billion…”
Raf whistled. As responses went it was entirely instinctive.
“And you,” he asked. “What did you get out of it?” Given the massive villa, the Havana cigars, the uniformed maid and frock-coated bodyguard, it seemed extremely unlikely that Hamzah’s need was anything physical.
“Respectability,” Hamzah said bluntly. “You’d be surprised what a title can do…”
No, thought Raf, thinking back to Felix’s reluctance to let the coroner-magistrate sweat him properly, he wouldn’t be surprised at all. “The khedive can’t take the effendi back?”
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