Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Tetrahydrocannabinol…

  The brass water pipe had bright edges. As if someone had traced neatly round its undulating body with light. The trunk of a eucalyptus, in whose shade Raf sat, was split in two at head height, then split again and again, time branching, until it ended as a luminous three-dimensional schematic, the answer to some important question no one had ever remembered to ask. He had a feeling the “no one” might have been him.

  Raf wasn’t sure if he should have accepted the water pipe or not.

  “Fuck it.”

  A minute or so later, Raf repeated himself.

  Later still, he rested the sheesha’s purple tube and mouthpiece on the café table in front of him and checked his wrist. Not as much time had passed as should have done.

  Swirled a glass of cooling tea with a spoon, Raf watching its brief vortex slow and die. Entropy. He was hot, his shirt was sticky and a thumb print smeared the lenses of the shades that kept the city at bay.

  He was breakfasting at a felah café on Place GH, incongruous among thickset moustachioed men wearing striped shirts or long jellabas. Everybody in the place was male, apart from an elderly Tunisian woman in black who appeared every few minutes carrying plates from the kitchen, which she left at one end of the counter for a waiter to deliver. It was a face of the city he hadn’t seen, where full breakfast cost half the price of a croissant at Le Trianon and the first sheesha came free.

  The only reason they accepted Raf at all was because of what he wore. Though it had taken him several mornings to understand that. The jacket was long and black, and it came from the back of a cupboard on the men’s floor at the madersa. It was old and had a collar of the kind that turned up rather than folded down. People glanced at him oddly in the street whenever he went out, but they still moved politely out of the way.

  New clothes. The thought was random but true. However, thinking it and achieving it were different matters, because his credit card had expired along with his aunt. A fact he’d only discovered when he had tried to use it in the French boutique near Place Orabi. What little money he had was borrowed against his salary from the Third Circle, which was looking more token by the day. Apparently working for S3 was an honour; it was just a pity it wasn’t one Raf could afford.

  Of course, he could always ask Hamzah for a job.

  Or not.

  The kif in his pipe tasted sour, even though it had been cured in honey. But that’s just me, thought Raf. The whole of life had turned sour the moment Felix barged into the madersa more than a fortnight back, dropped his bombshell and then gone, leaving Raf with the job of telling Hani she’d lost her aunt and now she was losing her house. Which wasn’t a good thought, because it just made Raf remember that he still hadn’t told her. And he really should have done.

  God help her.

  He couldn’t eat for worrying and he didn’t want to drink, no matter that spirits could probably be found in half a dozen illicit bars within five minutes’ walk of somewhere like Le Trianon. As for drugs… Leaf cured with molasses or honey was hard to avoid in this part of the city. Kif was sold ready-rolled by hawkers on every street corner and as huge, wood-stamped blocks in the suqs around el Magharba. But despite today’s sheesha, dope had never really been his style and when he did break with the fox’s good intentions, he used amphetamines. The basic kind cooked up in basements. Speed made him feel the fox more strongly.

  But Isk ran at the wrong speed for sulphate. And while coke could undoubtedly be found behind the black glass doors of expensive nightclubs, just as dance drugs could be had in the tourist haunts, which filled nightly with German kids whacked out on substances a mere molecule away from MDMA, finding fuel to feel the fox had proved more difficult.

  Besides, the fox was dying. Raf was pretty sure of that. It spoke less and less often and mostly after dark. It didn’t talk to him the way it used to and it had offered no advice on how to find his aunt’s killers, not even bad advice. Most of the time, when Raf went looking inside his head for the animal, he found only flickering facts and an emptiness where the voice used to be. And all taking the sheesha had done was add an echo to that emptiness. An echo of silence at odds with the street noise around him.

  To Raf’s right was the neo-baroque monstrosity of Misr Station, terminus for the A/C turnini that ran through from Cairo. From above, the tracks looked toylike and the dusty square seemed small, crowded and dirty, set between an overflowing taxi rank and a sprawl of flat roofs broken occasionally by the spiky minaret of a mosque, the breastlike dome of a Coptic basilica or the spire of a Catholic church.

  Higher still, the individual buildings blurred into a street plan that revealed only roads and blocks of solidified city life. The darker alleys, where the sun daily lost its battle against shadow, faded out until even el-Anfushi’s widest streets showed only as hairline cracks that finally blurred and vanished. Raf’s throat was too tight and getting tighter as he fought against the thinness of atmosphere, fought for breath.

  “Your Excellency?”

  The city span up to hit him, hard and fast. And Raf had to slam one hand on top of the other to stop both from shaking. He didn’t feel very excellent about anything.

  “You all right?” The boy’s voice faltered as Raf glanced up. “I’m sorry, sir. I mean, can I get you anything else?”

  A new life, a proper childhood, the answer to who really killed his aunt because, sure as fuck, she didn’t do it herself…

  “Felix,” Raf told his watch, popping in an earbead in time to hear the number being dialled. There were things they needed to talk about. Like the fact Raf had recently warned Mushin Bey that Lady Jalila and he would have to take Raf to court before they could get their hands on Hani.

  “Get me some fresh tea,” said Raf, peering at the waiter. “And take this away.” He pointed to the sheesha, now growing cold on the table in front of him.

  Felix arrived just after the tea. Running his pink convertible up onto the sidewalk and stepping straight out to stand beside Raf’s table. “You look like shit,” he said, as he yanked out a chair. “But I imagine you know that.”

  Without asking permission, he lifted the notebook out of Raf’s hand and snorted at the chart. “Very pretty,” he said, about to hand it back. Then he paused, and jabbed his finger at one of the names. “We’re raiding her dance club tonight,” he added as an afterthought. “You might want to come…” The gravel in his voice was a legacy of too many cigarettes, years of alcohol and the fact Felix regarded anything before noon as early morning.

  The fat man ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream and two almond croissants. “Falafel or cakes,” he said to Raf in disgust, when the waiter had gone. “No one in this godforsaken pit knows how to cook proper food.”

  “Why stay, then?”

  Felix looked surprised. “You think anyone else is going to employ me on that salary?” he asked. “Anyway, I’m too old for Los Angeles and too high-rent for some burb. And besides…” The fat man paused, choosing his words with care. “There’s fuck all real crime here.”

  Raf wanted to laugh. Or maybe cry. Or just go to sleep… He wasn’t certain which. Maybe all three.

  No crime…

  “Oh, sure,” said Felix. “Twice a year the winds come and the murder rate doubles, but that’s keep-it-in-the-family stuff. The odd drunken Russian gets rolled, but only occasionally and then only if he’s stupid. There’s rape, but no more than anywhere else, the occasional mugging, the odd drugstore heist, predictable low-level stuff. But the real shit? Forget it.”

  “Gangs,” said Raf. “Drugs running, organized crime…”

  “What about it?”

  “…It must exist…”

  Felix smiled. “You want to know what my boss does about organized crime? He invites the heads of each family to dinner once a year and reminds them—politely—to keep paying the General their taxes.”

  The fat man shut up after that, but only because his chocolate had arrived in a cup the s
ize of a bowl. When Felix resurfaced, the bowl was empty and cream ran across his upper lip in a tide mark.

  “Message direct from the General,” he said. He picked up a croissant, looked at it and then put it down again, carefully dusting sugar from his fingers. “He thinks it would be nice if you gave back the plastique.”

  “Didn’t…” said Raf, “…take any explosive.”

  “Then who did?”

  “How the…”Raf couldn’t remember the rest of that sentence so he finished the next one instead. “Who…stole…my…watch?”

  Who…stole…my…? Felix leant in close and lifted the dark glasses from Raf’s face. Swearing in disgust when the bey threw up one hand to protect his eyes from the sudden light. The pupils gazing back at him were vast and empty, black as dead stars.

  Fucking terrific: he was Chief of Detectives. He was meant to notice these things. “Get trashed, why don’t you…” Flipping open his briefcase, Felix reached inside for a Bayer-Rochelle inhaler and went back to swearing. His police issue THC inhibitor was almost empty.

  “Use the rest of this,” the fat man told Raf. “And then go to the pharmacy…”He pointed across the square to a neon green cross. “And buy another. Then we’ll talk.” He tossed Raf the empty inhaler, sighing as Raf fumbled the catch.

  “A package for Ashraf Bey.” Edouard stood at the fat man’s elbow, shuffling nervously. Despite the heat he was dressed in a cheap Kevlar one-piece and wore a smog mask. His one-piece had atlas cares scrawled across the shoulders in a kind of casual, outdated corporate scrawl that fifteen years earlier had probably taken some account exec three breakdowns and most of a week just to brief.

  Edouard was worried. He’d been told to follow his instructions exactly. And it was unquestionably noon, because the square echoed with the cry of a muezzin, and he definitely had the right café—but now the right man wasn’t here any longer. Edouard had decided he’d better deliver the package to the right place at the set time and then wait for the right person to return.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Edouard was about to protest when Felix flicked open his wallet and flashed his gold shield. “I said, I’ll take it…”

  “You’ll still have to sign.”

  The fat man scrawled his signature across a pad and reached for the fat envelope. “Go,” he said and Edouard went. Unhappy but resigned. A second day’s work looked increasingly less likely every time he ran what had just happened through his head.

  Glancing across the square to the apothecary, Felix checked Raf was still out of sight and gently shook the envelope which was brown, padded and looked very much like government issue. From habit, the fat man held the envelope by its edges, so as not to leave fingerprints. The only obvious anomaly he could see was that its flap was tucked in rather than glued, as if the sender had been too lazy to gum the thing shut.

  “What the hell.” Felix rattled the package until a flat box slid out into the table. It wasn’t like he’d actually opened the thing. What he got was a chocolate box, the expensive kind. Charbonel & Walker. Stuck to the top was a small white card with kittens on the front and a laser-printed message.

  “If you get this, I’m already dead—Aunt Nafisa.”

  Which wasn’t what Felix had expected the card to say. For a split second he almost slipped the chocolate box back into its envelope. That way he could watch Raf’s face for surprise or horror, for any clue at all as to what was going on. Because, as far as Felix was concerned, liking Raf and trusting the guy were two separate things entirely.

  But not even taking one peek was asking too much and, besides, knowing exactly what was inside put Felix in a still stronger position. Particularly if it was letters, maybe a diary, even photographs…

  Felix lifted the lid and a sweet smell grew. Not flowers, chocolate or marzipan. Something he knew so well the stray hairs had risen on the back of his neck before his brain even made the connection. RDX/C3. High-brisance plastique explos—

  Glass into diamonds, shattering.

  But by then a hundred eight-millimetre ball-bearings had already taken off half of the fat man’s face and removed his right arm at the shoulder, though Felix hadn’t yet grasped that. Where his cheek had been was living skull, yellow and glistening, one eye socket a smear of beaten egg white. A fist-sized hole in his temple exposed his brain and across his upper chest wounds had blossomed like blood-red poppies. The blast area was both precise and limited: the chocolate box little more than housing for a simple claymore.

  Fractured jaw opened impossibly wide, the fat man began to scream silently at the world. He tried to stand, found his leg was broken and crashed sideways, taking the table down with him.

  And still no one moved until Raf came running through shock-stopped traffic. Doing the fat man’s screaming for him.

  Sightless and almost deaf, gravity dragging the last shreds of identity out of his shattered skull in a heap of folded jelly, Felix still managed to make it to his knees, then spasmed and fell forward, grit sticking to flayed flesh.

  It was pointless even trying to talk to a man whose throat was ripped open, whose cerebral fluid oozed from an open skull and whose pumping blood was creating tiny cascades that branched left and right down cracks in the sidewalk, taking the shortest route to the gutter. Yet the pointlessness didn’t stop Raf shaking Felix. Shouting at him.

  In the distance the wail of an ambulance fought the siren of a racing police car. But the ambulance, at least, would be too late. The fat man was a corpse, his body just didn’t know it yet.

  “Do it.” The words came suddenly, cold and clear.

  Raf wanted to ignore them. To pretend he hadn’t heard. “Do it,” said the fox, who never usually woke in daylight. So Raf did.

  Unclipping the holster from the fat man’s belt—badge, spare clip and all—Raf slid free Felix’s Taurus and checked the cylinder. It was loaded with ceramic-jacket hollow-point.

  “Back,” he ordered. And, watched by a retreating crowd, he untangled the fat man’s coat from a broken chair and wadded it into a bundle to act as a pillow for Felix. Then, rolling Felix on to his front almost as if for sleep, Raf put the muzzle to the point where the fat man’s skull met his neck and softly squeezed. What was left of Felix’s head exploded, along with a chunk of pavement below. It was only luck that stopped ricocheting fragments taking out Raf’s own eye.

  Friendship came with a price that both of them had just paid.

  Sirens split the shocked silence that followed. Jellaba-clad gawpers scattered suddenly as a cruiser slid to a halt kitty-corner to Place Gumhuriya. Out of its doors came two armed officers in flak jackets, assault rifles at the ready. But by then Raf was already gone: retreating through the crowd, the fat man’s gun thrust into one pocket.

  He jumped a tram, standing at the back on its open wooden platform, slipping off at a crossing to cut through a narrow alley full of empty shops and boarded-up houses. A builder’s board promised total redevelopment. The completion date for the project was two years before Raf had arrived in Isk.

  The smell of urine and damp earth filled his nostrils, coming from houses that had fallen in on themselves to become gardens kept lush by sewage leaking from a shattered pipe. The area was full of blind alleys and cluttered yards. Sometimes two blocks was all it took to slide from comfort to abject poverty—or vice versa. Money clung to the boulevards and the coast. Cut back from those and the city of the poor was always there. The cities of darkness, of brothels and lies. Old beyond meaning or memory, desolately grand and running by unspoken rules.

  Raf was beginning to feel horribly at home.

  He stepped through an open door into a deserted house and kept going until he reached a locked door at the rear. One kick opened it and Raf found himself watched by an old woman as he crossed her courtyard and stepped out into a crowded street.

  It was only when Raf stopped, looked round and tasted the sweetness of blood at the corner of his mouth that he realized a sliver of pavement
had opened his cheek clean as a blade.

  RenSchmiss

  CHAPTER 37

  28th July

  The water lights were off, the house lasers down. Somewhere at the other end of the vaulted room, a band was tuning up. And here, where tiny waves splashed against the rough stone of a cistern wall, Zara had wrapped herself in the darkness. Below her feet had to be the bottom of the cistern but she had only a sense of hanging over emptiness.

  Three months before, a stoned-cold immaculate Danish boy had gripped tight to a rock and let the water close over him. Only to drop his ballast and kick upwards. He claimed to have seen a skeleton on the bottom, arms crossed over its chest. And people did disappear in Isk. Disappear completely. But Zara didn’t really believe the story of the skeleton. Something had gone wrong with a batch of E/equals that month.

  All the same, she did believe the darkness was occupied. Because whenever she left other swimmers behind and slid herself into a dark corner far away from the safety of the steps leading up to the dance floor, she could sense that something down there was aware she was there, hanging in the water above whatever it was.

  Though maybe that was just E/equals too, from way back…

  Now was chill-out time. Av’s decks were deserted. The huge bank of smart lights rippled rather than throbbed, stilled by the lack of strong beat to catch and follow. Up on stage, out of her sight, four elderly black guys were coming to the end of an acoustic set—well, mostly… Something intrinsically West Coast ethnic that mixed Cape Verde with Mbalax and Soukous. A click track hiccupped from a child’s beatbox, almost lost beneath balafon and sabar.

  And the fit sounded loose but was actually tight and Zara felt relaxed for the first time in weeks, though that could have been from mixing Mexican with Moroccan.

  Zara sighed. And kept sighing until the water closed over her again and bubbles like large pearls rose from her lips as she raised her arms and slid deeper. She would have gone deeper still but the pearls were gone. So she kicked once and glided to the surface.