“Sure.” Hani nodded at her bowl of melting ice cream. “You want some?” She knew full well he’d say no.
Two small coffees had already gone cold in front of Raf, but he didn’t mind and they weren’t really cold. In Isk, in high summer, nothing was unless it came straight out of a freezer like Hani’s endless supply of vanilla ice.
Raf thought Hani insisted on coming with him to Le Trianon every day because of the ice cream but he was wrong. What she liked was the bustle of the brightly dressed crowds, safely kept at bay by a rope that separated her table from the busy street beyond. And when she wasn’t there, she was up in his office, being spoiled by Raf’s assistant who’d suddenly revealed a side no one had ever before seen. It turned out the man grew up with three younger sisters and, bizarrely, had liked them all.
“Okay,” said Raf when his watch complained again. “You need me to take you up to the office?”
She didn’t. Not if her snotty look was anything to go by.
Finding her own way from the table up to his office was child’s play to Hani. For a start, the Third Circle had its own private lift. And, as Hani had pointed out more than once, she didn’t even have to climb the wire.
The girl was fine, Raf knew that. It was only anxiety that made him ask each day and that wasn’t Hani’s problem, it was his… Some day he’d have to stop trying to protect her. Not to mention stop letting her eat nothing but ice cream. But that time wasn’t yet.
“You can get me—”
“…On your mobile. Yes, I know.” Hani sighed. “Look, I’ll call you if I need you. Okay?” She had to have borrowed that line from Zara.
“Make sure you do.” Raf watched as the kid threaded her way between two pavement tables and disappeared into Le Trianon’s air-conditioned darkness. Maybe she knew he was watching her go, maybe not. Either way, she didn’t look back.
“Car,” said Raf and seconds later the fat man’s Cadillac rolled up to the kerb, white-walled tyres freshly washed. “The precinct,” Raf told his new driver, “and then home.”
“Whatever you say.” Skin like chocolate, eyes hidden behind mirror lenses, black cap balanced at an angle on his dreadlocked skull, Avatar nodded.
Zara’s half-brother had recently got the Cadillac’s shell sandblasted back to bare metal at a fly-by-night bodyshop out at Karmous. Then he’d had the twelve-cylinder super-tuned somewhere different. So now it roared like the devil and every surface burned with sunlight. The boy was arguing for a quad Blaupunkt sound system, flat speakers set into the leather door trim. To date Raf had been holding out, but it wasn’t an argument he was about to win.
“You called my sister yet?” Avatar demanded.
Raf shook his head.
“You plan to call her?”
“We’ve got ten minutes to get to the Precinct,” Raf said firmly and pretended not to notice Avatar’s grin.
It was only when the shining car overshot his turning and kept gunning down Iskander el Akhbar towards Glymenapoulo that he realized the boy intended that Raf should make a meeting all right, just not at the Precinct. And not with the Minister.
Raf could live with that.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to
Pathology guy Ed Friedlander MD for answering idiot questions on exactly what happens if someone sticks a spike in your heart. Everyone at rec.arts.sf.science for endless tolerance in the face of questions about genetic manipulation, wheelworlds, gravity and the nasty side-effects of vacuum (okay, we’re going back some years here). The now-nameless Islamic academic who provided information on Sufism. I’m sorry my Packard Hell P3 trashed all your details. New Scientist, just for existing. Dick Jude, ex head-honcho of Forbidden Planet, New Oxford Street for taking a punt on neoAddix and declaring that “Weird Shit” was a perfectly good publishing category. The Upper Street lunchtime crew, including but not limited to Pat Cadigan, Paul McAuley, Kim Newman, China Miéville, m. John Harrison, and (Jay) Russell Schechter. John Jarrold, ace editor, drinker and quoter of Shakespeare. Mic Cheetham, who sold the Ashraf Bey novels to Bantam. And Juliet Ulman, who not only bought the books but sat across the lunch table and sang “Yellow Dog Dingo…” A tip of the hat to Martin (Thraxas) Millar, whose novel Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation acted as a roadmap to the late 80s. Peter Sherwen, who froze on Bergen bandstand and crashed my bike in Morocco, then decided to ride it back to London because the forks “weren’t that bent.” And finally to my parents. Hindu shrines, Buddhist temples, deserted Far Eastern beaches and yet another bloody chateau… Much of these books I owe to you. (That’s a compliment.)
EFFENDI
A Bantam Spectra Book / September 2005
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2002 by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Cover photo copyright © 2005 by Laurence Dutton/Getty Images
Cover illustration by Bob Larkin
Book design by Virginia Norey
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grimwood, Jon Courtenay.
Effendi: the second arabesk / Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-553-58744-7
1. Police-Middle East-Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters-Fiction.
3. Serial murders-Fiction. 4. Industrialists-Fiction.
5. Middle East-Fiction. 1. Title.
PR6107.R56E352005
823'.92-dc22
2005046978
Manufactured in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
BVG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For EMC G
from Singapore to England, via Afghanistan
(a hard act to follow)
I saw three faces on one head. One was an angry red, another between pale and yellow, the last like those who live where the Nile rises…
—Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIV
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
EFFENDI
PROLOGUE
&n
bsp; “Of course,” said Ashraf Bey. “We could just kill the defendant and be done with it…” He let his suggestion hang in the cold air. And when no one replied, Raf shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe not.”
It was getting late and autumn rain fell steadily on the darkened streets outside, while inside, sitting around their table, Raf’s visitors continued to chase the same argument in tight circles. A Grand Jury was in session. If three judges plus a senior detective in a damp, third-storey office could be called anything so imposing, which seemed doubtful.
“An accident,” suggested Raf. “The steps in this precinct are notoriously slippery. Or perhaps suicide… Shoelaces, an unfortunately overlooked belt…? One of my people would have to be reprimanded, obviously.”
Raf looked from Graf Ernst von B, the German boy, to a sour-faced politician from New Jersey who insisted everyone call her Senator Liz, neither of whom met his eye. There was also an elderly French oil magnate, but he sat so quietly Raf mostly forgot he was there. Which was probably the man’s intention.
“Alternatively,” said Raf, “I could have him taken out to the courtyard and shot. Or, if you like, we could lose the body altogether and just pretend he never existed. One of the old Greek cisterns should take care of that.”
They didn’t like this idea either; but then the young detective with the Armani wrap-rounds and drop-pearl earring hadn’t expected them to… He was acting as magister to their judges. And no one as yet, least of all him, seemed very sure what that actually entailed.
“Justice,” Senator Liz said loudly, “must be seen to be done.” Her voice remained as irritating as when the session had begun several hours earlier.
“Lord Hewart.” Raf pulled the quote from memory. “One of the worst judges in history. And even he never suggested putting a North African trial on American television.”
“That’s not…” Ernst von B’s protest died as Raf flipped up a hand.
“Let’s hear what St. Cloud thinks,” he said, and turned to the Frenchman. “Do you think justice needs to be televised?”
“Me?” Astolphe de St. Cloud slid a cigar case from his inside pocket. And though the iridescence of its lizardskin was beautiful, even by the light of a single hurricane lamp, what they all noticed was the enamel clasp: an eagle spreading its wings, while jagged thunderbolts fell from between the bird’s sharp claws.
As if anyone there needed reminding that St. Cloud would have been Prince Imperial, if only his father had bothered to marry his mother.
“It depends,” said St. Cloud, “on what Your Excellency means by justice…” Shuffling a handful of prints, he stopped at one that showed a young girl with most of her stomach missing. “If we decide the evidence is convincing enough, then obviously the prisoner must stand trial. Like Senator Liz, my only reservation is that, perhaps, El Iskandryia is not quite…”
Raf caught the wry amusement in the Marquis’ voice and glanced round the room, trying to see it through the eyes of a man whose own business empire was run from a Moorish palace overlooking Tunisia’s Cap Bon, and who now found himself in a third-floor office, without electricity, on the corner of Boulevard Champollion and Rue Riyad Pasha, in a tatty four-square government block built around a huge courtyard in best Nationalist Revival style.
At street level the exterior walls to Iskandryia’s Police HQ were faced with cheap sheets of reconstituted marble, while glass hid the exterior of the two floors above. Black glass obviously. The architect had been on loan from Moscow.
It showed.
As for the level of comfort on offer… A fire burned in a bucket in the centre of the floor, filled with logs from a dying carob. Apparently, the tree had been not quite alive and not yet dead for as long as even Raf’s oldest detectives could remember.
Two men from uniform had hacked it off just above the roots, using fire axes. Now chunks of its carcass spat and spluttered as thin flames danced across the top of their makeshift brazier.
Directly above the brazier, suspended from the centre of the ceiling like an inverted red mushroom, hung a state-of-the-art smoke detector. Like almost everything else in Iskandryia since the EMP bomb, it no longer worked.
And behind Raf’s head, a window unit that once adjusted electronically to lighting conditions had been rendered smoke friendly, also with a fire axe. Through its shattered centre came flecks of rain and a salt wind that blew in from the Eastern Harbour.
“Justice,” said Raf, “is whatever we decide…” His voice lost the irony, became serious. “And since the killing occurred within the jurisdiction of the Khedive, I demand that the trial take place in El Iskandryia.”
Senator Liz shook her head. “Absurd,” she said. “We have to change the location. You cannot expect us to work in these conditions…”
“I don’t remember anyone asking you to work on this at all.” Wrap-round dark glasses were turned to the woman. The other two he’d chosen. The Senator was different, she’d practically demanded to sit on the Grand Jury.
Actually, there was no “practically” about it.
On her breath Raf could smell gin, while a none-too-subtle miasma of sweat rose from her compact body. If von Bismarck and St. Cloud could manage to bathe in cold rainwater, then so could she.
“Your Excellency,” said Ernst von B, “Senator Liz has a point. It will not be easy…” The young German spoke slowly, in schoolboy Arabic, supposedly out of respect for Ashraf Bey’s position as magister, though Raf suspected his real reason was to annoy the woman, who spoke no languages other than her own.
“Nothing is ever easy. But the decision is made.” Raf stood up from his chair. And it was his chair because they were in his office. His was the name engraved on an absurdly long brass plate on the door. His Excellency Pashazade Ashraf Bey, Colonel Ashraf al-Mansur, Chief of Detectives.
He’d told his assistant a plastic nameplate was fine but that wasn’t how things were done in El Iskandryia. The long plaque had turned up the day after Raf took the job, and once a week, on Thursdays, a Cypriot woman from maintenance came up from the ground floor to polish the sign.
“Excellency?”
Raf turned to find that St. Cloud stood next to him, leaning on a cane with a silver top.
“You were joking about those steps, the accidents… I have your word this trial will actually take place?”
Raf nodded. “You do.”
The trial would happen and it would happen soon. In all probability the defendant, one Hamzah Effendi, would be convicted. Raf just wished Hamzah wasn’t father to the girl he should have married.
CHAPTER 1
18th October
Nine days before the Grand Jury met in an upstairs office at Champollion Precinct, Ashraf Bey sat through a warm Iskandryian evening, bombed out of his skull, at a pavement table outside Le Trianon, drinking cappuccino and listening to DJ Avatar wreak havoc on the words of a Greek philosopher.
The afternoon call to prayer had finished echoing from the mosque on Boulevard Saad Zaghloul and the bells from l’Eglise Copte had yet to begin. If it hadn’t been for a sense of dread hanging over El Iskandryia, this could have been a Monday in October like any other.
Horse-drawn calèches, their brasses shined and wheel bosses polished, rumbled up the Corniche, from the fat seawall known as the Silsileh all the way north to Fort Qaitbey, where the ancient Pharos lighthouse once stood.
And at both ends of the sweeping Corniche, at Silsileh in the shadow of Iskandryia’s famous library, and at Fort Qaitbey, groups of tourists watched as fishermen set hooks or mended and untangled nets, waiting for the evening tide.
It was a tourist who’d taken the taxi that stopped outside Le Trianon, with its window down and sound system up too loud, giving Raf the chance to hear the city’s favourite DJ one more time.
“And remember…” Avatar’s voice was street raw. “Rust never sleeps. Coming at you from the wrong side of those tracks, this for the Daddy, the Don…”
Most of Raf’s
officers thought DJ Avatar came up with SpitNoWhere on his own; if they thought at all, which Raf considered unlikely. So they happily stamped the corridors at Police HQ, humming along, not knowing that the unchopped original went, “In a rich man’s house, there’s nowhere to spit but his face.”
Raf hadn’t known that, at least not until recently, but the fox in his head did. And while the fox couldn’t say why, the General’s aide de camp had just delivered to Raf an engraving of hell, inscribed with the words, “At its centre hell is not hot.” It had at least been able to identify the picture as late Victorian, unquestionably by Gustave Doré…
“…ou know,” said the fox, before all this happened. “…ese things, they occur.”
The fox had a grin like the Cheshire cat, except that no cat ever owned so many teeth or carried its tail wrapped up round its shoulders like a stole. Come to that, few cats took afternoon tea at Le Trianon.
These things could have been Raf becoming Chief of Detectives by default, or his recent refusal to marry the daughter of a billionaire.
“Why?” Raf asked. “Why do they occur?”
But the fox didn’t answer.
Sighing, Raf took a gulp of cold cappuccino to wash away the taste of cheap speed and fixed his gaze on the pedestrians who streamed past his café table, separated from the terrace where he sat by a silk rope and the assiduous attention of two bodyguards.
The only pedestrians to meet Raf’s stare were those, mainly tourists, who didn’t realize who he was. They just saw a blond young man in dark glasses, wearing an oddly old-fashioned suit, the kind with a high collar.
“Come on,” said Raf, searching inside his head. “You can tell me.”
He ignored his two guards, who looked at each other, then hurriedly looked away. Raf didn’t doubt that they could see tears trickling from under his glasses, but he didn’t much care either.
The fox was saying good-bye.
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