Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Where were you two hours ago?” Raf made little attempt to keep the anger out of his voice. This was the man who’d burned the note sent by Avatar’s kidnappers. The man who’d pimped his naked daughter the night Raf walked out of that door, who was now pimping her again to the Khedive.

  “Still dining with my wife at Maxim’s.”

  With my wife… Raf looked for the slightest hint of irony in Hamzah’s face but there was nothing. “Can you prove that?”

  Hamzah nodded. “I think they’ll remember us,” he said sourly.

  “And this was a long-standing arrangement?”

  “No,” said Hamzah, looking up. “It was very last-minute. Why?”

  “Because there’s a butchered girl in your garden, round about where your daughter usually swims, and your initials are carved into her wrist. So what I want to know is the usual stuff… Who is she/where did she come from/who did it…?”

  “And if I tell you I have no idea?”

  “No idea,” said Raf as he pulled a square of card from his pocket and tossed the Polaroid onto Hamzah’s desk. “No idea who did this?”

  Hamzah Effendi picked up the photograph and began to tremble. The movement started in his fingers and spread like fever until his whole body shook. And his body kept shaking, even after he’d turned the photograph facedown and pushed it away from him.

  His body was still shaking when he pushed back his chair to rush to the lavatory. And it was doing the same when he came back after vomiting up his breakfast and what had remained of the previous night’s meal.

  “She was facedown,” he said. “When I saw her she was facedown.”

  CHAPTER 13

  8th October

  “Eduardo?”

  Eduardo nodded from instinct. It didn’t matter that the person talking was half a city away and Eduardo’s watch wasn’t toggled to visual. He still nodded.

  “Na’am… This is me.” Eduardo folded his broadsheet and placed it carefully on the table. He would have preferred one of the Arabic-language tabloids but he had his position to consider, so he always downloaded L’Iskandrian.

  The Frenchman and Frisco were watching him from the corners of their eyes. He knew they’d both decided his watch was a fake and his new job just empty words, but they were wrong. Instinctively, Eduardo straightened in his café chair and ran one hand though his thinning hair, then discreetly rubbed his fingers clean on the side of his black chinos.

  He listened in silence, nodding seriously now and then like a man agreeing with a particularly pertinent point. Not everyone had an elegant Silver Seiko that double-encrypted conversation and screened itself from vanP hacking.

  “Na’am, I understand.” Eduardo did too—really—but just to be sure he asked the man to repeat his instructions more slowly.

  Eduardo liked his new job. He even had an office, a third-storey walk-up off Place Orabi, above a haberdasher’s at the back of the bus depot. With the office and watch came new shoes, new trousers and a zip-up leather jacket that looked old and tatty unless you got really close, when it was possible to see that the scuff marks were printed onto the animal hide.

  The man who gave Eduardo the jacket had pulled out a gravity knife, dropped its blade and driven it hard into the leather. The sharp point of the blade hardly even left a mark.

  “Mesh,” he told Eduardo, “ultrafine, from spiders that shit steel.” Eduardo didn’t know whether the man was making fun of him or not. All the same, Eduardo liked what he now did. Which was mostly sit in cafés and talk politics, something he wasn’t sure he really understood. Listening to the counterarguments, Eduardo had discovered a talent for separating half-truth from mere wish. A cast-iron, built-in bullshit detector, the man called it, speaking as if such a machine might actually exist.

  Eduardo imagined it as small, with cogwheels that whirred and narrow brass pipes that grew hot from circulating water. When Eduardo was a child he lived in a small burg in Namibia and the local train, to Windhoek and back, had run on coal and wood, dried dung too when the shortages began, though dung didn’t work that well.

  “Mmm…” Eduardo said, nodding. “Sure thing.” He tossed a handful of silver onto the table. Time to go. His watch didn’t need him to shut down the connection, because it did that for itself. It did other things too, like bring him the latest football results and forecast that it was going to rain.

  “Things to do,” he said to Frisco, speaking Ladino. “Deals to make.” Iskandryia was a city with a number of languages that might claim to be the lingua franca, of which Spanish Hebrew was just one. The other man nodded. Frisco had told Eduardo his real name but Eduardo kept forgetting, though he remembered that the man claimed his forefathers were moriscos, expelled from Spain.

  When Eduardo started coming to the café, he and Frisco had played a few games of chess but now the old man made excuses not to play, probably because Eduardo kept losing.

  Inside Eduardo’s office the air was cool, which was a miracle given his desk fan had fused and the October sun beat direct on an outside wall; but the walls were thick, built decades before from limestone blocks stolen from a Coptic church three streets away. And anyway, closed shutters kept out much of the brightness. There was also an air-conditioning unit attached to one wall, a brown box that stuck its metal arse out into the street, as if threatening to shit on pedestrians beneath. Unfortunately that had been broken ever since someone hid a wank mag up the air outlet. When Eduardo first took the box apart to see if anything obvious was broken, he’d been left with frayed wires, rusting iron pipes and mildewed, disintegrating pictures of pale nipples and shaven pudenda.

  So he’d put the casing back together and pushed the mags back where he found them, and now tiny mushrooms grew in clusters on the grey carpet, right below where the unit dripped water.

  A Sony Eon3 sat on an otherwise clear desk. A simple Luxor terminal, he’d chosen it at random in a souk at the back of Rue Faransa. Glued to its side was an anonymizer, which had been given him by the man. On the ’mizer was a label, PROPERTY OF EL ISKANDRYIA POLICE DEPARTMENT: NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM CHAMPOLLION PRECINCT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

  Punching a key, Eduardo started random number software and waited. Without him having to ask, the terminal popped up a comms screen and Eduardo keyed in the number he’d just been given. Then he did what the man had told him to do.

  Eduardo didn’t know that he was being rerouted or that, at the receiving end, his call was logged as having come direct from Fez; all Eduardo knew was that a tiny icon on the screen’s task bar lit green and a connection got made.

  The person who picked up at the other end said nothing to introduce himself, which was fine, because that was what Eduardo had been told to expect.

  “I’m taking the contract.”

  “Who gave you the details?” The voice was gruff.

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “What guarantees do I have that the job will be done?”

  “None.”

  “By the day after tomorrow or the line of credit closes.”

  “Tomorrow night,” said Eduardo and broke the connection.

  CHAPTER 14

  9th October

  “Don’t you like pastries?” Hani sounded puzzled instead of angry. She’d been ploughing her way through a dozen basbousa, stuffing them into her mouth with sticky fingers at the start, then eating more slowly and finally nibbling, mouselike around the edge, once she realized Raf wasn’t going to tell her to stop.

  Her lunchtime vitamin stood untouched by her plate.

  “What?”

  Raf glanced up to find dark eyes staring at him from a pinched face. He tried to make sure he and Hani ate together at weekends, while Donna bustled around in the background, banging together pans and clattering knives into a double stone sink, each side large enough to be a horse trough.

  The kitchen took up most of the ground floor of the al-Mansur madersa. Outside was a tiled courtyard with a fountain and beyond that a stone
garden house, then a walled garden, roofed over with glass.

  Above the kitchen was the qaa, where important guests were greeted. This had a large marble floor and smaller indoor fountain. The haremlek was a suite of rooms above the qaa and Raf’s floor was at the top, above the haremlek.

  The madersa was vast, old and badly in need of repair, but no other room was as large as Donna’s kitchen, which seemed to spread in all directions.

  It had taken Raf a while to realize that Donna’s clattering wasn’t irritation at finding him cluttering up her space, which was so big a crowd couldn’t have cluttered it; she objected to his presence for different reasons. People like Hani and His Excellency were meant to eat upstairs, at a marble table in the elegant qaa, waited on by others.

  “You’re not listening to me…” Hani said crossly.

  “I’m sorry…” She was right. He wasn’t.

  There wasn’t much else Raf could say. But Hani wanted more. Something dismissive of her concern, something adult. He could see that in her eyes, the wish for a fight so that she could stop being worried for him and go back to being angry.

  “Look,” he said softly, “let it go, okay?”

  By the time the noise of her falling chair had finished echoing round the kitchen, Hani was out of the room and racing up the outside steps to the qaa… Raf listened to her shoes slap the floor overhead, then heard Hani slam a hand against the button for the lift. Seconds later the madersa’s ancient Orvis creaked into action.

  Raf put his head in his hands. When he looked up again Donna was sitting on the other side of the table and in front of him was a tiny cup of Turkish coffee. It was the old woman’s cure for everything.

  “The child’s young, Your Excellency.”

  Raf nodded.

  “And she’s scared.”

  “That I will send her away?”

  Donna shook her head and discreetly rubbed her crucifix. “That you will die.” The old woman’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Since her aunt… She dreams all the time. That you die and she be left here alone.” Donna shrugged. “They would not let people like me look after Lady Hana. They would not let me live here…”

  Only Donna got away with calling the child by her real name. Everyone else had to use Hani. Named for the boy the child resented not being.

  “Go to her, Excellency,” said Donna, “and talk.”

  “And say what?” His question sounded weak even to him.

  The old woman shrugged. “That you will not be going away. That you don’t plan to die.” Her lips twisted into a sour smile at Raf’s expression.

  “Well, does Your Excellency?”

  Raf shook his head.

  “No,” said Donna, crossing herself. “Somehow I didn’t think so.”

  “Go away.” Hani didn’t bother looking up from her screen. On the floor beside her chair sat an untouched toy dog, still in its packaging. It was the most expensive model Raf had been able to afford.

  “It smells in here,” said Raf.

  She did look round at that.

  “Old clothes,” he said, gesturing to a bundle on the floor. “Old clothes and misery…” Raf pulled back the inner shutter of a mashrabiya and autumn sunlight washed into Hani’s bedroom, through her balcony’s ornately carved screen.

  “Now I can’t see my monitor.”

  “You can use it later,” Raf said, “but first we need to talk.” He sat on the red-tiled floor, his spine hard against the edge of her metal bed. The springs were rusted and the mattress so old that horsehair poked through holes in its cover. Changing the thing was absolutely out of the question, apparently.

  “Sit by me…”

  Hani sighed and made a great show of turning off her machine, even though they both knew it would have gone to sleep at a simple voice command. Then, surprisingly, she did as he asked and parked herself next to Raf, her own back pressed into the side of the bed. Dust flecks danced in the afternoon sunlight in front of them. Their ersatz randomness actually the result of immutable laws of heat and motion.

  “I saw a body yesterday morning.”

  Hani grew still.

  “It was at Zara’s house. A stranger…” Raf added hurriedly.

  “You’ve seen bodies before,” Hani said.

  He nodded, they both had. Aunts Nafisa and Jalila. Those deaths were one of the things that bound them together.

  “When you were an assassin…”

  “Hani!” They’d been through this before. “I was an attaché… Nothing more.”

  “Attachés are spies. Spies kill people. Everyone knows that.”

  Raf sighed.

  “Who was he?” Hani asked.

  “She,” Raf corrected. “And we haven’t found out yet.” Obviously enough, he didn’t mention the mutilation, which was actually a cross potent according to the pathologist, who’d looked it up.

  Toxicology showed heavy traces of an mdma clone in the victim’s blood and alcohol in her stomach. The girl had been alive and conscious from the start of the attack until near the end. And swabs taken from her oral, anal and vaginal mucosa indicated that she’d first been raped, then cut. So Raf now had a file to read on crosses coupe, which had apparently been the mutilation of choice during something called “the little war.” There was one bite mark, below her right breast, but that was faded and the bruise yellow. So either it happened before she arrived in Isk, it was the result of a casual holiday romance or her boyfriend had come with her but had yet to step forward.

  Which, at least, would give Raf one sensible suspect. Provided the boyfriend could be shown to have nerves of steel and a reasonable grasp of anatomy.

  “The trouble,” Raf told Hani, “is in realizing when facts aren’t related…”

  He halted himself there, wondering whether to begin again and decided not to bother with the talking. With luck, sitting next to Hani would be enough, because when he was a child, the point at which adults started in on explanations was the moment he stopped listening.

  “Everything is related,” said Hani. And glancing sideways, Raf realized her face was screwed up in thought. “That’s what Khartoum says…”

  The kid was nine, whipcord thin, with the body of a child younger still and eyes old before their time. Lack of sleep, bad dreams and night sweats, he remembered them all well. Although, these days, if Raf worked at it, he could go for months without recalling them once.

  “Maybe he’s right,” said Raf finally. “Maybe everything does connect.”

  “You don’t know?” Hani looked interested.

  “No.”

  “I thought spies knew everything.”

  “Not me.” Raf shook his head. “Me, I know nothing, except that I’m not going to send you away, I’m not going to leave you and nobody is going to kill me…”

  “Aunts Jalila and Nafisa were killed…” She waited for Raf to nod, which he did. “But the reason’s a secret…”

  Raf nodded again.

  “Why?”

  “Because…” Raf stopped. “Because that’s the way things work in Iskandryia.” He ignored the doubtful expression on her face. “What can I tell you? What the General says goes.”

  “Koenig Pasha?” Hani looked suddenly relieved. “Not Zara’s idea? Not yours…”

  Raf shook his head, his half smile a reflection of hers.

  Hani nodded. “I was worried,” she said, “that it was Zara. If it’s Koenig Pasha who says we must lie, then that’s different…” Her shrug was almost comically adult. “Lying is his job.” For a second, she sounded almost exactly like her late unlamented Aunt Nafisa.

  There were, it turned out, two entirely separate levels of morality in Hani’s world. One occupied by those, like him, her and Zara, who weren’t meant to lie, and another given over to those destined to massacre the truth.

  Pushing himself to his feet, Raf wondered what would happen when the child finally realized that if he was a spy, then she’d got him filed under the wrong group.

  “Wh
ere are you going?” Hani demanded.

  “Out,” said Raf.

  “The murder?”

  Raf shook his head. “Something else…”

  Hani regarded him carefully. “I thought you were going to leave finding Avatar to someone called Eduardo?”

  “Hani!”

  “So I listened,” said the child. “Anyway…you need me to help with the search.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yes you do,” said Hani.

  “There is no way,” said Raf, his voice firm, “that you’re coming with me.”

  “Who wants to come with you?” Hani said dismissively. Scrambling to her feet, she waved one hand in front of her screen and watched it blink back to life. A pass of her thumb over a floating track ball and the active window closed, revealing an aerial shot of the city.

  “He’s locked in a cellar,” said Hani, voice casual. “There’s stale water outside.”

  “What kind of stale water?”

  “So you do want my help?”

  Raf sighed.

  “Ali Bey ordered the Mahmoudiya Canal built in 1817,” Hani said carefully. “On the far side, a green tram comes towards the window, then turns left…”

  “Anything else?” Raf didn’t know what else to say.

  Hani nodded. “Turbini. No.” She stopped, correcting herself. “Not turbini. Freight trains, long ones that rattle, somewhere behind the room. Which means he’s…” She touched the picture, pulling up a tight lattice of streets, where tramlines ran south along Rue Amoud, before turning into Avenue Mahmoudiya. At the bottom of the picture, on the other side of the canal, a fat ribbon of track ran towards a rail yard. “Somewhere round here.”

  “And you know this how?”

  Hani nodded to a toy tortoise gathering dust in one corner of her bedroom. It was old, with overrounded edges and what proved to be fractal patterns playing constantly across its shell, like swirling clouds. Someone had applied a sticker of a cartoon rabbit, then tried to peel it off sometime later, leaving a sticky patch and half a smug, bucktoothed face.

  The tortoise was so ancient that it connected by cable to the wall feed, with another cable run round the edge of Hani’s room to her screen.