Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  On-screen, Ferdie Abdullah was explaining that, according to Iskandryia’s bright new Chief of Detectives, the apparently random, wide-ranging attacks of the previous week were connected after all, having been carried out by the Sword of God. Which was the first Raf had heard of it.

  “I never said that…”

  “What?”

  “I never said the attacks weren’t random.”

  “No?” Hani looked up from stroking Ifritah. “What does random mean?”

  “Not related.”

  Scooping the grilled aubergines out of their skins with a fork, Raf put the pulp to one side while he got butter from the fridge. Then all he needed was to add flour to the molten butter and beat hard as milk went into the mixture.

  “So they are related?”

  Raf stopped looking for a skillet. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Hani sighed.

  After he’d added mashed aubergine to his roux, Raf ground in a twist of pepper, a twist of sea salt and sprinkled on a handful of grated cheese. The lamb went onto the middle of an already warmed serving plate, with the aubergine sauce swirled in an elegant circle round the outside.

  “You hungry?”

  Hani shook her head.

  “No, me neither.” Raf passed the serving dish to Hani. “See if Khartoum wants this, then I’ll buy you a burger…”

  “For you,” Hani announced from the doorway of the porter’s quarters at the rear of the madersa’s covered garden.

  “For us?” Khartoum glanced up from his game of Go as did his opponent, the owner of a small stall in Rue Cif, which ran along the back of the madersa. “You made this?” Khartoum looked surprised. Also disbelieving.

  “No, Uncle Ashraf made it.”

  “His Excellency…” the stall holder looked surprised. “The bey cooks?”

  Hani smiled at the man whose knee-length coat and white cap announced he’d made the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca. “His Excellency does a lot of strange things,” she said shortly and backed out of the room. If either man thought it strange that the child had a flea-bitten cat slung round her neck like a collar, they didn’t mention it.

  “You’ll be fine,” promised Raf when Hani hesitated in the madersa’s ornate marble hall. For reasons neither Khartoum nor Donna could properly explain, her late Aunt Nafisa had felt it necessary to keep the child indoors. Which meant the funeral of her aunt was the first time Hani had ever left the house.

  “Of course I will,” Hani said and yanked open the front door. She smiled as she took Raf’s hand, though her nails dug hard into his palm as they stepped from the quiet of the madersa into the noise of Rue Sherif.

  Raf dug back and Hani’s grin turned vulpine. When they reached the corner she was still grinning and still trying to dig her nails through his skin. They both knew she was only half-joking…

  That night, the fox came as clouds blocked off the stars and the sky moved closer to the earth, imposing an obvious but impressive boundary, like that loss of focus at the edge of a dream or the distant strangeness of the world beyond an aquarium as seen by some captive angelfish.

  And as all this occurred, outside of the world outside the al-Mansur madersa, Raf sat on the edge of Hani’s narrow bed and watched the small child sleep, badly… She mewled half words and broken sentences that matched the fluttering behind her closed eyes. Panic glued strips of damp hair to her forehead and every so often she’d roll her shoulders as if fighting her way through a crowd. Raf watched and waited in what should have been darkness and would have been were he anyone else. At no point did he allow himself or the fox to sleep.

  CHAPTER 24

  Sudan

  It was Sarah who taught Ka how to catch the birds that flocked south. While the ghosts of the others hunted lizards through the ruins of J’habite, she sat in the shade of the truck, sharing her pipe with Ka and refusing to talk.

  Smoking always made Ka talkative. Sarah was the opposite. This was a month after Zac died and Ka was still afraid of Sarah’s long silences and the sudden thunder bursts of her anger.

  As she stared blankly at the blue sky, Ka risked an occasional sideways glance at where the top button of her shirt had come undone. Not her collar button, which was missing, the one below that.

  Through the slight gap he could see the start of a breast, shadow against shadow. And on the wrist of the hand holding her steel pipe, fine hairs lit in the light that dappled through the thermoflage covering their truck. His own skin had gone dark in the desert, yet hers was darker still. Almost purple, like al-badingan, a plant carried from Africa to al-Andalus by the army of Islam, though Ka didn’t know that. He just knew his uncle had grown them one year. Soft fruit that spoiled easily and was eaten as a vegetable fried with mutton oil and salt.

  The pipe was Sarah’s own. Bent and scratched, it had been filthy when she took it off a dead nasrani photographer. Which meant Sarah had wasted hours meticulously scraping tar from the mouthpiece with a thorn stripped of its bark.

  The last person to try taking the pipe from Sarah had ended up with two fingers of his right hand bound together for a month, to help his bones knit. But these last few weeks she’d taken to sharing her pipe with Ka and her food too, though only when there was enough to spare.

  Everything about that afternoon was normal until a small dark bird swooped overhead and Sarah suddenly sat up straight. A minute later other birds followed, heading south.

  “Netting,” Sarah demanded, her voice urgent.

  Ka looked puzzled.

  “Netting,” she repeated and pointed to an unused roll of thermoflage that still lay where they’d dumped it five days earlier. “Hurry.” Sarah grabbed his hand and pulled Ka to his feet.

  Ka knew better than to refuse. “What are we hiding?” Ka asked. “And what are we hiding it from?” Hiding themselves from the planes was the usual answer but the truck was already netted and the sky was free from silver specks.

  “We’re going to catch food,” she told Ka and the boy stopped fussing.

  “Do what I do,” said Sarah. So Ka did.

  Together they unrolled the net and laid it flat in the road. Then Sarah cut two long lengths of electrical flex from a cardboard roll in the back of the truck and gave one to Ka.

  “The net goes there,” Sarah said, indicating a dark slit of alley between two broken houses. “You take the one on this side and I’ll take the other.”

  Reaching the roof on his side of the alley was easier than Ka expected, mainly because the stairs were in place and neither floor had fallen in. Sarah’s climb took longer and when she finally appeared on the roof opposite, sweat had fastened her shirt tight against her back.

  “Broken stairs.”

  Ka nodded, silently threading one end of his wire through a gap in the parapet when he saw Sarah do the same. When she tied one end tight, he did that too and obediently tossed the rest of his flex over the edge, watching as it fell into the street below.

  “Okay,” said Sarah. “Now we do the netting.” She disappeared from view and it took Ka a moment to realize she’d started the return climb. Although he still made it down before she did.

  “You’ve got stairs,” Sarah said.

  Ka nodded guiltily.

  “Some people…” Crouched back on her heels, mouth slightly open and face fierce with concentration, Sarah carefully tied her wire to a corner of the net and waited for Ka do the same. After that, all they had to do was climb back to the top and haul on their wires until the net was in position.

  She smelt of kif, as always, but beneath the smoke Ka could smell sweat as it dried into her shirt and a feral stink that he also carried, but mostly forgot to notice. All of the other girls he’d met had washed with sand, disappearing behind a wall or bush to scrub it into their skin. Sarah was different. If the river was nearby she used that; otherwise she used nothing.

  “Why are you sniffing?”

  “I’m not.”

  Sarah looked at him.

  “The
pipe,” said Ka. “I like it.”

  Sarah nodded, like she understood. But a few minutes later she got up to make a hard-to-see adjustment to one corner of the trap and when she came back, she sat somewhere else.

  Later on, the blue sky turned pink along its edge. Pink turned to purple and purple to a blue so deep it was almost black. And stars hung silent as Sarah lay back and wondered at their unimaginable distances.

  Sitting on the other side of the fire, Ka held a spit-roasted bird, one of a dozen that he’d eaten as the evening wore on and the flames burned low. Two more tiny birds cooled on a length of aerial near his feet. The wings he’d taken to discarding as hardly worth the bother, throwing them back to sizzle in the fire while he concentrated instead on pinching strips of hot meat from the tiny carcass.

  When the fire was done and the night turned colder, they retreated to the back of the truck, Sarah to clean her pipe and Ka to talk to the Colonel. He was still talking when Sarah fell asleep. Though she woke once, later on, to remove his hand from inside her shirt.

  CHAPTER 25

  15th October

  It was a job and someone had to do it. Shutting his eyes briefly against a flickering beam of red laser, the man calling himself Mike Estelle opened them again, then smiled through the yellow afterglow at a young American dancing opposite.

  Wide face, fair hair, a turned-up nose that looked natural; sweat darkening the valley between her breasts and beading her throat like glitter dust. Trousers slung low enough at the back to expose the black waistband of a thong.

  Her name was Dawn, apparently.

  “Okay?”

  She grinned back and danced closer.

  And closer.

  When Mike jerked his head at an exit, she nodded. And when he put one arm round her shoulder to steer her towards the door, she smiled and let his hand slip forward until it hovered above her shiny bra. With a sideways glance, he grabbed a handful, ready to make a joke of it if she protested but Dawn just giggled and turned her head, mouth opening as she raised her face for a kiss.

  A crowd of students pushed past on both sides, jeering at the thirtysomething man with his arms locked round a teenager, though no one actually seemed to mind that he blocked the door between the main dance floor and the loos at Neutropic. The last of the students, a kid with a magenta dread wig, silver contacts and a vest that read DEEP AND TRIBAL, glanced back, noticed that the girl now had one breast completely out of her bra and grinned. So Mike twisted his lips into a smile and nodded to the student, a ubiquitous knowing nod that the Thiergarten agent hoped said sorted.

  From the floor came the gut-crunching, ear-bleeding thud of bass bins overlaid with a wasplike electronic loop that wound itself up and up but went nowhere, endlessly…

  Mike hated the noise but then, he hated nightclubs, which was why he’d been so happy to firebomb the last one. To really like the music, he’d decided, you had to be out of your head and Mike was teetotal everything. Unlike the Friday night crowd around him.

  That any clubs opened on a holy day upset the mullahs; so those which did made sure their licences were up-to-date, closing times were met and the local uniforms paid off. The morales themselves were mostly beyond bribery, though blackmail could work.

  The other thing Neutropic did was weed out locals at the door. Anyone who didn’t do a convincing impression of a well-dressed foreigner got bounced by the fashion police. Letting in Iskandryia’s own just wasn’t worth the grief.

  Which was fine with Mike Estelle. The last thing he needed was to hook up with some local kid who had an angry elder brother and five uncles.

  “You know what I like about this place?”

  He didn’t.

  “Everyone’s always off their heads.”

  Yeah, he liked that too. Mind you…“You know, it’s a bit noisy…”

  “What?”

  He started to repeat himself and then realized she was grinning, so he grinned back and gently steered her through the door and towards some fire doors.

  “Wait.”

  He looked at her.

  “Rehydration,” she said, pulling three tiny pink hearts from the pocket of her white jeans. “Need a bottle for these.” Actually they weren’t jeans, they were some kind of paper-thin trouser, bias-cut from acetate, belted with a silver sheriff’s star on a leather thong threaded through loops. And she didn’t need water…

  “You ever tried a kite?” He dipped his own hand inside his shirt, reaching for a small pouch that hung on a silver chain round his neck. Shaking out a tiny purple lozenge, he dropped it into her open hand.

  “No need for water with these,” he said. “They just melt in your mouth.”

  “What’s in them?”

  He smiled and named a cat valium analogue mentioned earlier at the bar by some girl he’d bought a drink. She had been older than this one, not yet close to being drunk and there was a hardness to her, a neurotic edge that made him nod politely, knock back his Diet Coke and disengage. Places like Neutropic didn’t exist for people like her to waste his time. Besides, she’d been Swiss and he needed a Yank… Or at the very least some Yank wannabe from the American university.

  What he actually fed the kid was something else, obviously; but the chemical formula would mean nothing to her and no one had bothered to name this drug something snappy. She didn’t yet know it but she was about to be reeled in on something none of her friends even knew existed.

  “They’re great,” said Mike, closing her hand around the lozenge, the chemical formula of which was just one molecule off an anaesthetic that had been briefly popular fifty years earlier. This version had remained on paper—well, disk—in a Swiss lab until a May evening three years earlier when a Sudanese research student working up something for the weekend had screwed over one of her sequences.

  Asked later that night at Zurich’s Apocalypso if she was carrying drugs, the research student had said, yes, lots… Ordered to empty her bag, she laboriously took out everything. Credit chips, tram tickets, vapour-thin condoms, a tampon, loose change, the fluff in the bottom…

  Standing in the queue watching all this happen was a very junior opportunities exec from the research division of Bayer-Rochelle. A thousand US dollars to the largest of the door staff saw the girl, plus her emptied bag, in a taxi headed out of Zurich towards an elegantly landscaped campus beside Lake Lucerne.

  They talked, at least she did. About everything she’d ever done that had embarrassed her. They ate supper at the campus canteen and then, much later, after a romantic walk beside the lake they went to bed via a quick detour to his open-plan office. She remembered nothing of the chocolate torte or Wiener Schnitzel, the moon glistening on cold water or the sex but she woke bandy-legged and raw, having signed a contract relinquishing any intellectual rights she might possess in whatever chemical had induced such a chronic attack of honesty and obedience.

  It was a good story, true or not. And amnesia was one of the more useful side effects of the drug. Amnesia, anaesthesia and obedience. What more could any person want?

  At the moment nothing. That would come later.

  “Real rush,” said the man, mouthing his words over the background noise.

  “If you say so.” Dawn shrugged, smiled and put the lozenge on her tongue, looking like a child with a sweet. Within seconds her smile had become a grin, then her personality imploded, her pupils widening into vast black circles through which she fell.

  It was 3.45 A.M. Exactly one hour and forty-five minutes after he walked through the door. With a satisfied smile, Mike reset the alarm on his Rolex and checked that it was off-line for all functions. It would be extremely inconvenient if some overzealous Iskandryian cop was to use station switching to check Mike’s progress across the city at a later date.

  “This way.”

  She nodded, her face so unguarded as to be almost infantile. Wrapping his arm tight around her shoulders, Mike steered her through the emergency door at the back of Neutropic and into a p
arking lot packed with cars but empty of people.

  “Which one do you like?”

  Dark eyes regarded him gravely.

  “Tell me.” It was an order.

  “That one,” said the girl without hesitation. The red Mazda to which she pointed was exactly what he’d have expected of her. Flash without being that well made. This was the difference between him and the girl. He’d have gone for something expensive but understated. Which, obviously enough, was why he’d got her to make the choice. That way police had a harder time trying to construct a profile.

  Pulling a thin grey card from the pocket of his trousers, he rested it against the lock of the little Mazda and let the internal electronics do their magic. Commercial versions of the universal key did stupid things like ping when the right combination was found or have diodes that flashed up the side in sequence, as if part of some scanning routine.

  His version had no diodes and made no noise. So the only way to know if the lock was disengaged and the alarm disabled was to listen very carefully to the tumblers.

  “Get in.”

  Without waiting to see if the girl would do what she was told—she would—Mike climbed into the driver’s seat and slid his card into the key slot. Lights lit on the faux-metal dash and the engine fired up. So did the sound system, which the owner had left tuned to some shit station that pumped dance.

  “Find something you like.”

  “I like this,” said the girl, nodding towards a speaker.

  He sighed. “Something else,” Mike said and waited while she found some woman singing about the taste on her tongue.

  Whatever… First gear meshed into third, then fifth, as he skipped second and fourth. From where they were to where he needed to be was next to no distance. Except that it would be best if the clock showed he’d driven somewhere else first, especially if he hadn’t… Or at least nowhere that mattered.

  A rip out along the Corniche added some distance, the little Mazda nipping in and out of the sparse traffic, hugging in behind trucks or bigger cars every time a camera came into view. One of them might actually have picked out his licence plate but, chances were, it wouldn’t matter. He’d be gone and the car dumped.