The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (27 page)

CHAPTER 35

28th July

Club CdH was hidden at the bottom of a well.

And on clubnite its crowded spiral staircase stank of cheap lager, expensive scent and musty groundwater. This last was because the shaft fed down to a vast cistern strung with steel walkways and ratchet joists, with a bar and JVC sound system at one end, both on a raised area where half the water-filled cistern had been paved over centuries before with stone slabs.

Underwater lights, sunk to the bottom of the cistern, up-lit swimmers so that they cast huge black shadows onto the vaulted ceiling overhead. Only a few clubhards swam naked. They went naked not because it was that kind of club but because public nudity was banned in Ottoman Africa and even being at CdH made a political statement.

That, at least, was how Zara justified it, if asked. Besides, everyone knew
E
=
MC
²
was a cuddle clone. It made danceheads love each other. It also made them way too chilled to be able to do anything about it…

The electrics were working, the bar was stocked with Star, memory on the sound system had been loaded for tonight’s mix. Come midnight the place would be rammed to the rafters, the crowd split unevenly between the majority on the dance floor and those, like her, who would be swimming. Zara grinned and adjusted an earbead, scanning bands until she found the voice for which she’d been searching.

Av was out there, spreading the good word.

“That was Vertigo Voudun, the Blue Ice mix. And don’t forget tonight—CdH goes naked.” He spoke through a button mike slicked to his throat. Inside his helmet Avatar had true quadsound, aural grooves cut into the lining to channel music to his ears. Stacked into one of the drag-resistant side panniers on his cut-down Yamaha DarkStar Racer was a hit-and-run sound system. The other pannier held kit that uploaded to a pirate satellite channel.

It was an old Balearic cliché to wire the bpm of a mix to the DJ’s heart rate but Av didn’t do cliché or tradition. He had the bpm wired direct to the engine of his bike. Every blip of the throttle upped tempo, every increase in tempo upped speed. And hard/Trance didn’t even kick in until his speeds were strictly illegal.

“This is LuxPerpetua with
Escape Velocity,
the FNM 90-2 mix… And remember, naked at CdH… Enjoy.” Avatar slammed opened his throttle and blasted the DarkStar and himself clear over the red line.

Zara locked the door behind her.
Danger
read a rusted sign.
40,000 volts. Keep out.
Avatar had lifted it off a substation at the North End of Rue Ras el Tin and Zara had epoxied it to the door hiding the way into the well. So far, no one from the city’s electricity board had turned up and tried to read their meter.

Known as
CdH,
the
Club des Hachichins
could only be reached by the red spiral behind that door. The staircase was six months old and ceramic, bolted together with green screws, each one the size of someone’s finger. Rumour said Av had stolen it from a hotel in Shatby that was looking for it still.

Zara had no idea of the age of the stone-lined shaft behind that door but she assumed it was at least five hundred years. Anything younger than this in Isk was regarded as almost new. Besides, newer than that and she’d have been able to find it on the city maps at the Library.

Zara was the club’s promoter, organizer and owner. That was, she owned it if anyone did, inasmuch as the medieval cistern was below a multi-storey car park owned by HZ International—which was her father by another name.

Once there had been hundreds of cisterns below the city, with arched roofs and stone-lined holding tanks. Every important family, every mosque or madersa had had one. Sometimes they had even been owned by individual streets or one of the souks. Most had dried up, collapsed or been forgotten. Of those that were known still to exist, twelve were mentioned in Fodors. CdH occupied the thirteenth.

She’d found the cistern before she went to the US but she’d only started up CdH on her return. And already Avatar and a posse of doormen were having to turn punters away. Clubnite ran one day each month, the date chosen at random by software on Zara’s notebook. All clubs went out of business eventually, but she and Avatar were doing their best to lower the odds against theirs doing the same.

And though Av was pretty freaked about not being followed, Zara knew that was just kiddie shit. Meanwhile, tonight was another clubnite and it was her job to go collect the brain candy.

CHAPTER 36

28th July

“Find the man. Deliver the package. Do it on time…”

This was his first day in the job and Edouard wanted to get things exactly right: because that way he’d have a better chance of getting chosen again tomorrow. Employment in Iskandryia was difficult. Upset one man and ten potential employers could slam their doors in your face. Edouard spent a lot of his life trying not to upset important people who might one day employ him. And the important person he’d visited this morning ran a courier service out of an office above a haberdasher’s at the back of the tram station on Place Orabi.

Now Edouard had a day’s work, with the chance of more work tomorrow if he was efficient. And he hadn’t even had to do this first day for nothing to show he was adaptable.

What he had to do was deliver a package, but not until 11:30 a.m. Edouard pulled his old Vespa back onto its stand and waited. He’d found the right café, on the edge of Place Gumhuriya just as he’d been told, and had spotted the man in the photograph. Now he just had to wait for the right time…

“And that was LuxPerpetua and this is Isk’s own Ahmed Shaabi with
Jules&Jeel
…” Slap bass began to stumble in and out of a drum track that sounded more Bedouin than anything else. To Raf it was just weird-shit music from a radio taped to the seat of some scooter parked up at the lights. Three weeks had passed since his aunt had been found dead and in one week’s time he would have to move himself, Hani, Donna and Khartoum out of the madersa.

He was doing his best to think about something else.

On the notebook in front of him was a list of names. The notebook was the old-fashioned kind with paper pages because that was safe. Short of looking over his shoulder or using a seriously hiRez satellite, no one could see what he was writing and he was secure in the knowledge that no pet geek of the Minister’s was sitting five tables away with a hidden Van Eck phreaker, recording everything he put up on screen.

Most of the names were crossed out, but half of them had then been written in again. In the centre was his aunt, circled heavily. Radiating out from Lady Nafisa were lines leading to Hamzah, Jalila, the General, Mushin Bey, Zara… Lines from these names led to other names until the page was a matrix of connections—all leading nowhere.

What he had was a diagram as hermetic as any kabbalistic chart and about as informative. Because, when it actually came down to it, Raf had to admit what he’d been avoiding admitting even to himself: he couldn’t prove for certain it was murder. And even if it was, what chance was there that he could solve a crime from scratch and with no obvious clues.

He’d followed them all except the General, who hadn’t left his house in weeks. Bought himself a digital scanner he couldn’t really afford in Radio Shack and fed it Zara’s number and then, in desperation, the number of the Minister and finally of Felix. The Minister hid his calls behind heavyweight crypt, Felix seemed to leave his mobile off most of the time and from Zara, once his scanner had cracked the crypt, he’d learned only that she ran a club and the GSP coordinates she gave out to selected punters indicated it was in a multi-storey garage. Which was vaguely interesting, if not helpful.

It was Wednesday, 28 July, 10:48 a.m. and his heartbeat, blood pressure and alpha count were almost normal, if maybe a little on the high side. No one at the office had yet tried to call him and he’d sat outside the Gumhuriya café for thirty-five minutes—which, in direct sunlight, was thirty-five minutes too long for his genetic make-up. The heat was thirty-four degrees and for once humidity was low. All this he read off from the face of his watch. None of it really interested him.

Missing from the report was a record of the complex organic molecules gating through myriad alveoli in his lungs, flooding his blood system each time he sucked the plastic mouth piece of a small sheesha.

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…