The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (60 page)

“
Hunkar begendi,
kind of…”

“Sultan’s delight.” Having just discovered McDonald’s, Hani’s tastes had telescoped. Anything that failed to come between two bits of bun with reconstituted french fries didn’t count.

For the sauce that gave its name to the dish, Raf needed to puncture tiny holes in four aubergines so they wouldn’t burst when he grilled them in Donna’s gas oven until their skins went black and blistered.

“You want to do this?” Raf picked up a fork and nodded to the uncooked aubergine.

Hani shook her head. So Raf punched holes in the purple skin instead.

“What
is
happening?” Hani asked. She was back with Ferdie Abdullah, who was running through the main headlines. Behind him a minor oil pipe bled crude onto gravel and hot sand while a huge billboard reading
MIDAS REFINERY
blazed like an advertisement for chaos. Before setting it on fire, the arsonists had taken time to stencil a row of red fists along the bottom of the sign.

Against a background of flames, impossibly young soldiers loaded two trespassing Ishies into a police van. With their faces hidden by goggles and belts studded with drives and umbrella modems, the freelance newshounds stumbled towards confinement like vintage astronauts traversing some monochrome lunar plain.

The masks were all affectation. A decent digital lens could be mounted onto the side of ordinary glasses and still be so small as to be almost invisible. As for the drives, anything bigger than a packet of Cleopatra was either outdated, third-world cheap or intentionally obvious.

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.