Arabesk (15 page)

“Shit.” ZeeZee picked up his envelope and headed downstairs, the Debussy nocturne looping in his head. He made it as far as the sand-blasted glass front door before someone yelled his name.

“Hey, ZeeZee…” The amused shout came from behind him. “Going somewhere?”

He turned to see two bulls he knew in SPD jumpsuits flanking a woman who wore a black Chanel suit, black shoes and Shu Uemura make-up. Not that she needed it: even naked, her face would have been flawless, her eyes bright, brown and hard as glass. He had no idea who she was.

All he knew was the woman had to have practised that contemptuous, deadpan stare. It was too convincing to be real. The grins on the faces of the uniformed officers were something else entirely. Certainly not real smiles, more grim-faced got-you-you-bastard kind of expressions.

“Micky O’Brian…” ZeeZee began, breaking the silence.

“Yeah,” said the woman. “Why don’t you take us to meet him?”

“He’s… When I got here… I didn’t know…”

She looked at ZeeZee without saying anything. Just waited until his words stumbled to a halt and then kept waiting while the English boy skidded around in his head for the right approach to take to what was about to happen—and realized there wasn’t one.

“Don’t tell me,” she said finally. “You got here a couple of minutes ago and found the front door open. You knocked but no one came, so you went inside. And guess what, you found Micky O’Brian shot through the skull
… Or
was it the throat?”

“A head shot,” ZeeZee said, without thinking.

The two uniformed officers looked at each other. As if that only confirmed what they expected.

“And you were on your way to call the police?”

ZeeZee nodded.

“So why didn’t you use the hall phone?” The woman nodded to a Sanyo fixed to the wall by the front door, its screen black but one diode flashing lazily in the lower left corner, to signal the system was set to standby.

“I didn’t see it,” said ZeeZee hastily. “I was too shocked.”

“Which is why you were whistling…” She hummed back at him the main motif from
Clair de Lune.
“I can see the headlines now. The whistling hit man…”

“I haven’t killed anybody,” ZeeZee protested.

“Of course you haven’t,” she said sourly. “So why don’t you come and show us the person you didn’t kill?”

Micky O’Brian’s body was where he’d left it. The blood seemed a little darker, Micky a little more obviously dead. Other than that, walking into the gallery could just have been a bad attack of déjà vu.

“So
you found him lying there like that?”

ZeeZee nodded.

“And you touched nothing?”

He shook his head, then hesitated.

“Yes?” she said, drawing out the word until it ended with a hiss.

“I touched the wine bottle. To check how cold it was… And I turned off the music.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

“But I didn’t touch anything else. I didn’t kill him. And I didn’t take the paintings,”

The detective flicked her gaze to a blank space on the wall. Then back to the body. So far none of them had checked Micky for a pulse. But maybe they’d decided it wasn’t necessary, given the very final expression on his face.

“So you’re trying to shift the blame to an accomplice, right? He shot Micky, took the paintings and left you to lock the front door… Yeah, I know,” said the woman, as she held up her hand to still ZeeZee’s protest. “You didn’t kill him and you don’t know who did.”

Shrugging, she walked over to Micky and looked down for a while, then bent to free something trapped under him. “Here,” she said, tossing it to ZeeZee. “You left this behind.”

The fat envelope he’d been carrying hit the floor as ZeeZee fumbled to make the catch. And then, while he was still worrying about what he’d dropped, ZeeZee realized what he’d just caught. What he’d just tagged with his sweat, fingerprints and oil. An old Wilson Combat, its usual barrel replaced with a .22 conversion. The deep scar of an acid etch where the barrel’s identification number should be.

“Ditch the gun.”

ZeeZee heard her words but he wasn’t really listening. Had he always been the patsy: or was he only now surplus to requirements? He looked in disbelief at the weapon in his hands, knowing exactly who it belonged
to…
Wild Boy had just, very firmly, taken him out of the loop.

“Drop it.” The woman nodded to the man beside her, who flipped his service-issue Colt out of its holster and trained the sight on ZeeZee’s chest before the English boy realised what was happening.

“Put it down real slow.” The man holding the revolver had a Southern drawl and a liking for theatrics. The trigger on his gun was already pulled, his knuckle white from depressing the trigger to its fullest extent. Only his thumb was holding back the hammer.

“Your choice,” the woman said coldly.

Wasn’t it always?

ZeeZee kneeled slowly and placed the Combat flat on Micky’s white carpet, muzzle pointed safely towards the wall. He didn’t want any misunderstandings.

“I didn’t kill Micky O’Brian. I didn’t…”He wanted his voice to sound decisive and confident but instead it sounded shrill, as if he was trying to convince himself.

“Switching to .22 was a good move,” said the officer with the gun. “But, you know what…?”

ZeeZee shook his head.

“You really should have used a silencer. We got a call about the shot right after it happened…”

ZeeZee looked through the gallery’s long window, taking in the rugged coastline, the choppy grey waters, the sheer isolation of this stretch of Puget Sound. Yeah, he’d
bet
there’d been a call, but not made from around here. There was no other house within miles. He couldn’t wait for the part where they looked in the envelope and discovered Micky’s delivery: half a kilo of uncut coke.

6th July

300-3500 Hz (with harmonics peaking above 3500), is
an average frequency-range for the human voice. And the sensitivity of human hearing is pretty smooth between 500-5000Hz, with 110dB being usually as loud as a voice gets.

The prisoner in the next cell was breaking 120dB, his screams emptying in a single breath that ended as swallowed, choking sobs. And though the air in Raf’s small room now stank of sweat, everyone was being positively polite.

The bey was good—Felix had to give him that. He hadn’t tried to claim immunity or demanded to talk to the Minister. He’d even allowed an embarrassed sergeant to wire him to a polygraph, fastening the band round his own wrist and placing his right hand completely flat on the plate. Not that the bey was exactly cooperating, either.

He hadn’t yet removed his black jacket, which still looked immaculate after hours of questioning: and he’d only just taken off his dark glasses, after Madame Mila finally agreed to lower the brightness of the overhead lights.

It had been hypocritical of the fat man to have put on record at the outset that he hoped the coroner-magistrate knew what she was doing—because he didn’t hope that at all. What he actually hoped—very much—was that Madame Mila was making the worst mistake of her short but impressive career.

“Hani heard you shouting at each other.” The sergeant kept his voice reasonable. At Madame Mila’s earlier suggestion, he’d tried hectoring but that only made the man in front of him shut down. Emotionally autistic.

“Arguing,” stressed Madame Mila. “All of last night.” That was the fact to which she kept coming back, time after time. The one fact Raf couldn’t deny.

“She wanted me to marry Zara bint-Hamzah,” repeated Raf. “I refused. She was cross.”

“Oh, she was
way
more than cross.” As ever, Madame Mila’s voice was cutting. “She threatened to disown you because you betrayed that poor girl. So this morning you went home and stabbed her. Rather than take the risk… That’s what happened, wasn’t it?”

“No,” said Raf. “It wasn’t…”

“So how did it happen?” The young police sergeant fired his question, but it might as well have been Coroner Mila speaking. This was definitely her show.

“I was in my office all morning.”

“No,” said the sergeant, looking at a screen, “we’ve been over this. You left at 11:30…”

“And went straight to Le Trianon,” Raf shrugged. “That’s the same thing. You can check at Le Trianon.”

“We have. You left your cappuccino undrunk and your paper on the table.”

“While I went for a stamp round Place Saad Zaghloul”

“Which was at what time?”

“Noon,” said Raf. “Maybe later. As I said, I didn’t look at my watch.”

Heartbeat, blood pressure and limbic pattern all held steady. Every diode on the Matsui polygraph lit a peaceful green. They might as well have been discussing the weather.
Hell.
The sergeant sucked at his teeth.
The weather might have got more of a limbic reaction out of the man.

The officer glanced bleary-eyed down at his screen. “According to the maître d’ you were gone for an hour, at least.”

Raf shook his head. “I got back slightly before that, then waited to catch someone’s eye. I wasn’t in a hurry…”

Madame Mila snorted.

“Besides,” said Raf calmly, “you know there isn’t time to walk there and back, from Zaghloul to Sherif, inside an hour, never mind murder somebody and fake a break-in. Which I didn’t.”

“So you took a taxi,” the sergeant announced tiredly.

“Then where’s the driver?”

“We’re finding him now.”

“No,” said Raf, looking straight at Madame Mila. “You’re not, because there
was
no taxi. I went nowhere near the Al-Mansur madersa at lunchtime and I didn’t kill my aunt—as that machine has already verified…” He nodded contemptuously at the primitive polygraph.

Felix pushed himself away from the wall. “Time to call the Minister,” said the fat man. He was talking both to the coroner-magistrate and to a fish-eye unit she’d placed on the plastic table between Raf and her sergeant. “You had your eight hours. You blew it… I’m releasing him.”

He glanced at Raf and grinned.

Raf sat next to Felix, his back to a sea wall, staring inland over the dark expanse of dust and shut-down kiosks that was Place Saad Zaghloul. The café where they’d just bought supper was the only place still serving at two a.m. and Felix had been hungry. In front of him rested a half-full bottle of Algerian
marc
and a paper plate that had, until recently, been piled with grilled chicken breasts drenched with harissa sauce. It was as near as the fat man could get to a genuine McD chick&chilli burger.

Raf was improving his life with a third styrofoam cup of thick black coffee laced with rum. He didn’t think of it as using caffeine to release dopamine in his prefrontal cortex, but he felt the hit all the same. This way he could tell himself the shakes weren’t really about having been locked up in a cell.

“You know,” said Felix, “you could have told me…”

Just what Raf could have told him the fat man left drifting on the sticky night breeze blowing in from behind then.

“…don’t you think?”

Raf said nothing. Instead, he drained his coffee to the dregs, only stopping when his mouth filled with grit from coarse-ground beans. He wasn’t going to sleep anyway. The image of Hani’s guilt-stricken face was pixel-clear in his brain.

“If you had,” continued Felix, “I could have got the coroner-magistrate off your case right at the start, before we hit the station. If only I’d known.” The fat man’s conversation seemed to be going round in circles. Or maybe that was just the sky.

“Known what?” Raf asked tiredly.

“I made a call to Hamzah Effendi. You know what he told me?”

No, Raf didn’t. In fact, he couldn’t begin to guess. The last time he and Hamzah had talked, the thickset industrialist had been standing on the upper steps of the
qaa
and had threatened to have Raf’s legs broken for disgracing his daughter.

“He said you were an attaché at the Seattle Consulate… Said I wasn’t to mention that he’d told me.”

Raf went very still.

“It’s okay,” said Felix as he leant back and drained off a beaker of Algerian rot-gut brandy. “Look, fuck forbid I should get all touchy-feely. But I’ve been there… Smoke, flames, flying rubble. I’m not saying you should talk any about what happened but, all the same, telling me would have spared you that shit with Mila.”

“You think I killed Lady Nafisa?”

“The bloody
Thiergarten
killed Nafisa.” Felix slapped Raf heavily on the shoulder. “All the same, until this is over I’m going to have to take that passport from you. And the gun. General’s orders”

“Gun…” Raf looked as shocked as he felt.

“Hani told Madame Mila you sleep with an old revolver by your bed.” Felix smiled sourly. “Someone should tell that kid to keep her mouth shut… Anyway,” he shrugged, “drop them both off tomorrow, before the autopsy.”

“Tomorrow…?”

“This morning, whatever… All bodies get buried by the following noon, murder victims included. Shari’ah Law.” His tone made it clear exactly what he thought of the Khedive’s new deal with the mullahs. “Five a.m. then,” said Felix. “Nice and early.” And he pushed himself to his feet, then staggered off across Place Saad Zaghloul without a backward glance.

7th July

Felix didn’t mention the tattered state of Raf’s beard or
hair. Most of both were gone, cropped short with kitchen scissors from the madersa. The job wasn’t yet finished, but then he’d only had two hours between arriving home and having to leave again, and most of that had been taken up with Hani.

“How’s the kid?”

Raf paused, remembering.

At 2.30 a.m. she’d been a shaking little bundle, crouched on the
qaa
steps with a blanket wrapped round her and Ali-Din clutched tight in her arms like life depended on it. “She’ll survive.”

Felix sucked at his teeth. “That bad, eh?”