Arabesk (28 page)

Fractured jaw opened impossibly wide, the fat man began to scream silently at the world. He tried to stand, found his leg was broken and crashed sideways, taking the table down with him.

And still no one moved until Raf came running through shock-stopped traffic. Doing the fat man’s screaming for him.

Sightless and almost deaf, gravity dragging the last shreds of identity out of his shattered skull in a heap of folded jelly, Felix still managed to make it to his knees, then spasmed and fell forward, grit sticking to flayed flesh.

It was pointless even trying to talk to a man whose throat was ripped open, whose cerebral fluid oozed from an open skull and whose pumping blood was creating tiny cascades that branched left and right down cracks in the sidewalk, taking the shortest route to the gutter. Yet the pointlessness didn’t stop Raf shaking Felix. Shouting at him.

In the distance the wail of an ambulance fought the siren of a racing police car. But the ambulance, at least, would be too late. The fat man was a corpse, his body just didn’t know it yet.

“Do it.”
The words came suddenly, cold and clear.

Raf wanted to ignore them. To pretend he hadn’t heard.
“Do it,”
said the fox, who never usually woke in daylight. So Raf did.

Unclipping the holster from the fat man’s belt—badge, spare clip and all—Raf slid free Felix’s Taurus and checked the cylinder. It was loaded with ceramic-jacket hollow-point.

“Back,” he ordered. And, watched by a retreating crowd, he untangled the fat man’s coat from a broken chair and wadded it into a bundle to act as a pillow for Felix. Then, rolling Felix on to his front almost as if for sleep, Raf put the muzzle to the point where the fat man’s skull met his neck and softly squeezed. What was left of Felix’s head exploded, along with a chunk of pavement below. It was only luck that stopped ricocheting fragments taking out Raf’s own eye.

Friendship came with a price that both of them had just paid.

Sirens split the shocked silence that followed. Jellaba-clad gawpers scattered suddenly as a cruiser slid to a halt kitty-corner to Place Gumhuriya. Out of its doors came two armed officers in flak jackets, assault rifles at the ready. But by then Raf was already gone: retreating through the crowd, the fat man’s gun thrust into one pocket.

He jumped a tram, standing at the back on its open wooden platform, slipping off at a crossing to cut through a narrow alley full of empty shops and boarded-up houses. A builder’s board promised total redevelopment. The completion date for the project was two years before Raf had arrived in Isk.

The smell of urine and damp earth filled his nostrils, coming from houses that had fallen in on themselves to become gardens kept lush by sewage leaking from a shattered pipe. The area was full of blind alleys and cluttered yards. Sometimes two blocks was all it took to slide from comfort to abject poverty—or vice versa. Money clung to the boulevards and the coast. Cut back from those and the city of the poor was always there. The cities of darkness, of brothels and lies. Old beyond meaning or memory, desolately grand and running by unspoken rules.

Raf was beginning to feel horribly at home.

He stepped through an open door into a deserted house and kept going until he reached a locked door at the rear. One kick opened it and Raf found himself watched by an old woman as he crossed her courtyard and stepped out into a crowded street.

It was only when Raf stopped, looked round and tasted the sweetness of blood at the corner of his mouth that he realized a sliver of pavement had opened his cheek clean as a blade.

RenSchmiss

28th July

The water lights were off, the house lasers down.
Somewhere at the other end of the vaulted room, a band was tuning up. And here, where tiny waves splashed against the rough stone of a cistern wall, Zara had wrapped herself in the darkness. Below her feet had to be the bottom of the cistern but she had only a sense of hanging over emptiness.

Three months before, a stoned-cold immaculate Danish boy had gripped tight to a rock and let the water close over him. Only to drop his ballast and kick upwards. He claimed to have seen a skeleton on the bottom, arms crossed over its chest. And people did disappear in Isk. Disappear completely. But Zara didn’t really believe the story of the skeleton. Something had gone wrong with a batch of E/equals that month.

All the same, she did believe the darkness was occupied. Because whenever she left other swimmers behind and slid herself into a dark corner far away from the safety of the steps leading up to the dance floor, she could sense that something down there was aware she was there, hanging in the water above whatever it was.

Though maybe that was just E/equals too, from way back…

Now was chill-out time. Av’s decks were deserted. The huge bank of smart lights rippled rather than throbbed, stilled by the lack of strong beat to catch and follow. Up on stage, out of her sight, four elderly black guys were coming to the end of an acoustic set—well, mostly… Something intrinsically West Coast ethnic that mixed Cape Verde with Mbalax and Soukous. A click track hiccupped from a child’s beatbox, almost lost beneath balafon and sabar.

And the fit sounded loose but was actually tight and Zara felt relaxed for the first time in weeks, though that could have been from mixing Mexican with Moroccan.

Zara sighed. And kept sighing until the water closed over her again and bubbles like large pearls rose from her lips as she raised her arms and slid deeper. She would have gone deeper still but the pearls were gone. So she kicked once and glided to the surface.

“Going down, floating up… Guess you could call that an Ophelia complex,” said a voice right beside her. “Oh no,” it countered, “because then you’d be wearing some clothes…”

Instinct made Zara cover her breasts, and water made her choke as her head bobbed below the surface. When she’d finished coughing, she concentrated on swearing. She knew who it was.

What she didn’t recognize was the voice of whoever spoke next.

“That was rude.”

Arms splashed up to snake round Zara’s neck and Hani was suddenly glued fast like a limpet. She was grinning in the darkness. Breathing hard, though at first Zara thought that was from the swim. Then she realized the child was excited, dangerously excited.

“He hit a big man at the door,” said Hani. There was a horrified fascination in her voice.

“He wouldn’t let us in,” Raf said apologetically.

Zara snorted, her face hidden in shadow until Raf adjusted his eyes and she came into view as cleanly as if someone had toggled the brightness on a screen.

“He didn’t get up,” Hani added.

“Unconscious,” insisted Raf hastily, “nothing worse. I had to see you…”

“Why?”

Of all questions it was the simplest to ask and the hardest to answer. Had Raf been thinking clearly, or even at all, he might have known he was in shock from Felix: seeing someone killed did that to you. But he wasn’t supposed to do shock, at least not according to the wretched genetic-heritability guarantee. And anyway, he had more than one reply to her question.

Club. Felix. Hani…which came first?

Raf had to remind himself that Zara couldn’t see in the dark, that her hearing was probably only average. So she might have missed the thud of heavy boots as bouncers crisscrossed the club searching for him. Pretty soon one of the bone clones would engage his brain and decide to fire up the water lights.

Except that they were about to be cornered themselves, if the distant clang of a door and abrupt trill of sirens at the high edge of his range was any clue.

“You’re being raided,” Raf told Zara.

“Shit…” She sounded almost grateful. “That’s what you came to tell me?”

No, he’d come to beg her to look after Hani and to tell her was Felix was dead. Just like his aunt was dead. This city was turning into a personal war-zone and he was still busy trying to spot the enemy.

Raf shook his head, remembered she couldn’t see him and opened his mouth to speak. But it was already too late. Up on the spiral, a riot cop using a throat mike attached to the kind of bass-heavy public hailer that turns your guts to water and dribbles them round your feet was demanding that
Someone Turn On The Lights. NOW…

“How many ways in?”
Raf felt an adrenalin rush kick-in with a vengeance. The fox was back on line.

“One,” said Zara.

Even Hani groaned.

“Two,” Zara amended, then corrected herself again. “Three… Do storm drains count?”

Hani grabbed her tee-shirt from a corner where she’d left it and scooped up Ali-Din while Zara went looking for her clothes, which should have been folded neatly beneath a bench. Raf’s own suit was sodden but at least he was wearing it.

“You need new clothes,” Raf ordered.

Zara opened her mouth to protest but Raf was gone, sliding off in a different direction towards a blonde girl in spray tights, a snakeskin waistcoat that might once have slithered and a long trench coat cut from wafer-thin
faux
ocelot. Zara couldn’t hear what Raf said but the girl handed over her coat without comment.

“Use this.” He stood between Zara and the worst of the crowd while she struggled into the coat. Searchlights were in use but the house system seemed down. If Avatar had any sense, thought Zara, he’d have pulled the fuses.

“Over there…” Zara said, nodding to a wall that lit and vanished as a hand-held hiLux hit the stonework and then swept back over the restless crowd. The crash squad were still looking for the main switch.

“…We need to get over there.”

Covering part of the wall was a swirl curtain that shimmered with an infinitely ridiculous number of infinitesimally small fluorescent beads trapped between its warp and weft. Raf didn’t really have time to admire the effect. His brain was rich with theta waves that rolled across his cortex, firing neurones. Behind his eyes was a memory of Zara naked, soft hips and no body hair. Her legs long, her stomach almost flat. Water rolling in droplets between full breasts.

Sweet memories that stopped him remembering ugly things. Like blood turning black in a gutter or a breeze-blown fragment of ribbon fluttering across the road towards him.

“He wasn’t listening,” Hani said.

Zara sucked her teeth, crossly. “This way,” she ordered and ducked under the curtain. Her fingers twisted and fluorescence blossomed from a broken trance tube. They were inside a packed alcove that was arched over with crumbling red brick, and around them was rubbish, mostly broken beer boxes or empty industrial-size containers of still mineral water. Someone’s knickers lay discarded on the floor.

Beyond the alcove was a gap where a storm drain fed into the cistern from the street. Clearly visible on the wall were crumbling iron handholds, rusted with age.

“You first,” Zara told Hani, “Me next, Ashraf last…”

That was the order in which they went and that was the order in which the
morales
arrested them in the narrow side street where the drain began. With Raf climbing out to find Hani silenced by a hand over her mouth, while Zara stared furiously at a
gendarme
officer with skin the colour of pure chocolate and a bottle-green uniform so immaculate it must have come straight out of a box.

Overhead an ex-Soviet copter, with a searchlight now fixed to the side of its gun bubble, pinned Raf in its beam then flicked its attention to another street as soon as the officer moved in, Colt held tightly in her hand.

“Ashraf Bey,”
she said, looking in shock at Raf’s still-dripping suit.

“Yeah,” said Raf. “Me.”

Behind the officer were two privates and at the end of the narrow street was a green van the same colour as the woman’s uniform. Its rear doors were open and waiting.

Been here,
thought Raf,
done that. Not doing it again.

There were three ways it could go. She could let him walk, try to arrest him or call for advice and back-up. Only the first was any good to him and Raf didn’t see it happening. Not if the screen-splash he’d caught at the madersa had been right and the IPD were busy nailing Felix to his forehead like the mark of Cain.

Crunch time came as the officer lifted her wrist to her face, ready to call HQ.

“Don’t even think about it.” Raf had the fat man’s gun out of his sodden pocket and in his hand before she had time to do much more than flinch. Her own weapon still pointed lazily at the ground. She’d got the uniform all right, she just hadn’t got the moves.

“Fuck up and I’ll kill her,” Raf told the two privates. “Understood?” The gun wasn’t the only thing he’d borrowed from Felix. The sudden hard-ass drawl also belonged to him.

“Your watch,” Raf demanded.

Bottle-green handed it over with a scowl that turned to distilled hatred as Raf tossed her elegant mobile straight down the storm drain. Now her HQ could pinpoint it all they liked.

“Going to shoot
me
too?” The woman’s voice was cold, her contempt unchecked. Raf didn’t know quite what she saw when she looked at him but it was something she hated. He wasn’t too sure he liked it that much himself.

“Felix was dying,” Raf said shortly. Which was true. Half of the fat man’s skull was gone, his brain a fat slug that gravity enticed towards the pavement.

“This man murdered Felix Bey.”

For all the attention the officer gave the gun in his hand, Raf might as well have been unarmed. Except then, of course, he’d have been under arrest already.

“There was a bomb,” said Raf, seeing shock explode in Zara’s eyes. “Felix took the full blast.”

Zara pushed hair out of her face and stared at Raf. “You finished him off?”

“Yeah.” Raf nodded. “What was my option? Let him exist on life support, wired up and quadriplegic, surviving on sugar-water and vitamins?”

With definitely no alcohol, no illegal porn channels and no working gearstick to engage even if he did. “He’d have hated it.”

“So you got to play God?” That was the officer.

“Someone has to…” Raf spun the Colt round his finger, stepped in close and jammed the gun under bottle-green’s chin.