Arabesk (32 page)

“And I’d do it again.”

He was too fired up on the mix, too wired to check his profile in the smoked windows of expensive cafés lining the final stretch of road.

“Right now, tomorrow, next year, whenever.”

Av didn’t recognize the man’s voice—because they’d never spoken—but he knew who it was. Just as he knew for sure it had to be Zara who’d dumped the file into his postbox. Her way of apologizing for who the
morales
drove home and who they kept locked up in a basement for forty-eight hours with a pisspot for company. Though where a murderer and his half-sister fitted together… Well, that was some place he definitely didn’t plan to go for too long.

All the same, the mix was sweet and its message sweeter still. Pure and illegal as the fragments of meth still burning the back of his throat. The police had cracked the club but this was his revenge.

Simple bass went nowhere slowly. The synth line looped colder than liquid nitrogen, crackling with static.

“Believe it. This is DJ Avatar and that was
the Bey.
Coming at you from the wrong side of the mirror…” The boy hit a button on his handlebar: manic laughter drowning out the track and then it was back, sucking its way inside his brain and the brain of everybody else listening, which by now was most of the city.

“Enjoy…” The bass dropped out to be replaced by a double heartbeat and the sound of pure anger, expertly mixed.

“Let me tell you about Felix…”

31st July

A wave rolled over Raf’s shoulder, leaving droplets that
shone like opals in the noon sun, their salt still prickling his factor 40-coated skin.
Let me tell you about…

He couldn’t get Av’s mix out of his skull but had moved beyond minding.

Behind him, the moored VSV operated at half stealth, which gave it the radar profile of a small fishing boat. Raf didn’t even know where he was, only that the vessel was nestling between two rocky headlands off a low island that lacked any fresh water. And that didn’t matter: Zara had brought her own supply and, anyway, VSVs carried small desalination units at the stern.

The sea was wine-dark, the sky a blue so impossible that, even through shades, it looked as if some unseen hand had ditched the presets and started messing with both saturation and brightness. Umber-hued shrubs lined the lower reaches of a stunted hill, their gnarled roots clawed into the thin dirt that had collected between huge rocks—and Raf could smell the scent of lavender blowing towards him on a warm wind.

They were there because Zara had announced that going there would be a good idea. And, without being told, Raf got the feeling that she’d visited the island many times before, though with whom she didn’t say. All Raf knew about her island was that it was three hours from Iskandryia—three hours, that was, if one travelled in a boat that cut through waves the way light skewered darkness.

“Hey, look at me.”

Raf watched as Hani launched herself, head first, off the side of the boat to sink below the waves in a stream of bubbles. She was diving, if it counted as diving to sit on the very edge of the deck and bend forward so far that her arms almost touched the waves.

“Did you see?”

Raf nodded and trod water as Hani splashed her way towards him with clumsy strokes. “Got you,” she said, her arms coming up round his neck: so that Raf was suddenly carrying her slight weight. The child’s hair spread in rat’s tails across a face that was suddenly split by a knowing grin. “Are we running away?”

“Only for today.”

Hani nodded thoughtfully. “Better do some more dives, then.”

From the deck of the VSV, Zara smiled as the child unhooked her arms and paddled back towards the boat. Her father, now—he ran in the opposite direction from responsibility and called it work.

Watching Raf with Hani was like seeing storm clouds clear. Zara knew exactly what had burnt out the storm, because she’d orchestrated it. Well, sort of… It began when Raf was out, checking exactly what was happening at the madersa and she’d started going over all the men she’d known, which wasn’t many. Whatever his reasons, her father had little to do with his brother and so she’d never met her cousins on that side. And her mother was an only child, as if that wasn’t obvious.

Boyfriends: there’d been two in New York. She’d chucked one of them and one had chucked her, but both times it had been over the same thing. Speaking to her friends in student halls, Zara had taken to referring euphemistically to the reason as
cultural differences.

Both boys had been white, both Protestant, both uptight and angry but too repressed to discuss it, do anything about it, except glower or sulk. She saw the same repression in Raf, for all that he was meant to be half Berber. He could undoubtedly do both in-your-face or reserved—violence being the flip side of stepped-back—but a straight-out raise-your-voice hand-waving argument? Zara didn’t think so. Which was why, after he finally got back from talking to Mushin Bey the previous night, she hadn’t given him any option…

And for a while she hadn’t been sure she was right.

Sitting on the floor of the VSV, darkness falling over the Western Harbour outside, Raf had rubbed one hand tiredly across the back of his neck and asked the kind of question you ask when your anger has been coming out of every radio in every cab in the city. And when getting home means walking unnoticed and unknown past slum kids chanting your words in the street.

It was too late to stop Avatar’s mix burrowing worm-like into the city, because
InnerSense/Fight Bac
was racking up heavy rotation, roughly every fourth play. But Raf still wanted to know one thing:

“How the hell did he get it?”

Zara swept the hair out of her eyes and hugged Hani closer. The child was curled up into a little ball, her head on Zara’s knee and the rag dog clutched between sleeping hands.

“Own the streets,” said Zara, quoting a liberation theosophist currently serving twenty-five years solitary in Stambul, “and you’ve got the city… He does it from the back of a bike, you know. Doesn’t need to, that’s just the way it’s developed.”

“Who does?”

“Avatar. My brother…” Zara made it a point of principle never to add the
half.

“Your…?”

Zara nodded, “Yes,” she said. “Av. You met him on the tram. I gave him the sound file.”

“You what?”

Their argument went from there. And at the point when Hani scrambled off Zara’s lap to cower against the bulkhead, her thin legs tucked up to her chin and her eyes wide with fright, having everything out in the open no longer seemed such a good idea to Zara and the damage looked done.

Zara had just finished accusing Raf of being an arrogant, over-bred, emotionally retarded inadequate and Raf was explaining to Zara in over-simple words why it wasn’t his fault if she was some spoilt little rich bitch who’d got done for stripping off at an illegal club.

As for marrying her…

“Stop it.”
Hani’s voice was fierce, her chin jutting forward and her mouth set in a determined line. She was way too cross even to acknowledge the tears that rolled down her face.
“Stop it.”

The small cabin was loud with their sudden silence.

“I’m sorry,” Raf said quietly and he got up to leave the VSV.

“Don’t go far,” Hani ordered. “You’ll only get lost.”

Darkness he liked, and silence. Both of which he got, staring out over the shimmering black expanse of the Western Harbour. There had been drunken shouting from Maritime Station as a party of Soviet sailors were escorted back to a destroyer by police: and Customs boats were making great play of crisscrossing the water at high speed, their searchlights cutting across the waves. Only, the sailors had got safely back on board and the cutters had given up sweeping the waters on the dot of midnight and returned to base, leaving the way clear for small, unlit boats to sneak out of the harbour mouth.

“That’s the thing about night-time,” Zara said behind him. “It makes even something as ugly as Maritime Station look beautiful.” She put a chilled beer into his hand and Raf was glad he’d pretended not to hear the door open.

“You know,” said Raf, “I’ve probably got a head full of hardware I didn’t ask for and, yeah, I can see in the dark but I don’t think I’m over-bred, though I’ll agree the emotional stuff…”

By way of answer, Zara ripped the top off her beer. As apologies went it raised more questions than it answered, but it was still better than she expected.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not even a real bey,” said Raf. “I don’t have finely honed battle skills and I wasn’t working for the Seattle Consulate when it got bombed or even before that…”

She held out her beer and, after a second, Raf realized he was meant to take it. Then she waited, while he worked out he was meant to give Zara his unopened can in return. The beer felt melt-water cold and tasted clean and slightly sweet. So he concentrated on tasting it, not taking a second mouthful until he’d properly savoured the first.

“What were you doing in America?”

“I’ve been in prison,” Raf said simply. “Outside Seattle. I was there for a while.”

“Why?” Zara demanded.

“I was charged with murder.”

“Don’t tell me…”

“I didn’t do it.”

Zara felt her lips twist into something that was almost a smile. “But they arrested you anyway.”

Raf nodded. “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here. And there’s something else. Why are you…?”

“Why am I helping you? Let me see,” said Zara, counting off the points. “You jilt me publicly, you shoot the fat policeman, I’m not wearing any clothes when I’m arrested and you’re accused of murdering your aunt for money… I don’t know, you tell me.” She looked at him, then looked again when she realized he really
didn’t
understand.

“I’m tainted,” she said flatly. “No one will marry me. I probably don’t even have my old job any more. I need you to be innocent…”

“And you came out to tell me this?”

“No,” Zara shook her head. “I came to tell you that Hani wants to say something.”

What Hani wanted to tell him was that Aunt Nafisa had had a big argument on the phone months before Raf even arrived. And Hani knew who with because her aunt spent a lot of time calling the man
Your Excellency
and
General.

“So,” Zara kept her voice low. “What do you think the argument was about?”

Raf shrugged. They’d been talking about it all day, whenever they got a second to themselves. And the only idea he’d come up with was too ludicrous to share.

“Well,” said Zara, “tell me this. Do you think she was drunk?”

The VSV was on its way back from the island, steering itself and running every routine in its armoury. This time round, it was Zara who leant against Raf’s shoulder, while Hani slept on the bed opposite, a sarong pulled tight round her like a sheet.

Did he think his aunt drank? No, even though the child had seen her staggering round the house. And Raf was sure narcotics were out, but equally he didn’t believe it was suicide. Which brought him back to murder. And if the
Thiergarten
were left out of the equation, and Raf really didn’t believe she’d been assassinated on orders from the khedive’s advisers, then nobody seemed to have a motive, unless it was hothead students at the German School in Iskandryia, and Raf didn’t believe even they’d be that stupid.

General Koenig Pasha might be half Prussian but, from what Felix had said, the General tolerated
Thiergarten
activity and that was all. And the students at the German School were unpopular, as young men with no real cares and excess money usually are: they knew full well the debt they owed Koenig Pasha for their protection.

“Drunk?” Raf said. “I don’t know… I’m losing the thread.”

“Assuming there is one.”

In less than two hours’ time they were due to enter Isk’s western harbour by running parallel up the coast, sliding between the shore and a breakwater, using a route firmly fixed in the boat’s memory.

The VSV would take a route close to the rocky shore, running low in the water and silent, staying well away from the naval base at Ras el Tin. And yet the naval base would still see them on screen.

But it wouldn’t matter.

Because, as she’d already told Raf, the boat belonged to her father who had an understanding in place with the General himself. A dozen passenger liners a day might dock at Maritime Station and still the western harbour’s single biggest commercial activity was smuggling. Hashish, vodka, Lucky Strike, Nubian girls… It didn’t matter. Cargo passed in and out through Western Harbour and the General’s men took his ten per cent off the top of the lot. To simplify life, boat profiles were logged at Ras el Tin and somewhere in a subset of a subset of the Navy’s housekeeping routines was a constantly updated record of how many runs each boat made.

It kept everybody honest.

“Want to tell me about that hardware in your skull?” She asked Raf.

“No,” he shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so.”

Some days he wasn’t even sure the fox was real. Although the malfunctioning hardware was, obviously. And somewhere in the soft stuff he had filed away a perfect memory of promises from a genome sub-contractor in Baja California that went belly-up two years after he was born. Infrared sight, ultraviolet, seven colours, nictitating eyelids—the 8,000-line policy said plenty about effective night vision and very little about retinal intolerance to sunlight.

Originally humans possessed four colour-receptors, only they weren’t human then, or even mammal. The fox had once explained it all, sounding almost proud. Most primates now had three receptors only, which was still a receptor up on the two that early mammals originally had, being nocturnal. Raf had a guaranteed four, with his fourth in ultra-violet. Something he had in common with starlings, chameleons and goldfish.

Later clauses dealt with extra ribs to protect soft organs and small muscles that let him close his ears. Only now probably wasn’t a good time to mention that.

Idly, Raf kissed Zara’s hair and smiled when she gently pushed him away… If she really wanted him to stop she’d say so. Her forehead tasted of salt and so did her bruised lips when she finally raised them, her mouth opening until he could taste the olives and alcohol on her breath.