Arabesk (36 page)

Putting aside the wallet, Raf sorted quickly through the remaining objects. A Lotus organizer, a penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle, a pepper spray and a little suede case for holding business cards. Inside were three cards of her own—
Lady Jalila, deputy head, Cross & Crescent—
an official laminate for entering the Precinct, one of the Minister’s own cards, tattered at the corners, and an even more tattered card belonging to Felix.

And then Raf got the information he’d come for, without even having to ask. The last card in the holder advertised an alternative-heath clinic and five dates were scrawled on the back, four of them crossed through, with one due the following week.

Raf slid the card into his pocket, just managing to scoop the rest of the contents back into Lady Jalila’s bag and get the bag back on the floor before the door opened.

“How thoughtless,” Lady Jalila said. “Anna’s forgotten to bring you coffee.”

“You told her to take the afternoon off,” said Raf.

“Did I?” Lady Jalila sounded puzzled. She wore black slacks and a white sweat shirt that might have suited a teenager if they were drunk, over-developed and vacant. “How odd… So what was it you wanted to ask me about Nafisa?”

There were a dozen places he could start. Beginning with the fact that his aunt had apparently been refilling her personal account with money from a charity of which the woman opposite was now acting head.

The first sum taken had been repaid in full, with interest. The second sum had just been repaid. Half of the next sum was still outstanding and Raf doubted that even Nafisa had been able to convince herself that the following sums were loans only…

“Well?” Jalila asked. “What was your question?”

No one Raf recognized stared out of her eyes. The wanton who’d sat opposite him with open knees had gone to be replaced by a prim but slightly swaying woman who smelled of soap, mouthwash and toothpaste.

“Probably not worth troubling you,” said Raf. “But I’m just tying up odds and ends and I wondered if you knew of a Madame Sosostris?”

“No. I’m sorry.” Lady Jalila shook her head, her blonde curls still damp but already falling perfectly around a face innocent as an angel’s. “That rings no bells at all.”

Raf shrugged. “Worth a try,” he said. Then he told her he knew exactly who had killed his aunt and asked her to fix him a meeting with her husband. Somewhere neutral. When he let himself out, she was still reciting digits to her wall phone.

1st August

“I’m armed,” said Hani. “And I’ll fire.”

In trembling hands, the child held a vast pistol with rubber handle and fat red barrel. The kind used to launch distress flares. Pulling the trigger would be enough to toss her backwards across the cabin, if not break both wrists. That it would leave a large hole in whoever was on the other side of the door was a given.

The door to the VSV stopped opening.

“Hani,” said Zara, her shock at meeting the khedive suddenly forgotten. “It’s me…”

The door started opening again and Zara put her head through the gap, her glance taking in the flare pistol and the tears streaming down Hani’s face. “Hani, put that down, okay?”

The child shook her head. “Step inside, slowly.” It sounded like something Hani had heard while playing
Killer Kop IV.

Zara stepped forward, her hands held up where Hani could see them.

“Right inside,” said Hani. “Then shut the door.” She was watching not the woman who’d just entered but the space behind her.

“You’re alone.” Hani’s words were pitched somewhere between statement and question. Only Zara didn’t need to reply because Hani was her own answer. Slumping to the floor, Hani pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms tight round them, the flare gun still held in one hand.

Whatever the fear was, it had the child rocking backwards and forwards, eyes screwed shut.

“Honey.” Zara kneeled in front of the girl. “What’s wrong?”

One eye opened. “It’s been h-h-hours,” Hani said furiously. “I thought you were d-dead.” She stopped rocking and somehow her absolute stillness was almost worse. “Lady Jalila called me…”

“Here?”

“Called Ali-Din.” She nodded to the rag dog thrown in one corner. “The Germans are coming to kill me. You’re to take me straight to her house…”

Which Germans…?

“No one’s trying to kill you,” Zara said firmly. “She’s got it wrong.”

The flare gun wasn’t even loaded, Zara discovered when she finally worked out how to flip down its barrel. The sobbing child had discovered the device in a watertight cupboard set into a bulkhead. What she hadn’t found were any flares. But then, maybe there weren’t any, because Zara couldn’t find them either.

“We’d better leave,” announced Zara, after she’d wiped the pistol with a rag and put it back in the cupboard, pushing the door so that it popped shut. Quite where they were going was another matter. She only knew it wasn’t anywhere near Lady Jalila’s house.

1st August

No signal. No up-link. Nothing.

Raf should have started getting worried when he noticed his Omega had stopped receiving, he realized afterwards. But at the time he figured it was just the usual crap connection.

So he kept heading north towards the address on the card he carried deep in his pocket, cutting through an area north-west of Place Orabi where child brothels used to be, back in the days Constantine Cavafy wrote his poems and Isk was where every would-be aesthete from New York, Berlin and London gathered to savour the exotic. Which usually translated into a taste for young Arab boys, rot-gut arak and opium.

Now the district was filled with hip boutiques, where the swipe of a credit card and the purchase tax-free of this season’s Nikes gave jet-trash travellers a similar, more legal thrill.

Half hoping to get a working connection, Raf made his way up a side street towards the Corniche, passing an ancient mosque and a school, coming out at the fish market where picturesque boats were moored off shore to bobbing floats of blown glass. His phone functioned no better there than it had before.

The boats were mostly clinker-built and wooden, brightly coated in blood reds and deep blues, with painted eyes that stared forward. It didn’t matter that some had satellite navigation and a few used echo-location to hunt bonito and shark: every family knew that the boats needed to be able to see their way home when the fishing was done.

It made sense to Raf who, by then, was standing with his back to the market, glancing between the card in his hand and a bank of buzzers on a wall. What was Tiriganaq if not his version of those eyes?

No one had answered when he pressed the right button, so he punched five or six wrong ones at random, ignoring the increasingly irritated voices demanding to know what he wanted until eventually someone hit enter, just as Raf knew they would, because someone always did.

He took the back stairs up to the fourth floor because, once again, most people always used the lift. Then he took the lift down a flight to the third floor and knocked on an unmarked cream door.

When no one answered that either, Raf whipped a new screwdriver out of its packaging and positioned it over the point where a strip of wooden frame obscured a Yale lock. One hit with the heel of his hand and the lock was sprung. Which told him two things. Not everything taught at Remand University was bullshit, and Madame Sosostris was nearby. Out for a coffee, maybe, or collecting laundry—whatever… People gone for longer usually remembered to double-lock their front doors.

A quick glance inside revealed a reception room that could have been for a brothel, a therapist or a chiropractor’s. Copies of glossy magazines, a handful of leaflets, mainly about acupuncture. A blank screen on one wall, two crystals dangling on thongs from its bottom corners. Wicker armchairs that looked newish but were already well used.

Then a treatment room, which looked like a coprophiliac’s paradise. Raf headed for a filing cabinet, ignoring the four polythene barrels atop metal scaffolding, with gravity tubes that fed down to end in surgical-steel twist joints, just as he ignored a kidney dish—next to a couch—that held various sizes of chrome speculums, each one double-tubed so water could feed one way and bodily waste the other. He needed more proof than a business card that Lady Jalila had been lying.

Raf found what he wanted in a bottom drawer, marked
dead accounts;
though he didn’t think that was meant to be a joke, sardonic or otherwise. Lady Nafisa had been a client for ten years and there was a long and obsessively regular list of appointments to prove it, written by the same hand using a wide variety of different pens. There was a pattern, Raf realized, and an easy one to break. The pen used to record payment was inevitably the same pen used to make a note in the diary of the next appointment.

But the note declaring the file dead and the line scrawled through Nafisa’s records were in the same ink as the last record of payment, dated the morning she died. Madame Sosostris had known Nafisa wouldn’t be coming back.

And Raf didn’t know if it really surprised him or not, but the person who’d originally introduced his aunt to the clinic was the person who said she’d never even heard of Madame Sosostris.

So all he needed to find was—

“Looking for something?”

The question came from behind him and the voice was confident. Which was probably reasonable, given the automatic in the blond man’s hand. Though maybe the gun-toting woman at the man’s shoulder was also a factor. Both were tall and fair and the last time Raf had noticed either of them they’d been standing by the harbour wall, studying a fold-out map headed
Ägypten—Kairo & Alexandria.
Something in their smiles told Raf they’d always known exactly where they were heading. And, more to the point, where he was headed as well.

Dancers, Hu San would have called them. Or rather, a dancer and a ballerina.

The woman kicked the door shut with her heel. She wore a straw Panama tipped over one eye and a pale scarf tucked into her silk blouse. They shared the same wiry build, the same almost white hair cropped short at the sides and left to flop forward over pale blue eyes…

In fact, they looked just like him. Give or take the slightly longer hair and his beard.

“Can I help you?” Raf asked politely.

Neither answered. Neither moved. But it didn’t matter, because the fox was awake.
Disarm yourself, disarm your enemy,
said a tired voice in his head. It sounded cracker-barrel, but Raf recognized it as a koan from the old rasta he’d trained with while on remand.

Raf put up his hands and watched both dancer and ballerina suddenly relax.

“Yeah,” said the man, coming closer. “We were told you’d be sensible.” He sounded disappointed.

“That’s me,” said Raf, stepping forward to sweep aside the man’s automatic with his left hand, while swinging in with his right elbow, catching him across the throat.

Sometimes you’ve just got to dance.

Raf uncoiled, right elbow returning to spread the man’s nose sideways across his once-handsome face. Balance Raf took out with a simultaneous clap to both sides of the man’s head, rupturing the eardrums. He was spared having to thumb the dancer’s eyes because the man was already headed floorwards, Raf following hard behind.

As they landed, Raf put one elbow through the dancer’s rib cage, driving a fat splinter of bone deep into a suddenly very shocked heart. The stink of open bowels filled the room but by then Raf had rolled sideways across the carpet, the dancer’s automatic already in his hand, coming to rest beside a filing cabinet. Either it would give him cover or fill him with shrapnel, depending on what loads the ballerina carried in her gun. It gave him cover, though the only thing to be said for the sudden stench of cordite was that it swamped the smell that came from the body between them.

“Hey.” Raf’s voice sounded better than he’d expected, given someone was using him for target practice. “You want to tell me what this is about?”

He wasn’t fussed about giving his position away. She already knew exactly where he was, she just couldn’t reach him. “Well?” Raf said.

Her answer was another slug, slammed into the filing cabinet. In at the front but not, thank God, out at the side. Her big problem was her slugs were small calibre, their load almost subsonic. She’d come carrying brass designed to fire at close range, then rattle round inside Raf’s skull magimixing.

“You can put that gun down or I can kill you,” said Raf. It was, he realized, probably the wrong time to start enjoying himself; but knowing that didn’t change a thing. His thoughts felt as clear as they’d ever been. And for the first time in years, he wasn’t standing on the outside watching himself.

“Make your choice” said Raf, noisily jacking back the slide on his newly borrowed automatic. “It means nothing to me.”

A slug fired into the filing cabinet gave Raf his answer.

Shaking dust from his short hair, Raf took a look around him. The ballerina had a door behind her to give an exit, if that was what she needed: this he already knew. He had a wall, a filing cabinet and a blind corner without door or window. Not good at all.

On the other hand… Raf smiled. “I hope they’re paying you well,” he said, doing his best to sound genuinely concerned. “And I hope you’ve got insurance. Because the hospitals round here are likely to slice you up for body parts if you look like you can’t meet their bill…”

He paused to let the silence build, thinking himself inside her head until he finally, briefly became her. “You’ve still got a chance,” he said. “Which was more than your friend ever had.”

The answering shot that Raf expected didn’t come. And it didn’t sound like the ballerina was changing position or anything, because he could hear silence, devoid of even the faintest tread of feet moving carefully over a carpet.

The woman was listening to him, which was her first mistake—probably the only mistake Raf needed. “Look,” said Raf. “You’ve been set up.” He paused again, as if hit by a sudden thought. “You got a mobile there?”