Arabesk (40 page)

“Of course I killed her,” said Lady Jalila. “There was no choice.”

Only the child wasn’t talking about the blonde German, Zara realized. Or about Madame Sosostris. And everything fell into place as if the answer had always been right there, just waiting for Zara.

Cold.

Staggers.

Hallucinations.

“The pen was a side issue,” Zara said without thinking. “Lady Nafisa died from poisoning.” And she suddenly knew exactly how the woman standing in front of her had done it. Except that by then Lady Jalila was crouching beside the dead herbalist, taking back her own gun.

The next bullet she fired took Ali-Din through the head.

1st August

Always count the guns.

Crouching by the window, company to fat-toed geckos that had grown used to his stillness, Raf whispered it again—just in case he forgot. Counting the guns had been rule one, according to Hu San; and Raf had made a special point of remembering the things Hu San told him.

The automatic would belong to the ballerina, only she was dead. Raf had heard that happen. Lady Jalila had the revolver, subsonic slugs but unsilenced barrel, because silencing a revolver was a contradiction in terms. From an empty plastic coke bottle taped to the muzzle to the most expensive hand-turned tungsten mutetube, nothing actually worked. Some of the shock wave always forced its way between cylinder and chassis.

If you needed to mute a revolver then the answer was to self-load the brass and use less charge, which was what she’d done. Whether or not in imitation of
Thiergarten
dogma, Raf didn’t know. But, either way, just knowing how to do it made her a professional in his eyes.

The ex-ballerina had a gun, so did Jalila and so did he… Three in total, if he didn’t count the one he’d lifted from the dead dancer. Which made it four functioning weapons. Quite how knowing that helped him Raf had forgotten.

“Enough already…”

Old words but true ones. Bats echo-located around him through the warm night air, taking moths in mid-flight, each curving strike almost surgical in its precision. Their echo bounced off shutters, refracted from high walls or vanished through open windows to return milliseconds later. Cold and mysterious, like some distant music of the spheres.

There was a tom cat lurking in the dirt of the alley floor far below, its heavy shoulders hunched and thick muscles locked in anticipation as it walked, oblivious, round Raf’s discarded jellaba and shades, tracking whatever vermin hid behind the rubble. If the cat was dimly aware of the spiralling almost-mice, it didn’t allow them to put it off the prey within reach.

Yet another city within a city, world within world. A metropolis of wild dogs and feral cats, rats breeding beneath grain silos and mice infesting the cotton bales that waited to be loaded into containers along the dock. Spiders, scorpions, and millipedes fat as callused thumbs, safe from the frail, fly-hunting geckos that haunted the twilight edge of street lights.

Raf twisted his head to one side, easing an ache in his neck. Just holding himself secure in that gap between walls took effort. And if he waited much longer he’d have no strength for what must happen next.

Dead boy…
It was an odd nickname for a man to give a child. He remembered the man well, with his faltering monitors and flat-lining neurofeedback machines. Remembering never had been Raf’s problem. His first identity number, its position over a battered metal hook that took his school coat, the exact marble pattern of tiles along a hospital corridor—he knew them all. Far better than he knew himself, because Raf had been afraid there was no self.

We are the hollow men…
Maybe now, but not back times… Back then he was just a hollow
child,
not English/not American, not rich/not poor, not wanted except for his logic skills. He could easily have passed that test. But he thought that if he failed they’d let him go home.

Live with it,
as the fox would have said.

The silver rain was finished, almost twenty years before.

While Hani was in there. Zara, too.

And he was out here.

And they both undoubtedly believed he was dead and some days he still was. Some days it surprised him he even had a shadow or that when he stared in the mirror there was a reflection waiting to scowl back. But those days got fewer.

And the fear was gone, burned out. The fox dying too. He was going to have to make his own decisions. And this was the first of them…

Grabbing the rusty metal bar that had once supported a pulley, Raf kicked off from the spice house wall and let gravity swing him through the open window towards which he’d been climbing.

Things to do, people to become.

Hani was sure she saw a smoke-grey animal leap into the room, becoming Raf as it hit the ground and rolled. When he came upright, Raf’s gun was already cocked, its muzzle pointed straight at Lady Jalila’s stomach. What Raf didn’t do was pull the trigger.

“You.”

He nodded.

“You’re…”

“Dead,” added Hani and Raf nodded, watching the revolver pointed at his chest. Small, elegant, with pearl handles and an over-fussy blue finish that definitely didn’t match the dark purple nails of the hand holding it.

Lady Jalila smiled. Her full lips twisting prettily.

“Darling,” she said. “You kill me, I kill you… Such a waste, don’t you think?” Lady Jalila meant it, too, Raf realized. Her greeting was real. In some warped way she really
was
pleased to see a man who only that morning she’d arranged to have killed.

“You murdered Felix,” said Raf.

Lady Jalila shook her head. “Murder has to be intentional. That was an accident.”

“And you expected to get away with it?”

“Oh,” said Lady Jalila, “I already have… And I’ll get away with this too. As will you. You and me, we’re different.” Her pale blue eyes swept the room, taking in the dead ballerina and herbalist, then Zara. “Whereas people like her…”

“What about people like me?” Zara demanded.

“Disposable.” Lady Jalila shrugged elegantly. “What on earth made you think you deserved a pashazade?”

“Who said I wanted one?”

Lady Jalila ignored that. “You know what you lack?” Lady Jalila said as the girl turned away. “Breeding… That’s why people like you never amount to anything. Ashraf, however… Who knows? With my help he could be the next Chief of Detectives.”

Looking deep into Jalila’s pale eyes, Raf finally recognised the truth. She was barking, completely off the Richter scale. Dysfunctional, deluded, sociopathic… Exactly the kind of ally someone like him might need to reach the top of the pile.

“Jalila.” He nodded discreetly towards the far end of the mezzanine, where light from the single bulb barely reached.

“Tell me how I could get Felix’s old job,” Raf said quietly when they got there. “And then tell me what it’s going to cost.” Both of them still held their guns, only now the muzzles pointed at the floor.

“The cost?” In her head, Lady Jalila divided the cost of a box of bullets, deducted the ten per cent discount she got at government shops and divided the remainder of it by fifty. “In cash terms, about thirty-five cents…” Her tongue dipped out to lick her bottom lip, its tip moistening already glossy lipstick. “The
how
should be obvious.” She glanced towards his gun.

“Kill Zara?”

“Too easy,” said Lady Jalila. “I’ll do that myself.”

The floor far below was in darkness. Hollow. Empty. She saw nothing and he saw the same. But with two more colours and in sharper focus. “Why just Chief of Detectives?” Raf said. “Why not Minister for Police?”

“What about my husband?”

“Accidents happen,” said Raf. “Ask Felix.”

“You’d really kill Mushin if I asked?” For a moment Lady Jalila sounded almost interested.

“Why not?” Raf’s voice was blunt. “He’s not that rich and I doubt he’s much use in bed. What have you got to lose?”

Lady Jalila roared.

“Try me,” suggested Raf, seriously.

“Maybe I will,” said Lady Jalila laughing. “Once you’ve met my reserve.”

“No problem.” Raf broke open his revolver as if checking the load. Blued, lightweight and virtually indestructible, the Taurus was a beautiful piece of work. It was also so much useless ceramic and tungsten with its cylinder flipped out to the side like that. Now was the time for her to shoot him if she wanted.

Lady Jalila just looked amused. “When did you know?”

About the pen being Jalila’s inability to resist an artistic flourish?
“Right from the start,” said Raf. He lied. It wasn’t until the night on the VSV he’d realized his aunt had been poisoned first, then stabbed later. Two different methods, two different places, same person. And as for Jalila being responsible… Originally he’d been sure it was the General.

“And you know the really ironic touch?” Lady Jalila’s eyes sparkled.

He didn’t.

“Nas was mean as sin, but she still paid good money for that colonic… Of course,” said Lady Jalila, as she reached out with one finger to brush the back of Raf’s hand. “In the end she left me no choice. And she would keep sleeping with my husband.”

“
That
was your reason,” said Raf.
“Jealousy?”

“No.” When Lady Jalila shook her head, burnished curls brushed her shoulders and framed an angel’s face. “But it didn’t help.”

She stretched lazily, her silk shirt pulling tight. Hani and were Zara invisible to her, Raf realized. All her artfulness was reserved for him.

“Why, then?” Raf prompted.

“The Autumn Ball. No one’s meant to hold the chair at the C&C for more than two terms. Nafisa had five and wanted six. It was my turn but she wouldn’t resign…” Lady Jalila sighed, then brightened. “You really must come. I promise you, this year will be the best ever. Everyone will be there.”

Of course Nafisa wouldn’t resign. She couldn’t, Raf realized. Not without admitting she’d plundered the accounts.

But what Jalila wanted, she was given. And if she wasn’t given it, she took it. He’d known someone else like that: his mother. Raf flicked the cylinder shut on his gun, hearing it click into place.

“And the price I have to pay?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Lady Jalila. “You know it already.”

So he did. Hani.

“On the count of three,” said Lady Jalila. “Okay?” Tightening her grip on the handle, she turned lazily to face Zara, trigger finger whitening at the knuckle.
One, two…

She made it to the start of
three
before Raf thumbed back the hammer on his own revolver, swung round and watched Lady Jalila’s baby-blues explode with shock. Very slowly, the woman tripped backwards over one kitten heel, and met the rail that might have saved her if Raf hadn’t reached down to scoop both feet out from under her.

Time expanded, so that every action took longer than it should have done, including the fall. If she wasn’t dead when she went over the rail, the wet thud as she hit concrete confirmed that she was once she reached the ground.

Raf stared briefly down at the smashed body, then back at the child who squatted by a broken rag dog and held the dead ballerina’s smoking gun in her hands. She’d understood every nuance of the conversation. Which had been a risk Raf had to take.

“You missed,” Raf told her fiercely. “Okay?”

Hani weighed next to nothing when he reached her. A bundle of sinew and bone. Terror holding her body so rigid that her arms and legs practically vibrated with fear.

“You missed,” Raf said more softly, stroking the back of her hair. “I didn’t. The police will tell you the same…” He kept his words simple, hoping that repetition would be enough.

“Do you understand? You missed…”

Disbelief slowly left the child’s eyes and then vanished completely, replaced by tears as her sticklike arms snaked up to superglue themselves round his neck, almost choking him.

Later, when Hani’s sobbing had stopped, Raf gently unpeeled her arms and sat himself back against the end wall, his spine pressed hard against rough brick.

Life felt real. This was who he was. He was Ashraf Bey, guardian to Hani al-Mansur and friend of… Raf looked across to the crude window where Zara stood staring at the wall opposite or half watching bats flitter over the rooftops without really seeing them. Well, maybe “friend” was the wrong word.

“You should talk to her,” whispered Hani from where she sat next to him, knees drawn up, back also pressed to the wall. At her feet was what was left of Ali-Din. Scraps of rag, smashed memory, a cracked lens, fragments of ubiquitous phenolic circuit board… All that remained of the only real proof that Lady Jalila had stabbed Nafisa.

“Zara?”

When the girl stayed silent, Raf sighed and slowly pushed himself up off the boards. It was evident that she heard him coming from the way her shoulders stiffened at his approach. “I thought you were dead,” Zara said. “And then, when you finally turned up, I thought
I
was dead. I really believed you intended to let her kill me…”

Underneath the overwhelming smell of past fear was the residue of some cologne, oxidized and turned sour from sweat. But then, God alone knew how
he
stank—or looked, for that matter.

“So did I,” said Raf.

Zara glanced round at that and their eyes locked, her own dark with
felaheen
DNA, his chilly and pale as any dawn. He couldn’t help it: that was the colour his pre-natal contract had specified.

“Only for a second, towards the end.” Raf shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture as old as humanity. “Sometimes, believing is the only way to play a part.”

“And I’m meant to accept that?”

“Yeah,” said Raf. “If I can I don’t see why you can’t.”

“So what happens now?” Zara’s voice made it clear she reserved the right to disagree, whatever his answer.

“We tell the truth.”

“We
what
…?”

“We tell the truth,” said Hani sadly. “It’s the one thing nobody can stand.”

Hani’s spoon froze in mid-air. “Zara would like this…”