Arabesk (51 page)

Above the kitchen was the
qaa,
where important guests were greeted. This had a large marble floor and smaller indoor fountain. The haremlek was a suite of rooms above the
qaa
and Raf’s floor was at the top, above the haremlek.

The madersa was vast, old and badly in need of repair, but no other room was as large as Donna’s kitchen, which seemed to spread in all directions.

It had taken Raf a while to realize that Donna’s clattering wasn’t irritation at finding him cluttering up her space, which was so big a crowd couldn’t have cluttered it; she objected to his presence for different reasons. People like Hani and His Excellency were meant to eat upstairs, at a marble table in the elegant
qaa,
waited on by others.

“You’re not listening to me…” Hani said crossly.

“I’m sorry…” She was right. He wasn’t.

There wasn’t much else Raf could say. But Hani wanted more. Something dismissive of her concern, something adult. He could see that in her eyes, the wish for a fight so that she could stop being worried for him and go back to being angry.

“Look,” he said softly, “let it go, okay?”

By the time the noise of her falling chair had finished echoing round the kitchen, Hani was out of the room and racing up the outside steps to the
qaa
… Raf listened to her shoes slap the floor overhead, then heard Hani slam a hand against the button for the lift. Seconds later the madersa’s ancient Orvis creaked into action.

Raf put his head in his hands. When he looked up again Donna was sitting on the other side of the table and in front of him was a tiny cup of Turkish coffee. It was the old woman’s cure for everything.

“The child’s young, Your Excellency.”

Raf nodded.

“And she’s scared.”

“That I will send her away?”

Donna shook her head and discreetly rubbed her crucifix. “That you will die.” The old woman’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Since her aunt… She dreams all the time. That you die and she be left here alone.” Donna shrugged. “They would not let people like me look after Lady Hana. They would not let me live here…”

Only Donna got away with calling the child by her real name. Everyone else had to use Hani. Named for the boy the child resented not being.

“Go to her, Excellency,” said Donna, “and talk.”

“And say what?” His question sounded weak even to him.

The old woman shrugged. “That you will not be going away. That you don’t plan to die.” Her lips twisted into a sour smile at Raf’s expression.

“Well, does Your Excellency?”

Raf shook his head.

“No,” said Donna, crossing herself. “Somehow I didn’t think so.”

“Go away.” Hani didn’t bother looking up from her screen. On the floor beside her chair sat an untouched toy dog, still in its packaging. It was the most expensive model Raf had been able to afford.

“It smells in here,” said Raf.

She did look round at that.

“Old clothes,” he said, gesturing to a bundle on the floor. “Old clothes and misery…” Raf pulled back the inner shutter of a mashrabiya and autumn sunlight washed into Hani’s bedroom, through her balcony’s ornately carved screen.

“Now I can’t see my monitor.”

“You can use it later,” Raf said, “but first we need to talk.” He sat on the red-tiled floor, his spine hard against the edge of her metal bed. The springs were rusted and the mattress so old that horsehair poked through holes in its cover. Changing the thing was absolutely out of the question, apparently.

“Sit by me…”

Hani sighed and made a great show of turning off her machine, even though they both knew it would have gone to sleep at a simple voice command. Then, surprisingly, she did as he asked and parked herself next to Raf, her own back pressed into the side of the bed. Dust flecks danced in the afternoon sunlight in front of them. Their ersatz randomness actually the result of immutable laws of heat and motion.

“I saw a body yesterday morning.”

Hani grew still.

“It was at Zara’s house. A stranger…” Raf added hurriedly.

“You’ve seen bodies before,” Hani said.

He nodded, they both had. Aunts Nafisa and Jalila. Those deaths were one of the things that bound them together.

“When you were an assassin…”

“Hani!” They’d been through this before. “I was an attaché… Nothing more.”

“Attachés are spies. Spies kill people. Everyone knows that.”

Raf sighed.

“Who was he?” Hani asked.

“She,”
Raf corrected. “And we haven’t found out yet.” Obviously enough, he didn’t mention the mutilation, which was actually a
cross potent
according to the pathologist, who’d looked it up.

Toxicology showed heavy traces of an mdma clone in the victim’s blood and alcohol in her stomach. The girl had been alive and conscious from the start of the attack until near the end. And swabs taken from her oral, anal and vaginal mucosa indicated that she’d first been raped, then cut. So Raf now had a file to read on
crosses coupe,
which had apparently been the mutilation of choice during something called “the little war.” There was one bite mark, below her right breast, but that was faded and the bruise yellow. So either it happened before she arrived in Isk, it was the result of a casual holiday romance or her boyfriend had come with her but had yet to step forward.

Which, at least, would give Raf one sensible suspect. Provided the boyfriend could be shown to have nerves of steel and a reasonable grasp of anatomy.

“The trouble,” Raf told Hani, “is in realizing when facts aren’t related…”

He halted himself there, wondering whether to begin again and decided not to bother with the talking. With luck, sitting next to Hani would be enough, because when he was a child, the point at which adults started in on explanations was the moment he stopped listening.

“Everything is related,” said Hani. And glancing sideways, Raf realized her face was screwed up in thought. “That’s what Khartoum says…”

The kid was nine, whipcord thin, with the body of a child younger still and eyes old before their time. Lack of sleep, bad dreams and night sweats, he remembered them all well. Although, these days, if Raf worked at it, he could go for months without recalling them once.

“Maybe he’s right,” said Raf finally. “Maybe everything does connect.”

“You don’t know?” Hani looked interested.

“No.”

“I thought spies knew everything.”

“Not me.” Raf shook his head. “Me, I know nothing, except that I’m not going to send you away, I’m not going to leave you and nobody is going to kill me…”

“Aunts Jalila and Nafisa were killed…” She waited for Raf to nod, which he did. “But the reason’s a secret…”

Raf nodded again.

“Why?”

“Because…” Raf stopped. “Because that’s the way things work in Iskandryia.” He ignored the doubtful expression on her face. “What can I tell you? What the General says goes.”

“Koenig Pasha?” Hani looked suddenly relieved. “Not Zara’s idea? Not yours…”

Raf shook his head, his half smile a reflection of hers.

Hani nodded. “I was worried,” she said, “that it was Zara. If it’s Koenig Pasha who says we must lie, then that’s different…” Her shrug was almost comically adult. “Lying is his job.” For a second, she sounded almost exactly like her late unlamented Aunt Nafisa.

There were, it turned out, two entirely separate levels of morality in Hani’s world. One occupied by those, like him, her and Zara, who weren’t meant to lie, and another given over to those destined to massacre the truth.

Pushing himself to his feet, Raf wondered what would happen when the child finally realized that if he was a spy, then she’d got him filed under the wrong group.

“Where are you going?” Hani demanded.

“Out,” said Raf.

“The murder?”

Raf shook his head. “Something else…”

Hani regarded him carefully. “I thought you were going to leave finding Avatar to someone called Eduardo?”

“Hani!”

“So I listened,” said the child. “Anyway…you need me to help with the search.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes you do,” said Hani.

“There is no way,” said Raf, his voice firm, “that you’re coming with me.”

“Who wants to come with you?” Hani said dismissively. Scrambling to her feet, she waved one hand in front of her screen and watched it blink back to life. A pass of her thumb over a floating track ball and the active window closed, revealing an aerial shot of the city.

“He’s locked in a cellar,” said Hani, voice casual. “There’s stale water outside.”

“What kind of stale water?”

“So you
do
want my help?”

Raf sighed.

“Ali Bey ordered the Mahmoudiya Canal built in 1817,” Hani said carefully. “On the far side, a green tram comes towards the window, then turns left…”

“Anything else?” Raf didn’t know what else to say.

Hani nodded. “Turbini. No.” She stopped, correcting herself. “Not turbini. Freight trains, long ones that rattle, somewhere behind the room. Which means he’s…” She touched the picture, pulling up a tight lattice of streets, where tramlines ran south along Rue Amoud, before turning into Avenue Mahmoudiya. At the bottom of the picture, on the other side of the canal, a fat ribbon of track ran towards a rail yard. “Somewhere round here.”

“And you know this how?”

Hani nodded to a toy tortoise gathering dust in one corner of her bedroom. It was old, with overrounded edges and what proved to be fractal patterns playing constantly across its shell, like swirling clouds. Someone had applied a sticker of a cartoon rabbit, then tried to peel it off sometime later, leaving a sticky patch and half a smug, bucktoothed face.

The tortoise was so ancient that it connected by cable to the wall feed, with another cable run round the edge of Hani’s room to her screen.

“I used Herbert,” said Hani.

It was possible… In theory, CCTV cameras covered all the main streets in the city. Trams, trains, even licensed taxis carried vidcams by law. Face recognition software was notoriously flawed, but could probably just about pick a dreadlocked DJ with facial piercings from the crowd of suits or jellaba-clad market traders.

“Really?”

Hani turned away, killing her terminal with a snap of her fingers.

Conversation over.

“Hani.” Raf dropped to a crouch in front of the small girl, and she let him take her pointed chin in his hands and turn her face back, so they stared straight into each other’s eyes. Dark brown and palest blue. Strange cousins.

“I need to know, honey. Please?”
Honey
was what Zara had taken to calling Hani, before Zara and Raf’s quarrel meant Hani stopped seeing the older girl.

“Not fair,” said Hani, her voice suddenly cross. She shook free her head. “Do I ask you about the fox? No, I don’t. Ever…” The child was unmistakably upset.

“Sorry,” said Raf, backing away. It looked like an impasse, pure and simple, except that nothing would ever be pure in Hani’s life, or simple. And they both knew she’d already answered him, in her own way. What Hani saw when she looked inside her head was not what he saw, obviously enough, but it was not what anyone else would expect to see either.

With one final apology, Raf left Hani to her tight and angry silence.

9th October

Eduardo was worried about his Vespa. It was genuine
Italian and had belonged to his uncle. The torn seat had only just been replaced with a new one made from red leather, while the old two-stroke petrol motor had been swapped for a Sterling unit that ran on pretty much anything. Mostly, Eduardo had been feeding his Vespa with the cheapest grade of
jaz,
a brandy so rough that even Frisco refused to drink it, but the unit seemed happy to work with anything vaguely flammable.

He’d left his bike near the canal, watched over by an urchin in a blue jellaba who squinted badly and carried a stick too small to frighten away anyone. Five lila, the boy had asked.
Five.
Grandly Eduardo had offered him ten to keep an extraspecial watch and the small boy’s smile had been vulpine, as if seeing straight through Eduardo’s generosity.

This was the first time that Eduardo had visited a proper brothel and it wasn’t nearly as grand as he’d been hoping. For a start, the huge entrance hall tickled his nose with dust and carpet cleaner, rather than with rose petals or expensive Parisian perfume. There were no chandeliers, few paintings and the Iskandryian rugs were old but not valuable. Though there were looking glasses, great big gilt ones on the walls, but these just showed Eduardo back to himself, a small man in a too-big leather coat.

At least the small cubicles above the bus station were easy to reach. Even if the beds were dirty and bare. Maison 52, Pascal Coste, was so out of Eduardo’s way that he’d got lost just getting there.

“Excellency.” The voice came from a narrow doorway, one Eduardo had dismissed as belonging to a cupboard. In it stood a blonde woman with a face so white she could have walked out of one of those Japanese pantomimes. Her mouth was a slash of Chanel, red as a wound. Behind her shoulder bobbed other heads, fair-haired and fair-skinned and way, way younger.

“Our girls, Excellency.”

He wasn’t an
excellency
and it seemed cruel to Eduardo to keep calling him one. True he wasn’t exactly a
felaheen,
but neither was he rich or well connected. No one called on him for patronage. He was just some
pied noir
who’d recently found work and been told by the man to come to 52 Rue Pascal Coste.

“I’m due to meet…”

“All in good time, Excellency.” The old woman swayed into the room, her feet compressed into tight pumps and her body wrapped in a fringed cocktail dress nearly as old as she was. A matching shawl hid most of the crêpe lines that marked her shoulders, chest and neck. “First you need to choose one of our delightful girls…”

They trooped silently into the hall. A few looked at him with vague curiosity but most just stared at the carpets or examined their nails. There were ten in total. Blonde or brunette. Two of his age and five somewhat younger. The last three were almost children and the prettiest had a dark frown on her face and a bruise across one soft cheek that no amount of makeup could hide.