Arabesk (52 page)

All except the youngest were bare-breasted, two of them completely naked, the rest wearing thin pants or white petticoats, mostly with tight elastic that cut into their middles. The youngest was dressed in a white nightgown with Maltese lace round the neck. Eduardo could recognize the stitching—his mother had worked in a sweatshop for most of his childhood. And when she wasn’t at the machines, she sewed at home at a window until the light faded.

The young one in the nightdress glanced up, scowled at Eduardo and Eduardo quickly looked away. Straight into the resigned face of a brunette.

“That one,” said Eduardo and the chosen woman looked surprised at his choice. She was not quite the oldest, with heavy hips, small breasts and full derrière. A half-smoked Ziganov hung from between her fingers, its gold band stained pink from the lipstick she used. English, Eduardo decided, that was how she looked…

“I’m Rose,” said the woman.

Eduardo gave his card to the waiting Madame without being asked. The gold Amex was only to be used in emergencies or when so ordered by the man, like now.

He signed with a flourish, not bothering to look at the amount.

“Excellency.” There was new respect in the old woman’s voice; and for the first time since she’d started using the honorific, it sounded like she might mean it.

Taking back his card, Eduardo smiled and started up the wide stairs. Then stopped to indicate that his choice should go first. He wanted to look at Rose’s buttocks as she walked. She climbed slowly, apparently only too aware of his gaze. And at the top she paused, as if trying to remember which chamber the Madame had told her to use.

“This one,” she said, opening a battered door.

“Eduardo,” said a voice Eduardo recognized. It was the man, dressed in black and wearing shades even though the chamber was shuttered against the evening light. Behind him sat a short-haired girl in a white shift, her breasts full enough to be obvious beneath the cloth and tipped with nipples that showed like shadows.

“Boss.” Eduardo bowed, feeling stupid. Nothing about the man suggested he wanted Eduardo to shake hands, but bowing still didn’t feel quite right.

“Come in and lock the door behind you,” ordered the man. He said something in a language Eduardo didn’t understand and Rose went to sit quietly on a large
bateau lit
beside the other woman.

“You made it,” said Raf.

Eduardo looked puzzled. Of course he’d made it. 52 Pascal Coste was where the man had told him to come.

“And you bought the things I asked for?”

Eduardo nodded and pulled a heavy package from under his coat. For extra safety he’d tied it tight with string, which suddenly seemed unwilling to untie.

“Later,” said Raf. “Put it down there for now.” The chest of drawers he indicated was cracked on one side and scratched across the top. “No, even better, put it in a drawer.”

Eduardo did what he was told.

The chamber was the largest in the brothel by far, with two leather divans and a big
bateau lit
filling most of its space. Most of the
maison
’s other rooms featured narrow single beds to discourage lingering. It had taken Raf nearly forty-five minutes of trawling the datacore at Police HQ before he finally found a brothel within easy distance of the corner of Mahmoudiya and Rue Amoud el-Sawari. Hani could undoubtedly have done it in a fraction of the time, but Raf just hadn’t felt right asking her.

This room had been the choice of visiting couples, back in the days before the General did his deal with the Mufti and the
morales
suddenly became a problem. It was somewhere wives could buy their jaded husbands a whore or two for their birthday, to do things that didn’t get done at home. Most of the visiting women just watched, a few joined in. All were married, rich and decently connected. Respectable members of the kind of families who donated funds regularly to the police.

The
accord
had changed all that.

For the first time in a hundred years girls from poor families returned to wearing the
hijab,
while Iskandryia’s
mesdames
made do with headscarves and dark glasses, altogether more elegant and not remotely to the Mufti’s liking. The property laws were revised to exclude female heirs, driving alone after dark became a criminal offence for women, and to go out with bare arms was to invite some fanatic to scratch his disapproval into your skin with a metal comb…

Raf had heard Zara on the subject. She was old enough to remember the city before it started to change. Felix too, the old Chief of Detectives, had been less than impressed with the General’s decision to sign an
accord
.

All trades had been hit, brothels included. Not that they actually closed. The brothels of Iskandryia were both an institution and tourist attraction (which was altogether more important). Along the Corniche several could be found in the grander houses, where chambers were by the night, cash was forbidden and anything less than a gold card strongly discouraged.

Of course, visiting tourists were billed variously for cultural excursions, theatre groups or an art exhibition. That way everybody was kept happy, from the punters to the card companies and the brothels. Especially the brothels, because embarrassed punters had a habit of getting home, then denying they’d ever visited the place that billed them and that made the card companies very unhappy.

This
maison
was different, though… Somewhere for Iskandryia’s own residents. It paid its local taxes, plus a little extra to Police HQ and in return found itself on the police database as an information source, which gave it some protection should the
morales
decide to call. The fat man had approved identical deals with brothels all across the city.

Raf and Eduardo were lovers, at least they were according to the Madame downstairs. That was how she’d explained Raf’s request for a double chamber to her girls. Officially, of course, homosexuality didn’t exist in Ottoman North Africa. In practice, it was almost universal, if staunchly illegal: a society that placed a premium on female virginity, made premarital sex a killing matter and then made it too expensive for most men to get married before their midtwenties was bound to need an easy acceptance of the inevitable, whatever the law said. And that was quite apart from the one in ten men born with little physical interest in women.

“What do we do now?” Eduardo asked.

“We fill the time,” said Raf. “Until it gets dark.” Walking over to the window, he examined the chamber’s mashrabiya, which looked out over the canal, taking in its two sets of shutters. One set closed it off from the street directly below, the other closed off the actual balcony from the room in which he stood.

“You,” said Raf, pointing to the girl he’d selected at random when he first arrived. “What did you say your name was?” She didn’t, or he’d have remembered it.

“Justine.” It was meant to sound French, Raf guessed. From her skin and the black roots to her short hair, he’d have said
moriscos,
but he’d been in Isk less than four months and he wasn’t Felix. His predecessor had been famed for his ability to read origins at a single glance.

“Can you get me a drink?”

She looked doubtful. “What would Your Excellency like?”

“Wine,” said Raf, “white and chilled, something dry.”

Justine looked more doubtful still.

“Anything you can find,” Raf said and she fumbled at the lock, then scurried from the room.

Raf sighed. He was tired of people being afraid of him. Maybe she was afraid because in her terms he was rich… To be honest, in Justine’s terms he was probably beyond rich. Even though he could barely afford Donna’s and Khartoum’s wages and repairs to the al-Mansur madersa were beyond his wallet. Maybe she realized he was police. Or perhaps it was just that he dressed in a suit and wore dark glasses indoors.

Probably it was all of those things. The girl was afraid of everything—of the punters, of her Madame and of time’s winged chariot—he could see it in her eyes. If he asked, she’d say she was seventeen, but Justine had a good ten years on that. She was older than he by maybe three years, older than she could afford to be in her trade.

“Will this do?”

Justine held up a dusty bottle of Cru de Ptolémées, two tooth mugs and a handful of ice cubes. Her breathing was ragged from having run upstairs.

“Thank you.” Raf smiled at her and nodded towards the balcony. “We’re going out there,” he told Eduardo. “I’ll see you in an hour or so.”

“What do I do?”

Raf glanced round the chamber. “Whatever.”

The wine tasted as sour as Raf expected, but all the same he smiled as he poured some for Justine.

“Salut.”

“I can try again?” Justine suggested, having tasted it.

“No.” Ice cubes clinked as Raf dropped a few into her glass. “Who knows?” he said, giving her mug a quick swirl. “This might help.” In fact, chilling it made no difference, but Raf finished his glass anyway and, when the sourness was gone, refilled. When that was done, he drank most of hers as well.

Sitting back against a shutter, the one he’d told Eduardo to bolt from inside the chamber, Raf examined the balcony, as he examined everything…

Straight ahead, beyond an intricately carved screen could be seen fragments of the darkening city; while folded back, against the sidewalls of the mashrabiya were plain shutters that could be used to close off the screen against afternoon heat or cold night air.

He sat in a little world, boxed in on all sides.

“Your turn,” said Raf, handing back Justine’s glass.

She drank a little and gave him back what was left. “You can tell me,” she said finally, when the weight of his silence got too heavy for her to bear. “Some men find it easier to talk.”

He was not
some men,
Raf wanted to tell her. He was
him,
however unsatisfactory that was. And there were days when he wasn’t even sure he was that. When the noise inside his head reached out for the rest of him and his fingers froze and his neck ached and a knot that writhed like an injured snake appeared in the pit of his stomach, leaving him breathless and filled with dread.

Those were the days he needed the fox most. And now the fox was dying and it looked like for good this time.

“Tell me,” Justine said, taking the empty glass from his fingers to put it carefully on the floor. “What’s troubling you?” Her question was as practiced as the butterfly touch of her fingers on his wrist. Even the slight tilt of her head looked like something she’d learnt. All the same, Raf felt a need to answer.

“I’m going to kill someone,” he said flatly.

“When?” Justine kept her expression masked and her question simple.

“Tonight,” said Raf.

“Me?”

He shook his head and felt a single tear slide under his shades. “Not you, not me. Not those two.” He nodded his head backward to the room behind. “Just a man.”

“One man?”

“With luck…”

“Without luck?”

He thought about it. “Several,” Raf said slowly, “maybe more.”

Justine nodded as if this was to be expected. “And this makes you sad?”

Raf shrugged.

Later, when he’d finished staring through the carved screen at the canal which ran wide and slow between concrete embankments, Justine helped him remove his jacket. And then, having folded that and placed it carefully beside his empty glass, she pulled up her slip and straddled him.

She turned away when he folded his fingers into her pinned-up hair to pull her forward into his kiss, then let him turn her back. They tasted the sourness on each other’s lips, their kiss slow, almost thoughtful. Not what she was expecting and not what Raf had intended. Putting up one hand to hold a breast, he felt Justine overflow his fingers.

A boat low in the water. A girl with her shirt undone. The salt of tears and the sea on her lips…

“Your Excellency’s paid for me,” Justine said, seeing his sudden hesitation. “You might as well have your money’s worth.”

And he’d paid for Zara too. Or was it that her father had paid for him? Either way, breaking the deal had cost Raf almost as much as it had cost Zara. Which was too much. And how could he tell himself his choice of Justine was random? She had the same dark skin and eyes, the full breasts and smooth shoulders.

“Fuck me,” he said. So she did; her fingers reaching down to undo his old-fashioned fly. Over her shoulder, Raf could see a boy fishing in the shade of a felucca. A makeshift house had been built on the felucca’s deck out of sheets of galvanized iron, laminated cardboard and what looked like the remains of a plywood tea chest. A scar on the trunk of a squat palm nearby, where it had almost closed round the felucca’s mooring rope, said the boat had been there a lot longer than the boy.

Occasional barges piled high with hessian sacks slid in front of the felucca, obscuring it. Perhaps cotton from the fields or a date crop. Raf hadn’t yet read up on the seasons in the Delta, what got gathered when.

“What’s in the boats?”

Justine stopped moving on his lap.

“The barges,” Raf said, nodding towards the canal behind her.

“Cigarettes,” Justine said without looking. She named two brands of cheap cigarillo made from a dark locally grown tobacco, then shrugged. “Why sell to the kiosks when you can sell at three times the price to tourists?”

Wrapping her arms round Raf, she pulled him in close, so he could no longer see the canal over her shoulder. And rocking gently, she pushed down against him, and pushed and pushed, until she finally came, or at least pretended to…insides tightening as she ground her face into the side of his neck.

“Enough.” Raf slid hands under her buttocks to help her off him. She was breathing swiftly and he could hear her heart pound against her ribs. The sudden satiety seemed real enough. As did the musklike stink of her body.

“What about you?” she asked eventually, sitting back on her heels.

“I’m okay.”

She smiled. “You don’t look like a man who lies.”

Raf’s grin was foxlike. “I seldom do anything else.”

Justine raised a carefully painted eyebrow. “As Your Excellency wishes.”