Arabesk (54 page)

Holding a gun in each hand, Raf stamped his way down the flight of steps, pulling the clumsy tread of the other man from memory. He remembered in time to bang into the upright at the bottom and casually shoulder open the kitchen door rather than use its handle. Two men and a boy glanced up, boredom becoming alarm when they realized that whoever Raf was he wasn’t one of them.

“No,” said Raf, twitching one gun, “don’t get up.” He spoke Arabic, his accent understandable if atrocious. “And there’s no need for anyone to die…” Just for a second the dark void of his gun’s muzzle hovered over the heart of the boy.

“Unless that’s your choice?”

They’d all shaken their heads before Raf had time to finish his question.

“Good,” said Raf, and found that he meant it. He also found he’d been wrong about them cooking. It was takeout he’d been able to smell.

In front of them, on a cracked pine table stood a foil plate filled with gristle and mutton bones, beside an even larger container that had held couscous. A half-empty jar of harissa sat nearby. As did unleavened bread and a jar lid’s worth of stubbed-out roaches and twists of torn cardboard.

Carbohydrate and kif, two good ways to waste one’s edge. Not that any of the three gave much sign of having had an edge to start with.

“Weapons on the table…”

A motley collection of go-faster revolvers and flashy switchblades piled up next to the foil containers. All fake pearl handles and fuck-me electronic sights that looked great and did nothing constructive.

“All of them.”

A couple of boot knives and a pair of brass knuckledusters joined the growing pile. It reminded Raf of the trash that he used to take off teenagers at the door of BonBon, back in Seattle, in the days before Raf fell out with Hu San, leader of the local Triad, and had to become someone else.

“And the rest…”

The middle one, whom Raf had figured for the boy’s father and the old man’s young brother, pulled out a one-shot throw-down from the back of his belt and sullenly placed it next to his knife.

“Now put them into this,” said Raf, pushing across the foil container that had held couscous. Obediently, the three began piling up weapons, taking care not to point the guns anywhere near Raf.

Sit down, stand up, sit down
… Every time they did what Raf ordered, the imprinting got stronger; that was how the human psyche worked… Had Raf been about to kill them, it would have been the right time. He assumed they were bright enough to understand that. And yet they were still way too casual.

“You do know who you’ve kidnapped?” Raf looked at the boy, the one who’d shivered under the gaze of Raf’s gun. Not only was he the youngest, he was also less obviously stoned. What Raf got by way of reply was a slight shake of the head. Though that turned out to be not in answer to the
who
part of Raf’s question but the
what
… The kid was arguing definitions.

“We didn’t kidnap anybody. We’re just guarding him.”

“And that’s meant to make a difference?”

The boy shrugged.

“It’s DJ Avatar,” Raf said. “Hamzah Effendi’s kid.”

The kid looked suddenly shocked. But even that wasn’t straightforward. It turned out he liked Avatar’s music. Hamzah didn’t figure.

“He’s been fucking arrested,” said the old man. “For torturing a
nasrani
to death.”

“Raped her first,” the boy’s father added. “He’s in prison.”

“Really?” Raf asked. “Who arrested him?”

“Ashraf-fucking-Bey. It happened yesterday.”

“No,” said Raf. “That’s not what happened. Believe me.”

“Yes it is…” The old man’s pupils were dilated beyond their natural limit, expanded so much they looked like the eyes of someone with a fatal head wound, fixed at that point when the pupils explode. Whatever the man’s poison, it was serious stuff.

“On his own beach,” added the boy, sounding suitably outraged.

They left via a back door into a rear alley, having collected both their lookout and Ismail, two men with evil headaches but no worse. The kind of small-time fry, all of them, evolved by every ghetto to fit the niches that others reject. Life’s bottom feeders; too disorganized to mastermind their own events, at least not ones that worked, and not hard enough to handle real trouble. That they’d been hired to guard Avatar made no sense at all.

Pulling his automatic from its holster, Raf prowled the house, leaving the locked cellar until last. The roof was deserted and the attic empty. So Raf took the few remaining bulbs from their sockets and locked the roof door before sweeping the level below, where bedrooms had once been. Four empty rooms, filled with acrid dust and silence. Broken chairs filled the far corner of one. In another, some
clochard
had started a small fire on tiles that had cracked. A handful of Thunderbird cans lay blackened in the ashes. Taking each bulb in turn, Raf locked those doors too, using the iron mortise locks common to North Africa. Just to be on the safe side he pocketed the keys.

Empty houses were a familiar sight south of Mahmoudia. At least they were on that stretch west of Rue Menascae, where an area of almost sufficiency surrendered to the dank touch of institutionalized poverty. For streets to be derelict there was as normal as finding crack houses at crossroads, or overcrowded tenements that overlooked unsafe playgrounds, dead trees standing reminder to unmet aspirations.

Travel companies did a good line in offering the “real Iskandryia” from the safety of air-conditioned coaches. As if the
arrondissement
’s simmering resentment somehow made it more real than the old wealth of the Greek District or the comfortable red-bricked mansion blocks near the fish market.

“Enough already,” said Raf, adding his varied collection of keys and bulbs to the weapons discarded by Avatar’s guards. There was nothing he needed in the empty kitchen. It was time to find the cellar.

The Daimler-Benz parked below the
FOR SALE
sign had smoked windows and whitewall tyres, newish but dusty from trawling through too many back streets. The vehicle had
hire car
written all over it.

Seconds after its headlights died, the near-side rear door opened, briefly lighting the inside. What interested Raf was the woman who got out.

“You know her?” Raf asked, yanking Avatar to his feet and dragging him across to the cellar’s high window. Had he had more time, Raf might have been kinder, gentler… The story of his life really.

“You’re drunk!” Avatar said, belatedly realizing the obvious. He sounded surprisingly shocked.

“Not entirely,” said Raf. “Now…you know her?”

Avatar shook his head.

“Well, I do. Last time I saw her she was standing behind your sister, waiting to climb onto a restaurant car.” The boy didn’t ask what Raf was doing watching Maxim’s. Which was a fair trade-off, because Raf didn’t ask what made Avatar throw in his job as Raf’s driver.

Zara had that effect on both of them.

“So what happens now?” whispered Avatar, watching the woman walk towards the house, her silhouette looming large above the bars of the cellar’s only window. Behind her walked a driver.

“We dance,” said Raf. “Then I go find whoever dumped a dead girl in your dad’s garden.”

He saw surprise on Avatar’s face. “This is just the sideshow,” Raf explained apologetically, looking at the drugged and swaying boy. “Just a sideshow.” Quickly drawing the black blade from its sheath on his right ankle, Raf checked the point and tried out a couple of steps.

“Well,” he amended, “I dance.”

Raf hauled Avatar over to a soiled mattress opposite the door. “You lie down here and
pretend
to be ill.” Flipping round the blade so that it pointed upwards, Raf stood with his back to the doorframe. All it took to embed the blade lightly in the wood was to flip up his hand and step away, leaving the knife protruding from the frame behind him. There were probably better ways to guarantee having a blade ready for use while leaving both hands free; this just happened to be the one that I & I had taught him.

The next few minutes Raf reconstructed later from sounds alone, beginning with the scratch of a key. The Yale on the front door was oiled but even so the tumblers grated a little. There was the click of a light switch, followed immediately by a grunt of irritation. A snatch of Arabic fired into the darkness was repeated, louder this time, irritation becoming anger as the woman caught her hip on the corner of a table in the hallway, the table scraping across tiles.

Already her breathing was less steady.

Raf caught the exact point her anger turned to worry. It came just after her driver banged open the kitchen door and found the room deserted, silent and dark. What little light came through the front door obviously revealed nothing except the fact her guards were gone.

“Fetch a torch.”

Heavy treads crossed the floor above Raf’s head, then came the clash of metal heels on the front steps. The creak of a car door. A slam. Moments later the driver was back, his tone apologetic.

The woman swore, louder than was wise. And Raf heard the click of a gas lighter, then heavy footsteps descending towards the cellar door.

“Fucking ragheads,” said the woman. “You can’t get them to do anything…”

The driver muttered something that might have been agreement. He was still muttering as he stepped through the door and dropped his lighter. Screaming was out of the question given that Raf’s garrotte had already crushed the cartilage of his larynx, so the man gurgled instead.

“Come in,” Raf told the woman. “Unless you want me to finish off your driver…?”

Not a problem apparently.

Finding her wrist in the darkness, Raf pulled her hand, gun and all, from her side pocket. The weapon she held was tiny, impossibly elegant and looked very expensive. Twisting it from her rigid fingers, Raf tossed it into Avatar’s slop bucket, adding a splash and liquid clank to his collection of sounds.

Everybody did something well, that’s what the fox used to insist when Raf was small. It was just that some people took longer than others to discover their real talent. And this, it turned out was his… Not caring about the doing until the doing was over. Of course, given his guarantee, Raf probably shouldn’t have cared at all.

Blood had strung a necklace round the throat of the driver, although Raf was the only person in the cellar who could see the dark pearls. And the wire was too tight to be clearly visible even to him.

“Slip off your jacket,” Raf told the woman, “then step away from it.” He waited while she shrugged off her dark coat and put it carefully on the damp tiles, folding it first. Did that signify strength or weakness? The fox would have known.

She was thin; dressed in a white silk blouse, thick black belt and a knee-length skirt that matched the folded jacket. As upscale and anonymous as the guards had been obvious and down-market.

“Turn around.”

Tucked into a small holster on the back of her belt was a tiny Colt. The almost invisible bulge on her thigh was undoubtedly something predictable like a derringer or throwing knife.

“Disarm,” Raf said simply.

The Colt she placed carefully on the floor. The bump remained where it was, which was her choice. Stupid, of course, but still her choice.

“This is where you tell me who you are,” said Raf.

The shake of the woman’s head was so slight as to be almost subliminal.

“The alternative,” said Raf, yanking the garrotte, “is that I finish strangling your driver.”

“Poor driver,” was all she said. And as the big man lurched in panic at the tightening of the wire, the woman dipped one hand towards her thigh, sliding back raw silk to reveal a razor-edged blade.

Now.

Without thought, without prior intention, Raf dropped the borrowed garrotte and reached up and back, his fingers folding around the handle of his own blade, which tumbled rapidly through the darkness; the woman’s right eye emptying onto her cheek like broken egg as vitreous humour slid down tight skin.

Stepping into her scream, Raf slammed palm against hilt and drove the knife through the woman’s parietal lobe and into her cerebellum. Somewhere in that sequence the woman’s brain stem got sliced and she stopped being strictly human. Though the whimpering only stopped when Raf put thumb and first finger either side of her throat and squeezed.

He was in the process of lowering her to the ground when a mobile rang. Raf found it in the inside pocket of the woman’s discarded jacket. The little phone was clumsier than he’d expected from someone of her erstwhile elegance.

“Na’am?”

Raf listened for a few seconds and shook his head.

“No,” he said, slightly breathless. “Fraulein Lubeck can’t come to the phone. Yes, I’ll ask her to call you back…” He listened hard. “No,” he said finally, “I’m sure she’s never heard of someone called Ashraf Bey.”

Sudan

Each Seraphim 4×4 had a blade at the front designed to
dig into dunes and turn over sand, which is what they did. Within minutes the dead were ploughed under, enemy trucks torched and camera crews invited in.

Trucks burning weren’t exactly hot news but new shots still got added to stale ones. And trustworthy faces in pale suits stood under the blistering sun and reassured the doubtful that after a bitter firefight rebel militia had been defeated with almost no loss of life to PaxForce.

“Zero loss of life…” corrected a voice in Ka’s ear.

“Then why say almost?”

“What?” Sarah glanced round, then shrugged and turned her attention back to Saul. They were moored under an overhanging thorn that kept the afternoon at bay, while lapping water cooled their hiding place and tossed sunlight onto the underside of its spiky canopy.

Ka was ignoring all questions. He was getting good at that. Ignoring the others meant not facing questions he couldn’t answer.

“Well?” Ka asked the voice.

“No dead would mean an unfair fight. Strong against weak. A few dead equals luck, skill, better weapons… It’s about presentation.” The voice paused and, without having to ask, Ka suddenly found himself looking down on a thornbush rather than at a battlefield.