Arabesk (63 page)

“Knock down a couple of cards at the top and only the top rocks. Maybe the top falls, maybe it stands. And if that level falls, it can be rebuilt, using the same cards if you must. But take a card from the bottom and the whole edifice is in danger. No matter how secure the top. Once the lowest level goes, everything goes. The old man knew this. I know this. Felix knew this. Even the boy in there knows this. It seems you don’t.”

“Iskandryia isn’t a pack of cards,” said Raf.

“No, it’s myth layered with history, so stiff with legacy code that life barely runs. A free city that half the free world would like to see abolished. Berlin mistrusts us, Paris too… Washington. Well, Washington hates us. The only thing still keeping us standing is that we’re too stupid to know we’re dead. You know what our Unique Selling Point is?”

Raf shook his head.

“Inertia. Iskandryia’s been a free city for so long no one can quite imagine how North Africa might operate if we weren’t. Well, take a look at the newsfeeds. People out there are beginning to imagine it…” The General swallowed back the last of his cognac and breathed in, inhaling the fumes. By the time he’d finished coughing he’d apparently reached a decision.

“So far as I can see,” said the General, “as Chief you have three main problems.”

“I have?”

“The first,” said the General, “is personal. The way life works is public virtue, private vice. You keep doing it the wrong way round. The remaining two problems are more serious…” Koenig Pasha’s voice was harsh but thin, its determination at odds with an old man’s frailty. “One big problem, one slightly smaller. First, find out why tourists are being butchered.”

“We think…”

The old man sighed heavily. “The problem,” he said, “is that you don’t… You’re going to tell me the killer’s dead, again. Burned up in that fire. You think I don’t get reports from your office? Forget finding out who carried out the latest atrocity. I told you to find out
why
it happened.”

“And how do you suggest I do that?”

“Break heads. Use the Army. Take whatever you need from the treasury…” The old man looked for a moment as if he might be about to rescind that last suggestion, but instead he shrugged. “Just find out. And keep it out of the papers and off the newsfeeds.”

“That’s the big problem, right?”

The General’s smile was wintry. Flicking a curled leaf from the arm of the bench, he followed its brief and twisting fall. Then he told Raf what Senator Liz really wanted and exactly why he, the General, couldn’t give it to her.

With trembling hand, the General took a crisp sheet of paper from his desk drawer and reached for a fountain pen, the black Mont Blanc inlaid with a silver cartouche bearing the arms of Prussia.

The old man was still writing laboriously when a knock came at the door. A second knock followed and when the General didn’t answer it was Raf who said
enter
and watched the door open a little. The boy who’d let Raf into the gubernatorial mansion slid sideways through the narrow gap, only to stop and glance anxiously between Raf and the General.

“General Koenig?”

The old man nodded but kept writing.

If the Khedive minded his chief minister sitting while he himself stood it didn’t show. In fact, nothing about the boy suggested he found the situation in any way odd, and only a glance at the ornately framed painting on the wall convinced Raf that he stood opposite El Iskandryia’s absolute ruler.

“…The newsfeeds.”

Without looking up, the General tapped one corner of his desk and a long glass with an opalescent Murano frame lit to reveal a worried woman standing outside an old-fashioned mansion, built in an early-twentieth-century style dismissed as High Arabesque. In an open subframe in one corner, fire engines hosed down the broken shell of something sheet glass and concrete.

Raf caught the words
casino, firebomb
and
US negotiator
… And then the main picture flicked to a woman in a black suit behind a large desk. On the front of the desk was a large seal displaying the American eagle.
Chaos, lawlessness
and
organized crime
cropped up in almost every other sentence. Just in case Senator Liz’s anger wasn’t obvious enough, C3N had thoughtfully run Arabic subtitles along the bottom of the screen.

“Don’t underestimate that woman,” the General said, “she flew UN ’copters back in the little war.” He reached for another sheet of paper and scrawled two lines across its china-clay surface, then signed the sheet with spidery handwriting and pushed it across the desk towards the Khedive, his fingers shaking. “All I need now is your signature for these…”

The boy signed without dragging his attention away from the news, which showed a crime team sifting the wreckage of the smouldering casino. A voice-over was talking, guardedly, about rumours of a dead girl found nearby. Raf got the feeling that more was intentionally being said with the gaps than with the words.

“Enough,” said the General, tapping his table to blank the screen. “We need to concentrate on getting His Highness out of here…”

“I’m sorry?” The Khedive looked startled, then stubborn. “No,” he said. “I can’t possibly… Not now.”

“Your holiday,” said Koenig Pasha. “What time’s your flight?” The voice was little more than a cross whisper from an old man. And he did look old, if one looked past his immaculate uniform to the liver spots speckling his trembling wrists or the carcinoma scars that puckered one side of his neck, below his sunken jaw.

“Fik, what time…?”

Mohammed Tewfik Pasha blinked, tears prickling up until he had to look away.
Okay,
thought the General,
maybe that was a little unfair
… He couldn’t quite remember the last time he’d used Tewfik’s pet name. Maybe when he was ten, that time the boy caught scarlet fever and was confined for days to a darkened room with curtains soaked in vinegar, much to the disgust of the palace’s English doctor…

“Early evening,” said the boy. “The flight’s collecting me at seven
P.M.
”

“And you
are
going alone?”

The Khedive shook his head.

“She’s the wrong choice,” said the General tiredly. “You know that.” He stared at the boy, seeing anxiety turn to stubbornness, and sighed. “Do what you have to do… Just remember, your job is to be on that flight. And yours,” he said turning to Raf, “is to make sure His Highness goes.”

Folding his resignation into three, Koenig Pasha gave the sheet of paper to Khedive Mohammed with a slight bow. The letter to Raf, the General folded just the once and handed over with a nod. Then the old man waited until they’d both read and then reread what he’d written.

17th October

Nothing so slight as a mere ring. Instead, long bursts of
increasing frustration filled the large hall.

Raf had been ignoring the bell for a while.

Sighing, he looked round for someone to answer the General’s front door and realized there was no one but him. So he went to answer it himself.

Another bad mistake.

While he and Zara stood, staring in disbelief at each other, the study door swung back and the young Khedive stormed out, tears of frustration streaming down his soft face.

Whatever final retort the boy was about to make died when he spotted Zara, with her cases. For a moment, it looked like the boy might walk across to where Zara stood, but then he shot Raf a bitter scowl, turned away and ran up the stairs. Somewhere a door slammed, then there was silence.

And as Zara stared between her suitcases and the emptiness on the landing above, Raf glanced into the study, his eyes meeting those of the General. What Raf got was an abrupt nod and an amused if wintry smile. And then the old man stretched, stood up from his desk and walked resolutely to the door, which he closed. The General didn’t even pretend to need his cane.

“What are you doing here?” Zara’s query was curt.

“Leaving,” said Raf. “To visit a crime scene.” He looked at her. “Oh, yeah, and trying to keep your father from being arrested for murder… Take your pick.”

Zara practically threw her suitcases into the boot of Raf’s Cadillac, stamped round to the passenger side and climbed in, shutting the door with a slam. As an afterthought, she reached behind her for a seat belt and found nothing. Felix had never got round to having them fitted and Raf hadn’t bothered to make good their lack.

Still seething about this stupidity, Zara stared resolutely ahead.

Which was how she missed seeing Raf clamber into the driver’s seat of the big Bentley, ram the huge car into reverse and spin it round on protesting tyres until it faced the mansion’s wrought-iron gates.

“What the…”

Zara never got to finish her question because Raf was already gone, all eight cylinders powering the Bentley out into traffic that skidded and stalled rather than risk scratching the General’s car.

My car,
Raf corrected himself, watching his gubernatorial pennant crack in the afternoon wind. My car, my city, my problem. My world coming down around my ears. And Hani’s too, if he wasn’t careful.

Up ahead was where Zara’s club had briefly been. Now CdeH was gone, and the venue had reverted to its original existence as a deserted cistern beneath a rain-stained, multistorey car park; the famous arrest and bust relegated to part of Iskandryia’s rapidly receding good times.

The number of clubbers who now swore they’d been there that night would fill the third-class stands at Iskandryia stadium.

He could have taken a direct route, east onto Faud Premier, then cut south, just before Shallalat Gardens, but instead Raf concentrated on working the big car round narrow back streets marked on the GPS in red, too narrow for the vehicle in which he drove.

So far he’d done little more than scrape one fender on a wall. Although this changed once he reached the car park at Casino Quitrimala. Of course, if he hadn’t spotted Madame Mila’s blue government Renault on his way in, he probably would have missed that concrete gatepost as well.

Madame Mila stood next to her car, back straight and eyes fixed firmly on the Bentley. Exactly a pace behind her, at a distance obviously laid down in regulations, stood two officers from the women’s police, both wearing the familiar police-issue
hijab
… Madame Mila, while obviously the most senior, was also by far the youngest. In place of her
hijab
she wore a simple blue scarf.

“General…” Her voice faltered as Raf climbed from the huge car, and Raf decided that maybe his morning wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Unfortunately, his optimism lasted only as long as it took him to reach the crime scene.

Right in the middle of the sodden wreckage of what had once been a casino stood a handful of uniforms, including a grey-haired lieutenant, a crime-locale technician in whites, two members of the
morales
made obvious by their bottle-green jackets, and three plainclothes in matching black jeans, blue shirts and long leather coats. From what Raf could see, it was a typical Iskandryian crime scene, five times as many officers as needed, with interdepartmental rivalries and demarcation disputes guaranteeing that no one was doing anything useful.

“Boss.” An elderly plainclothes stepped forward, all heavy moustache and combed-over greying hair.

“You’ve got something?”

“Looks like it.”

Beside him, the uniformed lieutenant snorted. The hyena-like grin on his youthful face didn’t even pretend to reach his eyes. “I think you’ll find
we’ve
got something.” There was an unsubtle stress to his words.

Raf raised one hand to chop dead an immediate protest from his own man and saw hurt pride and irritation swamp the old detective’s heavy face, only to be wiped. It was a reaction Raf had begun to recognize.

“What’s your name?”

The detective looked at him, judging the danger inherent in the question, while knowing he’d answer it anyway. “Osman, sir… Ibrahim Osman.”

“And what’s your job?”

Ibrahim Osman looked at him. “I’m your deputy.”

Raf sighed.

“What,” Raf asked the uniform, “makes you think this man was the butcher?”

The young lieutenant frowned. “We got his murder weapon,” he said defensively and reached into his pocket, pulling out a blackened hunk of metal he’d probably trampled all over a crime scene to find.

“…fic,”
whispered the fox.
“…taminated evidence…ow original.”

Raf beckoned for the two
morales
… “There’s nothing for you here,” he told them. “You can go too,” he said to the lieutenant. “Take your men and leave the blade… In an evidence bag,” he added tiredly. Not waiting for the man’s reply, Raf turned on his heels and headed back to Madame Mila.

Inside his head, the fox’s grin was thin and mostly invisible.

“Excellency…”

Heavy clouds crowded the horizon and according to Raf’s watch the temperature had fallen to 53° Fahrenheit, making it the coldest October for eighty-seven years. Mind you, according to his watch, he’d also missed three calls from Zara, who apparently needed to talk to him about her father. And one from Hani, which Raf found infinitely more worrying.

Toggling his Seiko to sound/vision, Raf added vibrate for any call coming in from the kid, while beside him the officers waited expectantly. Way too expectantly.

When Raf looked up from resetting his watch the coroner-magistrate was standing directly in front of him. A small and intense woman with braided black hair, minimal jewellery and shoes that were immaculately polished, for all that they were obviously cheap. She was, as Felix had once said, probably the most beautiful woman in the city and the most implacable. One who wore her disapproval of Raf like cheap cologne, flooding the moist air between them, colouring her every emotion.

“Madame Mila…”

It was obvious from her eyes what she saw when she looked at Raf. A rich, spoilt and overprivileged young notable who’d fallen into the job of Chief of Detectives. The dark glasses he wore permanently glued to his face she took as affectation, the rumours of his combat skills, exaggeration, nothing else. Which was true enough, they were exaggeration. But the ever-present shades were down to retinal intolerance and rich was the last thing he was. As for overprivileged… He could argue that definition with her all day.