Arabesk (64 page)

“Well?” The woman was waiting for some response from him. So was the tight little group of uniforms, gathered on the edge of Madame Mila’s conversation.

“I’m sorry,” said Raf tiredly, “what was your question?” Behind him, one of his own men sniggered and Madame Mila’s scowl grew, her face darkening and perfect lips setting into a bitter line.

“A whole day’s been and gone,” she said finally.

“And your point is?” said Raf, then realized what she meant. They were back to Sharia law. “You want proof the dead girl wasn’t local…” He was talking to himself but a plainclothes who stood nearby took it as a question and nodded, careful not to meet Raf’s eye. Which meant that was undoubtedly
exactly
what Madame Mila had just told Raf.

“Where’s the body now?”

“Still on ice.” It was Madame Mila who answered. “She’d been spring cleaning a guard hut when she died, apparently…” Her voice made it silkily obvious she wasn’t about to accept that fact without further proof.

“Wearing what?” He saw the sudden tension in Madame Mila’s face and qualified his question. “Before she was murdered,” he said, gently enough to surprise himself. “I’ve read the preliminary report. I know she was naked when found.”

“White trousers,” said Madame Mila stiffly. “Thin, like silk. And a silver…” Her hands sketched a slight, embarrassed double circle, well away from her own body. “A metal brassiere…”

“Friday night. Wearing almost nothing. You think someone from this city would behave like that?”

Madame Mila thought about it. “No,” she admitted finally. “Probably not.”

Raf did, but he wasn’t about to say so. “And the wounds,” he said, “no change at all?”

A blank look.

“Upward slash from pubis to throat, a right to left across the rib cage, entrails disturbed…” And if ever there was an appropriate word
disturbed
was it. Three psy-profilers had been busy from the start trying to explain exactly what that shit with the ripped guts might signify. So far, their sole conclusion was that the mutilation was historically interesting.

Madame Mila nodded, tight-lipped.

“You took a close look?”

Another nod.

Which probably explained the tightness in her eyes, thought Raf. She had slight sweat marks under her arms and tiny beads of perspiration where her dark hair was pulled into a shape nature never meant it to hold. By anyone else’s standards Madame Mila still looked immaculate: judged by her own, the woman was a wreck.

“Go on,” said Raf. “Get out of here.” He meant it kindly but that wasn’t how his comment was taken.

Instead Madame Mila bridled. She actually pulled herself up to her full height, slight though that was.

“Out,” Raf said, finally losing his patience. “I want all of you out of here… Except for you,” he added and pointed to a uniform at random. “You get to finish taping off the crime scene and chase sightseers away.”

The uniform glanced at his young lieutenant, who glared at Raf, caught between outrage and a growing unease. Madame Mila just felt the outrage, which was how she got her question in first.

“Just who do…”

“…oes he think he is?…interesting question.”
The fox had Raf take out his two-line letter and hand it to the furious woman.
“…erson giving orders, like it or not.”

Raf shut his eyes.

He was standing, dead on his feet, in an almost deserted car park, outside a firebombed casino, in a city undergoing meltdown, with five different flavours of police, none of whom knew his real name, his record or that he was meant to be serving time for…

Well, welcome to the Apocalypso…

Except that was a club, wasn’t it? Somewhere in downtown Zurich. He used to be driven past it on his way from the airport to school.

“…ap out of it,”
hissed the fox.

“Why?”

Madame Mila stared at him. “Why what?” Somehow she managed to add
Your Excellency
to the end of that sentence, as she handed back his letter. Though she did it through gritted teeth.

Raf ignored her. “Why?” he demanded, only this time when he spoke it was inside his own head.

“…ause you need to sleep and I’ve got to go.”

“No.” Raf’s silent refusal was loud enough to set his own teeth on edge. “You can’t go.”

“…y to stop me,”
the fox whispered, its voice fading. And Raf wasn’t sure if that was a threat, a plea or a simple suggestion. Whatever, he had to try.

“You,” Raf said, turning to the lieutenant. “You carrying any meth?”

“No, sir.” The shake of the head was emphatic.

No use asking her.

Stamping past Madame Mila as if she didn’t exist, Raf reached one of the cherry tops just as its driver slid into gear. The crime-locale tech pulled back into neutral when Raf rapped on the glass. A whir of electrics and cigarette smoke billowed from a suddenly open window. Smoking was illegal on duty for all ranks in all departments, but neither of them bothered with that.

“Meth, got any?”

Dark eyes looked at Raf from behind dark glasses. If the tech thought Raf couldn’t see his expression, then he hadn’t allowed for the Chief recalibrating his vision.

“Me, personally, Your Excellency?”

“Evidence, stuff on the way to a lab?”

“I’m not…”

“Redeem yourself,” said Raf and held out his hand. Sometime or other, he was going to have to find out their names, what jobs they did, official stuff like that.

Raf weighed the evidence bag, appreciatively. Fifty ready-made origamis of…

“What is it?”

“Dunno, Your Excel… Boss.” The techie shrugged. “We haven’t taken it to the labs.”

“You mean,” said Raf, “you haven’t taken it to the labs
yet
.”

The techie nodded.

Ripping open a fold, Raf tasted the earth-grey powder and felt the tip of his tongue disappear. “Ice,” he told the tech, “about sixty percent pure…” Raf debated cutting out a line and finding himself a clean note to roll but that seemed too much like hard work. So he just tipped the entire origami into his mouth and chewed, crunching crystals like sherbet. There was a synthetic sweetness that said someone had cut the dose with sorbitol.

Great, so tomorrow or the next day he was going to get the runs as well as suffer some hideous come-down… Or maybe not. There was enough in that bag to keep him up for…

Lights wrote themselves round fire-twisted trees. Broken casino walls suddenly became brighter, almost fluorescent. The slow sweep of the revolving cherry top looked positively alive, lambent. Even the rain fell like music.

Raf took a look at the plastic bag he was holding. There had to be enough ice in there to keep him up until the end of the world, which, according to Koenig Pasha, came the Tuesday after next, or some such. Raf still needed to get to the bottom of that one.

“You know Kamila?” Raf pulled the name from memory. “Works at the mortuary.” They had to know her, the woman’s father was one of them. A uniform. That was what Felix had said.

He took their silence for assent.

“Tell her to expect a couple of bodies. Tell her not to start without me.”

19th October

Avatar slid his finger under the flap and ripped.

He wasn’t sure what he anticipated from the envelope addressed to his sister on the cabin’s dressing table… Not a love letter from the Khedive, because even the Khedive wasn’t that stupid. Maybe an invitation to something aboard the SS
Jannah
that Zara would now miss.

Which would worry her no more than it would worry Avatar, so long as the Khedive didn’t expect him to attend instead. It was bad enough that Zara had suggested that Avatar take her place aboard.

And she was wrong to try to remake him; to force on him the opportunities she felt he needed. Avatar belonged where he belonged, he knew that. And he was much too proud of what he’d learnt in his fourteen years to change.

Shaking the contents of the envelope out onto his cabin’s pink bedspread, Avatar’s eyes widened. Whatever else he’d expected Zara to be sent, an engraving of a naked, full-breasted woman bent backward, scuttling across the dirt on limbs that turned to those of a spider was not on his list. On the back in elegant copperplate pen was the word
Judecca
. Beneath this,
Welcome to limbo
.

Nothing else whatsoever.

With a shrug, Avatar screwed up the envelope and tossed it out of a porthole, watching the wind that caught his crumpled offering and kept it for a few seconds from the embrace of the waves.

Maybe he should do the same with the naked spider? Avatar had dismissed the possibility before he’d finished thinking it. He was going to send the pervy engraving to Zara. As her just reward for getting Hamzah to agree he should take her place.

Avatar sighed heavily and wished he was somewhere else. The palm in the corner of his cabin was hideous. The size of a child and planted in a Chinese container that was painted with a ridiculous number of waterfalls and colts kicking their heels on a mountainside.

Pot or palm by itself would have been bad enough, but together they constituted an insult. It was all Avatar could do not to tip the plant, pot and all, after the envelope into the Mediterranean below.

Avatar was pretty sure Zara would have loathed the palm, not to mention the cabin’s kitsch Victorian screen plastered with pictures of children cut from old magazines; both of which had been meant for Zara, because this was to have been her cabin. And Avatar had been assured, by a very shocked steward, that everything in the suite had been selected personally by the Khedive himself.

If so, the Khedive had even less idea of what made his sister tick than Avatar imagined. And that included sending her a naked spider.

Avatar looked round his cabin for a scanner, realized there wasn’t one and took a lift down to the bleached-blond retro of the SS
Jannah
’s business suite. After he’d got over his shock at being told everything was free to a guest of the Khedive, he found and made do with a fax.

20th–21st October

Hell was a circle with bars and walkways, guards and
unseen voices: level after level of honesty, each level more brutal than the last. Endless faces that Raf knew intimately and had never before seen. A cold that filled his mind and chilled the inside of his bones.

“Ice,” he heard someone say. “A massive dose of methamphetamine. Close to fatal.”

“And the voices?”

“Cerebrospinal tests show viral RNA associated with schizophrenia.”

“He’s caught a virus?”

The voice was amused. “Someone did. Twenty million years ago. All we’ve got are molecular footprints.” And then the voice and the white coat it wore went away and the darkness came back in.

Sometime later, a small hand slapped Raf back to life, then cross fingers swung his head from side to side, like a physiotherapist checking mobility.

“Come on,”
demanded Hani.

She sat perched on top of his quilt, knees bent either side of his chest, her face almost touching Raf’s own. The blur of movement Raf saw when he finally opened his eyes was Hani moving away, shifting backward.

For a fleeting second she looked relieved, but when Raf checked again that expression was gone. “About time,” Hani said, scrambling off his chest. “You won’t believe the trouble you’re in.”

“I can’t be in trouble,” said Raf, “I’m…”

“…the new governor.” Hani rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t try that one on Zara.”

Over Hani’s shoulder Raf could see a distant blue sky, small white clouds and rays of golden sun that reflected on the skin of flying babies. Next to a cluster of pink cherubs floated an even pinker woman dressed in a strategically placed wisp of cloud.

The room in which he lay must have been thirty feet high, maybe more. Its ceiling was domed, the dome supported on marble pillars that, when he looked closer, turned out to be painted onto plastered walls.

“Late Victorian, trompe l’oeil,” Hani told him, following his gaze. “The dome’s earlier. You should see my room.”

The child slid off the bed and onto the floor. “I brought you coffee,” she said. “Proper coffee.” She indicated a cafetière and a china cup resting on a salver. The small tray was silver, a length of gold twisted like rope along its edge. Next to the salver was a sprig of bougainvillea stuffed into a tooth mug, the French kind with a slablike base and heavy sides.

Its smell was sickly.

“I picked it in the garden.” Hani’s eyes were open wide. “You should see the statues,” she said, “they’re all…”

“Naked.”

She nodded. Then carefully put the cup on its saucer… The thing that really worried Raf was just how hard Hani was trying to pretend that everything was normal.

“Why are they naked?” Hani asked, as if an afterthought.

“Perhaps it was warmer in the old days.”

“Yeah, right. But what about…?”

“Coffee,” suggested Raf and Hani smiled.

Pushing hard, she managed to wrestle the plunger to the bottom without spilling any onto the tray. Equally carefully, she poured Raf half a cupful, then her face came apart and tears overflowed her eyes.

“Milk,” she said, between sobs. “I forgot the…”

Raf let Hani pour him a second cup of black coffee. Her tears over and not to be mentioned. At least not yet.

“You blacked out,” said Hani. She used the term confidently, something overheard and assimilated. She seemed about to say more but instead lapsed into thoughtful silence, glancing at Raf when she imagined he wasn’t looking. Whatever she saw seemed to reassure her.

“Here.” She passed him the cup but he was already asleep. He slept for another day.

“Excellency…” Khartoum stood in the open doorway, the chewed stub of a cheroot in one hand and a tea glass in the other. It took Raf a few seconds to work out that the old man was waiting for permission to enter.

Permission given, Khartoum shuffled past Raf’s bed to put his tea glass on the floor in front of a huge sash window. Yanking back the velvet curtains and throwing up the bottom sash, Khartoum carefully repositioned the glass until it stood in the centre of a patch of brightness.