Arabesk (72 page)

“Will you be acting as prosecutor?”

Raf turned back and smiled in admiration. There was a lot to recommend sheer bloody-mindedness when it came to a job. “No,” he said. “One of the judges will be chosen as prosecuting judge. And I won’t be acting for the defence either… She will.” Raf jerked his thumb backward and heard Zara gasp.

Which was around the point the second EMP bomb exploded, followed by a third and a fourth, so those watching newsfeeds in other countries never knew if Zara’s shock was at being named defender or the fact that El Iskandryia had begun to shut down around her.

“Boss.” Bodyguards closed in on both sides, obviously anxious but still functioning. “We’ve got to get you back inside.”

Overhead, bright stars blossomed between clouds as the lights of the city began to flicker, its sodium halo fading from orange through palest yellow to perfect night. Somewhere far distant a dog began to bark.

26th October

“I shouldn’t be here,” said Zara, “you know that…”

Here
was Raf’s bedroom, with its domed roof and high windows, naked babies staring down from the painted ceiling and the air rich with the scent of orchids. A newly cut bunch stood in a Lalique vase beside the bed. Where Khartoum had found tiger orchids, Raf couldn’t begin to imagine. A smaller vase was thick with lilies and a silver bowl on his glass-topped dressing table contained potpourri. Neither flowers nor bowl had been there when they finally fell asleep.

But Raf’s smile was at the memory of warm skin and the smell of lapsang suchong, mixed with something citrus, labelled for an American/Japanese designer and bottled in Frankfurt. The tiny scent flask was on his dressing table along with the rest of Zara’s cosmetics. And, actually, that hadn’t been there either…

“Maybe I’m the one who should be somewhere else,” said Raf and Zara smiled, rolling over with a linen sheet tucked around her. The night before she’d had darkness to hide behind and only a candle flame to let them see each other. Now the sun streamed in through high windows, turning the white marble floor to a sheet of glistening ice, and the sea breeze tasted of iodine. Outside, the whole city was silent, with Rue Riyad Pasha devoid of cars. Or at least of cars that moved.

“Let it go,” said Raf, giving the sheet a small tug.

Zara shook her head.

“Please,” he said and so she did, at least partly. Letting him unwrap her shoulders to reveal full breasts and the start of a soft stomach. Her skin was honey, her nipples dark walnut. The rest she kept hidden, one hand holding her modesty in place.

“Marry me,” Raf said.

She pulled a face and grinned, but her smile died the second she realized Raf’s suggestion was serious. “Last night you wanted to have me arrested.”

“That was last night.”

Zara nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “that makes sense.”

It did too, at least to him. To be honest, Raf didn’t know the reason he’d shot the question. Being institutionalized did that to you. Half the time you didn’t really know the reason for most things. Time was, as the fox would say…time was he could blame what he did on the fox. Now he had no one to blame but himself and he was, if not white-knuckle sober then, at the very least, white-knuckle sane. Sometime or other, when he was feeling braver, he’d try to explain that to Zara.

Try to explain it and fail, most probably, but he’d still try. This too was coded into that famous eight-thousand-line guarantee.

“What will happen to my father…”

“You’ll marry me if I get him off?”

“Is that your price?”

Raf sighed. “Is it yours?”

“No,” Zara said shakily. “I just need to know. Will he be executed?” She would have cried, except she was all cried out. The first part of last night she’d spent wrapped tight in Raf’s arms, sometimes angry and occasionally scared, but mostly just crying silently into his shoulder. The second part… For all that nothing really happened, that was somewhere they’d both need to go.

“Look,” said Raf, “he may actually be innocent.”

Zara looked at him. “I can’t stand up there and defend him you know…”

“It’s your choice,” Raf said. Meaning that it wasn’t, not really.

“No,” Zara sat up, taking the sheet with her. “You’re missing the point. I refuse to defend him if he won’t defend himself.”

Raf understood how she felt. Her father had killed 183 people, all but 12 of them children. What Hamzah Effendi did was, almost literally, indefensible. And yet… Sitting beside her, in a sunlit bedroom thick with the scent of hothouse flowers, Raf told Zara the story as Hamzah had told it to him, about Ka, Sarah and the Colonel…

The evening before had begun very differently. In the light of an emergency lamp, seven people had watched Zara hit Raf and only one, a female clerk from the technical section, had made any move to stop Zara from taking a second shot. Which told Raf something he didn’t like about Hakim, Ahmed and the rest of his officers.

Although maybe such a reaction was inevitable in a city where crimes by or against women got dealt with by a separate force. And if any of them really thought women were incapable of being deeply dangerous, they should meet Hu San, leader of Seattle’s Five Winds Society. Compared to her, Iskandryia’s Dons were amateurs, which they mostly were. The only real professional among them was the man Raf had just arrested, and that was for something else.

“You poisonous…”

Raf had watched Zara fail to find the right word.

“Putain de merde?”
he suggested.

She didn’t even pause. “How could you?”

“Arrest him? Easily, I just pulled out a card and read the words.” Which wasn’t true because, for a start, Raf didn’t carry a Miranda card and secondly, he had uniforms to do that shit, but he was playing to an audience and she knew it. That was one of the things making her so angry.

“You… I thought you liked him.”

Better than me,
that was the subtext, or maybe not. Perhaps he was misreading the feeling that hung sour as ghost’s breath in the air between them. Chances were, she was just scared.

Raf sighed and cleared his head of the Huntsville psychotrash that flooded it every time he tried to think about what he felt. Other people’s feelings he could do. His own… He’d been analysed so many times by Dr. Millbank that he could no longer distinguish what was emotionally real from what he’d been told were his feelings. Which was weird because, and the fox always used to agree with this, half the time Raf was pretty sure he felt nothing at all.

“Are you listening to me?” That was the point at which Zara pushed her face in close.

No,
thought Raf,
not really
… And before he could stop himself, he had leant forward and kissed her, very lightly.

He apologized on the drive back to the governor’s mansion. A drive so short that he and Zara could have walked it in the time it took Hakim and Ahmed to safety-check the Bentley.

Of course, before he apologized he had to get his breath back.

“Columbia,” she had told him. “Power-punching exercises.”

She’d been reluctant to get into the Bentley until Raf explained that her alternative was to wait for a horse-drawn calèche to take her out to Villa Hamzah to be with her mother. Whatever her decision, Hamzah Effendi would remain under guard at the precinct.

Hakim and Ahmed he’d made walk back to the gubernatorial mansion. Punishment for grinning when she sucker punched him in the stomach.

“Why all the playacting?” she’d asked.

“Because that’s my job,” said Raf. “And the best way to fake something, is to pretend to be what you already are…” Catching Zara’s appalled glance, he shrugged and yanked at the wheel, suddenly dragging the Bentley round a bend into a side street. The car had no power steering, and Raf strongly suspected the absence was intentional.

He wouldn’t put it past Koenig Pasha to drive a telemetrics-free vehicle precisely
because
it lacked assisted steering, voice-activated starting, electronic locks or air-conditioning, not to mention adaptive cruise control. Even the engine could be hand-cranked, though it was hard to know if that was special or had once come as standard.

The point was, while almost every other vehicle in the city had seen its electronics go belly-up in the blasts, the governor’s Bentley still functioned. Which was how Raf ended up with a dusty square to himself. And it was obvious from the way pedestrians turned to watch the unlit Bentley slide slowly round Place al-Mansur, its pennant fluttering in the darkness, that they expected no less.

The city had a confidence in its new governor that Raf had never had in himself, that no one on the right side of sanity could ever have.

“Remember that lunch?” Raf asked. “When we met officially? Your father told me you never cried.”

“That was then,” said Zara crossly. “Things change.”

“Either that, or we change them,” Raf replied. “Sometimes surviving is all it takes.”

“And that’s what you do, is it? Survive…”

Raf nodded.

Sitting there beside him, her hands clasped tight between stockinged knees and her shoulders hunched forward like a frightened child, Zara took a deep breath and slowly willed herself back under control as a familiar street slipped by and the dark gateposts of the mansion came forward to meet her.

The fact Raf was right didn’t make her like him any more.

“I took a detour,” Raf told Hakim, seeing him standing by the gate, and with that Raf edged the Bentley into a courtyard lit by coal-filled oil drums.

“The master arrives…” Khartoum was no longer dressed in his ornate livery. Instead, the old man wore a pale grey souf so long its rough edges dragged on damp cobbles. Around him stood soldiers, plus a thin clerk in a flapping suit. The old man looked amused.

“Your office is worried.” The Sufi practically had to push the clerk towards the car window. “Tell him then.”

“Excellency… Ambassador Graf von Bismarck demands an immediate audience.”

Did he now?

“And the one from Paris?”

The man nodded.

“London, Washington, Vienna?”

A quick nod greeted each capital in its turn.

“And Stambul?”

“The red phone…” The man was embarrassed. “It rang, Excellency, but when I finally answered it the line was dead. Perhaps the main exchange…”

“It’s been fried,” said Raf. “Along with the relay stations. Please tell the Graf that I’ll see him for ten minutes, an hour from now, in the council chamber.”

“Your Excellency… The ambassador was hoping…”

“That I’d go there. Too bad.” Raf watched the clerk debate with himself which it would be most dangerous to offend, the Germans or Iskandryia’s new governor. His decision quickly became clear when the man snapped off a smart salute and stepped back from the car.

“You scare them, don’t you?” Zara’s smile was thin.

“It’s the aftertaste of the General.”

Zara shook her head. “It’s you,” she said. “Take a good look at yourself in the mirror.”

“I don’t do mirrors,” said Raf.

“That’s what I mean.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that so, once Khartoum had opened Raf’s door, Raf walked round to the other side of the car and opened the door for Zara.

“And I wish you’d stop that,” Zara said with a scowl. “All this heel-clicking shit.” Her scowl lasted until she reached the mansion’s steps, at which point Hani came bundling out of the big front door.

“Zara!”

“Hello, honey.”

Hani grinned. “How are you?” she added as an afterthought; visibly remembering her manners.

“Okay, I suppose. And you?”

“Terrific.” Hani suddenly opened both arms to embrace the ink-black sky. “Someone’s killed the lights. All of them. You can see what’s happened better from the roof.” Hani turned to go, then swung back, remembering something. “You and I,” said the child, looking serious. “We need to talk…”

25th October

“You know Colonel Abad stole someone else’s face?”

Zara didn’t.

“On the badges,” said Hani. “It’s not him. The face belongs to someone who died years and years ago. You know what that means? It means he kept himself to himself, or people would have noticed he wasn’t the same as his picture…”

Hani nodded. “I’m right, aren’t I?” She looked at the older girl, then frowned. “Don’t you like clues?”

Zara stared round at the governor’s study, her face doubtful. Official papers were piled in untidy heaps, encyclopedias, old history books, ancient maps of the Sudan. A bookcase along one wall had half the volumes pulled out and dumped on the floor. It looked like a whirlwind had hit the place. And the whirlwind was about four paces away, laying a fire and asking riddles.

“Honey, we really shouldn’t be in here.”

“You
want
to save your father?”

Do I…?
Zara stared at the child, throat tight.

“Thought so.” Hani walked over to Zara, gave her a quick hug and went back to work, crunching old financial reports into tight balls and pushing them under kindling.

“Clues,” Hani said firmly, putting a match to a computer printout. “Crosswords, logic puzzles, number grids, those stupid MENSA things in the papers… Do you like them?”

“Sometimes.”

Hani sighed. It was late. Raf was still furious about something, and Zara was so busy trying not to get upset in front of her that she wasn’t really listening to a thing Hani said. Even Khartoum was useless. She’d tried to talk to him but he’d just excused himself, then come back later with matches and a jug of water from the kitchens.

Which was less than no help.

It was hard being the only one who could think properly. Especially if you were nine. Or maybe ten, there was some doubt about that.

“In a moment,” said Hani, “I’ll make you some cocoa.” She blew on the flames until the kindling caught, added a couple of wooden candleholders from the mantelpiece and all the pencils from the General’s desk tidy.

Uncle Ashraf’s desk tidy, Hani corrected herself. Taking a half-eaten bar of Fry’s chocolate from her pocket—it was possible for a human to last a week on a single bar, she’d read it in some magazine—Hani broke cubes off the chocolate and dropped five or six into the water jug. She should probably have heated the water first, she realized, looking at the lumps lying there at the bottom.