Arabesk (78 page)

“What’s the temperature?” Avatar demanded.

“Cold,” said the voice. “Cold enough to shut down your core.”

“And you live in this?”

“It makes no difference to me,” the voice said. “And Saeed Koenig wanted to discourage sightseers.”

His teeth chattered uncontrollably and his feet were a memory beyond feeling. The black T-shirt and combats he’d put on that morning now seemed less of a fashion statement and more of an absentmindedly written suicide note.

“Where now?” Avatar asked, knowing he’d been followed on camera every step of his descent.

“Straight ahead. Use the door…”

Still cursing the lack of a flashlight, Avatar inched through the darkness until his outstretched hand found a handle, low down and on the right. He gripped it tight with shaking fingers and everything started to go wrong. Disbelief giving way to panic as he tried to yank free his hand and heard skin rip. What panicked Avatar wasn’t pain but its complete absence.

He was frozen fast to a subzero metal door handle.

“Piss on it,” said the Colonel.

Avatar ignored the comment and tugged again.

“Piss on it,”
Colonel Abad ordered crossly, his voice echoing from two places at once. “Go on. Do it now.”

The man meant it, Avatar realized. Using his good hand, Avatar fumbled at the nylon zip of his combats.

“Now piss on the other hand. Get some warmth into those bones.”

Avatar did as Colonel Abad ordered, fastened his fly and stepped through to the Colonel’s quarters, fingers still dripping. He didn’t imagine the Colonel would want to shake hands.

The room was in darkness.

“Lights,” said the Colonel, and a strip lit overhead. What it revealed was an empty space like all the others Avatar had passed through; just smaller, narrower and less high. The walls, which curved on both sides, were blasted back to bare steel and riveted plate. Obviously enough, there were no portholes. Also no furniture, apart from a low metal table, and no cooking equipment. No sign of human habitation and no Colonel.

As jokes went, it was a bad one.

“How are your fingers?” asked a voice behind him. “I’ve just checked my libraries and you may need a skin graft, when we get ashore…
If we get ashore,
” the voice amended, as if suddenly concerned not to push the bounds of accuracy.

Avatar looked round until he spotted a speaker, attached to the ceiling over in the corner of the room. It was so out-of-date that its grille was cloth, set into a case that looked like it might actually be wood. Soviet-made, from the look of things. “Where are you?”

“I’m the housekeeping routine on the table.”

“You’re what?” Avatar looked across to see a small radio wired into a feed socket on the wall. At first glance the radio looked to be covered with grey suede, but that was just dust fallen from the ceiling or carried in through a ventilation duct on the Arctic wind. Beside it, by themselves, stood an ugly-looking pair of spectacles.

“Yeah,” said the Colonel, “that’s me.” A CCTV camera on the wall swung slowly between Avatar and the table. It looked like nothing so much as a duck shaking its head. “Not what you expected, huh?”

Avatar shook his head in turn. “No, it’s not.” All the same, he felt he needed to clarify the position. “You’re my dad’s boss? Colonel Abad?”

“‘But in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. That is, destroyer. Angel of the abyss, he that brings God’s woes upon his enemies…’

“Revelation,” added the voice, when Avatar looked blank. “I’m either the true angel of God or his deadly enemy. Unfortunately, no one can decide which, though theologians once wasted a lot of time trying.” The Colonel’s tone made clear what he thought of that.

Revelation?
That was the
nasrani
political endgame, at least Avatar thought it was. He wasn’t big on politics. “You believe this stuff…”

“What do you think?”

He thought not.

“Either it was a geek joke,” explained the Colonel, “or they needed to find a framework in a hurry… Lash-ups are always easier than starting from scratch, take a look at religion or computer games. My guess is the shapers fed in a couple of terabytes of world myth plus Jung. It didn’t worry them if the deep background was suboptimal. I was only there for the duration of the war. And that was only meant to last a few months.”

“I’m dying of cold,” said Avatar, “and you’re talking shit…”

28th October

Mohammed Tewfik Pasha, Khedive of El Iskandryia,
rolled over in his huge water bed and opened one eye at the sound of knocking. The bed in which he woke was larger than king-sized, obviously enough, since this was the Imperial Suite.

It was also empty apart from him, and that choice was his. He’d seen how he was watched by the daughters of other guests, their eyes tracking him as he walked down the ornate stairs into the dining room to take his place at the captain’s table. And he knew too that the Van der Bilt girl had dined alone in her cabin every night until he’d taken to eating his supper in public.

El Iskandryia was widely expected to lose its status as a free city. And the shallow end of the gene pool was preparing itself for the Khedive’s new role as romantic but tragic hero (with looks, money and title).

His face was on that week’s
Time,
but for all the wrong reasons.
Cosmo Girl
had even produced a poster showing him in shorts and T-shirt, standing barefoot on the deck of a yacht and staring moodily out to sea, or so he’d read. He’d never actually seen the poster and couldn’t remember having been allowed to go barefoot anywhere. Just getting permission from the General to appear out of uniform usually took a tantrum.

Any one of the young mothers who promenaded their children through the upper deck’s Palm Garden each morning would go to bed with him. He’d had sly smiles, batted eyelashes, even a handwritten note folded and slipped into his trouser pocket by a mother of twins. Then there was that Australian woman, her smile anything but innocent, asking him how many slaves he had in his harem… And would he like one more?

Yet the only girl he wanted, the one he’d actually invited, had sent her bastard half brother instead.

“Rotate.”
Across the suite on a white ash sideboard (so retro-Cunard), a silver photo frame started to flick from picture to picture. It showed what the Khedive’s guests expected it to show. The General and Tewfik Pasha standing together in the throne room. Tewfik Pasha silhouetted against the sun in the luxuriant green of the General’s garden. A winter sunset over the Corniche. And, as a default setting, elegant hand-drawn calligraphy showing the name of God.

They were all an irrelevance… Except for the name of God, obviously. The Khedive’s correction was heartfelt and instant, but all the same he felt sick at the thought of his unintended blasphemy. And yet, the fact remained that the only picture that really mattered to him was a tattered clipping, tucked away in the back of his wallet.

It was taken in the early dawn outside an illegal cellar club and showed Zara naked except for a tight faux-fur coat. The grainy shadow between her half-seen breasts bothered him more than any of the pink Renoir nudes so carefully collected by his grandfather and great-grandfather.

“Your Highness…”

He’d forgotten about the earlier knock at his bedroom door.

“Yes,” said the Khedive and watched a heavy door swing open to reveal the captain, looking every inch the master of the world’s largest seagoing liner. One thick and three lesser rings circled the cuffs of Captain Bruford’s immaculate jacket. Her trousers had razor-sharp creases at the front and a heavy gold stripe down each outer seam. She seemed slightly embarrassed to see the Khedive, which puzzled Tewfik Pasha until he realized it might be because he was wearing nothing, at least nothing visible.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, sir.” With an effort, Captain Bruford shook her gaze from the half-naked boy. “You know we pride ourselves on how seriously we take the safety of our important guests. All our guests,” she corrected herself.

The Khedive nodded. It seemed unlikely that she’d come up to the Imperial Suite to make a mission statement on behalf of her company, much less discuss its core values or whatever buzzword best described the clichés he’d already heard on the induction film. All the same, the captain seemed to be having trouble coming to the point.

“Yes?”

“Helicopter…”

He looked at her in blank amazement.

“On the edge of our systems,” she said. “Approaching the SS
Jannah.
”

“And that’s a problem?” Guests came and went by helicopter all the time: that was the whole point of being aboard the SS
Jannah;
it never docked, anywhere, ever. The only time it left international waters, and that time was covered by special treaty, was when the liner passed through the Panama Canal or the Pillars of Hercules.

“They’re shielded,” said Captain Bruford. “And we can’t get a handshake. Believe me, we’ve tried.” The Englishwoman looked something between irritated and anxious.

“I think it would be safer,” she added, “if we were to get Your Highness off the ship. We have three high-speed VSVs available, Thornycroft-built and with submersible capacities…”

She just couldn’t help it, the Khedive realized. Every statement she made about Utopia Lines came out sounding like an advertisement. It had to be something the company burned into their brains at training school.

“You think I’d be safer aboard the VSV?”

“No.” The captain looked at him, her mind already made up. “I think everybody else would be safer. My chief of security has spent the last ten minutes running a risk analysis and you’re the obvious target.”

Tewfik Pasha nodded. In all probability that was true.

Climbing out of bed without thinking about how that might appear to his visitor, he collected a towel from the back of a chair, only to drop it on the tiles when he reached the cubicle.

One month each year was what he got. Time off for good behaviour, that was how he thought of the SS
Jannah
… One month away from lessons, from his staff, from protocol, from the General…

Four weeks in which he could do what he wanted. Sleep, eat, watch old Beat Takahashi vids, if that was what took his fancy. And then it was back to the uniforms, to living in a goldfish bowl, to being immensely rich but having no money. He owned palaces and slept for eleven months of the year in a small room without either air-conditioning or heating. A room where the basin ran only cold water and his antique Chinese carpet was worn to the thinness of tapestry, its holes and stains covered by a rug, thrown down in the strategic place. Living like that was supposed to teach him humility.

Tewfik Pasha wasn’t an idiot. He wasn’t even a child. He knew there were whole districts of his city that had no water for drinking, washing or anything else,
arrondissements
where houses had no glass in the windows and sewage ran untreated in the gutters, alleys where raggeds slept at night, curled against walls or under benches, hiding from the police or their families, or from both—violence came in many guises.

Ten years back, when he was small, death squads had cleared the streets of raggeds and kinderwhores, dumping childish bodies by the truckload into the weed-heavy waters of Lake Mareotis. As July had slid into August and the temperatures soared and foreign film crews began to descend on the city, the entourage around the young Khedive spoke of little else. Normal gossip ceased, as did backbiting and the daily jostle for position. A horrified fascination took hold of the palace, from which the Khedive had to be protected.

Rooms stilled when he walked into them, conversations died, no one would talk if he was there. Which made it twice as hard to work out exactly what was going on. It was weeks before he discovered that the rubbish being removed from the souks and alleys was human.

Almost everyone the Khedive overheard approved of what was being done. So much so that in the kitchens and sculleries, hardworking porters cursed each other for not having had the idea first.

The one person not impressed was Koenig Pasha.

With the arrival of autumn came the executions. An army major, two detective sergeants, a colonel in the
morales
and a uniformed police officer. After that, the street cleaning stopped and the only thing left to drive raggeds from their narrow alleys was that winter’s lashing rain.

Shaking water from his long dark hair, Tewfik Pasha stepped out of his shower and blinked, surprised to find Captain Bruford waiting impatiently in the doorway to his bedroom. He hadn’t actually asked the woman in, Tewfik Pasha remembered with a sigh. Unidentified helicopter or no, punctilious courtesy had kept the Utopia Line’s captain where she stood.

“Come in,” he suggested and turned away to slip his arms through the sleeves of a dressing gown. “Can I offer you coffee?”

His sudden smile dazzled Captain Bruford so much that she accepted, without stopping to remember that it was almost noon and her own breakfast had been eaten hours before. Coffee and toast, served on the bridge; which was what a few of her older officers still called the computer room.

“That helicopter…”

The Khedive handed her coffee in a bone-china cup with matching saucer. Both items featured a discreet Utopia Lines logo. “Do you want me to order some croissant?”

She refused the croissant, only too aware that eyes of darkest brown watched her from a face that was perfectly symmetrical, perfectly proportioned…just perfect really.

Captain Bruford shook her head and glanced back to find the eyes still watching her. “The VSV,” she said. “You really…”

“I am afraid I can’t.” The Khedive’s shrug was apologetic. Almost as apologetic as his voice. “You see,” he said as he spread both hands to indicate his helplessness, “I can’t be seen to run away.”

“But the other passengers…”

“You have an onboard defence system,” said the Khedive. He nodded to a complimentary notebook resting on his bedside table. It was that year’s Toshiba, an update of the model with the lizardskin cover and silver corners. In it was everything a guest might want to know about the SS
Jannah
.