Arabesk (93 page)

“What do you see?” Wu Yung asked her.

“Stars,” said Sally. “Points of light. How about you?”

Wu Yung climbed to his feet and walked to the window. Stood so close behind her that Sally could feel his breath on the back of her neck. “I see distance,” said Wu Yung. When he turned Sally round it was to ask her something else.

“Are you worried by the thought of death?”

“No more than anybody else,” Sally said, wondering if his question was sinister. “I’m one of life’s fighters,” she added firmly. “I work on instinct. It takes a lot to frighten me.”

“I didn’t ask if you were afraid of it.” Wu Yung’s voice was dry. “I asked if death worried you…”

“You’re saying there’s a difference?”

“Oh yes.” Wu Yung smiled. “All the difference in the world.”

Monday 7th February

Gulls shrieked, the way gulls mostly do when circling
against a wet and dirty sky. Somewhere beyond the drizzling rain the sun’s last rays withdrew, unnoticed by everyone except Raf, who lifted his shades and flipped frequencies to watch that day’s little death, its final flicker lost among chimney flare from the Midas Refinery.

At the back of Raf’s throat was the burn of cheap speed. Crystals of methamphetamine so filthy he’d picked out the blackest of the misshapen lumps and discarded them into a puddle. The wrap was one of a dozen left over from his brief and glorious stint as Chief of Detectives, evidence signed out from the precinct and never returned. It was, if he recalled correctly, the second to last of those left.

There were several ways Raf could restock his supply. The most obvious was to ask Hamzah Effendi, but somehow Raf couldn’t bring himself to do that. Another alternative was hit up Hakim and Ahmed, his old bodyguards, but that didn’t appeal either; which left buying his own and that brought its own problems, like making contacts and the fact he’d need to find some money.

He was a notable, living if not sleeping with the daughter of North Africa’s richest man. He had a title, contacts, and a reputation for ruthless efficiency entirely at odds with the facts. His niece was a certified genius. A woman he’d never met had just asked him to investigate an assassination attempt in which the only thing to die had been a snake. Short of not enough sleep and using too much speed, it was hard to work out why he was quite so depressed.

Unless it was the rain.

“Figure it out,”
said the fox.
“Before we both drown.”

As North Africa’s only remaining freeport, El Iskandryia shipped tobacco, rice and oil as legal cargoes; while illegal cargoes included most of the hashish destined for Northern Europe, commercial information, prostitutes, political intelligence and people in search of new identities.

At the back of Misr Station was an alley that did nothing but fake passports, identity cards, driving licences and new birth certificates; novelties all, apparently, but novelties good enough to pass the brief glance of a harried customs officer. Quality fakes came from the old Turko-Arabic district of El Anfushi, between Rue El Nokrashi and the chemical stink of the western docks.

Only, in El Anfushi there were no shop windows full of fake ID cards, no posters advertising
driving licences
,
any country
… Here you needed to be introduced, and even that took money. Zara’s father ran this, the high end of identity laundering, just as he controlled the refinery, tobacco shipments and illegal runs that carried hashish to Heraklion and returned with crates of fake Intel chips and memory boards, few of them labelled accurately.

This was where Zara’s fortune came from and where Hani acquired her dowry. From the trade in underage Sudanese whores, processed opium and scum on the run as much as from the vast petrochemical complex that squatted on El Iskandryia’s western edge, where slums ended and just before the desert began.

Raf knew this.

His garden was being rebuilt with dirty money. It was dirty money Zara had in Hong Kong Suisse, millions of dollars worth. And it would be Zara’s dirty money that sent Hani to school in New York, were he to allow that to happen.

The kind Bayer-Rochelle paid to his mother.

Of course, Raf had needed no introductions to acquire his new identity. This had been handed to him, five months back, outside Seattle’s SeaTac Airport, not so much on a plate as in an Alessi briefcase, empty but for a passport, a strip of photographs and a plane ticket.

The ticket had been to El Iskandryia, the passport a white leather affair stamped with the Ottoman crest and the cheap fotobooth pictures had been of a younger Zara, happy and smiling, words Raf wouldn’t associate with her now. His aunt had been responsible. The dead one.

Just after Rue L’Eglise Copte and a couple of minutes from where he would cut south across the six lanes of Boulevard Cherif Pasha, Raf tripped over what should have been a good memory while splashing through a darkened alley, so recently repaved its glistening cobbles were still unbroken.

Waves.

Opposite a new Starbucks, beside the shell of an empty shop, which was all plaster-skim walls and discarded, half-unravelled coils of wire, he came up with another memory.

Salt.

The final memory dripped from his lip as he crossed the wet expanse of Cherif Pasha and cut round a forlorn man standing in the rain selling roast quail on wooden skewers from a handcart.

Blood.

The summer before, on a smuggling VSV that operated at half stealth, giving it the radar profile of a small fishing boat, she’d bitten his lip, drawing salt. Zara’s kisses tasted of olives and red wine, her breasts beneath his hands were fire. If he was honest, he’d wanted her beyond thinking.

With the harbour lights in sight she’d undone pearl buttons on her shirt, pulling his head against her until his mouth found her breasts. And later still, as the boat slid into the Western Harbour past the headland of Ras el-Tin they’d knelt together in darkness, with Hani safely asleep on the seat behind them and she’d locked both knees around Raf’s leg to lose herself inside ragged breath and a spew of words that moved her lips but made no sound.

Somewhere between blood and salt and winter rain his new life had gone sour, seeding itself with ghosts and the expectation of failure. He’d like to blame the fox but it was working perfectly for the first time Raf could remember. And since his memory was eidetic, stone-cold perfect, that probably meant for the first time ever.

Blaming it on the fox had become Raf’s default position. They both knew that.

Emotional institutionalization.

“Deal with it,” Raf told himself and lifted a bunch of red flowers from a bucket in front of a store near the corner of al-Atarinne and Rue Faud Premier.

“Amaryllis,”
said the fox.
“Originally from the Andes. Discovered in 1828 by Dr. Eduard Poepping from Leipzig.”

Raf ignored the animal.

“How much?”

“For Your Excellency, fifteen dollars.” The young woman smiled from under a headscarf, mouth wide. They both knew she’d trebled the price and was daring him to argue. Just as they both knew she was in the process of closing up for the night.

Raf waved away the change from his remaining twenty-dollar bill. A stupid and empty gesture even by the standards of stupid empty gestures. “Keep it.”

Gripping the flowers in his left hand Raf headed down al-Atarinne walking with a half twist, holding the amaryllis to his side to protect the blooms from the rain; a minute or two later and the bunch was practically hidden under his coat; by the time he finally stopped under the awning of a
suq
he was actively looking for a waste bin.

Raf was still hunting for a bin when he passed through revolving doors, planning to cross the fish market’s emptying floor and use its exit onto a narrow and nameless side street that led south to Rue Cif. It was one of his less useful decisions.

“Not your fight,”
said the fox.

But it was. All fights were his fight. Or so it sometimes seemed.

The man with a knife was shorter than Raf, fairly normal for Iskandryia, where the average height barely reached five-foot-eight. His arms were corded with muscle and his back beneath a dirty string vest was broad with years of dragging nets from the sea. Only a tangle of grey across his bare shoulders put his age at, maybe, twice Raf’s own.

In his hand was a thin curve of steel, the remains of a blade honed over the years to a fraction of the original thickness. All this, the man’s age and occupation, fitness, and the fact he carried a filleting knife the fox took in with a single glance. While Raf wasted time staring at the face of a small boy being dragged across the floor.

“Forget it,”
the fox said.

“No one ever forgets,” said Raf, “that’s the problem.”

Tiri sighed.

Between Raf and the nearest wall huddled a handful of market traders and a young Japanese couple who stood openmouthed, their attention torn between what was happening to the boy and an old woman beside a stall who was slopping down its white-tiled surface, oblivious to the fuss around her.

“Do something,” the Japanese girl said.

Her partner shook his head. “We don’t know there’s a problem.”

Out of the corner of his eye Raf saw both become aware that he understood them, then all Raf’s attention was on the fisherman, his knife and the grip he kept on the boy’s thin wrist.

“Let the kid go,” said Raf, blocking the man’s path. He wasn’t sure which language he used. Raf had a nasty feeling it might have been Japanese.

In reply he got a growl of dialect and a wave of the knife. And as Raf stepped sideways, easily dodging the halfhearted thrust he saw in the man’s face a darkness he recognized. One that stared back at him on the days he dared face a mirror.

“The kid…” Raf said, in Arabic this time.

Again came a thrust of blade and again Raf twisted away.

“Increase the circle,”
said a voice in his head. The fox was big on rules of combat, though having learnt the rules Raf was apparently meant to forget them.

“Let go your shoulders…”

“I know,” said Raf, dropping to a fighter’s stance. Shoulders relaxed, knees slightly bent, ragged flowers hanging loose from one hand. Most of that stuff occurred below the level of conscious control. Now was the time for his heart rate to dip to half that of an ordinary man at rest.

Still wondering if this had yet to happen, Raf watched the blade race towards him with significantly more meaning behind it; and, as he blocked, the fisherman finally released his grip on the child, as it was the only way he could throw a punch.

Raf had time to notice an inscription on one of the rings, then he was fluid, his right hand sweeping aside the blow. And while the fisherman was still looking dazed at the speed with which his enemy moved, Raf sank two fingers into a nerve on the man’s shoulder and watched pain transform his face.

Raf was showing off, he knew that; but he was doing something worse in breaking a rule so old and incorrect that humanity liked to think it had moved on: until it blinked and found this untrue, which was often.

Raf could still remember the words of an old Rasta he’d met on remand, one time in Seattle, when they were both sharing a cell. The Jamaican had murdered fourteen people, all of them strangers. It was his job.

Never kill a man in front of his wife. Don’t hit a man in front of his child. Walk away if those options aren’t available. Anything else is allowed.

Raf blocked the next thrust easily and stepped back to widen his circle, a quick snarl shifting the slower members of the crowd.

The small boy, his tears now dry, was hugging a young woman almost lost inside a vast
hijab
that swathed her face in anonymity but didn’t quite hide a bruise below one eye. The backs of both her hands were hennaed, a cheap bracelet ringed her right wrist and the thumb on her other hand was dislocated.

It wasn’t a new story.

“Enough,”
said the fox.
“End it.”

Stepping in, Raf whipped his flowers across the fisherman’s face. A move guaranteed to inflame the man’s fury, not finish the dance.

“Pig,” Raf hissed the insult.

“You fight like a girl,”
added the fox, although the voice it used was Raf’s own.

The fisherman looked as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard.

“You heard me,”
the fox said.

With a snarl the man hurled himself at Raf, knife ready.

“See,”
said the fox smugly,
“punch the right buttons…”

One second the fisherman was feinting to the left, the next his right arm was whipping up as he went for a spike shot, the blade driving for the underside of Raf’s chin. And then Raf was inside the movement, no time to spare for fear or thought as he brushed the flicker aside with his left and stepped through the gap, the palm of his right hand slamming shut the fisherman’s jaw, so that the man’s head snapped back with an audible click.

The rest was almost too easy. A twist of the hips to put one elbow into the side of the older man’s head and then, as counterbalance, a fist under the ribs, carried there on recoil. As ever, Raf punched through his target, going for that invisible point behind his enemy’s spine. Four other moves promptly offered themselves to complete the sequence, but Raf didn’t bother…

“Knife,” Raf said.

The fisherman clambered to his knees, blood splashing onto the tiles from his torn mouth. Some of his teeth had shattered.

“Drop the knife,” ordered Raf.

Something was said to the fisherman by the girl with the headscarf and, eyes half-focused, the man glanced from Raf to the blade he still held. For a second all anyone in the market could hear was the clatter of steel on ceramic tiles, then the Japanese couple started clapping.

“Out of here,” said Raf, and stepped over his broken bunch of amaryllis.

“Ashraf Bey is leaving the building.”

“How did you know?” Hani fired off her question the moment Raf walked into the
qaa
, rain dripping from his jacket. She was very carefully not standing anywhere near the marble table, which was enough to make Raf glance at the collection of objects he’d left there that morning. At least three of Felix’s possessions had been replaced incorrectly, including his notebook.