Arabesk (94 page)

“If you’re going to examine things that don’t belong to you,” said Raf, “then at least memorize the position so you can put them back in the right place.”

“I didn’t…” Hani raised her chin.

“Yes you did,” said Raf. “And lying’s worse than touching. Anyhow, that was just a suggestion…”

Zara put down her book.

“What?” Raf asked.

“If you don’t know,” said Zara, “I can’t tell you.” Anything else she might have said was lost when Hani yanked hard on Raf’s sleeve.

“Come on,” Hani said. “Tell me how you knew the bad man was stealing Umar…”

“Who’s Umar?” said Raf.

Hani sighed. “You were in the fish market…”

Raf nodded.

“You had a fight…”

It had been on Isk3N apparently, courtesy of a newsfeed supplied by a Japanese tourist. And Hani knew infinitely more about the background than Raf did. The small boy’s name was Umar, his father had died two years before at Medinat al-Fayoum, ambushed by fundamentalists. Medinat al-Fayoum was known to the ancient Greeks as Crocodilopolis. This last snippet was added by Hani, who believed context was everything.

“So who was the fisherman?” Raf asked.

“You didn’t stop to find out…” Zara’s voice was icy.

“He pulled a knife on Uncle Ashraf.”

Zara smiled sadly. “So,” she said to Raf as she pushed back her chair, “you want to tell me who you were really fighting out there?”

“You want to tell me what’s made you so angry?”

“You,” she said. “Nothing else.”

“Got it in one,” Raf said.

“He was her father-in-law,”
Hani announced loudly. “And kept the boy out of school to work a boat,” she added more gently, once she realized she had Raf’s attention. “But he kept hitting Umar, so Umar’s mother took him away… You’re a hero.”

Raf frowned.

“Ex-Governor stops kidnap… It said so on the news.”

Flashback

Was it—Sally wondered—immoral to steal a sunrise
muffin before smashing up Koffe King or should she trash all the food along with the glass counter? Which was worse, wasting food in a world where hunger killed twenty-four-thousand people a day or eating corporate crap, which quite possibly contained GM flour?

Tough call.

Pressing the mute button on her Sony minidisc (an impromptu gift from Bozo, who’d liberated it from near the Exxon Building on 6th), Sally consigned New York Freeze to silence and pointed to a tray.

“One of those, please.”

“Which kind?”

There were two types, Sally realized. Both looked pretty identical to her and probably came out of the same machine, but maybe the dough mix was different.

“What’s the…” Sally began to ask and got a mouthful of fluff from her ski mask. So she yanked up the front edge. “Whatever,” she said. And when the boy still looked blank Sally chose one at random. “One of those on the right… Your right,” she added, when the boy reached in the wrong direction.

“Would you like a drink with that?”

“Skinny latte, grande,” said Sally.

Behind the chrome counter a Hispanic kid who looked about twelve took a sneak at the baseball bat Sally held.

“Easton Z,” said Sally. “C500 alloy, high-strain graphite core.”

The kid nodded to himself. “You want that muffin and coffee to go?”

“Yeah,” said Sally. “Definitely.”

They both waited while another kid made a quick espresso, slopped in milk from a plastic carton and jammed the mixture under a hissing chrome nozzle. From the metal jug to a cardboard cup took another practised slop and then the kid drizzled a streak of cocoa across the top.

“I asked for a latte, skinny,” Sally said, then shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Have a nice day…”

Sally nodded. “And you.” Behind her Atal and Bozo stood in silence, waiting patiently. They were on guard duty and Sally was the person they guarded. That was because, after this, Sally had another job to do, although this was the job she had to be seen to be doing, it had all been worked out.

“Go now,” she said to the two Hispanics. “You don’t get paid enough to get hurt protecting this place.” Sally looked back, to check that Atal and Bozo felt the same and they both nodded.

“She means it,” added Bozo, his voice dark as chocolate, the 70 percent cocoa solids kind. “Get while you can.”

The kid who’d asked Sally which muffin she wanted looked from Sally’s alloy bat to the link cutters that hung from Bozo’s huge hand, then took in a neoprene-handled clawhammer stuck in Atal’s woven belt. Something gluey was stuck round the claws.

Discarding their silly hats at the door, the counter staff left. Today wasn’t a good day to be wandering Manhattan south of Canal Street in corporate camouflage. Anyone with a brain knew not to blame the McKids stuck behind counters, who were as fucked over by corporate capitalism as the coffee growers, beef farmers and dairymen; but not every protestor currently wandering the streets of Manhattan had a brain.

“Do the clock,” Sally ordered and Atal frowned. It was true he outranked Bozo, being a vidhead, in as much as anyone outranked anyone, but Sally didn’t trust Bozo not to break the clock while he was trying to adjust it.

Climbing onto a chrome stool, Atal yanked the clock off the wall. It was battery-operated with hollow wood-effect surround that surprised no one. Twisting a plastic knob on the back, Atal ran the minute hand forward exactly three-quarters of an hour and wiped down the knob and casing to remove his fingerprints.

“Okay,” Atal said. “How do you want to do this?”

“The way we agreed.” Sally lifted her baseball bat over her head and paused while Atal found the angle. There was always an angle, apparently.

“Take it from the start,” said Atal, signalling to Sally that she should put down her bat. “Okay,” he said, “now move in from the door and take out the countertop…”

She did as he instructed. Going out of the door and coming back so Atal could start running the camera at the point when the door began to shut behind her. Three steps took her to the counter, up went her chrome baseball bat and down it came, fracturing twenty feet of hardened glass.

“Now smash the front…”

That took two swings, because the angle of attack was awkward. Of course, the whole sequence would have been better with sound, but Atal was scared he’d pick up some interference from outside, like a passing black-and-white and the police would be able to get them from that.

“Tables…”

These were chrome-topped, but cheap chrome glued over fibreboard circles and edged with silvery plastic that splintered at the first blow. Ten blows, ten tables, that bit was simplicity itself.

“Now the clock…”

Swirling round, Atal’s camera panning as Sally spun from the last of the tables to where the clock had been returned to its place high on a wall, Sally did something fiddly with her baseball bat which involved skimming it in a figure eight, then rolled it three times in a row backwards over her hand. A trick that looked more impressive than it was and the only thing of value she’d picked up from Drew, a nanchuku freak briefly her boyfriend. Since this turned out to be the only skill Drew had, Sally was loath to let it go to waste.

“Do it,” Atal said.

So Sally did.

Snapping the handle into the palm of her hand, she reached up and smashed the clock into fragments and destroyed every framed poster in the place. She didn’t want New York’s Finest thinking the clock had been given undue attention.

“Okay,” said Sally, flipping her bat in another circle. “Out of here. We’re done.”

Koffe King wasn’t the first place they trashed. At Sally’s insistence they’d already hit an antique emporium on the corner of 19th and Broadway. The kind of store where narrow people bought expensive things during the week and wide people went window-shopping on Saturdays.

Only there were no tourists to gawp as Sally took her bat to the biggest window of the emporium and showered a wooden Buddha with diamonds. Everybody had decided to stay home—except the fashion crowd who were watching from roofs right across Tribeca.

Atal liked the Buddha, needless to say, and so did Sally (if she was honest). What she hated was the fact that it cost more than the person who crafted or found it made in one year, quite possibly more than that person made in one lifetime.

So she did the window and liberated the statue, leaving it on the roof of an empty black-and-white as a present for the cops when they came back.

After ditching their ski masks and cycling gloves in a bin, Sally, Bozo and Atal swapped jackets, put on shades and hailed a cab on Madison. Apparently the NYPD were waving licensed cabs through a roadblock near Grand Central. Something that made no more sense to Sally than it did to Singh, the driver with limited English and advanced negotiating skills who finally took a risk and stopped for them.

Two blocks south of 42nd Street, Sally had Singh hang a right just before the Hill Building and shoot over onto Park.

“Outside the church,” she said.

They all caught the point at which Singh flicked his gaze from Bozo’s red tarboosh to the stone Messiah above the door of Our Saviour.

“Showing him the sights,” said Sally as she flicked the catch on a Balenciaga bag and overtipped horrendously. The bag came courtesy of a poorly guarded boutique next to the Thai café on Thompson, between Bleecker and West 3rd. The cash was liberated from almost everywhere.

Wednesday 9th February

“What doesn’t?” Eugenie de la Croix said, stopping
opposite Raf. There were plenty of chairs vacant but she stood, slightly impatiently, until a waiter slid from the gloom of Le Trianon’s interior to pull one back for her, apologizing profusely.

“What doesn’t what?” Raf demanded.

“Make any sense…?”

He looked at the elderly woman in front of him.

“You said,
It’s impossible to work out.
”

“I did?”

Eugenie nodded. “Then you said,
No it’s not. It just doesn’t make sense
… So my question is, What doesn’t make sense?”

“To eat so many almond croissants.”

Eugenie raised her eyebrows.

“Eighty-seven,” said Raf blandly, “since I arrived in El Iskandryia.”

“I’m surprised you can afford them,” said Eugenie, “given how little you currently earn. Have you paid off your overdraft yet?”

They both knew the answer to that.

“So how
do
you afford to do this every day?” Eugenie indicated the table and its litter of dirty plates, a half-drunk cup of cappuccino and discarded papers, one or two of which were still running comment pieces about the ex-Governor’s
heroic rescue
of Umar.

“It’s on my tab.”

“Tab?”

“Credit,” said Raf. “They keep note of what I owe.”

“Which is how much?”

Raf shrugged. “They’re the ones keeping track,” he said lightly and ignored the fox who grinned inside his head, anxious to give him the exact figure.

“You’re broke…” Eugenie said.

“And you’re repeating yourself.”

Eugenie sighed. “I can pay you.” She opened her bag and extracted a manilla envelope. “Very well indeed.”

When Raf raised his eyebrows it was in imitation of her earlier expression, although his shades ruined most of the effect. “You said nothing about paying me.”

“Nothing…?” For a split second Eugenie looked triumphant, but her face fell as she caught Raf’s twisted smile and realized he was mocking her.

But she threw out the hook all the same.

“Your father’s rich.”

“If he is my father…”

Eugenie sighed. “Believe me,” she said heavily and pushed the envelope across the table. “He is and you
are
an al-Mansur.”

“Just suppose,” said Raf, pushing it back, “that really were true. Why would I be interested?”

“What if I told you he wants to disinherit
His Excellency
Kashif Pasha?” Eugenie said, her words curdling around the honorific. “And that his favourite son is too young to command support of the army. And that without the support of the army Murad can’t be appointed the Emir’s new heir?”

Raf looked blank.

“That leaves you,” she said. “Doesn’t that make you feel like coming to his aid?”

At the shake of Raf’s head, Eugenie shrugged. “I told him this wouldn’t work,” she said, but she was talking to herself.

“I’ve got a question for you,” said Raf. “Ignore whether or not they were actually married. Did my mother really sleep with the Emir?”

Eugenie nodded.

“Can you prove it?”

They met again the next morning, Raf already one newspaper down with two to go by the time Eugenie stepped over the silk rope that separated the terrace of Le Trianon from Rue Missala.

The weather was warmer, almost humid, but Raf wore his black silk suit all the same and she wore the grey skirt and jacket she’d been wearing when the two of them first met, only now they no longer stank of camphor. A discreet holster still sat at the back of her hip. Her makeup remained so immaculate that Raf wasn’t quite sure it was there.

As ever, Raf wore his trademark shades and nursed a headache that was three parts caffeine to one part ennui. He’d been waiting for Eugenie’s arrival. Which was not to say he’d been looking forward to it.

“Cappuccino,” Raf told his waiter. “And whatever Lady Eugenie is having.”

“Madame de la Croix,” Eugenie said firmly. “And I’ll have my usual espresso… I turned down your father’s kind offer of an upgrade before you were born,” she added, once the waiter had gone. “Around the time I turned down his offer of a bed to share. My chance for immortality was how he described it.” The woman’s smile was so wintry that Raf looked at her then, really looked, the way the fox did when searching for stillness within life’s scribble.