The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (30 page)

The prefab was empty of people and full of kit. Each wall was smothered with cheap Ikea shelving, the bolt-together kind. Metal tables were pushed hard against the shelves. The only gap on the walls was a window, that would have looked north along the dockside towards Maritime Station if someone hadn’t covered it over with tar paper and taped along all the edges. There was a sourly mechanical, almost chemical stink to the place, underlaid with stale tobacco.

Most of the kit in the room was instantly recognizable, like two stand-alone Median PCs and an Apple laptop with a fold-out satellite dish, which was definitely illegal. Plus a stack of vinyl piled next to a Blaupunkt mixing desk. The rest of the apparatus was far weirder. Starting with a full scuba suit, matching quadruple oxygen bottles and a shrink-wrapped box of sterile 1000ml beakers stacked next to the entrance hatch.

And someone had gone to the trouble of dragging plastic drums of distilled water up to the office. But that was the least of it. In one corner was a Braun freezer, wired to a bank of car batteries. In the opposite corner, a cupboard made of glass had an extractor hood taped and double-taped to its top, with a duct leading straight out through an outside wall.

On a table by the cupboard a long glass spiral of tubes fed down to a sealed beaker and every ring in the spiral was joined to the next with a ground-glass joint. Jammed between two of the rings was a half-smoked packet of untipped Cleopatra, while a battered paperback copy of
Uncle Fester’s Organic Chemistry
leaned against the beaker. The
Fester’s
was the edition with a skull on its cover.

Inside a medical chest placed on the floor next to the table were bandages, burn salve, spray skin, surgical glue, a small canister of Japanese oxygen and a box of surgical gloves. There were also a dozen more packets of untipped Cleopatra.

“What have you found?” Hani demanded.

“A kitchen,” said Raf as he returned to the trap door and put out a hand to help her up, “but not the kind you know.” He tried not to mind that the child flinched away from his grip.

“Wake up,”
said Hani.

Raf came to on his feet. Banging into shelving as he spun, hand going for his shoulder holster before he remembered he didn’t wear one these days and the gun was in his pocket.

Instinctively, he checked the fat man’s revolver, fast-flipping the cylinder. Out and in. The weapon was one shot light—as if he could forget.

Still, with luck, whoever Ali-Din said was coming wouldn’t know that.

“Ali-Din…?”

Raf stopped.

“How does Ali-Din know someone’s coming?”

In answer, Hani put her puppy on a table by the taped-over window. The rag dog shuffled round and swung its large head until its eyes stared at where the tenements would be visible in the early-morning daylight, if only plyboard and tar paper hadn’t replaced the glass. When its head stopped swaying, its blue-buttoned tail started to wag, like a faulty metronome.

“Don’t tell me,” Raf said. “The nearer the person, the faster the wag?”

Hani nodded.

“So it’s a friend?”

Hani’s eyes went wide, impressed at his grasp.

“A friend?” Raf stressed, even though he already knew the answer.

Whoever had given the toy to Hani had chosen an expensive model. Though the mechanics couldn’t be that difficult. To greet or growl the unit wouldn’t even need satellite tracking—not the visual kind, anyway. Simple band scanning could check numbers on a mobile against basic visual recognition software and have the wag or growl defined either by how the child had reacted visually to that person before, or else, if the unit was really expensive, by reading off stress levels or beta waves.

There’d be a time lag of a few seconds but nothing too difficult to hide.

“Tell me,” said Raf, as he pocketed the revolver and headed for the trapdoor. “Wag or growl? Which did Ali-Din do when he saw Aunt Nafisa?” Hani still hadn’t answered when he reached the bottom of the ladder…

“Sweet fuck.” Raf forgot all about saying hello to Zara. Instead he stepped out into the morning glare, scrabbling for his dark glasses. He still couldn’t get used to the North African sun, not after the grey skies of Seattle and the equally soft skies of Switzerland and Scotland before that.

Zara was dressed in tight black jeans, matched with a white silk shirt with long sleeves, no bra and only flip-flops on her feet. But it was her split lip he noticed.

“Leave it,” she said, when he tried to check the swelling. She stopped outside the warehouse door, refusing to go any further. “I want to know why you shot Felix…”

“He was already dying. I just speeded it up.”

Zara sighed. “How very macho.” She pulled a print of
Iskandryia Today
from under her arm. “You sure it wasn’t because he told the truth about Lady Nafisa’s suicide?”

“How do you…?” Raf demanded.

“The whole city knows,” said Zara and shoved the front page in his face. Felix stared out, looking fifteen years younger and a hundred pounds thinner than when Raf had last seen him. There was no picture of Raf, though the words
Suicide, Lady Nafisa,
and
Ashraf Bey
made cross-heads down two columns on the right.

“Nafisa didn’t commit suicide,” Raf said flatly. “She was too devout, too
respectable.”
He put heavy stress on the last word, and knew it to be true. Delete and discard were functions his unconscious had never had to master. He could actually
see
Lady Nafisa, alive inside his head, retiring to her room five times a day for prayers. See her reprimanding Hani for playing with Ali-Din that first Friday when the child should have been reading quietly or practising needlework.

Suicide was a sin.

Besides, she was too selfish, too in love with who she was to throw over worldly grandeur without a fight. Lady Nafisa didn’t cast herself into darkness. Someone forced her through that door…

“There’s been a couple of people on the radio who agree it wasn’t suicide,” said Zara. “They say it was you.”

“Me?” Raf stopped, shook his head and stared at the picture of Felix. He hadn’t murdered the fat man and he hadn’t killed his aunt. And Raf didn’t need to stake his life on it, because he already had.

The raid on CdH also made the front page, but much smaller. And the picture of Zara was a paparazzi shot, snatched outside the Precinct as she clambered from the back of a riot van.

The copy didn’t actually need to say she’d been naked beneath her coat when arrested, because the valley of shadow just above where the
faux
ocelot buttoned told its own story. Which hadn’t stopped the paper stressing her nakedness three times in three paragraphs.

“What did they do to you?” Stepping forward, Raf took Zara’s chin gently between first finger and thumb and turned her cheek to the light. A heavy bruise could just be seen beneath carefully applied concealer. One eye was also bruised and bloodshot, though Zara hadn’t bothered with belladonna drops. No amount of eye brightener would be enough to hide her puffy eyelids or the redness where tears had dried.

Without thinking, Raf put an arm round her shoulder to help Zara into the warehouse, and felt rather than just heard her intake of breath and sudden hiss of pain.

“Forget it,” said Zara, brushing his apology away with a sour smile. “No one else seems to think it’s important. So what do you think of the place?” She stepped past him and into the warehouse. “The collective use it. I just pay the rent.”

“The collective?”

“Friends…”

“But you all share the profits?”

Zara shook her head. “I let them sell stuff at the club, at their own risk. CdH takes nothing off the top… Took,” she corrected herself. “We
took
nothing off the top.”

“Doesn’t look like that made a difference,” said Raf, one finger tracing a raw welt that ran round the side of her neck. Its edges were puffy and pinpricked with blood. This time Zara didn’t flinch.

“Bastards,” said Raf.

Zara laughed. “You think the police did this?” There was a slow-burn anger in her voice, like slightly damp black power getting itself ready to hiss and flare. “The
morales
were politeness itself. Even drove me back to Villa Hamzah in an unmarked car. This is my mother’s handiwork.”

“Because you were arrested?”

“Because I was naked. Because I was with you. Because no one worth anything will ever marry me now… How many fucking reasons do you think she needs?” Zara took a deep breath, steadying herself. “Why do you think I was so desperate to get away to New York?”

There was no answer to that.

Raf eyed the ladder doubtfully. Seeing Hani crouched at the top, watching them with a blind intensity.

“I’m up here,” she told Zara. “Do you want me to come down?”

By way of reply, Zara began to pull herself up the ladder, wincing at every new rung. By the time she reached the top, pain had her breathing only through her mouth, though she tried to hide the trembling in her hands.

“Antiseptic,” Hani told Raf, “and cotton wool.” She put them into his hands and returned with a spray that read
plastic skin,
another of analgesic and a small bottle of mineral water… Ripping a stained blanket off a lopsided camp bed, she nodded for Zara to lie down, which the young woman did, being too tired to disagree.

“This will hurt,” said Hani, her voice serious.

“Really,” Zara said dryly. “What a surprise.” For the first time in hours the child almost cracked a smile. But that vanished the moment Zara tried to take off her shirt and found it was stuck to her back.

Hani proved to be more than adept when it came to dressing the wounds, which she did with minimum fuss and maximum patience, stopping every time Zara swore or jerked under her touch. When one blast of analgesic proved not enough, Hani resprayed Zara’s bare back and counted up to fifteen before she began again to lift off dried blood with wet cotton balls.

Hani’s proficiency wasn’t what held Raf’s attention. What gripped it—so tightly he had to remind himself he’d actually seen Zara naked, not just without her shirt—was the curve of one full breast as it pressed out at the side, as she lay face down on that rickety camp bed. He’d seen his share of naked women, although none of them quite that beautiful; but this was heartbreakingly different, and he felt the breast’s shape in his head like a shiver.

Somewhere in his psycho-profile files at Huntsville there was probably an explanation. Which, no doubt, Dr Millbank would have been happy to expound. Back there sex was something to be talked about, analysed and discussed, preferably in open meetings. In return, Huntsville ran “access weekends” in a block of log cabins that looked like a bad lakeside motel. Every window had red checked curtains, little beds of nasturtiums prettied up both sides of the front door and books stood in neat rows on shelves inside, along with framed prints of snowcapped mountains and a fridge full of Miller Lite and that pale Mexican beer. The low-rent kind that made it hard to get drunk.

But the
normalizing
touches were irrelevant. All anyone was really interested in were the big Shaker beds with their disposable sheets that got replaced each morning.

It hadn’t mattered that Raf had no one to come visiting. At the end of his first month Dr Millbank signed him off as in need of ongoing psychosexual therapy. His designated therapist was a blond academic in her early thirties who was writing a thesis on
regressive institutionalization.
One weekend the academic didn’t arrive and a dark-haired serious Canadian student of hers turned up instead. All the Canadian wanted to do was heavy pet and then take breaks to make notes. It was from the student that Raf learned his therapist had been working on the same paper for eleven years. Which sounded pretty institutionalized to him…

When Zara’s welts were clean, Hani sterilized the area with antiseptic, waited for it to dry and then graffitied over each one with a thick line of plastic skin; and all the while the child’s face was frozen into a mask, seconds away from dissolving into tears.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Zara insisted. “It just stung a bit, you know?”

Slowly, Hani nodded. And the movement was all it took to tip the drops from her eyes and spill them down her cheeks: rendering Raf instantly irrelevant, though he didn’t know why.

The two girls looked at each other, then back at Raf.

“South of here,” said Zara, “you’ll find a boat, just before the railway jetty.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, revealing a flash of breast as she dipped one hand into her jeans pocket. “You’ll need this,” she said firmly. The card she gave him was grey, scratched and dull with age. It was blank on either side. “We won’t be long.”

“What about…”

“Hani’s going to clean up my face, aren’t you, honey? And then we’re going to talk, in private. Then we’ll do our prayers. After that, we’ll come and find you…”

The first vessel Raf came to stank of oil and rested so low in the water that any half-decent wave could lap over its side and finish the job of sinking it. The next two were small tunny boats, battered red hulls and peeling oak decks warped and split with heat. Old-fashioned steel padlocks locked tight their cabin doors.

After that was a long gap of jetty where rusting bollards waited vainly for bow ropes from container ships that would never come back. The new boats docked in the deeper waters behind him. Ferries and cargo vessels from Marseilles and Syracuse, roped fast to the jetty of Maritime Station. And beyond those were, anchored sleek grey cruisers and an elderly aircraft hangar that stood off from the entrance to the naval base at Ras el-Tin. The General was rumoured to keep certain prisoners aboard the
Ali Pasha,
held below decks in conditions of both sumptuous luxury and restraint.

Ahead of Raf, where shallows condemned the water to near-emptiness, the main dock came to an abrupt halt as the dockside jerked back onto itself to become a long jetty which angled out towards the middle of the harbour. The glint of wheel-hammered tracks confirmed that the spur was still in use. Probably to shunt containers out to Soviet cargo carriers too vast even to dock alongside Maritime Station.