Arabesk (12 page)

“Hold it,” Felix barked.

“I live here,” announced Raf, stopping to glance at the fat man blocking his way. From the rye on the man’s breath to his thinning hair gone grey and tied back in a lanky ponytail, the fat man had “American cop” written all over him. Which was weird, given this was North Africa.

“Prove it…”

Raf had left his office at a run, over-tipped a cab to jump two lights and pounded straight through Nafisa’s knot garden, leaving shredded shrubs behind him. He’d made it from office to steps in five and a half minutes. Obstruction wasn’t what he needed right now. Instead of stopping, he began to squeeze between the fat man and the door frame.

A finger jabbed his chest. “Identity papers,” the man demanded. Even speaking bad French he had an air of authority—derived from more than just age or experience.

Raf hated him on sight. So he made quite sure he got in the first move.

Faced with having his knuckle rupture or stepping backwards, Felix retreated with Raf still twisting the offending finger. Some of the moves Raf had learned on remand were so simple a child couldn’t screw them up. That was the idea, anyway.

“
Ashraf
…” Hani’s shout meshed with a blur of movement, the cold click of metal and the touch of a police-issue revolver to Raf’s head. Very slowly, Raf let go of the fat man’s finger and stepped back.

“You know this person?” the fat man asked Hani, sounding disappointed. As if that somehow meant he wasn’t allowed to beat his target to pulp.

Hani nodded, eyes wide. “That’s my new uncle.”

“Identity papers,” Felix said. His left hand kept the Colt pushed against Raf’s skull while his right reached for the card Raf extracted from his inside jacket pocket.

“Fucking terrific.”

Definitely American, Raf decided, watching the fat man return his revolver to its hip holster. First language Brooklyn, second Arabic, third very bad French. Which was one better than him.

“Colonel Pashazade Ashraf al-Mansur…
Pashazade?
Your dad’s a fucking Pasha?”

Your dad
. Now there was a concept with which to conjure.

“No,” said Raf, grabbing back his Third Circle laminate. “He’s the Emir of fucking Tunis.” Stepping round the fat man as if he wasn’t there, Raf knelt beside Hani.

“You all right?”

“No.” She nodded towards an open door. “Aunt Nafisa…”

“Don’t let the kid go in there,” said Felix heavily. “Don’t touch anything. And don’t even think of getting in my fucking face.” With that he stamped his way downstairs to tape off the crime-scene entrances before anyone else decided to appear.

It took Raf nearly a minute to spot the platinum pen rammed hard between her ribs, its metal end protruding beneath one breast like a witch’s third nipple; but then he was stood in an open doorway, on the other side of a rustling strip of police tape that had been hastily strung across the door.

“Shit.” There didn’t seem much else to say. And besides, it was hardly the first corpse he’d seen. All the same, it was his aunt, supposedly, and he was surprised at how unmoved he felt. The wound was ugly, the small office was a mess. That was it.

“They murdered her,” whispered a voice behind him and when Raf looked back Hani was there, eyes vast as she stared up at him.

“Who did?”

“The foreigners.”

Somewhere inside Nafisa’s office a lavatory flushed, a lock clicked open and before Raf could react an almost-elegant blonde stepped into the tiny room, still wiping her mouth. The door she’d used was hidden behind a Persian rug that hung on the wall from a wooden pole. Except the pole wasn’t really attached to Nafisa’s office wall: but to the top of a door. Behind her came the sound of a cistern filling.

“Lady Jalila,” said the woman, introducing herself.

“I’m Raf.”

“Yes, I know…”

They stared at each other in silence. She’d done a good job of cleaning herself up but the scrub marks on the front of her white jacket didn’t quite hide vomit stains. And she very carefully avoided stepping anywhere near the desk as she crossed the dead woman’s office.

Her composure held for as long as it took the child behind Raf to turn on her heel and clatter away down the
qaa
steps. Lady Jalila looked startled.

“You let Hani see this?” The woman’s voice was suddenly brittle, her hands shaking. To Raf it looked like the onset of shock.

“No,” said Raf. “That was you.”

Lady Jalila shot him a puzzled look.

“You were obviously here first,” Raf added.

“I imagine that I was in Nafisa’s loo being sick when Hani appeared.” Whatever else Lady Jalila intended to say was lost in a sudden tread of heavy feet below.

“Up here,” she barked. But Felix had got there first. The two uniformed police officers were halted in the courtyard, listening intently to whatever it was the fat man wanted to say.

“Hey, Boss,” said the younger, when Felix finally stopped talking. “Control said to tell you you’re showing up as offline…”

“His Excellency?”

Both uniformed officers nodded as one.

“Felix here,” the fat man announced, flicking a switch on his watch and then punching a button. Other than that, he said nothing for the next few minutes, just turned a deeper shade of red. “Yes, sir,” he said when the call was finishing. “I’ll make sure she gets every courtesy extended. And, yes, I’ll remember it’s easier for you if I don’t turn off my connection.”

“My Lady.” When Felix looked up to where Lady Jalila stood staring down into the courtyard, the politeness in his voice was at odds with the contempt in his eyes. “The Minister thinks it might be best if you went straight home.”

“Does he indeed…” Lady Jalila headed for the
qaa
steps, nodding for Raf to follow.

“Presumably he’s sending a car?”

“No,” said Felix. “He’s sure one of these officers will be delighted to drive you. That is, if you don’t mind travelling in a squad car?”

Lady Jalila sighed heavily. “If I must.”

“So all I need now,” said Felix, “is to know when it would be convenient for me to call on you…?”

“On me?”
The woman stopped in her tracks. Her voice made it sound as if Felix had suggested they book into the nearest Ramada for a quick afternoon of bestiality and child abuse.

“There
has
been a murder.” Felix glanced from Raf to Lady Jalila and then at Hani who was coming out of the kitchens with Donna in tow. What he thought about having his crime scene littered with a bey, children, cooks and the wife of his boss was obvious, if unprintable.

Seattle / New York

The third time ZeeZee arrived in America he was almost
sixteen and his previous trip was a memory he didn’t take out of the box and dust down too often. It had begun badly and gone down hill from there…

There’d been no waiting stretch limo that earlier time, no one to meet him, not that he’d expected either and not that he minded. And besides, he’d proved quite capable of catching a Carey Bus and unloading his almost empty case outside Grand Central. He ditched the case in a gash bin on 42nd. There was nothing inside except a school coat and he didn’t need that any more.

The yellow cab he stopped to take him to the apartment his mother was borrowing on the Upper East Side parked up illegally while he ran inside to get the fare. And when he discovered his mother wasn’t home, he borrowed the $10 from a uniformed doorman and was vaguely surprised when the elderly black man assured him that his Seiko automatic wasn’t needed as security for the loan.

It seemed she’d remembered to tell the front desk that her son would be sharing the apartment, even if she hadn’t remembered to meet him at the airport.

By the time his mother came home, he’d found a room he assumed was his—from an almost-new copy o
f Vampyre Blade III
and an old Sony console—and had a long shower, eaten a slice of cold pizza from the fridge and slept right through to the following morning.

She came in as he was cooking toast under a grill he could hardly reach because whichever designer her latest friend had employed hadn’t factored eleven-year-olds into his equation. But then, the apartment wasn’t designed as living space, more as a public statement of identity. And even the kitchen was bigger than his old dorm and it was only a fifth of the size of the new living room, where one complete corner had been ripped right out and replaced with glass to look down on Central Park. ZeeZee figured that when she borrowed the flat, she must have forgotten he hated heights.

The living-room fireplace was machine-cut from some grey stone he didn’t recognize and along both of its sides stretched elegant steel shelves packed untidily with master disks of her trips and large, tattered books full of her photographs. Other disks and books were crammed sideways into the narrow gaps above.

Rugs, oil paintings and an antique leopard skin completely covered the other walls, but those didn’t belong to her. On the floor itself, newspapers competed for space with empty plates, glasses, and half a dozen camera bags that did…

“Darling. How good to see you.”

She held a pair of shades and wore a crimson scarf tied over hair that needed washing. Her black jeans and jersey looked like they’d been slept in, except that one look at her eyes told him she was too wired to have slept in days.

They had both smiled, slightly tentatively.

“You found it, then?”

ZeeZee nodded, then went back to cooking his toast, leaving her to make conversation.

“I’ve booked you into a school,” she said. “It’s over on the other side of the Park. There’s a prospectus around here somewhere.” Her black-nailed hands fluttered at a clutter of papers covering the sand-blasted steel kitchen table. “You can start when you want. I hope it will do…”

He looked at her then.

She shrugged. “They took a year’s fees up front.”

While his mother took a shower and then fixed herself a line, ZeeZee set up the reconditioned Sony console. He got as far as skimming the “read me” before he realized there wasn’t a television in his room to plug the console into. Moving the huge TV from the living room into his bedroom seemed impractical. As did moving himself and his bed into the living room, so he decided to worry about it all later and instead took a lift down to the foyer to see the doorman.

What ZeeZee remembered most about that year with his mother was watching screens with Max the doorman. Inside Max’s office was a bank of video monitors linked to hidden CCTV cameras in the foyer, lifts, corridors and parking bay. The cameras were chipped for sound but Max liked to watch them with the volume turned down. Creating stories for the people he saw.

By the end of the first month, ZeeZee’s mother was just one of a dozen characters ZeeZee and Max watched lock up their doors, then promptly check their hair, cleavage, teeth or waistlines in corridor mirrors. ZeeZee learned which men were going into flats they shouldn’t be going into. He saw elegant women kiss men who weren’t their partners. He watched an Italian girl who didn’t even know he existed hurriedly change her tampon in a lift, secreting the old one neatly in a tissue. And he stayed glued to a monitor as two drunks screwed on the hood of a black Cadillac in a corner of the underground garage, even though one of them was his mother and the other the man who lent her the flat.

ZeeZee made it to the end of the year and then did what he’d always said he wouldn’t do, went back to Roslin in Scotland. Neither he nor his mother really discussed it. Life just happened that way, as if all the necessary conversations had already been had and all that remained was to fix the ticket. It was hard to know which of them found his leaving the greatest release.

6th July

The crime perimeter was secure, no press were present
and a junior detective was out on the sidewalk, trying to determine the perpetrator’s entry and exit routes. So far without success. Lady Jalila had gone and Felix was busy trying to persuade Raf to do the same.

Below them, guarding the bottom of the
qaa
steps was a tall young man with the flawless skin of a Nubian and the upset eyes of a recruit not yet grown used to death. The young uniformed officer had given a length of tape to Hani, who was twisting it endlessly so that sunlight caught a holostrip of lettering which read
EIPD—do not cross.
And as she flipped the tape back and forwards, making it sparkle in the hot sun, the child looked almost happy.

Felix shrugged. Kids weren’t his area and the idea wouldn’t have occurred to him. True enough, he had a daughter in Santa Fe. Only Trudi lived with her girlfriend, three tabby cats and a gun under her pillow; and the last time he’d seen his kid she’d probably been younger than the one sitting by the fountain playing with the tape.

These days his daughter had cropped hair, a razor-wire tattoo that wound up her arm from elbow to shoulder and nipples pierced with silver spikes, one tiny spike going across and the other down… He knew about those because her last but one Christmas card had a picture of her and Barbara on the front, taken at a Gay Pride barbecue in San Francisco. They were stripped to the waist and holding bottles of Bud. Only the bottles were closer to their button-flied groins than they were to their mouths and Barbara had pierced nipples too, linked together by a chain.

Trudi looked hot and tired, so he’d written back saying he hoped she was taking vitamins and that if she had to go out like that in public he hoped she was wearing lots of sun cream. That earned him a postcard of a tram. Only three scrawled lines on the back but one of them was her new e-address. They wrote to each other now, not often but a couple of brief paragraphs once every few months. And she sent him more photographs of herself, fully clothed this time, with one of the cats sitting on her lap.

There’d been a time of no photographs at all, when Trudi was in her early teens and her mother was going through a religious phase, if that was what you could call moving state and announcing to her new neighbours that no, she wasn’t divorced, her husband was dead. It had taken the ghost cancelling her alimony for five months to start the pictures flowing again. Before they did, he got a stiff letter from her attorney to which he’d had his own reply in Arabic. The photographs had restarted pretty soon after that.