Arabesk (2 page)

Politics—now there was one subject Felix spent a lot of time trying to avoid.

Grunting crossly, the fat man wiped fresh sweat from his face and grabbed two shots of a ridiculous rag dog, quite out of keeping with the cold elegance of the Khedivian desk on which it sat.

And then, having put off what came next for long enough, Felix turned his camera on the corpse.

“Exposure thirteen. Al-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior. The body, taken from front of desk…” Felix whipped off the modesty cloth and took his second look at the dead woman’s wounds. They were no more pleasant than first time round.

Once started, he worked swiftly on the crime grabs, moving in to get specific shots of the ripped-open blouse, the nails broken on one hand, the trickle of blood dried to a stark black ribbon down her side.

The woman was in her early forties. Middle height. Brown eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. Black hair cut short and expensive—elegant, obviously. The very fact her eyes were clear and the cornea unclouded told Felix that she was less than six hours dead, but he knew that anyway and put her death at two hours ago at the most.

One of her elbows was flopped across the arm of her chair and her head had tipped right back, the muscle relaxation that precedes rigor having smoothed her face until it looked more serene in death than it ever did in life: infinitely more serene than it did glaring out from that afternoon’s
Iskandryian
open on the desk in front of her.

“Berlin furious as society widow slams RenSchmiss.”

And those in El Iskandryia’s German community who believed in the legal right to slash open each other’s face for the sake of highly-prized duelling scars had slammed right back, from the look of things… Punching a button on the side of his Speed Graphic, Felix reduced the depth of field until it showed only what he wanted the judge to see. The injuries in sharp focus.

To him the victim was no longer human: that was where he differed both from his boss and underlings—and from Madame Mila, the coroner, who would already be on her way. To them, what slumped in that chair was still a woman. Deserving all the respect and modesty that the law allowed.

Which was why Felix had put the rest of his day on hold to make it to the scene of the crime first. Back in the City of Angels where Felix had trained, he’d have grabbed a few more corpse shots, lifted dabs, collected up handleable bio like hair and stashed it in evidence bags and then vacuumed the victim’s clothes, one garment at a time, again putting the dust into separate sachets.

And then, with the victim’s original position recorded beyond all possible doubt, he’d have had a medical technician take the body some place near but non-critical and remove the clothes so Felix could photograph the naked corpse, wound by wound and bruise by bruise.

But that wasn’t the way crime against women was handled in El Iskandryia. At least, not officially and this, regrettably, was unquestionably a very official crime. The victim had once been married to an important man, there were rumours that she was badly in debt—to whom nobody seemed to know—and she’d been outspoken enough to upset the young khedive’s German advisors.

This was the kind of crime that required press conferences, photo opportunities and fancy political footwork, all of which would get in the way of actually solving the murder.

Reaching into his pocket, Felix palmed a silver hip flask and opened it by flipping back its spring-loaded top with a single flick of the thumb. Like most things in his life, practice was all it took.

3rd July

Three days before Chief Felix found his holiday plans
suddenly ruined, the silent observer from the doorway of the al-Mansur madersa had been sitting at a café table, thinking. Of course, back then the observer hadn’t yet met Felix and still mostly thought of himself as ZeeZee.

Though this was in the process of changing. As for what he would become, he hadn’t yet decided. And he had no good reason to be sat in the sun anyway.

Which took care of
who, what
and
why…

Where?
was simpler. According to the fox, looking down from space revealed a green wedge of delta driven into yellow sand. Nature fighting the elements. Or rather, nature fighting itself…

The fox was big on
who, what, why
and
where.
That had long been one of its more irritating functions. The fox lived inside ZeeZee’s head. Most of the time it stayed there.

It used to ask him those kind of questions all the time when he was a child. But foxes live faster than humans and it was old now, tired. Mostly, though, he could still sense it lurking behind his eyes, and occasionally it took over. ZeeZee was fine with the fox. He had been ever since he’d realised it was meant to be there. And sometimes, back in the early days when they used to talk a lot, what the fox had told him was even interesting.

…looking down from space revealed a green wedge of delta driven into yellow sand. Stretching a hundred miles from south to north, over 125 miles at its topmost point and far longer than that if measured along the inlets and lakes of its almost fractal coastline, the delta fought back against a parched wasteland that dropped 2,000 feet into the desolate Qattara Depression only a day’s drive away.

Far to the delta’s south-west was the Great Sand Sea, an area so blasted in places by heat that the silica of some dunes had melted to chunks of clear, green-yellow glass. More than 1400 tonnes of the purest natural glass in the world lay strewn across the surface of the Sand Sea like fist-sized jewels. With a melting point 500 degrees higher than most natural glass, the sand-sea variety was so tough that a standard geological party trick was to heat a lump of the stuff until it was red-hot and then drop it into cold water. The interest was in what the glass
didn’t
do…which was splinter.

Scientific argument raged about whether the glass had been formed when an ancient meteorite had hit the desert full on or whether a meteorite had cut through Earth’s atmosphere at a shallow angle to skim the surface of the Sand Sea like a stone skipping across water, creating glass from the friction of its contact.

What was known was that a piece of the glass had been taken from the desert and carved into the shape of a sacred scarab, set into gold and given to a king. The scarab had been found by Wilhelm Dorpfeld in the tomb of Tutankhamen and was now in the Khedival Museum at Umm el-Dunya.

The green of the delta spread in a silt-rich patchwork of rice fields, date palms, villages and towns opening out like a fan from just north of Umm el-Dunya until it hit the southern edge of the Mediterranean where, in winter, waves crashed along barren, deserted beaches.

Three main roads cut through the delta, supports for the giant fan. And though one route led direct from the capital to El Iskandryia, few of those who used this road journeyed its full distance. People either flew over the delta or took the faster desert highway—a long strip of blacktop whose convict road-gangs engaged in a ceaseless war with the wind-shifted gravel that tried to eat the road at its edges.

The free city faced north, at the westernmost edge of the delta, limited on its northern side by the Mediterranean and to the south by a lake as long as the city itself. Necessity had made the inhabitants build and then build again on their narrow strip of land, until Iskandryia stretched over twenty miles from one side to the other but was never more than five miles deep at any point.

Looked at from any one of the spy satellites that hourly passed overhead, Isk appeared as a long grey rectangle bounded top and bottom by blue, with verdant green on the right and arid grit-grey to the left.

Increasing the magnification produced recognizable districts, from El Anfushi’s narrow side streets (built on what had once been an ancient causeway jutting between Western and Eastern harbour) to the ornate Victorian offices of Place Manshiya and the stuccoed villas and Moorish follies lining the Corniche: that elegant coastal strip which ran east and featured houses so exclusive their owners could afford to keep them staffed all year but use them for only six weeks in high summer when the capital became unbearably hot.

There were two gaps in the grand buildings lining the Corniche. One gap formed Place Orabi, which stretched from the shore back to a statue of Khedive Mohammed, the point where Place Orabi intersected with Place Manshiya, a different square that ran west to east along Orabi’s southern end.

To the east of Orabi was the second gap, which intersected with nothing at all. Place Zaghloul was named after the nationalist leader who in early 1916 had personally negotiated the Berlin Accord with Kaiser Wilhelm.

The political descendants of the Zaghloul party stressed that their man’s actions had led to Iskandryia’s status as a free city and Egypt’s return to enlightened Islamic government as an autonomous, khedival province of the Ottoman Empire. Opponents pointed out that—well over a century later—the Kaiser’s supposedly temporary German advisers were with them still.

The French were a newer addition to the North African cabal. Their place in the alliance cemented fifty years back by judicious marriages between Bonaparte princelings and both the Hohenzollerns and descendants of Mehmed V Rashid, Sublime Porte at the time of the original treaty.

South from Place Zaghloul ran Rue Missala, a thoroughfare lined with restaurants. And right on the corner, with entrances on both Zaghloul Square and the rue sat Le Trianon, Iskandryia’s most famous Art Nouveau café. On its walls were equally famous paintings, a series of seven increasingly unlikely tableaux depicting full-breasted dancers, naked save for open shirts and jewelled slippers.

The fox didn’t like the paintings. But then, the fox was a purist and had problems with Orientalist kitsch. And the fact that the fox was invisible to everyone but ZeeZee didn’t make it any less real. Though it wasn’t real, of course, not in the way the yellow cabs lurching along Rue Missala were real. ZeeZee had come up with a number of explanations for its existence. The fox’s favourite was that it was an autonomous construct of unprocessed dark memory.

In other times it might have been regarded as a ghost…

Sitting outside Le Trianon in an area roped off from pedestrians, the thin blond observer with the flowing beard and tangled dreadlocks washed down his second croissant with the dregs of his third cappuccino: and wished that what passed for breakfast at the madersa where he was staying would feed more than a stray mouse.

Ashraf al-Mansur—known as ZeeZee to the police, his therapist and a Chinese Triad boss who was undoubtedly even now searching the world to have him killed—had hated the interior of Le Trianon on sight. But since he’d needed to find somewhere to spend his mornings, this café was where he’d taken to eating. Now he just found the interior irritating.

“Another cappuccino, Your Excellency?”

Adjusting his Versace shades and brushing pastry flakes from the sleeve of his black silk suit, the young man nodded. “Why not,” he said slowly. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do.

“Very good, Your Excellency.” The Italian waiter bustled away, totally ignoring two English tourists who’d been waiting ten minutes for him to take their order. It was Saturday morning, four days after he’d arrived in the city, two days after he’d first met the industrialist Hamzah Quitrimala and one day after he’d finally agreed to marry the man’s “difficult” daughter. And every day, bar the day he’d actually arrived, he’d visited the café.

So now he was being treated as a regular. Which made sense, because by treating him as such, the patron hoped that was what he would become. Besides, once the patron had discovered that the excellency with the matted beard and odd hair would be working upstairs, it became inevitable that ZeeZee should take his place in a magic group who got tables when they wanted, exactly where they wanted them.

Situated directly over the café were the offices of the Third Circle of Irrigation, famous as the department where Iskandryia’s greatest poet, Constantine Cavafy, once worked. What the Third Circle actually did ZeeZee had no idea, despite having arrived on time at the offices every morning for the last three days. He was beginning to think they did nothing.

Certainly his assistant had looked deeply shocked that first morning when ZeeZee suggested he be told how the office operated. Politely, speaking English with an immaculate accent, the older man had made a firm but smiling counter-suggestion. His excellency might like to try Le Trianon, which was where many of the other directors spent their mornings—and their afternoons, too, come to that.

ZeeZee’s office occupied a corner site and his excellency had done enough corporate shit in the US to know the prestige
that
carried. What was more, it overlooked Zaghloul and Missala, making it prime real estate. And everyone in the office was polite, way too polite, which meant Hamzah Quitrimala had a big mouth. Albeit no bigger than ZeeZee’s own, because his had been the throwaway comment that started a rumour-become-certain-fact that he was a traumatized survivor from one of the greatest fundamentalist atrocities in living history.

“Your Excellency…” It was the patron himself, rather than the waiter who’d taken the original order. Putting the cappuccino carefully on the table, the patron picked up a crumb-strewn plate and hesitated.

“Did Your Excellency enjoy breakfast?”

ZeeZee nodded, adding,
“Mumken lehsab,”
as he instinctively scrawled an imaginary pen across an imaginary payment slip in the universal demand for the bill.

“Of course… Although perhaps his excellency would like to keep a tab?”

“Perhaps he would.”

Make like a chameleon. Acclimatize, was what the fox said. If you had time, that was, and ZeeZee was making time. Whether his position with the Third Circle made the difference or the fact that he ranked as a bey, life in El Iskandryia was proving easier than he’d ever dreamed possible when he stepped off the plane. But then, after prison, almost anything was going to be an improvement.