Arabesk (91 page)

“Caffeine darkens the skin,” said Donna crossly. Her own face was as brown as the inside membrane of a walnut and almost as crumpled.

“It’s for His Excellency.”

The Portuguese woman looked doubtful.

“Papers.”
Hani announced before she was even through the marble arch into the
qaa.
Zara and Uncle Ashraf would have had to be deaf not to hear Hani coming, she’d stamped so hard on her way up.

On Hani’s tray were a collection of afternoon papers, three tiny mugs of mud-thick coffee, and the plate of baklava Donna had insisted she take. Most of the papers blamed
Thiergarten
for the attack on Emir Moncef. Only one chose Washington over Berlin. And that one was more concerned with the miracle of the Emir’s survival.

“The
Enquirer
,” she told her uncle, dropping it onto his table and using it as a mat for his coffee.

Pope To Make Boy Saint?

The Emir of Tunis had been saved from death by a child’s power of prayer; the
Enquirer
was quite categoric about that. An unnamed source close to Emir Moncef had confirmed how, in the absence of serum, the Emir’s youngest son had prayed over the unconscious body of his father, refusing to leave Moncef’s bedside until the Emir finally awoke.

Missing from the story was the obvious fact that Pope Leo VII was unlikely to beatify, never mind canonize, a minor Islamic princeling (even assuming the mufti in Stambul was willing). Also missing was the fact that, far from being a hero, Murad Pasha had found himself in deep disgrace. In fact the beating he received for not obeying an order from the Emir left the boy unable to sit for three days.

Raf skim-read the story, shifted his cup to reach the end, and tossed the lies to the floor, narrowly missing Ifritah, Hani’s grey cat.

“Uncle Ashraf!”

“It was an accident,” Raf said firmly, and went back to work.

A fine-tooth comb, plus instructions on the correct way to lift potential evidence from pubic hair.

A Miranda card, one side listing
Inalienable Rights
, the other
Rules of Plain View
.

Two dozen unused postmortem fingerprint cards, both left and right.

Vacuum-packed latex gloves, eight pairs.

A booklet in Spanish on Vucetich’s system of fingerprint classification, stamped
LAPD not to be removed.

A foldout chart of poisons, arranged by the time in which they begin to react. Starting with
ammonia
, reaction time zero, and ending with
stibine
, three days to three weeks…

One single sheet of 80gsm A4 paper of the kind used in police stations across North Africa. On it the translation of an Ottoman wedding certificate typed on a manual typewriter, which suggested a fear of leaving electronic footprints. The names had been filled in but the dates left blank.

Polaroids, two, of a young man standing by a Jeep.

A jewellery roll made from chamois leather that turned out to contain three scalpels and a collection of surgical steel blades.

A small .22 derringer, two-shot, with an over/under configuration and mother-of-pearl grips, badly scratched. A handful of postcards…

Set out in front of Raf on an oval dining table, amid the debris of breakfast and the coffee Hani had just brought were fragments from two lives now gone. The Polaroids, both faded, had arrived in that morning’s post; everything else belonged to Felix Abrinsky, Chief of Detectives in El Iskandryia and briefly a friend.

It was a long time since Raf had been this upset and the feeling was unfamiliar. What he felt as a tightness in the back of his throat he took to be side effects from dust thrown up by workmen in a garden beyond the courtyard outside.

Me having a good time
, read a card. Flipping it over, Raf paused, eyes sweeping between two women in their early twenties, both bare-breasted and joined by a silver chain between nipple rings.

One had a bottle of beer clasped against her button-flied groin in crude imitation of an erect penis and both looked as tired and hot as the old man in the tutu behind them, the one bending bare-arsed over an open grill.

“How very American.”

Raf looked up to find Zara standing by his shoulder. Hollow-eyed, full-breasted and infinitely fragile since the night a month back she’d come unasked to his room and been sent away. She was younger by three or four years than the women in the photograph and wore significantly more clothes.

“Trudi and Barbara,” Raf said, in answer to a question not asked.

“Friends of yours?” There was enough of an edge to Zara’s question to make Hani look up, though all the child did was sigh and return to her chess computer. So far she’d won seventeen games straight. She reckoned Uncle Ashraf could be persuaded to let her buy a smarter model if she managed to get the total up to fifty.

“Felix’s daughter and her partner… That one’s Trudi,” Raf added, indicating the taller woman.

It had fallen to Raf to write to Trudi with news of her father’s death. A job Raf took in an attempt to assuage his own guilt. No one had suggested prosecuting Raf over the shooting of Felix because by then he’d already been offered the fat man’s job. And arresting El Iskandryia’s new Chief of Detectives was widely recognized as being a bad career move.

Of course, that was over too. Raf had lasted about two months as Chief, rather longer than he intended. The gun and the badge had gone back; the only thing Raf kept was the fat man’s silver Cadillac and that still sat in a parking lot under the police HQ at Champollion.

“She looks that good?”

Raf blinked, realized he was still staring at Felix’s daughter and put the card down, face to the table, one item among many. “I was thinking,” he said simply. “About what happened.”

Zara opened her mouth, then changed her mind. She was running out of fingers to count the number of times she’d screwed up in the last six months by opening her mouth before thinking. And bizarre as it seemed, probably her worst mistake was not marrying the man she was so busy insulting.

Zara had no objection to arranged marriages. She just hadn’t enjoyed being a piece in her mother’s game of social advancement. Other recent screwups involved finding herself seminaked in a local paper and appearing in court, supposedly defending her father.

Which one of the rest was actually the worst was a toss-up between… Well, that changed. If forced to choose, she’d say her current number one, her all-time recent fuckup was moving in with Raf, though that wasn’t how she’d put it to her father. It was the al-Mansur madersa she was moving into, at Hani’s suggestion. Raf was just coincidental.

Only he’d never been coincidental, at least not since that evening back in the summer on a boat in the Aegean, when she’d let him slip the shirt from her shoulders and watched it fall. Months later she went to his bed twice in three days; where she did more than she intended and less than he wanted. That was how she’d put it to him later or maybe that was how he put it to her.

Zara found it too cruel to remember.

“You okay?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Zara’s voice sounded mean, even to her, and from somewhere across the other side of the
qaa
came another sigh.

Raf and Zara sulking wasn’t what Hani had in mind for her birthday, but it was still infinitely better than last year. That had fallen on a Friday, which meant no presents. From the first call to prayer to the moment Donna put Hani to bed, her day had been spent in silence, sewing and reading. Aunt Nafisa had firm opinions on keeping Friday holy.

Now Lady Nafisa was dead and Hani had balloons, the
qaa
’s small fountain frothed with environmentally safe pink bubbles and Donna had spent yesterday baking a huge chocolate…

“I’m going to get some cake,” said Hani, moving her queen. “Who wants some?” She stared at her uncle and kept staring until he finally raised his head to look at her.

“Cake?”

Raf nodded.

“Excellent,” said Hani as she recorded another win. “You can help me get it.” Leaving her computer to shuffle through an ancient algorithm that would return every piece to its rightful place, she pushed back her chair. “Unless you’re too busy…?”

“No,” he said. “Not too busy.” Raf snapped shut the scrapbook he’d been examining as Hani reached his table. Most of the subjects were naked and all were dead, every one of them showed a wound of some kind or another. Near the beginning some of the crime shots were old enough to be in black or white and towards the end a few used the new Kodak tri-D format, which gave the wounds a disconcerting depth. Felix had annotated the lot, his handwriting hardly changing over the years.

“Not good,” said Hani.

Raf looked at her.

“Glue is much better than tape for sticking pictures. It does less damage.” Hani’s smile was bright, only her dark eyes betraying her as they flicked from Raf to the album, then across the
qaa
to where Zara sat listlessly reading a novel.

Monday 7th February

Monday morning brought clouds. Relative humidity stood
at 71 percent, projected to drop ten points by early afternoon. And there was, according to Raf’s watch, near certainty that it would rain—hardly shocking news for February in El Iskandryia.

Longer-term predictions featured a severe depression beginning in March. One that would, if the forecasts lived up to their current accuracy ratings, pull hot air from the Sahara and wrap parts of North Africa in a
khamsin
wind, but for now temperatures remained around 10°C and the sky was slate grey.

“Wrong,”
said the voice inside Raf’s head,
“it’s molten lead.”

He ignored this and concentrated on ripping apart his breakfast. Peeling back oily flakes to reveal sticky almond paste within.

The next voice came from the world outside.

“Excellency.” Le Trianon’s very own maître d’ scooped Raf’s empty cup onto a silver tray and replaced it with a fresh cappuccino. “Is something wrong with your croissant?”

“No, it’s fine.”

Le Trianon was Iskandryia’s most famous café. A statement both Pastroudis and Café Athineos would probably dispute. Occupying the corner site where Rue Missala met Place Saad Zaghloul, with a terrace on Rue Missala and exits on both, Le Trianon offered an aquarium darkness of spotless linen and Napoleon III chairs. Discreet wooden screens managed to combine art deco with Moorish fantasia, while a series of art deco murals displayed pert-breasted, half-naked dancing girls in jewelled slippers and diaphanous trousers.

“You love it really,”
said the fox, who hated Orientalist kitsch. But then Tiri refused to buy into a rule that defined everything over a century as classic by default.

The table Raf used was on the terrace and he sat facing the street, because this allowed him to ignore a bank of elevators inside. There were three elevators, framed in brass, with deco moulding and coloured enamel around their doors. Only directors of the Third Circle were allowed to use these, which was fine with Raf because, as the son of a pasha, he automatically qualified for a C3 corner office with magnificent views of Iskandryia’s Eastern Harbour.

Raf had his own opinion about his parentage but as no one else seemed bothered he was attempting to keep this to himself.

Between the harbour wall and Raf’s office stood Place Zaghloul, so his windows also overlooked palm trees, a busy bus station and a stark plinth on which rested Zaghloul Pasha, nationalist leader and the man who drove the British from Egypt in 1916.

As befitted his rank as a bey, Raf’s office featured a Bokhara rug, a white leather sofa, a filing cabinet made from mahogany and edged with brass and a large, predominantly blue-and-pink Naghi of the square outside, painted in 1943 and borrowed from the Khedival institute in Al Qahirah. What the room lacked was a computer or telephone, files to put in the elegant cabinet and any documents of real importance.

No one expected directors to work, least of all Madame Nordstrom, who in her twenty-fourth year as office manager of C3 regarded all directorships as entirely token, much like the salary. So he spent his mornings in the café downstairs, an arrangement that satisfied both Ingrid Nordstrom and Le Trianon’s maître d’ but was beginning to irritate Raf. Not because he disliked drinking cappuccino or reading the papers but because, every morning as Raf was shown to his table on the terrace, Tiri popped up to mutter
emotional institutionalization
… It was a phrase with which they were both far too familiar.

Most of the visitors to the famous café drank espresso or sticky, mud-thick shots of Turkish mocha; but then, what with it being February, everyone else ate their breakfast indoors.

Only Raf insisted on a pavement table.

For a while, a matter of weeks only, he’d had bodyguards to hold the tourists at bay and protect him from fundamentalists, crazies, German agents of the
Thiergarten
and anyone else who might be likely to attack the Governor of El Iskandryia; but that was before he resigned, when he had a different job.

“
Wrong,
” said the fox.
“That was when you had a job. Working at the Third Circle doesn’t really…”

“…count,” said someone, sitting herself down.

Raf blinked.

She was dressed entirely in grey, with a grey plait and minimal makeup. Her beauty had the fragility of old skin over fine bones, worn for so long she took it for granted. “No magic,” she said. “You were talking to yourself. One of the many traits you share with your father.”

There was no real reply to that so instead Raf concentrated on his visitor. And even without his acute sense of smell he’d have noticed a stink of camphor rising from her elegant skirt and jacket, spotted the dust under the buckles on her black shoes.

“Mostly I wear a uniform,” said the woman, settling back into a chair. “These were what I could find… Your nostrils flared,” she added by way of explanation. “Anyway I have a file on you. Augmented reflexes, heightened vision, hearing and smell… Ever since Khedive Tewfik sent me a copy I’ve been wanting to ask you if that also went for taste…”