The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (12 page)

The fact he wore grey flannel trousers and a cotton shirt with a striped tie helped fix the image in her mind. As did his thick tweed jacket, which he called
my coat.
His shirt even had links at the cuff made from Thai silver, with tiny dancers embossed on their black domed surface.

The stewardess let the boy be first off the plane, passing him into the care of a second attendant, who smelled strongly of roses and took him straight to baggage reclaim.

“Is that all you’ve got?” she’d asked, examining the single case he pulled from the executive-class carousel.

He nodded. There was no point telling her the case was almost empty and he’d only brought the thing because leaving it behind would have been rude. The case was a leaving present from his tutor’s wife.

“Over there,” he’d said suddenly as they walked into the Arrivals hall. Beyond a vast wall of glass stood a line of white Cadillacs on the slip road outside, their drivers standing by open doors while inside the hall excited families waved frantically. ZeeZee waved back.

“I’ll be fine now,” he said firmly and thrust out his hand.

Any fleeting doubt the attendant might have had lost out to the novelty of shaking hands with a serious, immaculately polite eleven-year-old boy. “If you’re sure,” she said.

“Of course.” ZeeZee sketched her the slightest bow.

The woman with the warm scent smiled and shook her own head in disbelief. “Okay,” she said, “enjoy your stay.”

“It’s not a stay,” ZeeZee said seriously. “This is where I live now…”

CHAPTER 16

6th July

Felix felt like a candle melting.

He was tired, he’d had his holiday cancelled and he’d been at the al-Mansur murder scene just long enough to confirm that a woman was dead, there was a traumatized child sat wide-eyed in one corner of the
qaa
and the Minister’s wife, who’d apparently called in the crime, was missing from the scene itself… And just when it looked like his afternoon couldn’t get worse, some dreadlocked trustafarian in shades and a stupid suit came hammering up the
qaa
steps, puffing like a lunatic.

“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.

CHAPTER 17

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.