The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (26 page)

Sitting on the edge of his bed, knife in hand, Haruki remained awake for the best part of five hours while he went over what had happened. What he’d said, what had been said to him. It was as if black and white had suddenly reversed. Maybe he could have handled matters differently. Perhaps he really should have launched himself at the English boy and not even thought about the gun.

Except that if life had taught Haruki anything it was when to lose fights. Most times he fought hard and won but occasionally he knew to give in. That knowledge had saved his life as a kid.
He wasn’t proud of how he’d made his living before he met Hu San but never once had she shown anything but sympathy. Until now…

Sadly, Haruki put his hand to his swollen eye and then touched the edge of the blade to his throat.
No use,
he didn’t feel brave enough for really grand gestures. Reversing his grip, so that he held the blade securely, Haruki dragged its point across his wrist, feeling sick. The wound should have been deeper but two glistening sinews blocked his way.

The tears that started up ran unchecked down his face as he sat there on his bed, his one good hand wrapped tight round his damaged wrist, trying to hold the edges of the cut together. For all his front, it seemed he couldn’t even kill himself properly. Haruki had a decision to make without being sure how much time he had left in which to make it… In the end, shame or not, Haruki ordered his mobile to call Hu San and keep calling until it got through. He wanted to apologize or say goodbye, whichever seemed appropriate.

CHAPTER 34

10-11th July

Saturday began hot, the early-morning sun turning the
Corniche to a burning silver strip that flared along the shore and separated the city from its beaches and low-lying headlands. But even early, with the sun hanging low over Glymenapoulo to the east, the air was too heavy and too sticky for blue sky to last.

A headache settled over the city, dogs growing restless and feral cats slinking from the shade of one shabby tenement to another. Policemen pulled at their high collars as they tried to relieve the itch, women scratched discreetly and men at café tables casually adjusted their balls. Through endless shuttered windows came the sound of toddlers whining, being slapped and whining louder still.

Under their glass roofs the souks overheated, peaches turned bruised and rancid in the open markets and at the taxi rank on Place Orabi a driver killed two passengers in an argument over his tip.

The storm came in at noon, as muezzin were calling the faithful to prayer. It fell on Iskandryia in a rolling landslide of dark clouds that slid down the coast, vast and soot-hued, banked so high that the outer edge of each cloud turned back on itself and still kept climbing. Looking up was like staring down into a bottomless canyon.

And with the clouds came a chill that cooled the air until the only heat was latent, radiating back from alley walls and parked cars. But Hani didn’t notice the sudden chill at the time because she was too busy in the haremlek throwing “rubbish” clothes into a black plastic bag… Rubbish meant anything neat, anything fussy, anything that Hani’s aunt had made her wear…

Now they were up in the attic, rubbishing that without quite saying so, Raf had decided to get the al-Mansur madersa swept clean of ghosts and rearranged by the close of the weekend. Some ghosts need exorcism. Some die, shrivel in the daylight or let time brick them off into the little-visited rooms of memory.

His own were mostly sterilized and labelled, neatly hidden away by the fox or secure behind emotional safety glass as the regime at Huntsville had demanded. But Hani’s ghosts… Raf intended to kill those with a bucket and mop, black bin liners and the scrape of clumsily moved furniture.

“It’s dark…”

“I know,” said Raf, glancing round. “The electricity’s out again.”

“No.” Hani stood in a doorway, holding a torch. “I mean it’s dark outside. The whole sky’s gone black… Come and see.”

“Let me just finish this,” said Raf, picking up a chair. He was sorting through an attic, which led out onto a flat roof. A room stuffed with ancient china, wall hangings, carpets and old chairs, domestic detritus to which people had been too attached or too lazy to discard. The space was also home to a wasps’ nest, high in one corner, and a tribe of mice that left markers in a spread of oily seed-like droppings.

They’d gone up there to find new furniture for the
qaa,
after Hani had rejected the original stuff on the basis that Aunt Nafisa liked it. Raf had seconded her opinion on the grounds that the silver chairs, at least, were unbelievably uncomfortable.

There were undoubtedly very good reasons why it was a psychologically bad move to let Hani discard her smart clothes and the
qaa
chairs on the sole basis that they had been liked by an aunt whose death she should have been mourning. And no doubt any child psychologist could have told Raf exactly what those reasons were but, since he’d had enough of psychologists as a child to last both of them a lifetime, he didn’t care.

As Hani waited, the first heavy droplets of rain hit the flat roof outside. “It’s beginning,” she announced and then she was gone, stepping though a sudden steel-grey sheet of rain that closed off the open doorway like a bead curtain.

“Hani!”

He was too late. By the time Raf reached the door, Hani’s hair was plastered to her face and her green tee-shirt had turned dark and heavy with rain. She was laughing.

“Come on.”

The water was warm and the drops huge, falling so heavily that they bounced off the tiles until the guttering that drained the roof could no longer cope and a skim of water built up across the surface of the roof to swallow the rain.

“Does this happen often?” Raf had to shout to make himself heard above the noise.

Hani grinned. “Not like this.” She spread her arms wide, welcoming the torrent. “This is wild.” And it was.

Walking to the edge, she leant over the parapet to watch rain racing through a storm pipe at her feet and fall in a heavy stream on Rue Cif below. Waves of racing water drove down the middle of the road, sweeping rubbish before it.

“The carpets,” said Raf, suddenly. “Come on.”

With Hani’s help, he dragged a heavy roll of cloth out onto the flooded flat roof of the madersa, discarding his shoes and socks to trample back and forth across the unrolled bokhara until grey water seeped between his toes and was washed away by rain. By the time he’d dragged out his second rug, Hani had ripped off the Nikes he’d bought her the day before and was trampling hell out of a small carpet of her own.

It rained…and then it rained some more. Fresh clouds rolling in over Iskandryia to replace those that were empty. Until they too were spent. By the time the storm had burnt itself out, four carpets were clean and two wall hangings were refreshed enough for the dark smudges across their middle to be revealed as mounted archers chasing what might have been antelope.

“It’s over,” Hani said, looking up at the clearing sky.

Raf nodded. The air was cool—and smelt completely clean for the first time since he’d arrived in El Iskandryia. The pressure was gone, too, the city’s headache lifting, with the storm clouds. Above the street swallows swooped, nymphing on newly hatched insects. Coming in low and fast, flying in formation, their shrill cries rising and falling as they swept by.

Felix rolled up the next evening in his Cadillac and dumped the car with its keys in the ignition, two wheels on the road and two on the sidewalk.

“You trying to get it stolen?” Raf demanded, opening the new front door to greet the fat man.

Felix glared at the nearest fellaheen who stepped into the road rather than try to push past the fat man or his car. “No one would dare,” he said. It took Raf a moment to realize Felix wasn’t joking.

“We’ve got a problem,” said Felix. He dug his hand into a pocket and pulled out a black G-Shock special, the kind people bought on planes. “This yours?”

Raf nodded. Anything else seemed pointless.

Thought it was hideous enough. Want to tell me when and where you lost it?

“I didn’t even…”

“…Know it was gone. So I take it you don’t admit to making a quick trip to my HQ in the last twenty-four hours?”

Raf just looked at him.

“We’ve lost some plastique,” Felix said flatly. “It happens. Someone at the precinct cuts a block in half, amends the evidence docket and usually sells it back to one of the crime families. Or to someone with a grudge…”

He was speaking openly, Raf realized, because the reality of who Felix saw was obscured by a fantasy CV that let the fat man treat Raf as more than equal.

“The problem is the plastique was lifted from Mushin Bey’s office.” Felix paused, long enough to let that sink in. “And your watch was found in the corridor outside.”

“Shit.”

“Oh, it gets worse,” said the fat man as he pushed past Raf and started up the recently uncovered stairs. Raf was still wondering how everyone who came in knew exactly where to go when the answer hit him in the face. All large houses of a certain period followed a rigidly defined floor plan. There was nowhere else those stairs could go.

“Coffee?”

Felix grunted, which Raf took for
How kind. Yes, please…

“Got any cake?” Felix demanded when Raf put a tray in front of him. By the time Raf had returned with baklava, Felix was emptying the last drop from his biggest flask direct into the brass coffee pot.

“You’re going to need it,” he said, seeing the look on Raf’s face. “You’re officially off the hook regarding this.” He tossed the G-Shock onto a table. “Though privately General Koenig Pasha himself says tell you not to be so bloody careless. And to listen very carefully to what I’ve got to say before you go take a private pop at the
RenSchmiss
brigade…”

Raf sighed.

“You remember the broken mashrabiya?” Felix said.

Yeah, he remembered it.

“We took a couple of bits off Hamzah’s boys and ran them under an electron microscope. The carving was ripped apart from inside. Not smashed from the outside. You understand what that means?”

Raf had a pretty good idea, and he didn’t like it one little bit. “That I’m back to being the main suspect?”

“No,” the fat man shook his head. “Not with polygraph readouts as flat as a boy’s tits…” He pulled out a leather-bound notebook and flicked it on, buying himself time as he pretended to read off the results. He could actually recite them from memory and had, in fact, only just done exactly that over his mobile to the Minister for Police.

“The mashrabiya was destroyed from inside. There were no fingerprints other than Lady Nafisa’s on the pen. The scrapings from under her nails contain skin, but it’s her own, and that bruise on the palm of her hand…”

“Matches the missing top for that make of pen.”

Felix nodded.

“And the stigmata on the other palm?”

“Is an impression left by the diamond ring on her other hand.”

Raf lifted his right hand and put it over his chest, then placed his left hand over the top of that, trying to imagine jerking down so hard that the sharp edge of a ring on his right hand sliced into the hand above as he drove a pointed object into his own heart. He couldn’t.

“And I know there were no hesitation cuts,” added Felix. “But there were no defensive cuts, either—no stabs into her hands, no slashes between thumb and fingers. And her shirt was open…”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Murderers usually stab through cloth. Suicides don’t… I’m really sorry.” Felix looked from the coffee cup in his hand to the newly cleaned
qaa.
There was a freshly washed carpet on the wall. A recently polished leather Ottoman in one corner. Donna had even put a vase of wild roses on a marble side table. He could recognize an exorcism when he saw one. Even when it was all for nothing.

“I don’t know how to say this… But in Iskandryia suicide is a crime. One with severe penalties.”

“She’s already dead,” Raf said flatly.

“I know,” said Felix. “By her own hand. And that means her entire estate becomes forfeit. This house now belongs to the Khedive. By law, you have thirty days to make other living arrangements.”

“No,” Raf said.

“That’s the law. But I’ve discussed it with the Minister and the Minister’s discussed it with the General. We’re prepared to say it wasn’t suicide if you’re willing to back up an announcement that your aunt’s will names the Khedive as sole heir.”

“I mean, no, she didn’t kill herself.” Raf knew his voice was shaking but, try as he might, it was impossible to keep it steady. “She didn’t kill herself… She wouldn’t… Why break the mashrabiya, why use a pen?” More to the point, why bring him over from Seattle if she planned all along to kill herself?

“Distraction, maybe?” Felix shrugged apologetically. “Someone decides to off themselves, who knows what goes through their mind?”

“She was murdered,” Raf said firmly. “You tell your Minister that.”

“That’s what Mushin Bey told me you’d say,” Felix muttered.

“Yeah? Well, you tell him I’ll nail the killer…”

Felix looked deeply unhappy.

“He said you’d say that as well.”

TWO