The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (29 page)

Club. Felix. Hani…which came first?

Raf had to remind himself that Zara couldn’t see in the dark, that her hearing was probably only average. So she might have missed the thud of heavy boots as bouncers crisscrossed the club searching for him. Pretty soon one of the bone clones would engage his brain and decide to fire up the water lights.

Except that they were about to be cornered themselves, if the distant clang of a door and abrupt trill of sirens at the high edge of his range was any clue.

“You’re being raided,” Raf told Zara.

“Shit…” She sounded almost grateful. “That’s what you came to tell me?”

No, he’d come to beg her to look after Hani and to tell her was Felix was dead. Just like his aunt was dead. This city was turning into a personal war-zone and he was still busy trying to spot the enemy.

Raf shook his head, remembered she couldn’t see him and opened his mouth to speak. But it was already too late. Up on the spiral, a riot cop using a throat mike attached to the kind of bass-heavy public hailer that turns your guts to water and dribbles them round your feet was demanding that
Someone Turn On The Lights. NOW…

“How many ways in?”
Raf felt an adrenalin rush kick-in with a vengeance. The fox was back on line.

“One,” said Zara.

Even Hani groaned.

“Two,” Zara amended, then corrected herself again. “Three… Do storm drains count?”

Hani grabbed her tee-shirt from a corner where she’d left it and scooped up Ali-Din while Zara went looking for her clothes, which should have been folded neatly beneath a bench. Raf’s own suit was sodden but at least he was wearing it.

“You need new clothes,” Raf ordered.

Zara opened her mouth to protest but Raf was gone, sliding off in a different direction towards a blonde girl in spray tights, a snakeskin waistcoat that might once have slithered and a long trench coat cut from wafer-thin
faux
ocelot. Zara couldn’t hear what Raf said but the girl handed over her coat without comment.

“Use this.” He stood between Zara and the worst of the crowd while she struggled into the coat. Searchlights were in use but the house system seemed down. If Avatar had any sense, thought Zara, he’d have pulled the fuses.

“Over there…” Zara said, nodding to a wall that lit and vanished as a hand-held hiLux hit the stonework and then swept back over the restless crowd. The crash squad were still looking for the main switch.

“…We need to get over there.”

Covering part of the wall was a swirl curtain that shimmered with an infinitely ridiculous number of infinitesimally small fluorescent beads trapped between its warp and weft. Raf didn’t really have time to admire the effect. His brain was rich with theta waves that rolled across his cortex, firing neurones. Behind his eyes was a memory of Zara naked, soft hips and no body hair. Her legs long, her stomach almost flat. Water rolling in droplets between full breasts.

Sweet memories that stopped him remembering ugly things. Like blood turning black in a gutter or a breeze-blown fragment of ribbon fluttering across the road towards him.

“He wasn’t listening,” Hani said.

Zara sucked her teeth, crossly. “This way,” she ordered and ducked under the curtain. Her fingers twisted and fluorescence blossomed from a broken trance tube. They were inside a packed alcove that was arched over with crumbling red brick, and around them was rubbish, mostly broken beer boxes or empty industrial-size containers of still mineral water. Someone’s knickers lay discarded on the floor.

Beyond the alcove was a gap where a storm drain fed into the cistern from the street. Clearly visible on the wall were crumbling iron handholds, rusted with age.

“You first,” Zara told Hani, “Me next, Ashraf last…”

That was the order in which they went and that was the order in which the
morales
arrested them in the narrow side street where the drain began. With Raf climbing out to find Hani silenced by a hand over her mouth, while Zara stared furiously at a
gendarme
officer with skin the colour of pure chocolate and a bottle-green uniform so immaculate it must have come straight out of a box.

Overhead an ex-Soviet copter, with a searchlight now fixed to the side of its gun bubble, pinned Raf in its beam then flicked its attention to another street as soon as the officer moved in, Colt held tightly in her hand.

“Ashraf Bey,”
she said, looking in shock at Raf’s still-dripping suit.

“Yeah,” said Raf. “Me.”

Behind the officer were two privates and at the end of the narrow street was a green van the same colour as the woman’s uniform. Its rear doors were open and waiting.

Been here,
thought Raf,
done that. Not doing it again.

There were three ways it could go. She could let him walk, try to arrest him or call for advice and back-up. Only the first was any good to him and Raf didn’t see it happening. Not if the screen-splash he’d caught at the madersa had been right and the IPD were busy nailing Felix to his forehead like the mark of Cain.

Crunch time came as the officer lifted her wrist to her face, ready to call HQ.

“Don’t even think about it.” Raf had the fat man’s gun out of his sodden pocket and in his hand before she had time to do much more than flinch. Her own weapon still pointed lazily at the ground. She’d got the uniform all right, she just hadn’t got the moves.

“Fuck up and I’ll kill her,” Raf told the two privates. “Understood?” The gun wasn’t the only thing he’d borrowed from Felix. The sudden hard-ass drawl also belonged to him.

“Your watch,” Raf demanded.

Bottle-green handed it over with a scowl that turned to distilled hatred as Raf tossed her elegant mobile straight down the storm drain. Now her HQ could pinpoint it all they liked.

“Going to shoot
me
too?” The woman’s voice was cold, her contempt unchecked. Raf didn’t know quite what she saw when she looked at him but it was something she hated. He wasn’t too sure he liked it that much himself.

“Felix was dying,” Raf said shortly. Which was true. Half of the fat man’s skull was gone, his brain a fat slug that gravity enticed towards the pavement.

“This man murdered Felix Bey.”

For all the attention the officer gave the gun in his hand, Raf might as well have been unarmed. Except then, of course, he’d have been under arrest already.

“There was a bomb,” said Raf, seeing shock explode in Zara’s eyes. “Felix took the full blast.”

Zara pushed hair out of her face and stared at Raf. “You finished him off?”

“Yeah.” Raf nodded. “What was my option? Let him exist on life support, wired up and quadriplegic, surviving on sugar-water and vitamins?”

With definitely no alcohol, no illegal porn channels and no working gearstick to engage even if he did. “He’d have hated it.”

“So you got to play God?” That was the officer.

“Someone has to…” Raf spun the Colt round his finger, stepped in close and jammed the gun under bottle-green’s chin.

“Ashraf…” Zara’s voice shook. “Don’t…”

“I didn’t kill Lady Nafisa,” Raf said slowly. “And I didn’t murder Felix.” He was talking to the officer, but Zara was listening and so was the kid; so really he was talking to them too. “But I’m sure as hell going to hunt down whoever did. And I’ll shoot anyone who gets in my way. You make sure everyone gets that message.”

Lifting the gendarme’s Colt from her lifeless fingers, Raf tossed it after the watch and then walked her to the rear of her van, with the two squaddies following meekly behind. She climbed into the riot van without being asked.

“Now you,” he ordered and the squaddies scrambled inside, jostling each other in their haste. They stank of sweat, fear and kif. Which was what you got if you conscripted
fellah
who just didn’t want the job. Still smiling, Raf slammed the rear doors, locked them and dropped their electronic key through the grille of a storm drain.

“Coming…?”

Watchful and unhappy, Zara shook her head. “No,” she said. “Running away only makes things worse.”

Raf’s laugh was sardonic. “You obviously never tried it.”

CHAPTER 38

29th July

Sudden and abrupt, Raf’s kick echoed off the side of a
derelict Customs shed, booming out over rusty tracks to the night-time emptiness of the docks beyond. No lights came on anywhere, no security guard ambled out of the darkness to find out what was going on.

The stretch of crumbling tenement south of Maritime Station was that kind of area. Low concrete housing with rusted bars for shutters and blank squares of chipboard where glass should be. Cancerous enough to make every project block Raf had ever seen look suddenly rich.

“For me…” Raf announced, as he kicked again at the steel door of the deserted warehouse, under a peeling signboard that read
Pascarli & Co, Cotton Shippers
, “Aunt Nafisa’s timing makes no sense. That’s the problem.”

He’d talked his way through the first two diagrams in his notebook, skipped the autopsy data as being much too upsetting for Hani, and was back to chasing timescale round in his head. Who was where, when?

He was talking to Hani because it beat bouncing ideas off thin air and the fox was back in hiding, or dead. Or both. At least the kid had Ali-Din to talk to, not that she spoke much to her rag dog either these days.

Hani was worried about something but asking her directly about it hadn’t worked. Though he’d tried that several times, starting when he’d got back to the madersa after Felix flatlined. All he’d got in return was sullen silence.

Back then, Raf hadn’t told the small girl the fat man was dead: any more than he’d told her they had to leave the house. Just asked his question and regretted getting no answers. But scaring kids wasn’t his style. And besides, Raf could remember a time when he too had shut right down, until the adults round him began to say his lights were on but no one was home. And he
had
been home, of course—he just wasn’t answering the door…

“You see,” Raf said. “Aunt Nafisa went to a committee meeting at C&C at 10 a.m.” He used
a.m.
because that was what Hani knew. Lady Nafisa had thought the 24-hour clock vulgar. “She left her meeting at eleven, but didn’t get home until one. So where was she…?

“Now,” said Raf, answering his own question. “She could have been shopping.” He kicked one last time at the door and it flew back to reveal damp-smelling darkness. “But then, what happened to her parcels?”

But it wasn’t shopping, because Lady Nafisa didn’t buy things when other people were about. She made stores open for her specially, at night, when she could count on the manager’s full attention.

“Through here,” Raf told the girl and stepped into a musty darkness, nudging the door shut with his heel. Her fingers in his hand felt as fragile as twigs and almost as dry. She hadn’t yet asked Raf why he’d really shot the fat man. But as she’d trotted through the night towards the docks, the child had tossed possible answers around in her head and not liked most of them.

It had been Ali-Din’s job to find the warehouse. And the way it worked was that every time a crossroads appeared, Hani would stare at the eyes of her rag dog and then nod left or right depending on which eye blinked. If neither lit then the route was straight ahead. The puppy ran on some kind of satellite positioning system matched to a template of Iskandryia.

Hani’s slight thaw had lasted until they reached the end of Fuad Premier, where a narrowing boulevard intersected with Rue Ibrahim and rattling midnight trams ran south-west from Place Orabi towards a rail terminus and the Midas Refinery stockyard.

The address Zara had given Raf was on the far side of the tramline, in an area where ramshackle souks gave way to near-derelict tenements before ending in a stink of sewage, rotting fish and diesel that leached from rusting dockside cranes dotting a cancerous concrete wilderness at the south-east end of Western Harbour.

It was dog-shit city.

A whole area of festering poverty that the
Rough Guide
didn’t mention, other than to suggest that visitors should keep to the main routes during the day and avoid the place altogether at night. The official city guide omitted any mention of the area.

And, in a sense, the tenements and sprawl of empty warehouses
didn’t
exist for most people in Iskandryia: for them, the slums were invisible and unnoticed, except by
felaheen
who didn’t vote or would only have voted the wrong way if they did. America might stack its urban poor one family on top of another in high-rise blocks but in North Africa the poor were marginalized in a more literal sense… They lived at the barren edges of its cities or in occupied unwanted spaces like this one—which existed between a tramline and the dockside railway, was edged along its third side by a canal and slid, on its one good side, from squalor through poverty to the almost picturesque as it finally meshed with the souks of the El Gomruk…

“Up here,” said Raf, reaching a ladder. His voice echoed inside the empty warehouse the way kicking down its door had echoed off derelict buildings outside.

Above was a prefabricated office, slung between two steel girders originally added to strengthen the brick walls of the warehouse. The spiral staircase that should have led up to it was missing, so maybe Zara’s tale of an upset hotel was untrue.

“Can’t see,” Hani protested. She sounded cross and upset, but at least she’d started talking.

“I can,” said Raf. “I’ll go first and you follow after.” Part of him wanted to do it the other way round—so that he could catch Hani in case she slipped—but it was impossible to know what he might find in the office, so he went first. He could have made her stay below, of course, but he knew the child would like that even less.

“How can you see?” Hani asked scornfully. “It’s dark.”

“Ali-Din can see in the dark.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because Ali-Din is only…”

Her voice trailed away and Raf started climbing. Left hand pulling him up the ladder, his right tightly gripping the fat man’s revolver.