The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (33 page)

As for marrying her…

“Stop it.”
Hani’s voice was fierce, her chin jutting forward and her mouth set in a determined line. She was way too cross even to acknowledge the tears that rolled down her face.
“Stop it.”

The small cabin was loud with their sudden silence.

“I’m sorry,” Raf said quietly and he got up to leave the VSV.

“Don’t go far,” Hani ordered. “You’ll only get lost.”

Darkness he liked, and silence. Both of which he got, staring out over the shimmering black expanse of the Western Harbour. There had been drunken shouting from Maritime Station as a party of Soviet sailors were escorted back to a destroyer by police: and Customs boats were making great play of crisscrossing the water at high speed, their searchlights cutting across the waves. Only, the sailors had got safely back on board and the cutters had given up sweeping the waters on the dot of midnight and returned to base, leaving the way clear for small, unlit boats to sneak out of the harbour mouth.

“That’s the thing about night-time,” Zara said behind him. “It makes even something as ugly as Maritime Station look beautiful.” She put a chilled beer into his hand and Raf was glad he’d pretended not to hear the door open.

“You know,” said Raf, “I’ve probably got a head full of hardware I didn’t ask for and, yeah, I can see in the dark but I don’t think I’m over-bred, though I’ll agree the emotional stuff…”

By way of answer, Zara ripped the top off her beer. As apologies went it raised more questions than it answered, but it was still better than she expected.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not even a real bey,” said Raf. “I don’t have finely honed battle skills and I wasn’t working for the Seattle Consulate when it got bombed or even before that…”

She held out her beer and, after a second, Raf realized he was meant to take it. Then she waited, while he worked out he was meant to give Zara his unopened can in return. The beer felt melt-water cold and tasted clean and slightly sweet. So he concentrated on tasting it, not taking a second mouthful until he’d properly savoured the first.

“What were you doing in America?”

“I’ve been in prison,” Raf said simply. “Outside Seattle. I was there for a while.”

“Why?” Zara demanded.

“I was charged with murder.”

“Don’t tell me…”

“I didn’t do it.”

Zara felt her lips twist into something that was almost a smile. “But they arrested you anyway.”

Raf nodded. “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here. And there’s something else. Why are you…?”

“Why am I helping you? Let me see,” said Zara, counting off the points. “You jilt me publicly, you shoot the fat policeman, I’m not wearing any clothes when I’m arrested and you’re accused of murdering your aunt for money… I don’t know, you tell me.” She looked at him, then looked again when she realized he really
didn’t
understand.

“I’m tainted,” she said flatly. “No one will marry me. I probably don’t even have my old job any more. I need you to be innocent…”

“And you came out to tell me this?”

“No,” Zara shook her head. “I came to tell you that Hani wants to say something.”

What Hani wanted to tell him was that Aunt Nafisa had had a big argument on the phone months before Raf even arrived. And Hani knew who with because her aunt spent a lot of time calling the man
Your Excellency
and
General.

“So,” Zara kept her voice low. “What do you think the argument was about?”

Raf shrugged. They’d been talking about it all day, whenever they got a second to themselves. And the only idea he’d come up with was too ludicrous to share.

“Well,” said Zara, “tell me this. Do you think she was drunk?”

The VSV was on its way back from the island, steering itself and running every routine in its armoury. This time round, it was Zara who leant against Raf’s shoulder, while Hani slept on the bed opposite, a sarong pulled tight round her like a sheet.

Did he think his aunt drank? No, even though the child had seen her staggering round the house. And Raf was sure narcotics were out, but equally he didn’t believe it was suicide. Which brought him back to murder. And if the
Thiergarten
were left out of the equation, and Raf really didn’t believe she’d been assassinated on orders from the khedive’s advisers, then nobody seemed to have a motive, unless it was hothead students at the German School in Iskandryia, and Raf didn’t believe even they’d be that stupid.

General Koenig Pasha might be half Prussian but, from what Felix had said, the General tolerated
Thiergarten
activity and that was all. And the students at the German School were unpopular, as young men with no real cares and excess money usually are: they knew full well the debt they owed Koenig Pasha for their protection.

“Drunk?” Raf said. “I don’t know… I’m losing the thread.”

“Assuming there is one.”

In less than two hours’ time they were due to enter Isk’s western harbour by running parallel up the coast, sliding between the shore and a breakwater, using a route firmly fixed in the boat’s memory.

The VSV would take a route close to the rocky shore, running low in the water and silent, staying well away from the naval base at Ras el Tin. And yet the naval base would still see them on screen.

But it wouldn’t matter.

Because, as she’d already told Raf, the boat belonged to her father who had an understanding in place with the General himself. A dozen passenger liners a day might dock at Maritime Station and still the western harbour’s single biggest commercial activity was smuggling. Hashish, vodka, Lucky Strike, Nubian girls… It didn’t matter. Cargo passed in and out through Western Harbour and the General’s men took his ten per cent off the top of the lot. To simplify life, boat profiles were logged at Ras el Tin and somewhere in a subset of a subset of the Navy’s housekeeping routines was a constantly updated record of how many runs each boat made.

It kept everybody honest.

“Want to tell me about that hardware in your skull?” She asked Raf.

“No,” he shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so.”

Some days he wasn’t even sure the fox was real. Although the malfunctioning hardware was, obviously. And somewhere in the soft stuff he had filed away a perfect memory of promises from a genome sub-contractor in Baja California that went belly-up two years after he was born. Infrared sight, ultraviolet, seven colours, nictitating eyelids—the 8,000-line policy said plenty about effective night vision and very little about retinal intolerance to sunlight.

Originally humans possessed four colour-receptors, only they weren’t human then, or even mammal. The fox had once explained it all, sounding almost proud. Most primates now had three receptors only, which was still a receptor up on the two that early mammals originally had, being nocturnal. Raf had a guaranteed four, with his fourth in ultra-violet. Something he had in common with starlings, chameleons and goldfish.

Later clauses dealt with extra ribs to protect soft organs and small muscles that let him close his ears. Only now probably wasn’t a good time to mention that.

Idly, Raf kissed Zara’s hair and smiled when she gently pushed him away… If she really wanted him to stop she’d say so. Her forehead tasted of salt and so did her bruised lips when she finally raised them, her mouth opening until he could taste the olives and alcohol on her breath.

“Wait,” she said.

When Zara had finished tucking in Hani, the thin sarong completely covered the sleeping child, resting lightly over Hani’s face so that it quivered with each breath like the wing of a butterfly. “That’s better,” said Zara.

“Lights lowest,” she added and the cabin dimmed.

The next time they kissed it lasted until he moved Zara gently backwards and she winced. “God, sorry.” Raf had seen the bruises again when Zara swam briefly, letting salt water sterilize the whip marks.

She shrugged. There had been worse. “Guess what?” Zara said lightly. “You’re the oldest man I’ve dated.”

“I’m twenty-five!”

“You look older.”

“I don’t feel it,” said Raf, “except on the days I’m a thousand.”

She wore no bra that he could feel and, when his hand finally found them, her breasts beneath her shirt were fuller than he remembered, tipped with soft nipples that promptly puckered against the cloth.

Raf kissed her lips, as if kissing might take her attention off where his hand had strayed, and when her lips melted he risked smoothing his palm softly up over a hidden nipple, his touch feather-light.

“How long before we’re back?”

Zara smiled. “Not that long.”

He wasn’t sure which question Zara thought she was answering; but reckoned this was the point where those
cultural differences
came in. Except her fingers were already undoing enough pearl buttons for him to slide back the sides of her shirt and reveal one full breast.

It tasted of the sea, so Raf’s tongue traced the taste in a salt circle around her nipple, feeling her flesh pucker and harden, then turn soft as his tongue lapped wave-like over the top.

Zara shivered.

So Raf undid a few more buttons for himself, bringing up both hands to grip her newly freed breasts. His balls ached, his brain swam with alcohol, cheap drugs and cheaper memories but he knew that on this boat, with this person, he’d finally discovered where he belonged, where he always wanted to be.

“Let me try this,” said Zara and she shuffled him sideways, off the long seat until Raf was kneeling between her open knees with his hip pressed hard into her. Her knees locked and she wrapped both arms around Raf’s hips to pull him tighter still. Her movements were deliberate, intense and shockingly private: as if, despite the fact Raf was kneeling in front of her, his hand gripping one breast, she was somewhere else, alone.

He couldn’t see her in her eyes. And yet Zara wasn’t totally in that urgent, rocking darkness between her knees. A darkness so intense he could taste a different salt rising to drug him. She was rocking, pushing herself forward and grinding hard against him. Each movement faster and harder than the one before. Breath hissed between her teeth like pain as she muttered something over and over. Some command or order that finally spilled her over the edge into a sudden gasp that she swallowed, muting it to a low moan that died as the rocking ceased and she pushed him away.

She was crying.

CHAPTER 41

1st August

The Sunday-morning air held more smells than a spice
market—baking bread, an open drain, wood smoke from a
hamman,
turmeric from a locked warehouse…

All the scents mixed in her nostrils as Zara ploughed her way across the city, down starved alleys that turned right, then left, then right again. She was walking the bottom of a dark crevasse. Guided not by daylight, which was confined to those brief patches of sky visible between roof edge and a forest of satellite dishes or aerials, but by her inbuilt, almost perfect sense of direction. Not to mention anger, barely restrained irritation and killer PMS.

There were 150 districts in Iskandryia. Cities within the city, villages within towns. Some were rich and some crowded, a few almost deserted, backdrops to a play with no characters. Rotting houses and crumbling souks emptied of the living by the Influenza attack of ’28. Her grandmother had died in the epidemic and so had an aunt. That so few members of her family had been taken, and those old and ill, was regarded by her father as a kindness from God.

Other districts were too poor to have been mapped. They went untaxed as well, because no one earned enough to make taking direct taxes worth the trouble. Where that happened, other groups levied tariffs instead, in the name of religion, protection or some banned nationalist ideal kept alive by crowded housing, open sewers, infrequent water and nonexistent Medicare.

These groups paid protection in their turn. And those they paid had their own dues to pay. And somewhere high above them, like a hawk looking down disdainfully at vermin on the ground, hung the shadow of her father…

Ashraf Bey knew nothing of this city. He thought he did because he knew Place Zaghloul from Place Orabi and could walk from Le Trianon to Rue Cif without consulting a map or needing to stick to the grand boulevards. He believed Isk was a European city lodged on the edge of North Africa.

Anyone who knew anything knew that this was at least as untrue as it was correct. There
was
an elegant European city of red-brick apartment blocks, stuccoed villas and vast palazzos. But it made up only one layer and that was mostly confined to the sweep of the Corniche, the apartment blocks both sides of boulevards like Fuad Premier and an area around Shallalat Gardens where irrigation kept manicured lawns preternaturally green.

The
real
El Iskandryia had more layers than baklava, more layers than time itself. There was the expatriate-Greek city, the city of visiting Cairene families who appeared at the start of summer and vanished just as promptly. And the city of Jewish shops and synagogues, of rich Germans and infinitely less rich Soviets. And below all that the invisible, the Arab city from which her father hoped to remove her and his family… Money could do that, if it was used well. Take you from
felaheen
to
effendi
in three generations.

The city moved across time as well as cultures. A single turn from one alley into another could throw you back a century, to spice markets and dark warehouses where herbs hung from wooden poles, drying in the hot breeze. Another turn, a different alley and the present receded further, as the scent of herbs changed to the rawness of uric acid, of dressed hides hanging in a tannery while raw skins were trampled underfoot in urine-filled vats by men with jellabas pulled up round their hips.

She loved El Iskandryia, its uncertainties and contradictions. Its outward self-assurance and inner darkness. It was the politics Zara didn’t like. But then some things in life were beyond change: that was what her father said. She still hoped to prove him wrong.