The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (37 page)

It made sense to Raf who, by then, was standing with his back to the market, glancing between the card in his hand and a bank of buzzers on a wall. What was Tiriganaq if not his version of those eyes?

No one had answered when he pressed the right button, so he punched five or six wrong ones at random, ignoring the increasingly irritated voices demanding to know what he wanted until eventually someone hit enter, just as Raf knew they would, because someone always did.

He took the back stairs up to the fourth floor because, once again, most people always used the lift. Then he took the lift down a flight to the third floor and knocked on an unmarked cream door.

When no one answered that either, Raf whipped a new screwdriver out of its packaging and positioned it over the point where a strip of wooden frame obscured a Yale lock. One hit with the heel of his hand and the lock was sprung. Which told him two things. Not everything taught at Remand University was bullshit, and Madame Sosostris was nearby. Out for a coffee, maybe, or collecting laundry—whatever… People gone for longer usually remembered to double-lock their front doors.

A quick glance inside revealed a reception room that could have been for a brothel, a therapist or a chiropractor’s. Copies of glossy magazines, a handful of leaflets, mainly about acupuncture. A blank screen on one wall, two crystals dangling on thongs from its bottom corners. Wicker armchairs that looked newish but were already well used.

Then a treatment room, which looked like a coprophiliac’s paradise. Raf headed for a filing cabinet, ignoring the four polythene barrels atop metal scaffolding, with gravity tubes that fed down to end in surgical-steel twist joints, just as he ignored a kidney dish—next to a couch—that held various sizes of chrome speculums, each one double-tubed so water could feed one way and bodily waste the other. He needed more proof than a business card that Lady Jalila had been lying.

Raf found what he wanted in a bottom drawer, marked
dead accounts;
though he didn’t think that was meant to be a joke, sardonic or otherwise. Lady Nafisa had been a client for ten years and there was a long and obsessively regular list of appointments to prove it, written by the same hand using a wide variety of different pens. There was a pattern, Raf realized, and an easy one to break. The pen used to record payment was inevitably the same pen used to make a note in the diary of the next appointment.

But the note declaring the file dead and the line scrawled through Nafisa’s records were in the same ink as the last record of payment, dated the morning she died. Madame Sosostris had known Nafisa wouldn’t be coming back.

And Raf didn’t know if it really surprised him or not, but the person who’d originally introduced his aunt to the clinic was the person who said she’d never even heard of Madame Sosostris.

So all he needed to find was—

“Looking for something?”

The question came from behind him and the voice was confident. Which was probably reasonable, given the automatic in the blond man’s hand. Though maybe the gun-toting woman at the man’s shoulder was also a factor. Both were tall and fair and the last time Raf had noticed either of them they’d been standing by the harbour wall, studying a fold-out map headed
Ägypten—Kairo & Alexandria.
Something in their smiles told Raf they’d always known exactly where they were heading. And, more to the point, where he was headed as well.

Dancers, Hu San would have called them. Or rather, a dancer and a ballerina.

The woman kicked the door shut with her heel. She wore a straw Panama tipped over one eye and a pale scarf tucked into her silk blouse. They shared the same wiry build, the same almost white hair cropped short at the sides and left to flop forward over pale blue eyes…

In fact, they looked just like him. Give or take the slightly longer hair and his beard.

“Can I help you?” Raf asked politely.

Neither answered. Neither moved. But it didn’t matter, because the fox was awake.
Disarm yourself, disarm your enemy,
said a tired voice in his head. It sounded cracker-barrel, but Raf recognized it as a koan from the old rasta he’d trained with while on remand.

Raf put up his hands and watched both dancer and ballerina suddenly relax.

“Yeah,” said the man, coming closer. “We were told you’d be sensible.” He sounded disappointed.

“That’s me,” said Raf, stepping forward to sweep aside the man’s automatic with his left hand, while swinging in with his right elbow, catching him across the throat.

Sometimes you’ve just got to dance.

Raf uncoiled, right elbow returning to spread the man’s nose sideways across his once-handsome face. Balance Raf took out with a simultaneous clap to both sides of the man’s head, rupturing the eardrums. He was spared having to thumb the dancer’s eyes because the man was already headed floorwards, Raf following hard behind.

As they landed, Raf put one elbow through the dancer’s rib cage, driving a fat splinter of bone deep into a suddenly very shocked heart. The stink of open bowels filled the room but by then Raf had rolled sideways across the carpet, the dancer’s automatic already in his hand, coming to rest beside a filing cabinet. Either it would give him cover or fill him with shrapnel, depending on what loads the ballerina carried in her gun. It gave him cover, though the only thing to be said for the sudden stench of cordite was that it swamped the smell that came from the body between them.

“Hey.” Raf’s voice sounded better than he’d expected, given someone was using him for target practice. “You want to tell me what this is about?”

He wasn’t fussed about giving his position away. She already knew exactly where he was, she just couldn’t reach him. “Well?” Raf said.

Her answer was another slug, slammed into the filing cabinet. In at the front but not, thank God, out at the side. Her big problem was her slugs were small calibre, their load almost subsonic. She’d come carrying brass designed to fire at close range, then rattle round inside Raf’s skull magimixing.

“You can put that gun down or I can kill you,” said Raf. It was, he realized, probably the wrong time to start enjoying himself; but knowing that didn’t change a thing. His thoughts felt as clear as they’d ever been. And for the first time in years, he wasn’t standing on the outside watching himself.

“Make your choice” said Raf, noisily jacking back the slide on his newly borrowed automatic. “It means nothing to me.”

A slug fired into the filing cabinet gave Raf his answer.

Shaking dust from his short hair, Raf took a look around him. The ballerina had a door behind her to give an exit, if that was what she needed: this he already knew. He had a wall, a filing cabinet and a blind corner without door or window. Not good at all.

On the other hand… Raf smiled. “I hope they’re paying you well,” he said, doing his best to sound genuinely concerned. “And I hope you’ve got insurance. Because the hospitals round here are likely to slice you up for body parts if you look like you can’t meet their bill…”

He paused to let the silence build, thinking himself inside her head until he finally, briefly became her. “You’ve still got a chance,” he said. “Which was more than your friend ever had.”

The answering shot that Raf expected didn’t come. And it didn’t sound like the ballerina was changing position or anything, because he could hear silence, devoid of even the faintest tread of feet moving carefully over a carpet.

The woman was listening to him, which was her first mistake—probably the only mistake Raf needed. “Look,” said Raf. “You’ve been set up.” He paused again, as if hit by a sudden thought. “You got a mobile there?”

The woman would have, undoubtedly. A Seiko wrist model or a Paul Smith wallet, the chrome flip-open kind. Something classy but anonymous to let her call in the cleaners when her job was done.

“Call home,” he told her. “Have your handler access the precinct files, check out Ashraf al-Mansur.”

Nine, three…three, nine, two…two, two, five, four, zero, three. She was using something with a keypad and it was a local number, Raf decided, following the dial tones in his head. What was more, she got a connection first time which told him all he needed to know about his own situation.

The woman spoke rapidly, her intonation rising towards the end. Twice she stumbled over her words. Being scared made her unpredictable, which made her dangerous; and Raf seriously didn’t want to be on the wrong end of a gun held by a frightened ballerina. Not when more triggers got yanked in panic than ever got squeezed with intent.

“Schisen.”
The word was soft, spoken with feeling.

“Ashraf al-Mansur,” said Raf, “special forces, explosives expert, advanced weapons training…” He paused, trying to remember what else the kid had put on her list, because it was Hani who’d faked his CV, Raf was certain of that. “Crack shot, proficient in close combat.” And there was other stuff, real facts that Hani didn’t know or couldn’t imagine.

“Acute hearing,” said Raf, “enhanced vision, eidetic memory… How am I doing?”

He wasn’t expecting an answer yet and didn’t get one. All the same, the woman’s breathing grew shallower, more ragged. Right about now should be when she’d start thinking about how to bring this deal to an exit.

“There’s a door behind you,” said Raf. “Feel free to use it.”

“And get killed on the way out? Spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder?” The blonde woman spat out her words, bitterness battling fear. “You killed Marcus.”

“I’m sorry,” said Raf. What was more, he meant it. Killing the blond man hadn’t been an accident but equally it hadn’t been entirely from choice. “You were set up, both of you. Because whoever sent you knew you wouldn’t walk away from this alive…

“Think about it,” he said as he stood up, staying pressed back against the wall. “You’re disposable. Not to me but to whoever hired you.”

“That goes with the territory.”

“Yeah,” said Raf, “but what was the franchise? To kill me or get killed yourself? Think about it,” he repeated. Surrendering the protection of his filing cabinet, Raf stepped carefully over the dancer who lay face up, blindly staring at a cracked ceiling. And the bullet he’d been waiting for all his adult life never came.

She was smaller than Raf had thought. Older, too. Her eyes only half watching Raf’s gun.

“Your husband?”

“My brother.” She tossed her own weapon onto a nearby chair and peeled off latex gloves. Glancing at Raf for permission to approach the body.

The woman didn’t touch the corpse, just kneeled beside it and looked. Her eyes were as dry as her face was impassive. But when she spoke her voice was cracked with tension and raw with anger. And the anger was not directed at him.

“Bastards.”

Raf gave a long low, silent sigh of relief and put the dead dancer’s automatic in his jacket pocket. What he’d just achieved was the cerebral equivalent of reversing a throw hold. “You want to tell me who hired you?”

She didn’t, which was exactly what he expected. He wouldn’t have believed her anyway. That would have been too easy and these things never were.

“Fair enough,” said Raf. “But I’d like you to be very clear on one point. I’m already dead. And I’d like you to pass that on…”

The ballerina glanced up at that and saw Raf’s smile. A smile so wintry she wanted to shiver. Very briefly, she wondered what his face would look like without those shades and decided she didn’t want to know. Never would be too soon to see him again.

From the bullet-riddled filing cabinet Raf took the files for Nafisa and Jalila, ripped the page that contained Lady Nafisa’s last appointment from the clinic diary and grabbed a manila envelope as an afterthought. When he shut the door behind him, the ballerina was carefully picking up her spent brass. One less collection of calling cards for forensics to consider.

Time to change camouflage, Raf decided. The building’s elevator only ran as far as the fifth floor, after that it was stairs all the way up to the eighth. On the sixth floor was a communal bathroom for men and a separate one for women, which probably meant no hot water at all on the floors above where the hall carpet grew stained, the paint peeled and the doors became narrow. More importantly still, the locks became old and cheap…

Raf posted the files and appointments page to Zara, c/o Villa Hamzah. Then, wearing his new washed and untorn jellaba, he ordered a coffee at a café next door to the apartment block and waited. When the dregs of the first coffee got cold, he ordered another and took the offer of an ornate sheesha and the evening paper. For once he wasn’t on the front page or on pages two and three. Page four had a small paragraph, no picture. Someone somewhere had taken a decision to turn down the heat.

Raf smiled.

An hour after he’d left the clinic, a black van turned up outside. Largish, oldish, anonymous… The man in the driving seat clambered out, brushing cake crumbs from dirty blue overalls. Licking the suction strip on an on-call sign, he slicked it to the inside of his windscreen and wandered up to the main door, large toolbox in hand.

Cable repairs…air-conditioning experts…24-hour electrics… From city to city, the cover rarely changed. The only thing unusual was that it had taken the van an hour to arrive. Since it was unlikely that the firm for which the dead dancer worked was that inefficient, it meant the woman had needed time to say goodbye to her brother. Which was a good sign. At least, Raf thought so.

The coffee was bitter and what little Raf had of the hashish was home-grown and too sweet. But when the man in overalls reappeared Raf knew it had been worth his wait. So he tossed a couple of notes onto his café table and pushed back his seat.

What was left of the dead dancer was being carried out, cut up and jointed in those black bags. And from the frozen stare on the blonde ballerina’s face as she trailed after the clean-up man down to his van, it was equally clear she’d been present when the butchering had been done.

That was love of a kind.

Cleaner and woman held a fleeting discussion on the sidewalk. More a quick question and an emphatic answer, really. The man wearing overalls shrugging and pulling himself up into the driver’s seat. The ballerina didn’t acknowledge his nod or even glance at the vehicle as it slid into the traffic, positioning itself behind a rattling green-painted tram.