The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (85 page)

Atrocity
was the word Raf used to describe what the judges were seeing. It wasn’t a term to which Zara felt she could object.

Hani, however, sat at the back. And although the steady swing of her legs, which earlier had been flicking backward and forward to scuff the floor, had stopped completely, she resolutely watched one of the screens, her dark eyes darting from horror to horror; though whether to see more or allow herself to take in less was hard to tell.

She shouldn’t have been on board the SS
Jannah
anyway, which the Khedive had declared Iskandryian soil for the duration of Hamzah’s trial. But Khartoum had been strangely willing to be persuaded that he should accompany her, and the soldiers at the door had done nothing but stare at the cat on her shoulder. As a result, she now sat beside the skeletal Sufi in a makeshift public gallery, watching things she was pretty sure she didn’t want to see.

The picture quality was terrible, the contrast too sharp, and the camera juddered with the reporter’s every step, none of which really mattered. It was what the camera showed that counted. Oh, and spinning numbers near the bottom that gave time, date and an accurate GPS reading.

The ownership of the battleground itself was moot. So the location was translated underneath as “Northeastern Sudan/Southern Egypt (disputed)…”

At first, as Raf gestured at the early images, inviting the judges, press and public to watch the evidence being presented, he’d thought the juddering was due to gyroscope malfunction in the original handheld camera, but as the lens panned across another dead boy, fist stuffed into his mouth to prevent himself from crying out, he realized the gyroscope just hadn’t been able to compensate for the photographer’s shock.

Raf pushed a button on his control and the picture froze.

The assignment had both made and destroyed Jean René; turning the man into a living saint and consigning him to forty years of knowing his single most significant work was already behind him.

Raf stepped back to give the judges clear sight of the elderly, shock-haired Parisian, who stood in a witness box built overnight by carpenters at the Khedive’s order.

“Who took these photographs?”

The elderly man stared down his hawklike nose. “You know who took those,” he said crossly. “Why else would I be here…?”

Raf smiled sympathetically. Nodding to show he understood the tumble of emotions through which the man must be going. “Who took these photographs?” Raf repeated, his voice loud enough to carry to the public gallery.

“I did,” said Jean René.

“You did?” Flipping open a leather notebook, Raf pretended to check its screen. Working hardware, decent lighting and reliable power had ceased to be a problem the moment Tewfik Pasha relocated the court to the ballroom of the SS
Jannah
.

“You are a war reporter?”

“I was,” said the man bitterly.

“And you gave up when?”

The man’s leonine mane of white hair rippled as he nodded towards the frozen screen, where the dead boy still lay with one fist in his open mouth. “I gave up after that,” he said. “How could I not?”

“And you became what?” Raf asked, glancing again at his notebook.

“I founded Sanctuary,” said Jean René, staring at the judges. His gaze bathed St. Cloud, the Graf and Senator Liz in ill-hidden contempt. “So long as countries like yours fight their wars by proxy there will always be work for people like me.”

Senator Liz opened her mouth but shut it again at a glance from St. Cloud.

“Excellency…” St. Cloud’s tone made it clear Raf could continue.

Only Raf was thinking, of nothing.

Less than nothing.

“Excellency…”

Raf came awake with a start, glanced at the judges and realized it was still his witness, but he had no questions for Jean René. Not real ones. Hamzah had been there, DNA matching marked him out as the soldier found on the battlefield by the Red Cross. His fingerprints, taken by a teenage Jewish nurse who hoped to reunite the boy with his parents, had identified Hamzah as the person who loaded and fired the HK21e machine gun.

If that wasn’t enough, the boy’s inky thumbprint validated a typed confession found locked in a Chubb in Koenig Pasha’s study; typed, it seemed, on an old Remington Imperial, to ensure no trace was left on any datacore. The confession had been witnessed by a certain Major Koenig Bey. A copy of this rested among the documents piling up in front of the three judges.

As for the defendant himself, guilt oozed from Hamzah’s skin like sweat. Expensive and overtailored though his clothes might be, they still hung from his diminished body like a beggar’s rags. Everything about the man conceded defeat.

There was very little chance that Raf could blow this case. And inside his own head, Raf was already writing his closing speech, the winning address he’d make once all the evidence, both direct and circumstantial, had been heard. Once the transcripts, old newsfeeds and actual weapons had been examined.

The press were already his, Raf could tell that just from watching them. The public gallery were glued to every unfolding moment. It was undeniably time to wind up his examination of this witness and let Zara take the floor.

Flicking his eyes from the photograph on-screen, back to where Jean René stood in the makeshift witness box, Raf opened his mouth to thank the man and did what he’d been avoiding doing all morning, somehow allowed his gaze to shift past René to where Zara sat.

Pain.

Absolute loneliness.

Enough of both to rock the courtroom around Raf.

If ever he’d needed the fox it was now. The fox would have known what to do because the fox always knew what to do. That was why it existed. To take from Raf the need to make those kind of decisions.

Ashraf al-Mansur, sometime ZeeZee, shuddered at this sudden understanding. Or else the courtroom shuddered. Whatever, something did as his eyes adjusted. And the rococo magnificence of the ballroom, with its borrowed ceiling, faux marble and fat gilded cherubs faded to a pixillated blur.

“Safety off,” said a gun.

Raf blinked at the words in his head and felt the cherubs reappear. Nothing had changed except for him and that change was so small, he wasn’t even sure it was real. But then, he’d never been too sure about anything. Mostly he just accepted things. Accepted, then assimilated the accepting. Whatever he needed to become he became…

Some people regarded that as a psychologically adaptive advantage. Others knew it as negative capability. A few said, without quite realizing what they said, “There but for the grace of…”

And then Raf found himself inside a battle.

Standing beside Ka, Zac said nothing. He’d talked little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he spoke even less…

Ka thought that strange.

“Distance?”

“Half a klick and closing…”

It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the kid with the amulets didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered. But then the kid was just that, a kid. Someone too young to make the link between action and…

Everything that Raf had ever read about The Hague Convention suddenly ran like water through the parched soil of his mind.

“Did you actually photograph this man?” Raf turned to point at Hamzah who, for the first time since the trial had begun, lifted his head and looked around the well of the court. Maybe it was something in Raf’s voice or else he too could hear clouds growling low like thunder.

Justice. That was what a court was supposed to provide. And he was Ashraf al-Mansur, Ottoman bey and supposedly Governor of El Iskandryia, for the next few hours at least. Raf looked at Zara, then inside himself.

The living saint looked puzzled.

“It’s a simple enough question,” Raf insisted. “Did you photograph Hamzah Quitrimala?”

“Back then?”

“Yes,” said Raf heavily, “back then…”

Jean René nodded.

“You photographed Hamzah Effendi as a child?” Raf said slowly, as if trying to get something straight in his head.

“I did. Yes.”

“Describe him.”

Puzzled, the elderly man glanced from Raf to the row of judges who sat watching from their raised bench. Above and behind them, alone at a higher bench sat the Khedive.

“Hamzah’s over there,” said Raf. “Not on the judicial benches. That is, if you need to take another look.”

Jean René hesitated.

“Tell us,” demanded Raf. “How did he look?”

They stared at each other across the well of the court. And somewhere at the back of the bey’s mind, thoughts continued to resonate until their growl manifested as a shiver that ran the length of his spine.

“Nothing unusual,” Jean René said finally. “Scruffy. Wearing a man’s shirt, trousers held up by a broken belt.”

“Broken?”

“The buckle was missing. The belt was tied round his waist. He had bare feet but then they all did. After a while, hot sand and gravel baked their feet to leather…”

“You’ve looked at this photograph recently?”

Raf paused, seeing Jean René look uncertain. “It’s a simple enough question,” he said. “Did you dig out your photograph of this murderer?”

“Objection…” Zara was on her feet.

The Khedive shook his head. “Objection overruled.” He turned to Raf, eyes hard. “Presumably you have sound reasons for this line of questioning…?”

Raf nodded. He had reasons all right. Half a dozen within his own head. Plus another, still standing, glaring at him. Although his main reason sat at the back of the court beside Khartoum, her eyes spilling over with tears as they flicked between him and Zara.

What was justice anyway?

Nothing most people would recognize. Nothing Hani had ever been given.

“Find the photograph,” Raf demanded. “I want the court to take a good look at this killer.”

Finding the shot took a minute or two of skipping forward and backward, looking for the right image. And all the while, screens flickered with figures that came and went as Jean René trawled angrily through his notebook’s data sphere.

A girl half-buried in a sand dune.

Camels starved to a sack of fur and protruding bone.

A burned-out Seraphim driven by something reduced by flame to the texture of bitumen. Teeth grinning from a lipless mouth.

Images enough to make the ballroom fall silent and its gilded elegance suddenly appear frivolous and out of place. And finally, when it seemed not even the judges could stand another close-up of a dead child, Jean René found the picture for which he’d been looking.

A boy shading his face against the sun as he stared into a hungry lens. The shirt he wore lacked buttons and the trousers had been hacked short in the leg. At his feet rested an open water bottle and a radio.

Half a dozen amulets hung around his neck. Most were beaten silver or brass, with one no more than a bundle of hawk feathers tied tight with a leaf. But the last one, the one that mattered because it led aid workers to get wrong which side he was on, was a small cross carved from bone. The boy’s eyes were hidden by thick dark glasses and a cigarette hung from his bottom lip, tendrils of smoke vanishing into the hot-afternoon air.

Not that much older than Hani really.

“How old would you say this child was?”

“Irrelevant question.” Senator Liz Elsing was out of her chair.

“Overruled,” said the Khedive. “The prosecutor still has the floor, as is his right…” Tewfik Pasha’s smile was thin. “Mind you,” he said, “if this is the prosecution, I can’t wait for the defence.”

“How old?” Raf repeated.

Jean René thought about it, looked at the screen, then back at Hamzah, an element of certainty leaving his face. Finally the man shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.”

“Then perhaps we should find somebody who can tell us…” Raf stared at the public benches and a dozen cameras clicked. “Presumably the SS
Jannah
has a doctor…?”

There was silence while the judges tried to work out which of them Raf was asking. Finally, they realized he was talking to the Khedive.

Tewfik Pasha nodded, reluctantly.

“And may I borrow your medical officer as an expert witness?”

The boy scowled, skin darkening under immaculately applied makeup. “Of course,” he said. “Provided the captain also agrees.”

The court recessed while the ship’s medical officer was summoned. And then everyone waited again while a tall German woman introduced herself to the court and was sworn in.

“You are Lena Schultz?”

“I am.”

“And you trained where?”

“Heidelberg…”

Raf couldn’t resist glancing at von Bismarck. The young Graf leant forward and Raf knew he, at least, would regard her every word as absolute.

“You are the surgeon for the SS
Jannah
?”

She shook her head and dark hair flicked across to touch her cheeks. “I am not a surgeon,” said Dr. Schultz. “I am a general practitioner.”

“I see,” said Raf, sounding as if he didn’t. “Can you tell me why Utopia Lines employ a general practitioner?”

She looked at him.

“Instead of medical software.” Raf paused, wondering how best to qualify his question. “I thought that statistically…”

“Some people,” she said heavily, “actually prefer the human touch.”
Some people
being rich. At least that was the inference.

“Really?” Raf shrugged. “In that case, don’t such people bring their own?”

“It happens, sometimes.” Her tone made it quite clear she didn’t like that question or him. “Now,” she said. “You need me to present an opinion on a medical matter?”

“Sort of…” Raf pointed to where the boy still shielded his eyes from a sun that caught on the edge of his open shirt and cast its shadow across his bare chest and stomach.

“How old is that boy?”

The woman barely glanced at the image. “Impossible to say,” she said firmly.

“Is he twenty?”

“Obviously not.”

“Six?”

She shook her head crossly.

“So you can say,” Raf told her. “That at the very least he’s older than six and younger than twenty…”