The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (11 page)

Disappear into the night?

That was a definite possibility. Isk was full of foreigners running bars, brothels and dubious businesses, doing the work pure-born Iski regarded as beneath them. The only flaw there was that Lady Nafisa would undoubtedly call the police. It didn’t matter what version of the truth she told them. She was
someone who mattered:
they’d find him.

Killing her or staying close were his safest options, maybe his only options. Either way, he kept ahead.

“Ashraf?” The question was a whisper.

He spun, fast. “How the fuck did you…”

Wide-eyed, Hani held up her hands so he could examine the grease smeared across her palms, then lifted her arms to show the oil smeared down the front of her flannel pyjamas. “It’s a bit slippery,” she said seriously. “It gets easier when you’ve done it a few times.”

Like using the glass sword in
Dragon’s Bane III
or writing your own level for
Imperial Assassin.
Hani didn’t really distinguish between what she did on screen in her nursery and what she did in life, it was all real. Sort of…

Raf said nothing. Telling the child that climbing wires was dangerous wasn’t his job and besides, judging by the stubborn glee in her eyes it would have been pointless anyway. The danger was precisely why she did it.

“You off to feed Ali-Din?” he asked eventually.

Hani looked at him with a new respect. “That too,” she admitted. “But I also came to see you.”

“Well, here I am,” said Raf.

“They work like speaking tubes,” Hani said, pointing towards the lifts. “Stand at the top and you can hear everything…” She paused to consider what she’d just said. “That’s why we should whisper…”

“I’m whispering,” mouthed Raf and Hani giggled.

“Stupid.”

“Yep,” Raf glanced round the silent
qaa.
“You’re probably right.”

“Why were you in prison?”

To answer or not to answer. “For killing someone.”

Hani looked appalled, shock swallowing her small face as she struggled for something to say. And then she relaxed slightly. “They must have done something very bad.”

“No,” said Raf. “They just talked too much.”

“And you killed them?”

Raf shook his head. “At least, I don’t think so. But I got the blame.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No, it isn’t.” Raf smiled. He could remember when he too used to believe in “fair”, right up to the day he’d been driven, aged five, through the gates of a Swiss boarding school. And he’d kept wanting to believe. Making excuses for the arbitrary beatings, cold baths, sly hands, the randomness of lesser punishments… He was seven the first time he ran away. The last time was the day before his eleventh birthday, but that was from a different school. Out of five attempts, three were briefly successful.

In the end, his brain had to admit what his gut already knew: there was no justice, no fairness, only rules. Those who used, twisted or kept to the rules got by, those that didn’t were marked down as enemies of order. It was a very thorough training. “Emotional institutionalization” was how Dr Millbank described it.

And in his own fashion Raf had been keeping to rules ever since. What was his taking the fall for Micky O’Brian but playing to the rules of the world in which he found himself?

“Aunt Nafisa said you were a spy,” Hani said, tugging his sleeve. “Spies kill people. It’s their job.”

“Assassins
kill people,” said Raf. “Spies collect secrets.” But Hani wasn’t listening. She was already working out another justification in her head.

“If it was your job that would make everything all right.”

CHAPTER 14

6th July

Lady Jalila rolled sideways off the couch and wrapped
her gown tightly round herself. Her stomach was cramping and she wore the tension in her neck and shoulders like a heavy body cast. It hadn’t been an easy final half-hour.

“You know where…”

She nodded abruptly at the slim Greek woman and walked hurriedly from the consulting room to the lavatory next door, squatting just ahead of a spasm that emptied her bowels in a long squirt of almost clear water. That final ritual was as much a relief as it was undignified. Lady Jalila could put up with the anal speculum and lying on her side with her knees pulled up and buttocks exposed as gravity forced water into her colon and out again, emptying her lower gut of faecal matter. She could even stand those five minutes of intolerable pressure towards the end, when a warm herbal infusion replaced cool water and Madame Sosostris locked a crocodile clip round the tube to keep the infusion inside.

It was the uncontrollable gripe in her gut immediately afterwards that upset her. Those few seconds between the couch and the lavatory pan when she feared she might disgrace herself.

As for the rest of it, Lady Jalila made a point of never considering how she looked when she was on that couch or what the Greek woman thought of her endless visits. The beneficial effects of cleansing were too valuable to give up. And though she knew her husband the Minister didn’t really approve for a number of reasons, none of which included the substantial cost of her frequent visits—she could handle him. Literally, if that was what it took.

Better.

Sighing, Lady Jalila squatted again, double-checking that her gut really was empty. It was. As empty as her abdomen was flat and her stomach just slightly, attractively curved. Even her hips looked thinner now that her colon was no longer a sausage stuffed full of poisonous waste.

If only all life’s complications could be flushed out that easily.

Wrapping the paper gown tight about her, Lady Jalila returned to the consulting room of the relentlessly old-fashioned third-floor clinic set between Nokrashi and Rue Tatvig, in a not-at-all-salubrious area of El Anfushi.

She’d been the first to discover Madame Sosostris, back when the herbalist was pulled in for questioning. In those days Lady Jalila had been just plain Jalila, a uniformed recruit in the
morales.
Recognizing someone useful, she’d amended the arrest sheet from performing abortion to practising unlicensed female circumcision and kicked Sosostris free with a warning. Two months later, she’d gone looking for the woman with a search warrant in one hand and a business proposal in the other.

Now everyone Lady Jalila knew came to the clinic—even Coroner Mila, the new City Magistrate for Women, who usually regarded matters faecal as being beyond mention, like sex.

Lady Jalila smiled sourly. Everybody fucked. The coroner-magistrate just withheld her approval because Lady Jalila didn’t bother to hide the fact.

“All done, then?” asked the Greek woman, looking up. Tall, hipless and small-breasted to the point of clinical androgyny, Madame Sosostris had the body most of her clients secretly craved, whether or not they realized it. Her very shape gave them a target at which to aim. A reason to keep coming.

“Then I’ll let you dress…”

Madame Sosostris always waited for the client to return before leaving them to change back into their clothes. Of course, Lady Jalila was more than just a client. She’d quickly become Madame Sosostris’s dear friend and ally, an invaluable patron for a woman practising therapies not entirely approved of by Islamic mullahs. Her husband was Mushin Bey, Iskandryia’s Minister for Police, respected deputy of General Koenig Pasha himself.

Madame Sosostris left the room at an elegant glide.

Next Tuesday,
decided Lady Jalila climbing into a white CK thong that no longer felt tight round the hips. That was when she’d visit next. She shuffled her full breasts into a sports bra and looked round for a mirror, forgetting there wasn’t one. Though it didn’t matter: she’d still be thin enough to check her shape in the glass when she got home for lunch, after she’d dropped in to check on Nafisa.

All in all, a good morning’s work. Her white jacket now clung in the right places without bulging in the wrong ones and the matching silk skirt hugged her hips without wrinkling. Lady Jalila wore white because white went with her swept-up blonde hair and her husband liked clothes that emphasized the difference in their age. Thirty-one might be old enough for all of her friends to have large families but to the sixty-five-year-old Minister of Police it seemed positively childish. But then, Mushin Bey still thought of her as the seventeen-year-old she’d been when she first joined the women’s police force. All blonde hair, blue eyes and innocence.

Lady Jalila pushed her feet into a pair of Manolos, then picked up the Dior bag that contained her credit cards and smiled.

Long may it remain so.

Lady Jalila let herself into her cousin’s madersa, frowning at the door Khartoum had left unguarded. Nafisa always had been slack with her house boy.

The glassed-over knot garden was hot as a steam bath, bringing Lady Jalila out in an instant flush. She knew her cousin claimed not to be able to afford air-conditioning except in her own little office. But what was the point of owning a famous garden if it was uninhabitable for most of the summer?

“Nas?” Lady Jalila used her pet name for Nafisa.

Nothing.

Passing the
liwan
with its cooling marble slab now dusty and dry, she stepped out into the open courtyard and stopped to breathe deeply. Early July in El Iskandryia was often humid and hot, but nothing like as cruel as that covered garden.

“Nas?”

The silence was complete. Made deeper by the absence of running water in the courtyard in front of her.

Lady Jalila started to climb the
qaa
steps, hearing her heels ring on the stone slabs. Cousin Nafisa didn’t approve of Lady Jalila’s kitten heels: they made scars in the marble. At the top of the stairs, she hesitated. To her left was the large tiled expanse of the
qaa
proper. While straight ahead was the cubicle of Lady Nafisa’s office, cool and air-conditioned, created by filling space between arches with sheets of smoked glass.

That was where Lady Jalila went first…

“I don’t care who he’s with. Tell him I’m at the al-Mansur madersa and I need to talk to him
now.”
For once Lady Jalila didn’t have to raise her voice. The urgency in her tone was obvious even to his idiot PA and, seconds later, her husband’s worried face flashed up on her tiny silver Nokia. As ever, he looked just like a small startled rat.

“What’s…”

“Wait,” said Lady Jalila suddenly, snapping off the camera option on her mobile. Something silver and sickening had just caught her eye. Let him read about it or look at the crime-scene photographs later if he must. Nafisa dead with her blouse ripped open—there were some things she didn’t think her husband needed to see.

“Nafisa’s been murdered,” said Lady Jalila.

“Nafisa?”
His horror was absolute, obvious. There were several things the Minister immediately wanted to say. But he said none of them, contenting himself with a simple “I’m so sorry.” He glanced beyond the edge of her screen to a group of people she couldn’t see and waved his hand, dismissing them. A muted question filtered into her earbead and she heard her husband’s grunt of irritation. “Tomorrow,” he said crossly. “It can wait.” And then she had his full attention again.

“How did she die?”

“She was stabbed…with her pen.”

Lady Jalila heard him punch buttons on his desk. “Don’t touch anything.” That was the policeman in him speaking. “I’ll get my best man onto it now.”

“Mushin.”

The anger in her voice stopped him dead.

“You really don’t get it, do you?” She didn’t care if all his calls were taped or not. Or what his PA thought when the little tramp typed up that day’s transcripts. “Nafisa was stabbed with her pen, understand? She wrote that letter and someone stabbed her.”

He understood now. She could see that from the sudden tightening of his jaw.

“You know who else signed that letter,” said Lady Jalila. “Don’t you?”

He did. He knew only too well.

She had.

“I want you to put Madame Mila on this case,” Lady Jalila said fiercely. “It’s an attack on our values.” By “our”, she meant women’s.

The Minister’s lips screwed into a tiny moue of irritation but he nodded. “I’ll do it now,” he promised.

“Good,” said Lady Jalila and punched a button on her Nokia, consigning her husband’s rat-like features to a flicker, then darkness.

CHAPTER 15

New York

It was ZeeZee’s childhood therapist who first suggested
that, since the small boy had hated his time in Switzerland and New York obviously didn’t suit him, the best answer might be to find him a place at a specialist boarding school in Scotland.

So, four months after he first arrived in New York, the child who would become ZeeZee left again, at the suggestion of a therapist that ZeeZee knew, even then, he didn’t need. And the boy knew why he was being sent away too. He kept fusing the man’s neural-wave feedback machines…

The next time ZeeZee arrived in America he was eleven. The Boeing had come in low over Long Island and sank onto the runway at Idlewild in a simulation-perfect landing. It was the first time ZeeZee had ever flown in an Alle Volante. He travelled executive-class with his own tiny room, and though the cubicle walls were veneered from a single peel of Canadian maple and his bed had a frame made from the same extruded magnesium alloy found in Japanese racing bikes, the cubicle was still no bigger than the inside of a small van.

ZeeZee hadn’t minded about the size at all. After a term in a dorm with nine other boys—the largest of whom thought
Welham
sounded enough like
wanker
to be interchangeable—the privacy and silence of his cabin was enough to make him drunk with the luxury of it all.

There was a stewardess who arrived every time he pushed the button, and who smiled and didn’t mind because he was travelling on his own and looked just like she thought English children were meant to look—blond and blue-eyed, the way they did in films.