The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (18 page)

Her Korean visitor wore a dark suit, white shirt and red tie. The uniform of money-men or gangsters. He came in just as Hu San finished her third attempt. Neither bowed to the other and the Korean made no effort to hide his contempt at the smallness of the shop or at how Hu San was passing her time.

“Try writing an epitaph,” he suggested, “if you must do that ethnic crap.”

But Hu San had no intention of dying. At least, not that day and not to any timetable worked out by a Korean. She knew the Korean’s name, of course, but wasn’t prepared to do the man the honour of using it, not even in her head. She’d known his father and that one had also been stupid.

“You know why I’m here?”

Hu San gave the briefest nod.

The Korean put his hand into his jacket pocket. “Agree our terms,” he said, “or else…” The rest of what he planned to say was lost in the ring of a bell as ZeeZee walked back into the shop and headed straight for the sword. Hu San had been right. The boy had gone next door to Starbucks and nursed a regular latte—at the shelf by the window—while he came up with his proposal. He would put down a deposit on the
katana,
pay every week and collect the sword when its price had been met.

He wasn’t about to mention that he didn’t yet have a job.

Taking the sword from its rack, ZeeZee slid free the blade and held it out in front of him, feeling the perfection of its balance. Only then did he notice Hu San was not alone and that her visitor was gaping bug-eyed at him like some fish out of water.

“Go,” ordered Hu San. “I’m shut now. Come back tomorrow…”

“You heard her,” said the suit. “Move.”

ZeeZee was never quite sure why he didn’t just walk out of the shop. Stubbornness, maybe. Disappointment at not being able to make his eminently sensible proposal. Sheer chance, perhaps. Some half-remembered butterfly stamping its foot way back when he was born. Although, later, the fox told ZeeZee it had snapped awake, sniffed the air and tasted something sour. Tiri was like that, unpredictable. Whatever the reason, ZeeZee lowered the blade and started towards the counter. There was something he really needed to discuss.

“Out,” said the Korean, jerking his head towards the door. He had a gun in his hand that hadn’t been there a second before.

Inside the boy’s head an animal growled and ZeeZee heard a low whisper that hadn’t spoken since he was seven.

Raise the sword…

Without pausing to think, the boy lifted his blade, cavalry-sabre-style, and stepped forward. “Are you being robbed?”

Hu San glanced from the boy to the Korean and then nodded.

The growling got louder.

“Call the police,” ZeeZee’s voice was hoarse, way too high. He took a slow breath to steady himself. “Call them…”

Most of his weight ZeeZee rested on his left heel, leaving his right leg forward and heel slightly raised, as he took up the two-handed position taught at school. Man with gun versus man with sword. In theory it was a straight stand-off, but the idea he might actually have to use his blade raised questions of the kind the boy didn’t want to answer.

“Fuckwit,” the Korean said flatly. He was talking to ZeeZee, or rather he was talking
at
ZeeZee, because his hand was already bringing up the revolver.

Sun flashed on metal, time slowed, and a
katana
blade slid through flesh and bit through bone showering the boy with hot rain.

“Bow,” ordered Hu San.

For a second the Korean’s severed head remained on his neck. Then it tipped forward and fell to the floor. Death smoothing away the man’s sudden expression of disbelief.

The Korean would probably have crumbled forward anyway, though to ZeeZee it looked as if the blood pumping from the man’s neck was what forced him to his knees. It rained down around ZeeZee as he stood staring in shock at the razor-sharp blade resting unused in his hand.

“Could you have killed him?” Hu San asked as she wiped her own blade on a comer of her jacket.

Could he? ZeeZee didn’t find the question odd. But then there was very little in life that he found odd. And it was a good question, even if he didn’t yet know the answer. He’d never killed anything, not a fish from a lake or a sparrow with a BB gun, and yet…

He shrugged.

“No matter.” Hu San, elder sister of the Five Winds Society, pulled a tiny Nokia diary from her blood-splattered jacket and flipped it open. Her conversation was soft, unhurried and authoritative. ZeeZee didn’t understand a word. Just as he didn’t really understand how a middle-aged Chinese woman could manage to vault a counter and unsheathe a sword in less time than it took the Korean to raise his gun.

Stepping round the blood-splattered boy, Hu San walked to the shop door and flipped round a simple sign, from
open
to
closed.
Then she pulled down two bamboo blinds and locked the door. “Shut for stocktaking,” she announced lightly.

CHAPTER 26

7th July

Lady Jalila blinked as the crypt’s darkness gave way to
sudden daylight. Beside her walked Madame Mila, head turned slightly towards the older woman. There was probably only five years’ difference in their ages, but the Minister’s wife had a confidence that came with money, good clothes and power, even if that power was vicarious and by right belonged to her husband.

By contrast, Madame Mila felt ill at ease and bitterly resented the fact. She had intellectual brilliance, striking looks and an unbroken run of victories in court from her recent career as a public prosecutor. What she lacked was connections. Lady Jalila knew that. They talked, or rather the Minister’s wife talked and the younger woman listened intently, occasionally nodding.

Both of them were headed towards where Raf and Hani sat in the shade of their borrowed cork tree, backs pressed hard against another family’s tomb. Reluctantly Raf climbed to his feet and brushed gravel from his suit. Hani clambered up after him.

She didn’t look at her aunt or the coroner-magistrate.

“You have my sympathy,” Lady Jalila told Raf. “And, of course, if there’s anything I or the Minister can do to help…” She smiled, then shrugged as if to stress she wished there was more she could offer. But Raf still caught the point when her eyes slid across to Hani and noticed that the child was clinging to his hand, her fingers glued firmly inside his.

“Thank you,” Raf said politely, nodding first to Lady Jalila and then at the stony-faced woman stood beside her. “I’d better get Hani home…”

“Your Excellency…”

He was the person addressed, Raf realized, turning back. The coroner-magistrate was staring after him, her elegant face at once flawless and utterly cold. Her eyes between darkness and a void.

The woman was attractive and regretted it. Her brittleness a warning at odds with the warmth of a perfume that featured musk mixed with some botanical element so elusive Raf decided it had to be synthetic. Chemical analogues that fell midway between spices and fruit were big business, even in a city that prided itself on having the finest spice markets in North Africa. He’d seen the hoardings on his way through Place Orabi.

“…Yes?” Raf said finally.

“You didn’t know your aunt very well, did you?”

“I hardly knew her at all.” Raf kept his voice cool, matter-of-fact. “Why?”

“Madame Mila was just wondering,” Lady Jalila said.

The younger woman nodded. “She must have been surprised when she first heard from you. Pleased, obviously…”

“She didn’t hear from me,” said Raf. “Until last week I didn’t even know she existed…” And here came today’s understatement. “My father’s family isn’t something my mother talks about…”

“So how did your aunt know where to find you?”

How indeed?

“Good question.” Raf let his gaze flick over Madame Mila, taking in the neat row of tiny plaits, her perfect skin and her scrupulously simple suit, which was immaculately pressed but nothing like as expensive as Lady Nafisa’s outfit or the suit he was wearing. It was a gaze Raf had watched Dr Millbank use at Huntsville to bring unexpectedly difficult inmates into line. And the beauty of it was that its effect was almost subliminal.

“I believe my father keeps an eye on my progress.”

This time when Raf walked away no one called him back.

Felix offered to drive them home from the necropolis. But his
drive home
turned out to be an extended tour of the city that involved a slow crawl along the Corniche, beginning at the crowded summer beaches at Shatby and taking them past the grandeur of the Bibliotheka Iskandryia (where a rose-pink marble façade hid 125 kilometres of carefully ducted optic fibre) round the elegantly curved sweep of Eastern Harbour so Hani could see the fishing boats and horse-drawn caleches and then north along the final stretch of the Corniche towards the new aquarium and out along the harbour spur towards Fort Qaitbey, which had once been the site of the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world.

Pointing with one hand and steering with his other, the fat man kept up a running commentary that made up in jokes for what it occasionally lacked in historic accuracy. He didn’t stop or even suggest they stop, except once on the return trip, when he pulled over an ice-cream van and Hani was given her first ice cream.

Heading south down Rue el-Dardaa at the end of Felix’s impromptu tour they hit afternoon traffic. Squat, brightly carapaced VWs, sleek BMWs, the odd Daimler-Benz mixed in with an occasional bulbous-headed Japanese vehicle, apparently designed around some idealized memory of a Koi. By then, the kid was asleep on the back seat, her head against Raf’s side, and Raf was running over his future options and getting nowhere fast.

There’d be a will to be read. Legal requirements to be observed. But he already knew from something the fat man had said that he was the sole heir. The house was his and so, it seemed, was responsibility for Hani.

“Sweet Jeez.” The fat man grabbed a hip flask, gulped and put it back under his seat. “Can’t be doing with this.” He spun the wheel hard and Raf suddenly found himself out of the crawling traffic and cutting the wrong way up a one-way route. The fish van headed in the other direction very sensibly mounted the sidewalk and scraped a wall rather than tangle with Felix.

The fat man was right. The traffic really was tight as a nun’s ass.

“Which reminds me,” said Felix. “You saw who else was there?” He tossed the words over his shoulder.

“No,” said Raf. “Tell me.”

Felix grinned. “Quite pretty, very rich, spent most of her time glaring at you…”

Oh,
her.
“Hamzah’s daughter?”

“Yeah,” said Felix. “I wondered who’d show.” He glanced in his rear-view mirror, catching Raf’s eye. “All respect to your late aunt and everything, but that was the real reason I went. It’s the old dog-to-vomit syndrome. If killers can’t manage a nostalgia trip to the crime scene they sometimes attend the funeral.”

“Zara?”

Felix sighed theatrically, shook his head and flipped his vast car into Rue Kemil, then hung a right into Rue Cif, completely blocking the narrow street as he killed his engine outside the nondescript madersa door. “Not Zara. The man who wasn’t there, her father. We’ve wanted to rattle Hamzah’s cage for months.” Felix grinned. “I’m going to be bringing him in personally first thing tomorrow. See what happens if I poke him with a stick…”

CHAPTER 27

7th July

“We’re here…”

Situated out beyond Glymenapoulo in a formal garden that ran down to a rocky beach, the Villa Hamzah was a bastard cross between the Parthenon and a Sicilian palazzo. Only three storeys high, but each one heavy with grandeur, colonnaded and porticoed like a riotously expensive wedding cake baked in brick and iced with grey stucco.

At its back stood the sea. At its front the Corniche…though an expanse of expensive lawn and a short length of drive kept the villa and road separate. Steps led up to a huge portico that rose two full storeys, with the portico’s flat roof forming the floor of a balcony that jutted from the front of the house as proud and heavy as any conquistador’s chin.

Double columns on either side of the balcony rose higher than the balustraded roof of the house itself, to support a smaller portico decorated at its centre with an Italianate and recent-looking coat of arms.

The windows at ground level were small and rudimentary, in keeping with Iskandryian tradition that put serving quarters on the lowest floor rather than in the attic. It was the windows of the second and third floors that were grand. Each one peering imperiously at the world from under a colonnade that ran round both sides and the rear of the house.

Villa Hamzah was the house of an industrial conquistador. Arrogant and assertive, but also bizarrely beautiful and with proportions so perfect the plans had to have been drawn up using the golden mean. Not at all what Raf was expecting—though he wasn’t too sure what he had been expecting, except that it wasn’t this.

“You want me to wait?”

Raf glanced both ways along the Corniche, seeing cruising cars, noisy groups of expensively dressed teenagers and an endless row of street lights flickering away into the far distance. It was late but there were empty yellow taxis every seventh or eighth vehicle and he was unlikely to be at the villa long enough for the traffic to die away completely.

“No, it’s fine.” Raf peeled off an Iskandryian £10 note and then added £5 as a tip. He could always call the driver back if he needed to, and besides, it was still cheaper than having him wait.

“I’ll take your card.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.” The cabbie pulled a crumpled rectangle from his pocket and handed it to Raf, who immediately scanned both sides to check that a number was given in numerals he could understand. It was.