The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (41 page)

Looking deep into Jalila’s pale eyes, Raf finally recognised the truth. She was barking, completely off the Richter scale. Dysfunctional, deluded, sociopathic… Exactly the kind of ally someone like him might need to reach the top of the pile.

“Jalila.” He nodded discreetly towards the far end of the mezzanine, where light from the single bulb barely reached.

“Tell me how I could get Felix’s old job,” Raf said quietly when they got there. “And then tell me what it’s going to cost.” Both of them still held their guns, only now the muzzles pointed at the floor.

“The cost?” In her head, Lady Jalila divided the cost of a box of bullets, deducted the ten per cent discount she got at government shops and divided the remainder of it by fifty. “In cash terms, about thirty-five cents…” Her tongue dipped out to lick her bottom lip, its tip moistening already glossy lipstick. “The
how
should be obvious.” She glanced towards his gun.

“Kill Zara?”

“Too easy,” said Lady Jalila. “I’ll do that myself.”

The floor far below was in darkness. Hollow. Empty. She saw nothing and he saw the same. But with two more colours and in sharper focus. “Why just Chief of Detectives?” Raf said. “Why not Minister for Police?”

“What about my husband?”

“Accidents happen,” said Raf. “Ask Felix.”

“You’d really kill Mushin if I asked?” For a moment Lady Jalila sounded almost interested.

“Why not?” Raf’s voice was blunt. “He’s not that rich and I doubt he’s much use in bed. What have you got to lose?”

Lady Jalila roared.

“Try me,” suggested Raf, seriously.

“Maybe I will,” said Lady Jalila laughing. “Once you’ve met my reserve.”

“No problem.” Raf broke open his revolver as if checking the load. Blued, lightweight and virtually indestructible, the Taurus was a beautiful piece of work. It was also so much useless ceramic and tungsten with its cylinder flipped out to the side like that. Now was the time for her to shoot him if she wanted.

Lady Jalila just looked amused. “When did you know?”

About the pen being Jalila’s inability to resist an artistic flourish?
“Right from the start,” said Raf. He lied. It wasn’t until the night on the VSV he’d realized his aunt had been poisoned first, then stabbed later. Two different methods, two different places, same person. And as for Jalila being responsible… Originally he’d been sure it was the General.

“And you know the really ironic touch?” Lady Jalila’s eyes sparkled.

He didn’t.

“Nas was mean as sin, but she still paid good money for that colonic… Of course,” said Lady Jalila, as she reached out with one finger to brush the back of Raf’s hand. “In the end she left me no choice. And she would keep sleeping with my husband.”

“
That
was your reason,” said Raf.
“Jealousy?”

“No.” When Lady Jalila shook her head, burnished curls brushed her shoulders and framed an angel’s face. “But it didn’t help.”

She stretched lazily, her silk shirt pulling tight. Hani and were Zara invisible to her, Raf realized. All her artfulness was reserved for him.

“Why, then?” Raf prompted.

“The Autumn Ball. No one’s meant to hold the chair at the C&C for more than two terms. Nafisa had five and wanted six. It was my turn but she wouldn’t resign…” Lady Jalila sighed, then brightened. “You really must come. I promise you, this year will be the best ever. Everyone will be there.”

Of course Nafisa wouldn’t resign. She couldn’t, Raf realized. Not without admitting she’d plundered the accounts.

But what Jalila wanted, she was given. And if she wasn’t given it, she took it. He’d known someone else like that: his mother. Raf flicked the cylinder shut on his gun, hearing it click into place.

“And the price I have to pay?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Lady Jalila. “You know it already.”

So he did. Hani.

“On the count of three,” said Lady Jalila. “Okay?” Tightening her grip on the handle, she turned lazily to face Zara, trigger finger whitening at the knuckle.
One, two…

She made it to the start of
three
before Raf thumbed back the hammer on his own revolver, swung round and watched Lady Jalila’s baby-blues explode with shock. Very slowly, the woman tripped backwards over one kitten heel, and met the rail that might have saved her if Raf hadn’t reached down to scoop both feet out from under her.

Time expanded, so that every action took longer than it should have done, including the fall. If she wasn’t dead when she went over the rail, the wet thud as she hit concrete confirmed that she was once she reached the ground.

Raf stared briefly down at the smashed body, then back at the child who squatted by a broken rag dog and held the dead ballerina’s smoking gun in her hands. She’d understood every nuance of the conversation. Which had been a risk Raf had to take.

“You missed,” Raf told her fiercely. “Okay?”

Hani weighed next to nothing when he reached her. A bundle of sinew and bone. Terror holding her body so rigid that her arms and legs practically vibrated with fear.

“You missed,” Raf said more softly, stroking the back of her hair. “I didn’t. The police will tell you the same…” He kept his words simple, hoping that repetition would be enough.

“Do you understand? You missed…”

Disbelief slowly left the child’s eyes and then vanished completely, replaced by tears as her sticklike arms snaked up to superglue themselves round his neck, almost choking him.

Later, when Hani’s sobbing had stopped, Raf gently unpeeled her arms and sat himself back against the end wall, his spine pressed hard against rough brick.

Life felt real. This was who he was. He was Ashraf Bey, guardian to Hani al-Mansur and friend of… Raf looked across to the crude window where Zara stood staring at the wall opposite or half watching bats flitter over the rooftops without really seeing them. Well, maybe “friend” was the wrong word.

“You should talk to her,” whispered Hani from where she sat next to him, knees drawn up, back also pressed to the wall. At her feet was what was left of Ali-Din. Scraps of rag, smashed memory, a cracked lens, fragments of ubiquitous phenolic circuit board… All that remained of the only real proof that Lady Jalila had stabbed Nafisa.

“Zara?”

When the girl stayed silent, Raf sighed and slowly pushed himself up off the boards. It was evident that she heard him coming from the way her shoulders stiffened at his approach. “I thought you were dead,” Zara said. “And then, when you finally turned up, I thought
I
was dead. I really believed you intended to let her kill me…”

Underneath the overwhelming smell of past fear was the residue of some cologne, oxidized and turned sour from sweat. But then, God alone knew how
he
stank—or looked, for that matter.

“So did I,” said Raf.

Zara glanced round at that and their eyes locked, her own dark with
felaheen
DNA, his chilly and pale as any dawn. He couldn’t help it: that was the colour his pre-natal contract had specified.

“Only for a second, towards the end.” Raf shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture as old as humanity. “Sometimes, believing is the only way to play a part.”

“And I’m meant to accept that?”

“Yeah,” said Raf. “If I can I don’t see why you can’t.”

“So what happens now?” Zara’s voice made it clear she reserved the right to disagree, whatever his answer.

“We tell the truth.”

“We
what
…?”

“We tell the truth,” said Hani sadly. “It’s the one thing nobody can stand.”

EPILOGUE

Hani’s spoon froze in mid-air. “Zara would like this…”

“Probably,” said Raf, glancing at his Omega a second ahead of it beeping to remind him that he should be somewhere else.

Pashazade Ashraf Bey was in demand. Three weeks after the shocking murder of Lady Jalila by a renegade
Thiergarten
assassin, he was still a hero for the daring rescue of his niece, Hani al-Mansur, and of the daughter of Hamzah Effendi, a well-known industrialist. Charities begged Raf to be on their committee. There was the rumour of a Japanese miniseries. General Saeed Koenig Pasha called him almost daily. He had until two p.m. to decide if he wanted to be Iskandryia’s new Chief of Detectives.

He didn’t.

The only person not interested was Zara; not interested in Raf and not interested in the polite, handwritten little notes the Khedive had taken to having delivered to Villa Hamzah. As soon as she’d been polygraphed, her statement taken and affidavit signed, she’d stormed back to Glymenapoulo Bay. Not to the Villa Hamzah but to a small summer house in the grounds. And since then she’d met Raf only once. At the office of her father, where she’d stood stiff-backed and formal while Raf politely refused Hamzah Effendi’s offer of a reward for rescuing her and the big bear of a man had tried hard not to be offended.

“Look,” Hani said, spooning down another mouthful of ice cream hand-beaten from fresh milk, egg yoke and Caribbean vanilla pods. “She’s not going to call you. So you call her. It’s not difficult.”

“Maybe… Later…”

Hani sighed and turned her attention back to her pudding. No matter how cold the vanilla ice was when Hani’s bowl left the kitchen at Le Trianon, it still melted before she could take more than a dozen spoonfuls.

Still, they were small elegant spoons and she ate slowly. Her attention taken mainly by tourists who strolled the length of Rue Missala. Some smiled at the small girl sitting at her roped-off pavement table. Others glanced away, having decided the child in the Armani shades was famous and the man beside her was a bodyguard. In their next few steps they invariably decided who they’d just seen.

She’d been variously the child-model Isabella Cloud, a violin prodigy called x’Tra Sweet, known never to leave her compound in Wako and HRH Yasmine, only cousin of the young Khedive.

“Ready to move?” Raf folded his afternoon paper. He’d had the vending machine include downloads of anything personal and there were three snippets about him in the paper, none of them true and all of them highly complimentary.

“Sure.” Hani nodded at her bowl of melting ice cream. “You want some?” She knew full well he’d say no.

Two small coffees had already gone cold in front of Raf, but he didn’t mind and they weren’t really cold. In Isk, in high summer, nothing was unless it came straight out of a freezer like Hani’s endless supply of vanilla ice.

Raf thought Hani insisted on coming with him to Le Trianon every day because of the ice cream but he was wrong. What she liked was the bustle of the brightly dressed crowds, safely kept at bay by a rope that separated her table from the busy street beyond. And when she wasn’t there, she was up in his office, being spoiled by Raf’s assistant who’d suddenly revealed a side no one had ever before seen. It turned out the man grew up with three younger sisters and, bizarrely, had liked them all.

“Okay,” said Raf when his watch complained again. “You need me to take you up to the office?”

She didn’t. Not if her snotty look was anything to go by.

Finding her own way from the table up to his office was child’s play to Hani. For a start, the Third Circle had its own private lift. And, as Hani had pointed out more than once, she didn’t even have to climb the wire.

The girl was fine, Raf knew that. It was only anxiety that made him ask each day and that wasn’t Hani’s problem, it was his… Some day he’d have to stop trying to protect her. Not to mention stop letting her eat nothing but ice cream. But that time wasn’t yet.

“You can get me—”

“…On your mobile. Yes, I know.” Hani sighed. “Look, I’ll call you if I need you. Okay?” She had to have borrowed that line from Zara.

“Make sure you do.” Raf watched as the kid threaded her way between two pavement tables and disappeared into Le Trianon’s air-conditioned darkness. Maybe she knew he was watching her go, maybe not. Either way, she didn’t look back.

“Car,” said Raf and seconds later the fat man’s Cadillac rolled up to the kerb, white-walled tyres freshly washed. “The precinct,” Raf told his new driver, “and then home.”

“Whatever you say.” Skin like chocolate, eyes hidden behind mirror lenses, black cap balanced at an angle on his dreadlocked skull, Avatar nodded.

Zara’s half-brother had recently got the Cadillac’s shell sandblasted back to bare metal at a fly-by-night bodyshop out at Karmous. Then he’d had the twelve-cylinder super-tuned somewhere different. So now it roared like the devil and every surface burned with sunlight. The boy was arguing for a quad Blaupunkt sound system, flat speakers set into the leather door trim. To date Raf had been holding out, but it wasn’t an argument he was about to win.

“You called my sister yet?” Avatar demanded.

Raf shook his head.

“You plan to call her?”

“We’ve got ten minutes to get to the Precinct,” Raf said firmly and pretended not to notice Avatar’s grin.

It was only when the shining car overshot his turning and kept gunning down Iskander el Akhbar towards Glymenapoulo that he realized the boy intended that Raf should make a meeting all right, just not at the Precinct. And not with the Minister.

Raf could live with that.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to

Pathology guy Ed Friedlander MD for answering idiot questions on exactly what happens if someone sticks a spike in your heart. Everyone at rec.arts.sf.science for endless tolerance in the face of questions about genetic manipulation, wheelworlds, gravity and the nasty side-effects of vacuum (okay, we’re going back some years here). The now-nameless Islamic academic who provided information on Sufism. I’m sorry my Packard Hell P3 trashed all your details.
New Scientist,
just for existing. Dick Jude, ex head-honcho of Forbidden Planet, New Oxford Street for taking a punt on
neoAddix
and declaring that “Weird Shit” was a perfectly good publishing category. The Upper Street lunchtime crew, including but not limited to Pat Cadigan, Paul McAuley, Kim Newman, China Miéville, m. John Harrison, and (Jay) Russell Schechter. John Jarrold, ace editor, drinker and quoter of Shakespeare. Mic Cheetham, who sold the Ashraf Bey novels to Bantam. And Juliet Ulman, who not only bought the books but sat across the lunch table and sang “Yellow Dog Dingo…” A tip of the hat to Martin (Thraxas) Millar, whose novel
Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation
acted as a roadmap to the late 80s. Peter Sherwen, who froze on Bergen bandstand and crashed my bike in Morocco, then decided to ride it back to London because the forks “weren’t that bent.” And finally to my parents. Hindu shrines, Buddhist temples, deserted Far Eastern beaches and yet another bloody chateau… Much of these books I owe to you. (That’s a compliment.)