The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (54 page)

CHAPTER 16

9th October

Raf saw the grey kitten first. So he stopped, swaying
slightly, and waited for the suddenly frozen animal to unarch its back and walk away. There were mice nesting in attics, geckoes so still they could be dead and desiccated and bats that spiralled like embers in the hot night, dancing through the air to a tune that only they and Raf could hear.

Bats liked old buildings and El Iskandryia was nearly as full of old buildings as it was of bats. It was one of the things that Raf…

Enough scribble,
Raf told himself,
you need to concentrate
.

Crossing the darkened roofs without problem, Raf moved silently from one pool of shadow to another, until he was almost where he needed to be. Then he stopped and began the breathing.

He had a dozen triggers. Single words, snatches of song… But the long slow breath that emptied his head was the one he liked most. The facility was already there long before he first met I & I. And although the old Rasta had found it hard to believe how fast Raf picked up
rabo de arraira, querxada
and
esquiva,
killing moves disguised as Latin American dance, Raf never told him that he was designed to learn. He just left the old con where he’d found him, still in the yard at Remand3/Seattle.

Occasional cars prowled the street in front of the derelict house, fuelled by petrol, natural gas or alcohol. The signature from their exhausts mixed into a heavy soup of sugar and hydrocarbons that made his sinuses ache. And there were stronger smells, coming from somewhere closer. Food cooking, mixed with something raw and potent, like burning leaves, which is what it was…

Retracing his steps until he found a low wall that edged a roof terrace, Raf used this to clamber onto the tiles of a spice attic running the width of the next two houses. A couple of seconds of silence later, Raf was looking down on a thin man smoking in the shadow of a door, his hand curled round the end of his joint to hide its gleam. At the man’s feet was a discarded copy of
Hustler
… Three cans of Diet Coke had been drunk, then crushed flat, before being lined up on the edge of a plastic table.

Careless,
the fox would have said.

Beside the crushed cans was an empty automatic. Handle angled away from the man’s reach, with its full clip resting alongside. The guy was standing guard because that was what he’d been told to do; not because he was expecting visitors.

“Really careless,”
said Raf, dropping in from the low roof. And as the thin man spun round, Raf flipped out his cosh and tapped the side of his head, hard to medium. Catching the guy before he hit the tiles was the only difficult part.

A battered hiPower, an old Opinel lock-knife with a broken tip to its blade and a handmade garrotte constructed from fishing line and toggle handles. Not exactly
Thiergarten
issue. Raf still pocketed the lot, pushing the oversized Browning through his belt. The unconscious body he rolled against the wall.

Braised mutton, Raf decided as he stood near an open doorway. Mutton, coriander and bread cooking on a skillet. Somewhere in the house a radio was tuned to a pirate station, raw
al-jeel
mixed with a thin synth loop that scratched at the back of Raf’s mind. If there was anyone in the rooms directly below, then they were either very still or fast asleep.

No one was there, although Raf checked each room to make sure, finding them all empty. At the top of the next flight of stairs, he stopped to listen. The radio was closer and there were too many people for him to work in silence…

It was time to make another plan.

Up above the tiles, bats ran tight circles, losing their fear of the silent figure who stood frozen while they scooped insects from the warm wind.

Ten minutes was what Raf had allowed himself. Ten minutes of stilling his heart and breath and thoughts. Chasing away the sour fog in his head. And then, as one soft fragment of blackness lurched in too close, made clumsy by a struggling moth, Raf flipped out his hand and pulled the bat from the air. Breaking its wings, he tossed the animal down at his feet to watch it flap helplessly on the red tiles.

He was going to kill a human in a minute. Life’s price for getting Avatar back. Both for the person who paid and the person who took. So it was, he realized, unutterably childish to be upset about hurting something with a brain the size of a grain of rice, especially something that made its living killing other things.

Red in tooth and claw,
his mother would have said. It was humans who were unnatural, having placed themselves outside evolution from choice, which was bad for the world as a whole. He’d read her paper,
Restoring the Balance
… Pretty good for a woman who accepted cash from a Swiss multinational in return for stepping down as head of
NatureFirst
. Of course, they’d given her something extra as well, him…

Or perhaps it was the other way round. Maybe funding her films was extra and he was the deal. The fox was better at this kind of stuff. All Raf knew was he came with an eight-thousand-line guarantee from a company that went belly-up after he was born.

So no one got to collect on anything.

“Hey.” Raf’s whisper was low, but easily heard by a scrawny stray that watched him from the next roof, its back prickled with doubt as hunger fought its mistrust of Raf.

As ever, hunger won.

Raf knelt beside the twitching bat, watching the stray approach, its whiskers spread. Very slowly the small cat came within range. Not adult, but no longer really a kitten. The soft fur was gone and with it most of one ear.

And as the hungry stray shot forward to take the dying bat, Raf reached out and placed one finger on a broken wing, preventing the cat from dragging away its prey. “Eat it here.”

The animal did so, killing the bat with a bite to the neck. By the time the cat realized Raf had released the wing, its meal was almost finished and all that remained was a smudge of soft leather dark against the cooling roof.

“I’d get you another,” Raf said, as he took the animal by the scruff of its neck, “but we don’t really have time.”

From the floor below came the sound of rats. Somewhere below that a water pipe banged and a conversation started up, then died as a door opened and shut. In the background a three-chord special died midthrash, feeding into a jingle for Peugeot. All in all, it sounded like the backing track to utter normality.

“Okay,” said Raf, “this is what we do…”

The cat landed at the bottom of the stairs, flipping itself over in midair to land on the bare boards. One glance said its route back to the roof was blocked so instead the animal ran towards an open door, stopped at the top of those stairs and froze as someone at the bottom looked up and swore.

“Ismail?” A gruff voice called up twice and, when hissing was the only answer, the questions turned to swearing. Raf heard the Arabic for
useless
and
idiot
several times. Confident steps on the stairs said the man expected no trouble and at the point he understood it was trouble that expected him, he was already heading for the floor.

“Two down,” said Raf to the cat, which did little but swish its tail in silent agreement.

Under his tatty jacket the unconscious man wore a shoulder holster and nestled inside that, still locked in place by a Velcro strap, was a snub-nosed revolver, with letters engraved along its chassis that read
genuine Colt, made in USA
. The sharp edges to that lie made it obvious that the actual place of origin was some local sweatshop.

Which worried Raf a lot.

That there were two sides to Hamzah Effendi was common knowledge. The family man and the crime boss, Jekyll Effendi to Felaheen Hyde. Offend the first and he’d buy out your company and close it down. Offend the second and he’d slaughter your children, bulldoze your house into the ground and sow that ground with rock salt. There was something very biblical about some of those reports on file.

Kidnapping Hamzah’s child, even a bastard born without property rights, was the crime-world equivalent to standing on the rails at Masr Station and trying to hold back an incoming train. There might not be quicker ways to commit suicide but there were undoubtedly a dozen ways that were more pleasant.

So why do it? And why do it with cheap labour?

“Up you go.” Raf waved his hand at the cat, which had just taken to sharpening its claws on the edge of a banister. The grey cat left via the roof stairs without a backward glance.

Raf telescoped the cosh and put it in his pocket. The fake Colt got stuffed into his belt. One cosh and three guns—his own, the Browning from the roof and now the fake—plus a black glass blade, its edge ground so sharp as to be almost fractal. That was what the advertising promised anyway. The fawn jacket he stripped off the unconscious man and shrugged his way into, feeling the cloth flop round his shoulders.

Holding a gun in each hand, Raf stamped his way down the flight of steps, pulling the clumsy tread of the other man from memory. He remembered in time to bang into the upright at the bottom and casually shoulder open the kitchen door rather than use its handle. Two men and a boy glanced up, boredom becoming alarm when they realized that whoever Raf was he wasn’t one of them.

“No,” said Raf, twitching one gun, “don’t get up.” He spoke Arabic, his accent understandable if atrocious. “And there’s no need for anyone to die…” Just for a second the dark void of his gun’s muzzle hovered over the heart of the boy.

“Unless that’s your choice?”

They’d all shaken their heads before Raf had time to finish his question.

“Good,” said Raf, and found that he meant it. He also found he’d been wrong about them cooking. It was takeout he’d been able to smell.

In front of them, on a cracked pine table stood a foil plate filled with gristle and mutton bones, beside an even larger container that had held couscous. A half-empty jar of harissa sat nearby. As did unleavened bread and a jar lid’s worth of stubbed-out roaches and twists of torn cardboard.

Carbohydrate and kif, two good ways to waste one’s edge. Not that any of the three gave much sign of having had an edge to start with.

“Weapons on the table…”

A motley collection of go-faster revolvers and flashy switchblades piled up next to the foil containers. All fake pearl handles and fuck-me electronic sights that looked great and did nothing constructive.

“All of them.”

A couple of boot knives and a pair of brass knuckledusters joined the growing pile. It reminded Raf of the trash that he used to take off teenagers at the door of BonBon, back in Seattle, in the days before Raf fell out with Hu San, leader of the local Triad, and had to become someone else.

“And the rest…”

The middle one, whom Raf had figured for the boy’s father and the old man’s young brother, pulled out a one-shot throw-down from the back of his belt and sullenly placed it next to his knife.

“Now put them into this,” said Raf, pushing across the foil container that had held couscous. Obediently, the three began piling up weapons, taking care not to point the guns anywhere near Raf.

Sit down, stand up, sit down
… Every time they did what Raf ordered, the imprinting got stronger; that was how the human psyche worked… Had Raf been about to kill them, it would have been the right time. He assumed they were bright enough to understand that. And yet they were still way too casual.

“You do know who you’ve kidnapped?” Raf looked at the boy, the one who’d shivered under the gaze of Raf’s gun. Not only was he the youngest, he was also less obviously stoned. What Raf got by way of reply was a slight shake of the head. Though that turned out to be not in answer to the
who
part of Raf’s question but the
what
… The kid was arguing definitions.

“We didn’t kidnap anybody. We’re just guarding him.”

“And that’s meant to make a difference?”

The boy shrugged.

“It’s DJ Avatar,” Raf said. “Hamzah Effendi’s kid.”

The kid looked suddenly shocked. But even that wasn’t straightforward. It turned out he liked Avatar’s music. Hamzah didn’t figure.

“He’s been fucking arrested,” said the old man. “For torturing a
nasrani
to death.”

“Raped her first,” the boy’s father added. “He’s in prison.”

“Really?” Raf asked. “Who arrested him?”

“Ashraf-fucking-Bey. It happened yesterday.”

“No,” said Raf. “That’s not what happened. Believe me.”

“Yes it is…” The old man’s pupils were dilated beyond their natural limit, expanded so much they looked like the eyes of someone with a fatal head wound, fixed at that point when the pupils explode. Whatever the man’s poison, it was serious stuff.

“On his own beach,” added the boy, sounding suitably outraged.

They left via a back door into a rear alley, having collected both their lookout and Ismail, two men with evil headaches but no worse. The kind of small-time fry, all of them, evolved by every ghetto to fit the niches that others reject. Life’s bottom feeders; too disorganized to mastermind their own events, at least not ones that worked, and not hard enough to handle real trouble. That they’d been hired to guard Avatar made no sense at all.

Pulling his automatic from its holster, Raf prowled the house, leaving the locked cellar until last. The roof was deserted and the attic empty. So Raf took the few remaining bulbs from their sockets and locked the roof door before sweeping the level below, where bedrooms had once been. Four empty rooms, filled with acrid dust and silence. Broken chairs filled the far corner of one. In another, some
clochard
had started a small fire on tiles that had cracked. A handful of Thunderbird cans lay blackened in the ashes. Taking each bulb in turn, Raf locked those doors too, using the iron mortise locks common to North Africa. Just to be on the safe side he pocketed the keys.

Empty houses were a familiar sight south of Mahmoudia. At least they were on that stretch west of Rue Menascae, where an area of almost sufficiency surrendered to the dank touch of institutionalized poverty. For streets to be derelict there was as normal as finding crack houses at crossroads, or overcrowded tenements that overlooked unsafe playgrounds, dead trees standing reminder to unmet aspirations.