Effendi a-2 Read online

  Zara practically threw her suitcases into the boot of Raf’s Cadillac, stamped round to the passenger side and climbed in, shutting the door with a slam. As an afterthought, she reached behind her for a seat belt and found nothing. Felix had never got round to having them fitted and Raf hadn’t bothered to make good their lack.

  Still seething about this stupidity, Zara stared resolutely ahead.

  Which was how she missed seeing Raf clamber into the driver’s seat of the big Bentley, ram the huge car into reverse and spin it round on protesting tyres until it faced the mansion’s wrought-iron gates.

  “What the . . .”

  Zara never got to finish her question because Raf was already gone, all eight cylinders powering the Bentley out into traffic that skidded and stalled rather than risk scratching the General’s car.

  My car, Raf corrected himself, watching his gubernatorial pennant crack in the afternoon wind. My car, my city, my problem. My world coming down around my ears. And Hani’s too, if he wasn’t careful.

  Up ahead was where Zara’s club had briefly been. Now CdeH was gone, and the venue had reverted to its original existence as a deserted cistern beneath a rain-stained, multistorey car park; the famous arrest and bust relegated to part of Iskandryia’s rapidly receding good times.

  The number of clubbers who now swore they’d been there that night would fill the third-class stands at Iskandryia stadium.

  He could have taken a direct route, east onto Faud Premier, then cut south, just before Shallalat Gardens, but instead Raf concentrated on working the big car round narrow back streets marked on the GPS in red, too narrow for the vehicle in which he drove.

  So far he’d done little more than scrape one fender on a wall. Although this changed once he reached the car park at Casino Quitrimala. Of course, if he hadn’t spotted Madame Mila’s blue government Renault on his way in, he probably would have missed that concrete gatepost as well.

  Madame Mila stood next to her car, back straight and eyes fixed firmly on the Bentley. Exactly a pace behind her, at a distance obviously laid down in regulations, stood two officers from the women’s police, both wearing the familiar police-issue hijab. Madame Mila, while obviously the most senior, was also by far the youngest. In place of her hijab she wore a simple blue scarf.

  “General . . .” Her voice faltered as Raf climbed from the huge car, and Raf decided that maybe his morning wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Unfortunately, his optimism lasted only as long as it took him to reach the crime scene.

  Right in the middle of the sodden wreckage of what had once been a casino stood a handful of uniforms, including a grey-haired lieutenant, a crime-locale technician in whites, two members of the morales made obvious by their bottle-green jackets, and three plainclothes in matching black jeans, blue shirts and long leather coats. From what Raf could see, it was a typical Iskandryian crime scene, five times as many officers as needed, with interdepartmental rivalries and demarcation disputes guaranteeing that no one was doing anything useful.

  “Boss.” An elderly plainclothes stepped forward, all heavy moustache and combed-over greying hair.

  “You’ve got something?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Beside him, the uniformed lieutenant snorted. The hyena-like grin on his youthful face didn’t even pretend to reach his eyes. “I think you’ll find we’ve got something.” There was an unsubtle stress to his words.

  Raf raised one hand to chop dead an immediate protest from his own man and saw hurt pride and irritation swamp the old detective’s heavy face, only to be wiped. It was a reaction Raf had begun to recognize.

  “What’s your name?”

  The detective looked at him, judging the danger inherent in the question, while knowing he’d answer it anyway. “Osman, sir . . . Ibrahim Osman.”

  “And what’s your job?”

  Ibrahim Osman looked at him. “I’m your deputy.”

  Raf sighed.

  “What,” Raf asked the uniform, “makes you think this man was the butcher?”

  The young lieutenant frowned. “We got his murder weapon,” he said defensively and reached into his pocket, pulling out a blackened hunk of metal he’d probably trampled all over a crime scene to find.

  “. . . fic,” whispered the fox. “. . . taminated evidence . . . ow original.”

  Raf beckoned for the two morales. “There’s nothing for you here,” he told them. “You can go too,” he said to the lieutenant. “Take your men and leave the blade . . . In an evidence bag,” he added tiredly. Not waiting for the man’s reply, Raf turned on his heels and headed back to Madame Mila.

  Inside his head, the fox’s grin was thin and mostly invisible.

  “Excellency . . .”

  Heavy clouds crowded the horizon and according to Raf’s watch the temperature had fallen to 53° Fahrenheit, making it the coldest October for eighty-seven years. Mind you, according to his watch, he’d also missed three calls from Zara, who apparently needed to talk to him about her father. And one from Hani, which Raf found infinitely more worrying.

  Toggling his Seiko to sound/vision, Raf added vibrate for any call coming in from the kid, while beside him the officers waited expectantly. Way too expectantly.

  When Raf looked up from resetting his watch the coroner-magistrate was standing directly in front of him. A small and intense woman with braided black hair, minimal jewellery and shoes that were immaculately polished, for all that they were obviously cheap. She was, as Felix had once said, probably the most beautiful woman in the city and the most implacable. One who wore her disapproval of Raf like cheap cologne, flooding the moist air between them, colouring her every emotion.

  “Madame Mila . . .”

  It was obvious from her eyes what she saw when she looked at Raf. A rich, spoilt and overprivileged young notable who’d fallen into the job of Chief of Detectives. The dark glasses he wore permanently glued to his face she took as affectation, the rumours of his combat skills, exaggeration, nothing else. Which was true enough, they were exaggeration. But the ever-present shades were down to retinal intolerance and rich was the last thing he was. As for overprivileged . . . He could argue that definition with her all day.

  “Well?” The woman was waiting for some response from him. So was the tight little group of uniforms, gathered on the edge of Madame Mila’s conversation.

  “I’m sorry,” said Raf tiredly, “what was your question?” Behind him, one of his own men sniggered and Madame Mila’s scowl grew, her face darkening and perfect lips setting into a bitter line.

  “A whole day’s been and gone,” she said finally.

  “And your point is?” said Raf, then realized what she meant. They were back to Sharia law. “You want proof the dead girl wasn’t local . . .” He was talking to himself but a plainclothes who stood nearby took it as a question and nodded, careful not to meet Raf’s eye. Which meant that was undoubtedly exactly what Madame Mila had just told Raf.

  “Where’s the body now?”

  “Still on ice.” It was Madame Mila who answered. “She’d been spring cleaning a guard hut when she died, apparently . . .” Her voice made it silkily obvious she wasn’t about to accept that fact without further proof.

  “Wearing what?” He saw the sudden tension in Madame Mila’s face and qualified his question. “Before she was murdered,” he said, gently enough to surprise himself. “I’ve read the preliminary report. I know she was naked when found.”

  “White trousers,” said Madame Mila stiffly. “Thin, like silk. And a silver . . .” Her hands sketched a slight, embarrassed double circle, well away from her own body. “A metal brassiere . . .”

  “Friday night. Wearing almost nothing. You think someone from this city would behave like that?”

  Madame Mila thought about it. “No,” she admitted finally. “Probably not.”

  Raf did, but he wasn’t about to say so. “And the wounds,” he said, “no change at all?”

  A blank look.
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  “Upward slash from pubis to throat, a right to left across the rib cage, entrails disturbed . . .” And if ever there was an appropriate word disturbed was it. Three psy-profilers had been busy from the start trying to explain exactly what that shit with the ripped guts might signify. So far, their sole conclusion was that the mutilation was historically interesting.

  Madame Mila nodded, tight-lipped.

  “You took a close look?”

  Another nod.

  Which probably explained the tightness in her eyes, thought Raf. She had slight sweat marks under her arms and tiny beads of perspiration where her dark hair was pulled into a shape nature never meant it to hold. By anyone else’s standards Madame Mila still looked immaculate: judged by her own, the woman was a wreck.

  “Go on,” said Raf. “Get out of here.” He meant it kindly but that wasn’t how his comment was taken.

  Instead Madame Mila bridled. She actually pulled herself up to her full height, slight though that was.

  “Out,” Raf said, finally losing his patience. “I want all of you out of here . . . Except for you,” he added and pointed to a uniform at random. “You get to finish taping off the crime scene and chase sightseers away.”

  The uniform glanced at his young lieutenant, who glared at Raf, caught between outrage and a growing unease. Madame Mila just felt the outrage, which was how she got her question in first.

  “Just who do . . .”

  “. . . oes he think he is?. . . interesting question.” The fox had Raf take out his two-line letter and hand it to the furious woman. “. . . erson giving orders, like it or not.”

  Raf shut his eyes.

  He was standing, dead on his feet, in an almost deserted car park, outside a firebombed casino, in a city undergoing meltdown, with five different flavours of police, none of whom knew his real name, his record or that he was meant to be serving time for . . .

  Well, welcome to the Apocalypso . . .

  Except that was a club, wasn’t it? Somewhere in downtown Zurich. He used to be driven past it on his way from the airport to school.

  “. . . ap out of it,” hissed the fox.

  “Why?”

  Madame Mila stared at him. “Why what?” Somehow she managed to add Your Excellency to the end of that sentence, as she handed back his letter. Though she did it through gritted teeth.

  Raf ignored her. “Why?” he demanded, only this time when he spoke it was inside his own head.

  “. . . ause you need to sleep and I’ve got to go.”

  “No.” Raf’s silent refusal was loud enough to set his own teeth on edge. “You can’t go.”

  “. . . y to stop me,” the fox whispered, its voice fading. And Raf wasn’t sure if that was a threat, a plea or a simple suggestion. Whatever, he had to try.

  “You,” Raf said, turning to the lieutenant. “You carrying any meth?”

  “No, sir.” The shake of the head was emphatic.

  No use asking her.

  Stamping past Madame Mila as if she didn’t exist, Raf reached one of the cherry tops just as its driver slid into gear. The crime-locale tech pulled back into neutral when Raf rapped on the glass. A whir of electrics and cigarette smoke billowed from a suddenly open window. Smoking was illegal on duty for all ranks in all departments, but neither of them bothered with that.

  “Meth, got any?”

  Dark eyes looked at Raf from behind dark glasses. If the tech thought Raf couldn’t see his expression, then he hadn’t allowed for the Chief recalibrating his vision.

  “Me, personally, Your Excellency?”

  “Evidence, stuff on the way to a lab?”

  “I’m not . . .”

  “Redeem yourself,” said Raf and held out his hand. Sometime or other, he was going to have to find out their names, what jobs they did, official stuff like that.

  Raf weighed the evidence bag, appreciatively. Fifty ready-made origamis of . . .

  “What is it?”

  “Dunno, Your Excel . . . Boss.” The techie shrugged. “We haven’t taken it to the labs.”

  “You mean,” said Raf, “you haven’t taken it to the labs yet.”

  The techie nodded.

  Ripping open a fold, Raf tasted the earth-grey powder and felt the tip of his tongue disappear. “Ice,” he told the tech, “about sixty percent pure . . .” Raf debated cutting out a line and finding himself a clean note to roll but that seemed too much like hard work. So he just tipped the entire origami into his mouth and chewed, crunching crystals like sherbet. There was a synthetic sweetness that said someone had cut the dose with sorbitol.

  Great, so tomorrow or the next day he was going to get the runs as well as suffer some hideous come-down . . . Or maybe not. There was enough in that bag to keep him up for . . .

  Lights wrote themselves round fire-twisted trees. Broken casino walls suddenly became brighter, almost fluorescent. The slow sweep of the revolving cherry top looked positively alive, lambent. Even the rain fell like music.

  Raf took a look at the plastic bag he was holding. There had to be enough ice in there to keep him up until the end of the world, which, according to Koenig Pasha, came the Tuesday after next, or some such. Raf still needed to get to the bottom of that one.

  “You know Kamila?” Raf pulled the name from memory. “Works at the mortuary.” They had to know her, the woman’s father was one of them. A uniform. That was what Felix had said.

  He took their silence for assent.

  “Tell her to expect a couple of bodies. Tell her not to start without me.”

  CHAPTER 30

  19th October

  Avatar slid his finger under the flap and ripped.

  He wasn’t sure what he anticipated from the envelope addressed to his sister on the cabin’s dressing table . . . Not a love letter from the Khedive, because even the Khedive wasn’t that stupid. Maybe an invitation to something aboard the SS Jannah that Zara would now miss.

  Which would worry her no more than it would worry Avatar, so long as the Khedive didn’t expect him to attend instead. It was bad enough that Zara had suggested that Avatar take her place aboard.

  And she was wrong to try to remake him; to force on him the opportunities she felt he needed. Avatar belonged where he belonged, he knew that. And he was much too proud of what he’d learnt in his fourteen years to change.

  Shaking the contents of the envelope out onto his cabin’s pink bedspread, Avatar’s eyes widened. Whatever else he’d expected Zara to be sent, an engraving of a naked, full-breasted woman bent backward, scuttling across the dirt on limbs that turned to those of a spider was not on his list. On the back in elegant copperplate pen was the word Judecca. Beneath this, Welcome to limbo.

  Nothing else whatsoever.

  With a shrug, Avatar screwed up the envelope and tossed it out of a porthole, watching the wind that caught his crumpled offering and kept it for a few seconds from the embrace of the waves.

  Maybe he should do the same with the naked spider? Avatar had dismissed the possibility before he’d finished thinking it. He was going to send the pervy engraving to Zara. As her just reward for getting Hamzah to agree he should take her place.

  Avatar sighed heavily and wished he was somewhere else. The palm in the corner of his cabin was hideous. The size of a child and planted in a Chinese container that was painted with a ridiculous number of waterfalls and colts kicking their heels on a mountainside.

  Pot or palm by itself would have been bad enough, but together they constituted an insult. It was all Avatar could do not to tip the plant, pot and all, after the envelope into the Mediterranean below.

  Avatar was pretty sure Zara would have loathed the palm, not to mention the cabin’s kitsch Victorian screen plastered with pictures of children cut from old magazines; both of which had been meant for Zara, because this was to have been her cabin. And Avatar had been assured, by a very shocked steward, that everything in the suite had been selected personally by the Khedive himself.

  If
so, the Khedive had even less idea of what made his sister tick than Avatar imagined. And that included sending her a naked spider.

  Avatar looked round his cabin for a scanner, realized there wasn’t one and took a lift down to the bleached-blond retro of the SS Jannah ’s business suite. After he’d got over his shock at being told everything was free to a guest of the Khedive, he found and made do with a fax.

  CHAPTER 31

  20th–21st October

  Hell was a circle with bars and walkways, guards and unseen voices: level after level of honesty, each level more brutal than the last. Endless faces that Raf knew intimately and had never before seen. A cold that filled his mind and chilled the inside of his bones.

  “Ice,” he heard someone say. “A massive dose of methamphetamine. Close to fatal.”

  “And the voices?”

  “Cerebrospinal tests show viral RNA associated with schizophrenia.”

  “He’s caught a virus?”

  The voice was amused. “Someone did. Twenty million years ago. All we’ve got are molecular footprints.” And then the voice and the white coat it wore went away and the darkness came back in.

  Sometime later, a small hand slapped Raf back to life, then cross fingers swung his head from side to side, like a physiotherapist checking mobility.

  “Come on,” demanded Hani.

  She sat perched on top of his quilt, knees bent either side of his chest, her face almost touching Raf’s own. The blur of movement Raf saw when he finally opened his eyes was Hani moving away, shifting backward.

  For a fleeting second she looked relieved, but when Raf checked again that expression was gone. “About time,” Hani said, scrambling off his chest. “You won’t believe the trouble you’re in.”

  “I can’t be in trouble,” said Raf, “I’m . . .”

  “. . . the new governor.” Hani rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t try that one on Zara.”

  Over Hani’s shoulder Raf could see a distant blue sky, small white clouds and rays of golden sun that reflected on the skin of flying babies. Next to a cluster of pink cherubs floated an even pinker woman dressed in a strategically placed wisp of cloud.