Chapter Forty-nine
1st August
Some sense of meaning was there, just about. Hidden beneath animal howls that ended in choking silence. Stb pzzz. But the German ballerina had no interest in stopping, not yet. Not until Madame Sosostris told the ballerina why she' d been hired. Only Madame Sosostris wasn't saying, because refusal was the only thing keeping her alive — although that definition was becoming increasingly loose.
Sighing, the ballerina lit another Cleopatra and inhaled deeply, letting the smoke dribble from her mouth. Then she inhaled again, and stubbed the cigarette out in the screaming woman's navel.
Zara put her hands over her ears.
Ashraf was dead. Someone she knew and liked had been murdered. Maybe more than liked, if she was honest. Now she'd walked Hani straight into a trap. Zara had brains, she had courage, she should have been planning their escape but somehow...
All she wanted to do was cry. Zara was disgusted at her own cowardice. The kid, on the other hand seemed almost oblivious, only glancing up from where she squatted beside Ali-Din whenever another cigarette went out.
Outside, late evening leeched daylight from the sky. Lights would be coming on along the Corniche, the fish restaurants shuffling tables as tourists finished their supper and locals arrived to eat, children in tow. And, sitting alone in his study, nursing an illegal whisky, her father would be checking his messages and trying not to worry. She could look after herself, that was what he would tell himself because that was what she'd spent the last five years telling him, every opportunity she got.
She was sorry to have let him down.
'It's okay.' Hani squeezed Zara's hand. 'Raf will be here soon.'
'Raf's dead, honey.'
'No,' said Hani, as she tucked her wriggling rag dog tight in her arms and stroked its ears. 'He's just late, as usual ...'
They both waited at one end of a spice-drying attic, or maybe it was a mezzanine. Whatever, it filled a third of the length of the building and was a simple platform, hung under the roof and anchored to an end wall. Slit windows in that wall let in air and would have looked down onto a street if only the street hadn't been so narrow or the windows set so high. That was the end where rickety stairs led up from ground level. At the other end of the platform, a simple rail separated the edge from a drop to the floor of the warehouse far below.
Light came from a single bulb that hung like a fat water drop at the end of an age-blackened twist of flex. The room it revealed was functional. A place of sour-smelling leaves drying on canvas tarpaulins, of peppery herbs hung from crude beams, each brittle bunch lashed together with rough string. The same type of string that bound the elbows of Madame Sosostris tight behind her as she lay quivering face up on a medical couch, knees wrenched back and ankles lashed to her elbows so that her arched body was taut beneath a short Muji vest which was all that she now wore, hi Berlin that position was called 'Teasing the Rat'.
The more Zara tried not to think about what that couch was actually doing there, the nastier her suspicions became. Full pharaonic circumcision, which used to be called female infibulation was illegal in Iskandryia. But then, so was abortion and the little silver trolley with the surgical trays could have been for either — or even for both.
Beside her, Hani suddenly sneezed at the dust in the air.
The ballerina paused. 'Gesundheit', she said, sounding distracted. And then went back to heating the tip of her flick knife with a Zippo.
Black carob, henna and oregano, chilli and ginger. Their scents clashed with each other and with the smell of cumin, coriander and frying garlic that drifted up from a distant street stall. But rich as the mix was it wasn't enough to hide the stink of fear that rose from the tethered herbalist.
'Tell her,' Zara pleaded.
The ballerina smiled.
'Please.'
'Ja,' said the blonde German, as she pressed red-hot metal into the inside of the bound woman's thighs. 'Explain who really hired me and maybe I'll let you live ... But then again, maybe not.' She jerked the blade sideways.
Blood ran between Madame Sosostris's legs in a trickle like scarlet tears.
'Tell me,' suggested the ballerina.
'What's to tell ... ?' The question bubbled between bitten lips. 'I hired you. I didn't know he was dangerous ... I made a bad mistake.'
'No,' said the ballerina. 'Not you. Someone else ordered you to hire me.' She pivoted on her heel and buried rigid fingers into the side of the arched woman, ignoring piss that spread across wipe-clean leatherette and dribbled floorwards, following blood down a crack in the boards. And in the silence between falling drips Zara heard a knock at the door below and then the sudden jagged trill of a bell, so loud that even the ballerina jumped.
'Expecting someone?' she demanded, holding her blade close to her victim's eye. Madame Sosostris shook her head.
'Well?' The question was shot behind her, at Zara.
'No,' said Zara.
The ballerina turned back to her victim. 'Well, now,' she said, listening to a second, more impatient ring from below. 'Maybe we can kill you, after all. Okay, you ...'
Zara nodded.
This is how it works ... You answer the door and the child stays there. Any problems and ...' She flicked her knife sideways, leaving Zara no doubt what would happen to Hani's throat.
Zara went. Walking slowly down the ancient stairs until she reached the main door to the spice house. A big part of her wanted to keep walking, out of that door and into a world where upstairs wasn't happening. But she knew, stupid or otherwise, she'd probably die rather than leave Hani.
'Who is it?' she demanded.
'Me.' Lady Jalila's voice was scared or furious, but through an inch of sheet steel it was hard to tell which. 'Now open up, quickly...' She pushed at the door, then visibly jumped when she saw it was Zara. 'Where is Madame Sosostris?'
Zara pointed to the ceiling.
'And you brought Hani?'
Of course she'd brought Hani. This was where the message had told them to come. Zara nodded.
'Good.' The woman pushed past Zara and headed towards the stairs without needing to be shown the way. 'I'll be taking her with me.'
'Lady Jalila ...'
'What?'
What indeed. Zara thought of Hani upstairs and the blonde woman with her cold northern eyes and hot blade and said nothing. Besides, something was wrong. What did Lady Jalila mean, asking if Hani was there? Here, still? Here, now? Where else would the child ...
'Lady Jalila.'
'Well?' The woman's eyes flicked from Zara to dark drips on the floor behind her. And when she stayed silent, Lady Jalila sighed. 'Leave it to me,' she said, reaching into her pocket. 'Just leave it to me.'
The rest Hani and Zara reconstructed from memory. Remembering most a pas de deux faster and more intricate than any they'd seen on a newsfeed.
Sound travels relatively slowly but, being cool-loaded and thus subsonic, Lady Jalila's first bullet travelled more slowly still, which meant it wasn't quite the surprise to the ballerina that it might have been. Though by the time Hani looked up, the German's blonde hair had finished streaming out behind in a sticky white, grey and red plume.
The .38 hollow-point entered the ballerina's head just below the jaw, passed through her soft palate and removed what had until then been the back of her skull, sucking out blood, bone fragments and grey jelly to splatter them over the brick wall behind.
A split second after her head flicked back, the woman's bowels and bladder loosened and her body stepped back, exploded blue eyes staring blindly at nothing. The crash the ballerina made as she hit the boards was loud enough to echo through the almost empty building.
'Mid-period,' muttered Lady Jalila, surveying the wall. 'Maybe mid-to-late ...' Her eyes swept over the attic to take in Hani with her rag dog, the dead ballerina and finally, scornfully, Madame Sosostris hog-tied on the couch.
'Murderer.'
Before Zara could protest, Lady Jalila bro
ught up her gun and yanked the trigger three times. Hollow-points took Madame Sosostris in the upper body, splintering ribs into bone fragments. Lungs collapsed as the first two bullets blossomed into sucking wounds in her side, the final shot taking Madame Sosostris sideways through the heart and blasting her off the couch onto the floor.
The gurgling stopped.
'She hired the German to kill Ashraf,' Lady Jalila said as if that explained everything, though whether it was said to Zara or herself wasn't clear. Walking over to the dead woman by the bed, Lady Jalila lifted a scalpel from a metal dish and slashed the twine binding her arms and feet. Then she rolled the sticky twine into a neat ball and dropped it into her pocket. She placed her own .38 in the dead herbalist's hand.
'We'll tell the police they shot each other.'
It wasn't a suggestion.
'Just leave the official stuff to me,' said Lady Jalila. 'Okay... ?' Without waiting for Zara's answer, Lady Jalila walked across to where Hani sat, hugging her knees and clutching her rag dog.
'Time to take Ali-Din home.'
Hani shook her head. 'You killed her,' she said, voice empty.
'Of course I killed her,' said Lady Jalila. 'There was no choice.'
Only the child wasn't talking about the blonde German, Zara realized. Or about Madame Sosostris. And everything fell into place as if the answer had always been right there, just waiting for Zara.
Cold.
Staggers.
Hallucinations.
'The pen was a side issue,' Zara said without thinking. 'Lady Nafìsa died from poisoning.' And she suddenly knew exactly how the woman standing in front of her had done it. Except that by then Lady Jalila was crouching beside the dead herbalist, taking back her own gun.
The next bullet she fired took Ali-Din through the head.
Chapter Fifty
1st August
Always count the guns.
Crouching by the window, company to fat-toed geckos that had grown used to his stillness, Raf whispered it again — just in case he forgot. Counting the guns had been rule one, according to Hu San; and Raf had made a special point of remembering the things Hu San told him.
The automatic would belong to the ballerina, only she was dead. Raf had heard that happen. Lady Jalila had the revolver, subsonic slugs but unsilenced barrel, because silencing a revolver was a contradiction in terms. From an empty plastic coke bottle taped to the muzzle to the most expensive hand-turned tungsten mutetube, nothing actually worked. Some of the shock wave always forced its way between cylinder and chassis.
If you needed to mute a revolver then the answer was to self-load the brass and use less charge, which was what she'd done. Whether or not in imitation of Thiergarten dogma, Raf didn't know. But, either way, just knowing how to do it made her a professional in his eyes.
The ex-ballerina had a gun, so did Jalila and so did he ... Three in total, if he didn't count the one he'd lifted from the dead dancer. Which made it four functioning weapons. Quite how knowing that helped him Raf had forgotten.
'Enough already ...'
Old words but true ones. Bats echo-located around him through the warm night air, taking moths in mid-flight, each curving strike almost surgical in its precision. Their echo bounced off shutters, refracted from high walls or vanished through open windows to return milliseconds later. Cold and mysterious, like some distant music of the spheres.
There was a tom cat lurking in the dirt of the alley floor far below, its heavy shoulders hunched and thick muscles locked in anticipation as it walked, oblivious, round Raf's discarded jellaba and shades, tracking whatever vermin hid behind the rubble. If the cat was dimly aware of the spiralling almost-mice, it didn't allow them to put it off the prey within reach.
Yet another city within a city, world within world. A metropolis of wild dogs and feral cats, rats breeding beneath grain silos and mice infesting the cotton bales that waited to be loaded into containers along the dock. Spiders, scorpions, and millipedes fat as callused thumbs, safe from the frail, fly-hunting geckos that haunted the twilight edge of street lights.
Raf twisted his head to one side, easing an ache in his neck. Just holding himself secure in that gap between walls took effort. And if he waited much longer he'd have no strength for what must happen next.
Dead boy.. .It was an odd nickname for a man to give a child. He remembered the man well, with his faltering monitors and flat-lining neurofeedback machines. Remembering never had been Raf's problem. His first identity number, its position over a battered metal hook that took his school coat, the exact marble pattern of tiles along a hospital corridor — he knew them all. Far better than he knew himself, because Raf had been afraid there was no self.
We are the hollow men ... Maybe now, but not back times ... Back then he was just a hollow child, not English/not American, not rich/not poor, not wanted except for his logic skills. He could easily have passed that test. But he thought that if he failed they'd let him go home.
Live with it, as the fox would have said.
The silver rain was finished, almost twenty years before.
While Hani was in there. Zara, too.
And he was out here.
And they both undoubtedly believed he was dead and some days he still was. Some days it surprised him he even had a shadow or that when he stared in the mirror there was a reflection waiting to scowl back. But those days got fewer.
And the fear was gone, burned out. The fox dying too. He was going to have to make his own decisions. And this was the first of them ...
Grabbing the rusty metal bar that had once supported a pulley, Raf kicked off from the spice house wall and let gravity swing him through the open window towards which he'd been climbing.
Things to do, people to become.
Hani was sure she saw a smoke-grey animal leap into the room, becoming Raf as it hit the ground and rolled. When he came upright, Raf's gun was already cocked, its muzzle pointed straight at Lady Jalila's stomach. What Raf didn't do was pull the trigger.
'You.'
He nodded.
'You're ...'
'Dead,' added Hani and Raf nodded, watching the revolver pointed at his chest. Small, elegant, with pearl handles and an over-fussy blue finish that definitely didn't match the dark purple nails of the hand holding it.
Lady Jalila smiled. Her full lips twisting prettily.
'Darling,' she said. 'You kill me, I kill you ... Such a waste, don't you think?' Lady Jalila meant it, too, Raf realized. Her greeting was real. In some warped way she really was pleased to see a man who only that morning she'd arranged to have killed.
'You murdered Felix,' said Raf.
Lady Jalila shook her head. 'Murder has to be intentional. That was an accident.'
'And you expected to get away with it?'
'Oh,' said Lady Jalila, 'I have got away with it... And I'll get away with this too. As will you. You and me, we're different.' Her pale blue eyes swept the room, taking in the dead ballerina and herbalist, then Zara. 'Whereas people like her ...'
'What about people like me?' Zara demanded.
'Disposable.' Lady Jalila shrugged elegantly. 'What on earth made you think you deserved a pashazade?'
'Who said I wanted one?'
Lady Jalila ignored that. 'You know what you lack?' Lady Jalila said as the girl turned away. 'Breeding ... That's why people like you never amount to anything. Ashraf, however ... Who knows? With my help he could be the next Chief of Detectives.'
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 usless 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.'
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