Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  ZeeZee stopped rubber-necking Mohammed the moment he realized he was the only person on Place Mohammed paying Khedive the slightest attention. He didn’t want to look the tourist, even when that was so obviously what he was.

  The first three shops in Rue Faransa sold bric-a-brac masquerading as antiques. A Bakelite radio in one window caught ZeeZee’s eye but when he went inside to examine it he discovered that someone had replaced the original valves with a cheap Somali chipset. So he put the radio back in the window and retreated under the shopkeeper’s watchful eye.

  Two clothes boutiques followed, both in the process of closing for the night and both featuring short dresses in washed-out silk by designers ZeeZee had never heard of, though given the prices displayed in pounds Iskandryian, US dollars and Reichsmarks everyone else obviously had.

  The next shop looked much more promising. It sold menswear, was still open and, even better than that, had an industrial-strength air-conditioning unit sticking straight out into the street. ZeeZee couldn’t tell how expensive the suits in the window were from their price tags because there weren’t any such tags—which probably made the garments concerned seriously upscale. But since it wasn’t really his charge card he could live with that.

  Something tastefully restrained was playing on the sound system as he entered. Gorecki probably. One wall was matt black, the rest sand-blasted brick. All of which left ZeeZee as singularly unimpressed as the intimidating elegance of the boutique’s French manager, the simplicity of her stark granite desk and the three obsidian-topped work tables.

  ZeeZee might heal unnaturally fast but he was still in too much pain from his ribs and far too strung out to take note of the shop’s expensively understated detail. All he noticed was a framed page from Esquire, showing a man wearing a black tee under a loose lightweight black coat with matching trousers. The shoes the model wore had Cuban heels and sloped to a point at the toes. The outfit looked elegant, sophisticated and just slightly threatening. But most of all it looked cool. Not fashion-victim cool, just as if the model wasn’t overheating.

  “That,” said ZeeZee, nodding at the cover and putting his card on the counter. “I want that.”

  The glance the woman gave his card was so fleeting ZeeZee almost missed it. “Good choice,” she said. “Good choice.” Pushing herself up off a silver chair, the manager stepped quickly behind ZeeZee and ran one slim hand across his shoulders and then down his spine from his neck to the small of his back. And even as ZeeZee tensed, the manager was across the other side of the boutique, standing next to a rack of jackets, muttering measurements under her breath.

  “Smart silk,” she told ZeeZee, returning with a coat. “Double-stitched, jet buttons, silk half-lining. Ideal for this weather.” She slung the garment across ZeeZee’s back, not bothering to get her only customer of the evening to thread his arms through the sleeves. “If it hangs okay like this then the fit is good. I’ll check sleeve length later, but it will be fine.”

  She stepped towards ZeeZee and hesitated as he stepped swiftly back. “I need to check your waist,” she said. “If that’s a problem I have a tape…”

  “No problem.” ZeeZee stood as the woman touched her fingers together over his spine and deftly smoothed the tips around his waist until they met slightly below his navel. If she noticed the heavy cross-hatches of tape coming down from his damaged ribs she didn’t mention it.

  “Thirty, maybe thirty-one. We’ll try both. Okay, now the length.” She skimmed one hand up ZeeZee’s inside leg and nodded. “Thirty-three…” A pair of silk trousers joined the jacket, leaving only a black cotton tee that the woman selected from a pile on the obsidian-topped table. Shoes came last.

  “The changing room’s through there.”

  “There” was a black curtain screening off a tiny corner of the boutique, a CCT camera bolted baldly to the bare brick wall.

  “How about shades?” ZeeZee asked when he emerged, his duty-free clothes and shoes crumpled into a bundle in his hands.

  She shrugged, the merest hint of an apology. “Afraid not, but Versace’s across the street…”

  ZeeZee initialled the slip she handed him without checking the amount, dropped his old clothes in a bin and took a small silver-and-red business card the woman was offering. It was only when he felt its weight he realized the card really was silver, the hallmarked kind.

  “We make hotel calls,” said the manager. “If your itinerary is too crowded to allow for a revisit. Our number is in enamel.”

  CHAPTER 8

  29th June

  “I don’t usually…”

  The boy with the cats-eye contacts nodded like he understood and Zara took a good look and realized that he did. Which was just as well, because someone had to understand that she had her reasons for not wanting to be back.

  “Where are we going…?”

  She knew the answer to that because he’d already told her, but asking again was easier than trying to remember, particularly as remembering might bring back something best forgotten.

  “My place,” said the boy.

  Her answering smile was wry, almost ironic. There were a dozen reasons why this was an extremely bad idea,

  “Okay,” said Zara and climbed onto the waiting tram.

  Where?

  The elderly woman who stumbled into ZeeZee from behind when he suddenly stopped dead took one look at the foreigner’s scowling face and decided to keep walking, in another direction. Not that ZeeZee even noticed: he was too busy stripping down his memory, deleting taste, smell and extraneous movement to find a simple primary colour.

  There.

  It took ZeeZee a split second to reassure himself that the people on tram weren’t staring at him because he was dripping blood (he’d already sealed the knife cut with surgical glue from his complimentary Pan American medical kit before taping his ribs with skin from the all-night pharmacist). And it wasn’t his suit that worried the people on the green tram, even though most of the other men wore flowing jellabas. It was his beard and dreadlocks. Or maybe it was the shades.

  Too bad.

  And yes, once they’d been a trademark of his but that had been by accident—and besides, it had been in another country. He wore shades from necessity because without them his eyes swallowed too much light. Just one of the little childhood modifications for which he had his mother’s friends to thank.

  Lately he’d taken to wearing polarized contacts but his supply was back at Huntsville along with his stash of crystalMeth and the rest of his life. Except it wasn’t just life he’d been doing at Huntsville, it had been all day and all night, life with no option of parole. Which was still a pretty good result, given the district attorney had been going for throwing the big red switch.

  “Excuse me.” ZeeZee stepped carefully across some market trader’s outstretched boots and slid between two thick-set construction workers in concrete-splashed jellabas.

  His brain was headed for what the fox would call a five-car crash and he needed that seat. Besides, that was where the girl sat, the girl he’d seen hesitate, then get on a green tram. The one whose sadness was flash-frozen to the inside of his eyes like lightning.

  Though maybe that was just the meth.

  ZeeZee knew immediately why his seat had been left free when the tram braked suddenly and the girl shot forward, straight into him. No amount of cologne could hide the reek of alcohol.

  “I’m sorry,” said the boy beside her. He half stood, then sank back into his seat and turned away with the embarrassment of the still-young. Fourteen, thought ZeeZee, fifteen at the most. Silver hair, gold tear, laser tattoo. Not as hard as he wanted to be.

  Politely, ZeeZee put one hand on each of the girl’s shoulders and pushed her back into her seat. The slightest of nods was all he got by way of acknowledgement. And it was obvious that she didn’t trust herself to speak. As if sitting very still could hide the fact that she was too drunk to stand. A birthday or leaving do, ZeeZee decided, noting the card clutc
hed loosely in her fingers and the bunch of orchids wilting on her lap.

  Birthday parties gave good access. He’d used them back in Seattle. People’s guards came down, making it easy to get close. Much closer than they mostly wanted: but then that was ZeeZee’s speciality, getting close to targets who spent time and money keeping people like him at arm’s length.

  Style was a key factor and ZeeZee could do style. Looking right got you through doors that remained closed to others. Neatness, youth and an ability to blend. There’d been few places he couldn’t enter if needs must… There was even a name for it. Negative capability…

  ZeeZee smiled.

  He was still smiling when the girl hunched forward and dribbled vomit from her mouth onto the tram floor between his shoes. She didn’t do anything as vulgar as actually throw up, she just let the alcohol make its own return trip.

  “Sorry.” That was the boy again.

  ZeeZee shrugged. “It happens.”

  At Rue Sherif, ZeeZee pushed himself up off his seat and paused. He needed to know who she was, but he also needed to get off at this stop. Most of all, he wanted to tell the boy not to worry. But anything he said would have drawn attention to the girl’s plight, so ZeeZee just nodded and kept going. He’d been those people, both of them. Just not for a long time.

  CHAPTER 9

  29th June

  Lodging House & Eating Shop read the old sign at the corner of Abu Dadrda and Rue Cif, though the building in question showed nothing but empty spaces where windows and door should have been. At ground level even the floorboards were missing, long wooden joists stretching out over darkness that dropped to a cellar below.

  A plank had been nailed crudely across the open doorway as vague warning of the dangers that hid inside. And over by the far wall in the darkness something glittered that might have been glass reflected in the headlights of a car but proved to be a fox when ZeeZee removed his shades to take a proper look.

  “Later,” said ZeeZee and the fox grinned toothily, saying nothing.

  The man didn’t believe in omens and of his many childhood demons only the arctic fox remained untamed. And Tiriganaq was more afraid of him than ZeeZee was of the fox. Because, if necessary, ZeeZee could stop answering and then it wouldn’t matter if the fox called itself Tiriganaq, Smoke or Earl Grey Malkin, it would be alone.

  Still, they’d always faced trouble together before, so ZeeZee couldn’t imagine how he might have thought the fox would lie low this time.

  Above them both, three storey walls gave way to a thin night sky, softened and faded by a sodium glare that didn’t stretch far enough down to reach the side walk, had there been one.

  East of El-Gomruk and south of Manshiya, but way too far north to be Karmus or Moharrem Bey, ZeeZee wasn’t sure what this district was called. It had been blank of any name on the map at the tram station, its streets cross-hatched to tell cash-rich tourists that here was where they could find Iskandryia’s famous souks.

  ZeeZee could see the map clearly in his head, right down to the pink cross-hatching, but that meant nothing. There was very little from his life that he couldn’t see in his head once he’d remembered where it was filed.

  The entrance ZeeZee wanted turned out to be a narrow arch between two shops, one of which sold beaten brassware, the other old computers in shades of pastel. Between them was a door without a knocker. At head height was a peeling sign that read On ne visite pas.

  Straightening his shoulders, ZeeZee rapped hard on the ancient door and then regretted it as noise crashed like thunder down both sides of the street. So he knocked again, more gently this time.

  “What do you want?”

  At least, ZeeZee imagined that was what the man on the other side of the door said, though he didn’t recognize the language.

  “I’m looking for Lady Nafisa,” said ZeeZee.

  Nafisa. The voice turned the word over as if tasting it.

  “Yes,” said ZeeZee. “My aunt.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” In the space where the door had been stood an old man, the stub of a cheroot gripped between his right thumb and skeletal first finger. Dark eyes examined ZeeZee’s face and then the man stepped to one side. “Our house is your house.” This time round he spoke in French, with a voice raw from a lifetime of cheap cigars.

  There were five bolts on that door and the old man secured them all, including one that fixed straight up into the top of the arch and another that drove into the worn surface of a stained flagstone.

  “This way.”

  An arch in the side of the entrance room led left, followed by an immediate right turn through a second arch, which was when ZeeZee realized the shabby corridor he was in was really the start of a small, very simple maze leading to an ugly, obsessively-neat garden immediately beyond.

  On either side of the garden stood open-fronted rooms, little more than flat roofs supported by sandstone pillars over a cracked terracotta floor. And at the far end of the garden was an ornate marble arch set in a simple brick wall. Once the formal garden had been naked to the sky but someone, years back, had roofed it over with steel and glass, panes of which were now cracked and dirty.

  That the glass roof was old was obvious, because the frame supporting it was riveted to crossbeams that were held in place by cast-iron pillars, and a century’s worth of paint had crusted round the rivets and smoothed the Doric decoration on the plinths to a bland ripple.

  “This way.” The old man vanished through the marble arch into a cavernous, empty room where water didn’t so much fall from a fountain as run bubbling down a free-standing slab of marble.

  “Shazarwan,” announced the man and ZeeZee guessed he was naming the strange object.

  Open arches on the far side of the room led into an open courtyard, smaller than the garden and tiled with white stone. In the centre stood a fountain carved from a single block of horsehair marble. But what ZeeZee noticed was the impossibly ornate four-storey house that rose at the far end of the courtyard.

  Soft uplights pulled detail from a carved balustrade and threw its huge arches into shadow. If the al-Mansur madersa was meant to impress, then it succeeded.

  Jerking his chin towards stairs that started up the outside of the madersa, then turned in under an arch to continue inside, the thin man stood back.

  “Nafisa…” He said simply.

  ZeeZee went.

  “You’re late,” said a voice that ZeeZee tracked to a small woman angrily pacing near the top of the stairs. Backlit by wall lights, Lady Nafisa looked thin and birdlike, a neat faceless shadow but an angry one.

  “Am I?” ZeeZee’s first reaction was to apologize, then insist his flight was late, even though she’d know from her driver that this was untrue. But he didn’t let himself do either. Instead, he shrugged and kept climbing, as if not caring if he walked straight through her.

  “Shit happens,” he said as he reached the top and stared round at a huge room, open to the night through its arches on one side. Since heights and he didn’t agree with each other, he didn’t go look at the view. “And besides, someone wanted a word.”

  Lady Nafisa stopped suddenly. “You saw somebody you knew?”

  “Other way round,” said ZeeZee. “He thought he knew me.”

  They spoke French because that was the language Lady Nafisa had first used. Yet when it came, her switch to English was so fluent ZeeZee wasn’t even certain she was aware of making it.

  “I sent a car for you. A stretch Daimler-Benz.” She was doing her best to smile but there was real anger in her eyes. Which was fine with ZeeZee because he was pretty sure that, behind the expensive anonymity of the Versace shades she’d unwittingly bought for him there was real anger in his too.

  Families had that effect on him and no family more strongly than his own. If she really was family, which remained to be proved.

  “I make my own way,” said ZeeZee.

  The woman stared at him. And behind the fashion-plate suit she saw ghosts o
f her husband backed up like reflections in a mirror. “Later,” she said hastily. “We can deal with this later…”

  As iron cue, the skeletal porter from the rear entrance strode in clutching a brass tray that he placed on a three-legged wooden contraption which seemed to be waiting for it.

  “This is Khartoum,” said Lady Nafisa, as if talking about a dog. “He’s from the Sudan so you can say anything you like in front of him.”

  Meaning he didn’t speak English, presumably.

  “Unless, of course,” said ZeeZee, “I say it in French, Arabic or whatever that other language was.”

  Nafisa sighed. “German,” she said heavily. “I can see you’re going to be like your father.”

  Father? ZeeZee stared at her.

  “Precise to the point of irritation.”

  ZeeZee hadn’t meant to be precise, merely glib. And since he’d never met his father and the last time he’d seen her, his mother still regarded the truth as something so fluid that identical sentences could mean opposite things on different days, he had no idea if Lady Nafisa even knew who his father was. Somehow he doubted it. Some undiscovered theory of chaos seemed to be the only thing that made sense of his family life to date.

  Aim to please, shoot to kill. That had been one of Wild Boy’s phrases back before Huntsville when he and Wild were still not quite enemies. “We aim to please,” said ZeeZee.

  “We?”

  Yeah, we… ZeeZee clicked his heels and bowed slightly, almost as if he meant it. Me and the fox.

  “Stupid that is,” the sudden voice behind ZeeZee was cutting in its contempt. “Clicking your heels. No one really behaves like that in Iskandryia. I knew you’d be stupid.”

  “Hana.”