Circling the thin tube he held, but not touching it, was a spiral of bare copper wire, with a metal clothes hanger looped at the top, like a makeshift replacement for a vandalized car aerial.
The object looked like something from Sculpture 101 at St. Mark’s.
“Detonator,” said Raf, pointing to a cigarette-sized tube rammed into the underside of the weird exhibit. Copper wire, aluminium stuffed with cheap explosive, aerial loop, battery pack.
“To create a magnetic field between copper coil and tube,” Raf added, when the German ambassador looked blank. He didn’t mention that he’d spent the last few minutes before the Graf arrived checking a pencil-sketched schematic for a flux generator, as e-bombs were apparently called.
“Detonate the charge,” said Raf.
“. . . and the whole thing blows up.” Graf von Bismarck finished the sentence for him.
“You got it.” Raf took a brass pipe from the tray and gave it to the young German, who absentmindedly inhaled.
“As it blows,” said Raf, “the blast rips up the tube at six thousand metres a second or something, the exploding tube flares out to touch the wire and power gets diverted into the undamaged coil ahead . . .”
Absolute incomprehension closed down the Graf’s boyish face.
“You didn’t do physics, did you?”
The German shook his head. “It wasn’t an option. I took philosophy, politics and history at Heidelberg.”
Yeah, exactly as recorded in Koenig Pasha’s file.
“It works like this,” said Raf patiently. “The magnetic force gets squeezed as the tube behind it explodes. That creates a huge rise in current in the coil ahead. When the current finally hits the loop antenna it sprays out a terawatt of electromagnetic energy . . . From detonation to destruction takes less than . . .”
He clicked his fingers. “A hundredth of that, probably less. There were seven of these spread across the city . . . Six went off.”
“But the worst is now over . . .”
“I wish,” said Raf, meaning it. “The worst is only just beginning.”
“Then even more reason . . .” The Graf put down his little pipe. “This trial . . .” He stopped and pursed his lips. “The thing is,” he said, “Berlin are . . .” The Graf shrugged and reached again for the pipe. “My problem is . . .”
“Berlin are worried,” said Raf. “Who wouldn’t be?” He picked up his own pipe but didn’t actually inhale, merely watched thin strands of pungent smoke spiral away into what the Graf saw as darkness and Raf knew to be a different density of light.
By now Astolphe de St. Cloud, France’s ambassador to El Iskandryia, would have heard that Ashraf Bey was locked in a meeting with the ambassador from Berlin and would be at the mansion’s gates demanding admittance. Raf was depending on it.
“The trial . . . ?” Raf prodded gently.
“We want it in Berlin,” said the Graf.
“No.” Raf shook his head. “Absolutely impossible.”
“You misunderstand,” the Graf said, sounding nervous. “We demand it be held in Berlin.”
“As I said, impossible.”
Something flitted across the young man’s face that looked to Raf remarkably like relief. “We will be making an official protest . . .”
“I’m sure you will,” said Raf gently. “But the trial will be held in Iskandryia. Not in The Hague or Paris or Berlin. And I’m relying on you to be a judge . . . The court will be calling Jean René . . .”
Ernst von Bismarck nodded knowledgeably.
“The photographer who filmed the aftermath of the massacre,” Raf explained. “I should also inform you,” he added, pulling Hani’s scribbled note from his pocket, “that my intelligence officers tell me Hamzah Effendi may call a character witness from his own brigade.”
“Impossible,” the Graf said. “Every one of them died except Hamzah. I’ve read the report.”
“If that’s true,” said Raf with a smile, “it should make for an interesting trial.”
The Graf frowned. “I will inform Berlin of the situation.”
“How?” Raf asked and watched the Graf realize that doing so would be less simple than he’d imagined. “How will you go about informing Berlin?”
“By letter. There’s a passenger service to Syracuse . . .”
“If it runs.”
Both ferries would run, Raf already knew that, because one of the first things he’d done was send Hakim to Maritime Station to find out which of the regular boats had been caught in the blast and which, if any, had been lucky enough to be at sea.
They were currently two Soviet liners without electricity, a worthless aircraft carrier, and half a dozen expensive yachts that now needed a partial refit. The people who owned those could afford the damage. It was worse for the fishing boats. Almost all of those had lost their navigation systems and sonar. They also had engines that now wouldn’t start.
“Oh,” said Raf, “if you do write, be sure to tell Berlin that I’m closing the city. A total curfew is being imposed. Other than mine, all cars are banned, assuming any still work. No one comes in or leaves without my written permission . . . My handwritten permission,” he added grimly. “Except for those travelling under a diplomatic passport or a carte blanche, obviously enough. And the accredited press. They can come in. They can even bring cameras. Leaving, of course, is another matter.”
“How long . . . ?”
“Until we catch the bombers.” Raf rose from his chair, waited until the Graf realized his meeting was over, then walked the young German to the chamber door.
“I have a city in meltdown,” he told the boy, “a natural gas plant that can’t pump natural gas, a petroleum refinery that isn’t refining crude, no electricity, no telephones. The few computers that still work are dying by the minute. Most cars don’t run, garages can’t dispense gas . . . You know what that means? No working hospitals, no schools. Think about it.”
Raf ushered the Graf through the hall and out into the rain. Good-byes said, he went back into the darkened chamber and listened.
“You can come out now,” he said.
Very slowly, Zara appeared. “You knew I was here.” It was half question, half statement.
“I heard you.”
“Across that distance?” She stared in disbelief from where she stood to where Raf and von Bismarck had been sitting.
“I can hear the heartbeat of a bat,” he told her simply, “and see a hunting cat across Zaghloul Square at the dead of night. Everything that has ever happened to me I remember. Everything . . .”
I can’t die, he added in his head. I can only be killed. But he kept those words where they belonged because her smile was already gone, shocked out of being by his honesty, her shock coloured round the edges with unease, even fright.
“You mean it, don’t you?” said Zara.
Did he? Raf nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid I do.” He didn’t mention that he could smell expensive scent oxidizing on the inside of her wrist, an overlay of white willow extract from her shampoo and something underneath all that, much more animal.
“You remember everything?” Zara asked in disbelief.
“Exactly as it happened.” Raf stopped opposite the girl and caught the point at which her eyes widened and she remembered that night they’d spent on her father’s boat. Her mouth had tasted of olives and her breasts had rested heavy in his hands, salt with the memory of a wine-dark sea and blood from where she’d bitten his lip.
There had been more, but not much, not as much as he wanted. Now things between them were broken and the memory was what he had left.
“I’d better get off to bed,” said Raf.
“What about me?”
“Choose a room, use it. Call it protective custody,” Raf suggested. “Find Khartoum,” he added when Zara looked blank. “Tell him to find you something or else share Hani’s room. She’d like that . . .” Raf paused, took a deep breath. “Alternatively, there’s always mi
ne . . .”
“What about seeing the French ambassador?” Zara asked. Which wasn’t exactly what Raf expected her to say.
“What about him?”
“Isn’t he waiting . . . ?”
“Undoubtedly.” Raf shrugged. “I don’t want to see the man,” he said. “And besides, St. Cloud hired a man to have me killed.”
Raf smiled at her surprise.
“The night I first arrived,” he said. “Someone tried to knife me . . . I told Felix. It was one of the things he was investigating when he died . . .”
“What happened to the someone?”
“He attacked me, so I killed him.”
“And that’s the scar?” Zara said when Raf had finished hanging his jacket in an old rosewood cupboard. In her hand was a wineglass, still half-full of white Rioja. It was Raf’s glass. Her own was long since empty.
She pointed to a seam visible along his wrist.
“No,” said Raf, pulling off his shirt. “This is the scar.” He traced a line across his ribs with one finger and felt the faintest echo of hardened tissue. “It was only a flesh wound, nothing more . . .
“What?” he asked when Zara smiled, a little sadly.
The room was lit by a single candle that sat, fat and pale in a dish turned from a single section of monkey puzzle, the ancient wood so thin that the candle’s dancing flame made it translucent. The monkey-puzzle dish sat on an oak table beside a metal bed so old that its horsehair mattress rested on wire mesh. Since the room Raf had chosen was originally meant for the General’s personal use, the choice of bed undoubtedly held some special significance.
Raf had selected the room because Hani had one next door. A small dark space that might once have been a dressing room to this, though the entrance between rooms had been bricked up long enough for the Persian wallpaper that covered it to have faded to faint horsemen who hunted in shadow.
“Blow out the candle.”
“I can see in the dark,” Raf warned Zara.
“Maybe,” she said, “but I can’t.” And so Raf blew out the single candle and the room’s cool air flooded with acrid smoke.
“How?” Zara demanded suddenly. “How do you see in the dark?”
“My eyes adjust . . .” Raf thought about it. “No,” he said, “I adjust my eyes. There’s a difference.”
“Then don’t.”
Raf looked at her.
“Stay blind.”
“If that’s what you want.” The last thing Raf saw before he tuned the room into darkness was Zara unbuttoning the front of her short dress. She wore no bra and her body was as perfect as his memory of it.
He met her clumsily in space that waited between them, neither one quite certain of where the other stood in the darkness. Zara felt his hands reach up to grip her naked shoulders and he felt her fingers brush against his face. And this time their kiss was slower, much less frenzied than that time when they were drunk and tired and on her father’s boat.
Zara’s breath tasted of wine and her throat of salt. He got colours and memories with each kiss, though they might have been imagined. Putting both hands around her, Raf followed her spine with his fingers, pausing only when he reached the silk of her thong.
He smiled.
“No.” The command was simple, far simpler than the mix of emotions encoded in her suddenly breaking voice. Sheer nervousness Raf could have understood. His own body was almost vibrating with tension. And fear of what might come next was possible. As was worry that she’d let things get this far . . .
But this was anger.
Raf just wasn’t sure it was directed at him.
He stepped back just enough to put a slight distance between them. “You okay?”
Zara leant her head against his neck and nodded, feeling his answering smile. There was a neat scar under his jaw, the one half the city assumed was RenSchmiss. And another on his shoulder, so ugly that no one in their right mind could have assumed it resulted from a formal duel.
“Seattle . . . ?” Zara asked, running her fingers across ridged skin. Something else he didn’t talk about, the bombing of the Consulate in Seattle.
“A fox cub,” said Raf lightly, “when I was a child.” He touched her face and let his hands rest there before dropping them to cup breasts that were full and high, with nipples that hardened beneath his touch. They both shivered, but he did so first.
“You like?” Zara’s voice was low, almost mocking.
In answer, Raf shifted one hand to the back of her head, feeling her lips silence and her mouth open wider.
“Of course I like.” His right hand found a pressure point between her third and fourth vertebrae and he pushed, so that her chin came up and her neck exposed itself. Her pulse beneath his lips was as loud as a bass loop.
Somewhere, in the hollow where the fox should have been, Raf knew this was merely an act of mutual empathy, the grown-up equivalent of the intimate attunement of infant to mother, mere parasympathetic arousal. Everything that wasn’t the fox-shaped void didn’t mind about that. It welcomed the night outside and the faint pricks of light glimpsed through a badly drawn curtain. And it bathed in the sound of gulls riding salt winds over a city struck into near darkness for the first time in centuries.
“Open the curtains and shutters,” demanded Zara suddenly.
“It’ll let in the stars.”
“That much I can cope with,” she said in a voice as bitter sweet as black chocolate. “Probably . . .”
When Raf turned round from pulling back the double shutters that usually closed off each of the room’s five floor-to-ceiling windows, Zara was in bed, safely tucked under a linen sheet.
The first thing she said when he joined her there was, “I won’t have sex with you . . .”
“So how old were you when it happened?”
“Seven, maybe eight . . . At an age you don’t really realize what’s being done. Maybe that helps.” Zara sounded doubtful, like she was trying to convince herself.
Raf’s answer was noncommittal.
“You know,” Zara added, “I forgot all about it for years. I just thought it was normal.”
“What changed?”
She was lying beside Raf in the darkness with a late-October wind rattling the sash windows and a quilt pulled up so tight around her it almost hid her face. One of Raf’s arms held her shoulder as she lay on her side, facing him, and when she spoke it was in a monotone so soft and so quiet that Raf doubted if anyone but he could have heard even half of what she said.
Sometimes she spoke and sometimes there was silence. When the silence grew too strong, Raf asked another question. Zara had been talking for hours, her voice never raised nor showing any emotion Raf could recognize. Except its very emptiness told Raf more than her answers to half a dozen of his questions.
Zara had, so far as he could tell, long since forgotten he was there. He didn’t know who she thought he was . . . Maybe some part of herself.
“What changed?” Raf asked again.
“Schools changed. My mother refused but I kept insisting. And eventually Dad agreed I could go to the American High. They did a medical.”
“With a male doctor?”
“Of course not! The nurse was French. Probably not much more than five or six years older than me. She did a blood test. Asked for a sample of urine. Cut a strand of my hair and took a swab from my mouth . . . Drugs and DNA profile,” Zara added, as if Raf couldn’t work that out for himself.
“She listened to my heart and lungs, took my blood pressure and did a quick CAT scan with a handheld. Then she asked about periods. Only I didn’t know what those were, so she explained and I said they hadn’t started. Which was when she asked me to get back on the couch.”
Zara sighed.
“I don’t think she’d ever seen a female circumcision before. When she came back she had Sister Angelica, our school doctor, in tow. She was maybe thirty-five, though she seemed much older to me.” Zara spoke as if this had all happened d
ecades earlier, rather than just five years before. “It was the first time I heard a woman swear . . .
“Apparently, because there were now laws against female circumcision, Sister Angelica thought it didn’t happen.”
“What did she do?”
Zara’s laugh was a bitter bark. “After she’d slammed the phone down on my mother, she went to see my father at his office. It’s probably the only time he’s stood there, utterly speechless while a woman shouted at him.”
“And then?”
Silence was Zara’s answer. An absence that stretched so thin that Raf finally decided Zara must have fallen asleep, but he was wrong. She was busy remembering the bits she didn’t usually allow herself to remember.
“They cut the stitches,” she announced flatly. “Sister Angelica did it herself. There were five in total, each separate, transparent and beautifully neat, pulling together the sides of my . . .”
Zara stopped, starting up again, minutes later, as if she’d never paused.
“Sister Angelica cleaned the area where the inner labia should have been and removed an oval of surgical plastic designed to create enough space for urination . . . It had been done in a hospital, you see. A good hospital with qualified doctors and a resident anaesthetist. And that was the problem. Because if it had been done by a jobbing midwife with a piece of broken glass in a back room, then I’d have struggled, which would have made it hard to cut away as much as my mother wanted.
“You know what Sister Angelica did after that? She bought me a German porn mag . . .”
“She . . .”
“I knew it was German because I’d started learning German the year before. Every spread had women naked with other women . . . I remember the Sister gave me a large cup of coffee and left me with the magazine and a mirror. By the time she came back I’d worked out the differences for myself. But Sister Angelica slipped up with the magazine because it wasn’t until later, when I was sharing a shower with another girl that I discovered that some girls have this . . .”
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