Jon Courtenay Grimwood - Arabesk 2 - Effendi

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EFFENDI
Arabesk 02
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
A DF Books NERDs Release
EFFENDI
A Bantam Spectra Book / September 2005
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York
Visit our website at
www.bantamdell.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2002 by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grimwood, Jon Courtenay.
Effendi : the second arabesk / Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
p. cm.
eISBN 0-553-90191-5
1. Police—Middle East—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Serial murders—Fiction. 4. Industrialists—Fiction. 5. Middle
East—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.R56E35 2005
823'.92—dc22
2005046978
v1.0
CONTENTS
___________
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
About the Author
Also by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Preview of Felaheen The Third Arabesk
Copyright Page
For EMC G
from Singapore to England, via Afghanistan
(a hard act to follow)
I saw three faces on one head. One was an angry red, another between pale and yellow, the last like those who live where the Nile rises . . .
—Dante,Inferno, Canto XXXIV
PROLOGUE
____________
27th October
“Of course,” said Ashraf Bey. “We could just kill thedefendant and be done with it . . .” He let his suggestion hang in the cold air. And
when no one replied, Raf shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe not.”
It was getting late and autumn rain fell steadily on the darkened streets outside, while inside, sitting around their table, Raf's visitors
continued to chase the same argument in tight circles. A Grand Jury was in session. If three judges plus a senior detective in a damp,
third-storey office could be called anything so imposing, which seemed doubtful.
“An accident,” suggested Raf. “The steps in this precinct are notoriously slippery. Or perhaps suicide . . . Shoelaces, an unfortunately
overlooked belt . . . ? One of my people would have to be reprimanded, obviously.”
Raf looked from Graf Ernst von B, the German boy, to a sour-faced politician from New Jersey who insisted everyone call her Senator Liz,
neither of whom met his eye. There was also an elderly French oil magnate, but he sat so quietly Raf mostly forgot he was there. Which was
probably the man's intention.
“Alternatively,” said Raf, “I could have him taken out to the courtyard and shot. Or, if you like, we could lose the body altogether and just
pretend he never existed. One of the old Greek cisterns should take care of that.”
They didn't like this idea either; but then the young detective with the Armani wrap-rounds and drop-pearl earring hadn't expected them to .
. . He was acting asmagister to their judges. And no one as yet, least of all him, seemed very sure what that actually entailed.
“Justice,”Senator Liz said loudly,“must be seen to be done.” Her voice remained as irritating as when the session had begun several hours earlier.
“Lord Hewart.” Raf pulled the quote from memory. “One of the worst judges in history. And even he never suggested putting a North
African trial on American television.”
“That's not . . .” Ernst von B's protest died as Raf flipped up a hand.
“Let's hear what St. Cloud thinks,” he said, and turned to the Frenchman. “Doyou think justice needs to be televised?”
“Me?” Astolphe de St. Cloud slid a cigar case from his inside pocket. And though the iridescence of its lizardskin was beautiful, even by the
light of a single hurricane lamp, what they all noticed was the enamel clasp: an eagle spreading its wings, while jagged thunderbolts fell from
between the bird's sharp claws.
As if anyone there needed reminding that St. Cloud would have been Prince Imperial, if only his father had bothered to marry his mother.
“It depends,” said St. Cloud, “on what Your Excellency means byjustice . . .” Shuffling a handful of prints, he stopped at one that showed a
young girl with most of her stomach missing. “If we decide the evidence is convincing enough, then obviously the prisoner must stand trial.
Like Senator Liz, my only reservation is that, perhaps, El Iskandryia is not quite . . .”
Raf caught the wry amusement in the Marquis' voice and glanced round the room, trying to see it through the eyes of a man whose own
business empire was run from a Moorish palace overlooking Tunisia's Cap Bon, and who now found himself in a third-floor office, without
electricity, on the corner of Boulevard Champollion and Rue Riyad Pasha, in a tatty four-square government block built around a huge
courtyard in best Nationalist Revival style.
At street level the exterior walls to Iskandryia's Police HQ were faced with cheap sheets of reconstituted marble, while glass hid the exterior
of the two floors above. Black glass obviously. The architect had been on loan from Moscow.
It showed.
As for the level of comfort on offer . . . A fire burned in a bucket in the centre of the floor, filled with logs from a dying carob. Apparently,
the tree had been not quite alive and not yet dead for as long as even Raf's oldest detectives could remember.
Two men from uniform had hacked it off just above the roots, using fire axes. Now chunks of its carcass spat and spluttered as thin flames
danced across the top of their makeshift brazier.
Directly above the brazier, suspended from the centre of the ceiling like an inverted red mushroom, hung a state-of-the-art smoke detector.
Like almost everything else in Iskandryia since the EMP bomb, it no longer worked.
And behind Raf's head, a window unit that once adjusted electronically to lighting conditions had been rendered smoke friendly, also with a
fire axe. Through its shattered centre came flecks of rain and a salt wind that blew in from the Eastern Harbour.
“Justice,” said Raf, “is whatever we decide . . .” His voice lost the irony, became serious. “And since the killing occurred within the
jurisdiction of the Khedive, I demand that the trial take place in El Iskandryia.”
Senator Liz shook her head. “Absurd,” she said. “We have to change the location. You cannot expect us to work in these conditions . . .”
“I don't remember anyone asking you to work on this at all.” Wrap-round dark glasses were turned to the woman. The other two he'd
chosen. The Senator was different, she'd practically demanded to sit on the Grand Jury.
Actually, there was no “practically” about it.
On her breath Raf could smell gin, while a none-too-subtle miasma of sweat rose from her compact body. If von Bismarck and St. Cloud
could manage to bathe in cold rainwater, then so could she.
“Your Excellency,” said Ernst von B, “Senator Liz has a point. It will not be easy . . .” The young German spoke slowly, in schoolboy Arabic,
supposedly out of respect for Ashraf Bey's position asmagister, though Raf suspected his real reason was to annoy the woman, who spoke no
languages other than her own.
“Nothing is ever easy. But the decision is made.” Raf stood up from his chair. And it was his chair because they were in his office. His was
the name engraved on an absurdly long brass plate on the door.His Excellency Pashazade Ashraf Bey, Colonel Ashraf al-Mansur, Chief of Detectives .
He'd told his assistant a plastic nameplate was fine but that wasn't how things were done in El Iskandryia. The long plaque had turned up the
day after Raf took the job, and once a week, on Thursdays, a Cypriot woman from maintenance came up from the ground floor to polish
the sign.
“Excellency?”
Raf turned to find that St. Cloud stood next to him, leaning on a cane with a silver top.
“Youwere joking about those steps, the accidents . . . I have your word this trial will actually take place?”
Raf nodded. “You do.”
The trial would happen and it would happen soon. In all probability the defendant, one Hamzah Effendi, would be convicted. Raf just
wished Hamzah wasn't father to the girl he should have married.
CHAPTER 1
___________
18th October
Nine days before the Grand Jury met in an upstairsoffice at Champollion Precinct, Ashraf Bey sat through a warm Iskandryian evening,
bombed out of his skull, at a pavement table outside Le Trianon, drinking cappuccino and listening to DJ Avatar wreak havoc on the words
of a Greek philosopher.
The afternoon call to prayer had finished echoing from the mosque on Boulevard Saad Zaghloul and the bells from l’Eglise Copte had yet
to begin. If it hadn’t been for a sense of dread hanging over El Iskandryia, this could have been a Monday in October like any other.
Horse-drawn calèches, their brasses shined and wheel bosses polished, rumbled up the Corniche, from the fat seawall known as the Silsileh
all the way north to Fort Qaitbey, where the ancient Pharos lighthouse once stood.
And at both ends of the sweeping Corniche, at Silsileh in the shadow of Iskandryia’s famous library, and at Fort Qaitbey, groups of tourists
watched as fishermen set hooks or mended and untangled nets, waiting for the evening tide.
It was a tourist who’d taken the taxi that stopped outside Le Trianon, with its window down and sound system up too loud, giving Raf the
chance to hear the city’s favourite DJ one more time.
“And remember . . .” Avatar’s voice was street raw. “Rust never sleeps. Coming at you from the wrong side of those tracks, this for the
Daddy, the Don . . .”
Most of Raf’s officers thought DJ Avatar came up withSpitNoWhere on his own; if they thought at all, which Raf considered unlikely. So they
happily stamped the corridors at Police HQ, humming along, not knowing that the unchopped original went, “In a rich man’s house, there’s
nowhere to spit but his face.”
Raf hadn’t known that, at least not until recently, but the fox in his head did. And while the fox couldn’t say why, the General’saide de camp
had just delivered to Raf an engraving of hell, inscribed with the words,“At its centre hell is not hot.” It had at least been able to identify the
picture as late Victorian, unquestionably by Gustave Doré . . .
“. . . ou know,”said the fox, before all this happened.“. . . ese things, they occur.”
The fox had a grin like the Cheshire cat, except that no cat ever owned so many teeth or carried its tail wrapped up round its shoulders like a
stole. Come to that, few cats took afternoon tea at Le Trianon.
These thingscould have been Raf becoming Chief of Detectives by default, or his recent refusal to marry the daughter of a billionaire.
“Why?” Raf asked. “Whydo they occur?”
But the fox didn’t answer.
Sighing, Raf took a gulp of cold cappuccino to wash away the taste of cheap speed and fixed his gaze on the pedestrians who streamed past
his café table, separated from the terrace where he sat by a silk rope and the assiduous attention of two bodyguards.
The only pedestrians to meet Raf’s stare were those, mainly tourists, who didn’t realize who he was. They just saw a blond young man in
dark glasses, wearing an oddly old-fashioned suit, the kind with a high collar.
“Come on,” said Raf, searching inside his head. “You can tell me.”
He ignored his two guards, who looked at each other, then hurriedly looked away. Raf didn’t doubt that they could see tears trickling from
under his glasses, but he didn’t much care either.
The fox was saying good-bye.
The beast had been dying for years. Its abilities limited by memory conflicts, failed backup and the fact that, these days, the animal could
only feed on neon light.
Once Tiri had been state of the art. Feeding on daylight, infrared and ultraviolet, or so it told Raf. White light, black light—back then
anything went. The fox sharpened Raf’s reflexes, steadied his nerves and gave him good advice. It was what Raf had instead of parents . . .
A small ceramic box set into his skull behind one ear which kept him sane, sort of, and gave him a definable centre. And once, when Raf
was very young and in another country, it had helped him walk out across a steel beam through flames and crumbling walls.
Only life wasn’t simple; because the fox, of course, refused to admit that it existed. The fox’s view was that Raf had a number of unresolved
issues.
“Your Excellency . . . ?”
Someone hovered at his shoulder.
“Go,”said Raf and the waiter went, grateful to have been waved away.
Raf went back to watching the tourists who fed from Place Saad Zaghloul, and headed south down Rue Missala, searching for bars and
theatres or just in a hurry to get back to their hotels.
After a hundred and eleven days in the city, Raf could now identify tourist groups as clearly as if they wore labels: waddling Austrians,
dark-haired Frenchmen, the odd bunch of shore-leave Soviets in mufti and, rarer still, an occasional pink-skinned Englishwoman with silk
scarf and sensible shoes. But mostly Iskandryia got nice couples, as befitted a famously romantic city.
The fuck-me singles, with their piercings, tattoos and trailer chic, came out only after dark, and then only in closely defined areas. Places like
PeshVille, where Scandinavian kids hosed lines of coke off toilet rims, while girls shuffled, in darkened corners, on the unzipped laps of
boys too blasted to know they weren’t safely hiding out in student halls back home.
But that wasn’t really Iskandryia, just how it went, with the limo-delivered international DJs as interchangeable as the clientele. It could have
been Curitiba or Berlin, Punta del Este or Kota Baru. And anyway those clubs weren’t Raf’s business. The tourist police dealt with that stuff.
“You in there?”
Raf counted off the seconds, listening carefully for an echo inside his head. One winter night, when he was maybe ten and feeling sorry for
himself, something that happened less often than Raf remembered, he’d asked the fox if he (Raf that was) had a soul . . . And the fox had
gone all silent.
That was the weekend Raf refused to go to chapel. For five weeks he’d been made to run round a field in the sleet at the back of his school,
while the others sang hymns in the dry. And the fox’s only comment, months later, had been to point out that he should have waited until
summer to lose his faith.
Maybe it was one of his schools that first put the fox in his head. Or perhaps it was his mother. Alternatively, just maybe the fox was right
and it didn’t exist, maybe it had never existed outside of Raf’s imagination.
Raf sighed. “Do I get an answer?” he demanded. “Or do I sit talking to myself like an idiot?”
“Your Excellency?”It was the maître d’ this time. Raf tried to wave away the thin man but the maître d’ stayed rooted to the spot, urgency
winning out over embarrassment. “The General is on the line from New York . . .” In his hand the man held an old-fashioned telephone.
“He says it’s very urgent.”
Raf shook his head and almost laughed as shock flooded the maître d’s face. No one refused to talk to General Saeed Koenig Pasha, not even
His Excellency Ashraf Bey.
“What do I tell him?” The maître d’ begged frantically.
Raf thought about how to answer for so long that the thin man holding the telephone actually began to squirm with agitation.
“I know,” said Raf finally. “Tell him my fox is dying.”
CHAPTER 2
___________
19th October
An early tram rattled up Rue Moharrem Bey towardsMisr Station, jinked around the silent taxi rank at Place Gumhuriya and continued west
along Boulevard Sherif, passing the open front door of the al-Mansur madersa.
On the madersa’s second floor, in a small room in the haremlek, a nine-year-old girl, nicknamed Hani, slept badly while a Catholic cook
watched over her. The cook spoke just enough Arabic for her closest friend to be the skeletal Sudanese porter who sat, cross-legged, on
worn stone steps at the front of the house talking slowly into an ancient cell phone.
“Yes, Hamzah Effendi,” he said, watching the almost empty tram go by. “I know where His Excellency is. He’s still at Le Trianon.” Khartoum
listened again. “Wrestling with evil djinn,” he answered and broke the connection.
Two of the tram’s fares were tourists late home to bed, the other three Iskandryian, headed to work. A short-order cook, a chambermaid, a
stall holder from a minor souk. Travel was cheap in the city. For most of those who worked in the service industries it needed to be.
At some hours of the day gulls could be heard everywhere across the city, but this early in the morning they circled tightly over the
Shambles, rabid for any entrails that might be tossed from gutting table to harbour.
Years before, when the women with their razor-edged filleting knives had been children, or maybe it was when their mothers had been
children, the Khedive had declared it illegal to discard the guts and tailings of each night’s catch. Every scrap not sold had to be ploughed
into the barren edges of the delta to improve the soil. Then came the first flu epidemic and with too fewfelaheen to gather in crops that lay
spoiling in the existing fields, increased maize yields ceased to matter. So now the entrails went back into the water.
And when the gulls finally dispersed and first light finished staining the horizon, the sun rose out beyond Glymonopolo Bay and another
Tuesday morning began.
Shutters were opened, doors unlocked. In red-brick tenements everywhere, middle-aged women looked at potbellied men and remembered
dark-eyed boys, marriage vows and lost virginity. Men mourned the slim-hipped girls they’d married and, catching sight of themselves in the
mirror, wondered how they’d never noticed they’d become someone else.
And on the edge of Glymonopolo Bay, in a stuccoed villa as arrogant as any conquistador’s palace, a barrel-chested industrialist turned off his
phone, sighed heavily and picked up a revolver.
Again.
In front of Hamzah Effendi was a naked angel, wings spread wide and breasts full, like those of a distantly remembered mother. Except that
the angel was pale and fair-haired and elegant, things untrue of anyone in his family.
She hovered within a page torn from a book, written in a language he couldn’t read and inscribed on the back,“Only here will you find peace” and
“Apollyon.” General Koenig Pasha had penned these in his immaculate copperplate just below a half title that read“Divina Commedia di Dante
Alighieri: Paradiso.”
With the engraving came a gun. They were the governor’s answer to Hamzah’s desperate plea for help.
Shooting himself would ruin his looks, Hamzah knew that. Regretted it. A long succession of twentysomething mistresses had assured him
that he had the dark eyes of a hunter, the mouth of a poet and the profile of an emperor: the founder of a dynasty, not one of those
weaklings that came later, slope-chinned and nervous, the kind who got strangled with a golden rope as they slept.
Hamzah’s chin jutted so proudly that the eye almost slid past his heavy jowls and neck. His face had a flabbiness now that business partners
seldom recalled when they thought back to meeting him; somehow imperfections got forgotten, leaving only a memory of his strength.
A gulp from his crystal tumbler later, Hamzah put down the gun.
Again.
“Coward.”
Alcohol tells the truth.“I didn’t mean it,” that’s the lie. People do mean it, every time. Hamzah did, even if the person at which he swore was
himself. Of course, he’d have preferred to bawl out Ashraf al-Mansur but the recently appointed Chief of Detectives wasn’t taking calls.
Downing another gulp of neat Laphroaig, Hamzah topped up his glass and carefully hid the bottle in the bottom drawer of a burr-walnut
desk. Alcohol was illegal in Iskandryia, except for tourists and in certain bars attached to the bigger international hotels, or unless one had
written permission from the General. It was a prohibition of which Hamzah heartily approved since one small sliver of his diverse interests
involved supplying illegal alcohol to illegal clubs, many of which he owned anyway.
There were no early memories for him of a high-breasted, thin-hipped girl. Any more than his wife had memories of a smouldering-eyed
boy who turned her body to fire. Their marriage was arranged and the only thing odd about it was that, in theory at least, Hamzah did the
arranging. Rahina’s useless father had owed him a debt and she was part payment.
Hamzah would have preferred the money.
He wondered, but only briefly, how well his wife would cope as a widow. Maybe her life would be improved? Money would be no
problem and Villa Hamzah had never been Rahina’s first choice as a home, so his guess was that she’d leave the city entirely. Either to live on
a country estate in the delta or else move to Tunis or Algiers, where his disgrace might not follow her.
Hamzah ran through the checklist in his mind.
Will,signed and witnessed.
Accounts,doctored obviously; the real ones were bleached to NSA standards, overwritten and bleached again.
Deeds to the villa.
Share certificates. . . Those were mostly for Hamzah Enterprises, the Midas Refinery, Quitrimala Industries and the offshore and Sudanese oil
fields. The French and the Germans had recently offered to buy him out, but any deal could be done with his executor.
Bank accounts,both known and previously hidden.
Suicide note. Words had always given Hamzah trouble. So he’d quoted from a poem he learnt once, long ago beside a river, when he was a boy.
“I loved you so I wrote my need across the night in stars . . .” He’d probably got half of the words wrong, but they’d expect that.
Everything was in place for what came next. Shares in Hamzah Enterprises would dip on the Bourse but bounce back. Oil prices were
rocketing and the Midas Refinery would continue turning crude to cash, whoever owned it. Only in the illegal clubs, brothels and dance
halls would there be a fight for succession, and that would have happened someday, whatever . . .
The revolver he held stank of oil, which was his own fault. Every gap in the previous week he’d spent cleaning and recleaning the .38, until
the rifling shone metal-bright and the cylinder spun as cleanly as if the weapon was new rather than a hundred and twenty years old.
Now was the point for him to suck silence from its muzzle.
Only he couldn’t.
He’d been maybe ten years old when he acquired his first gun.Felaheen back then didn’t know their ages. Often they didn’t know their
families either. Some nights he’d wished he was one of them. But later he found excuses for the beatings as he tried to imagine what life
must have been like for his uncle in Abu Simbel at the height of the little war, to be penniless, illiterate, with a dead wife, dead sister and a
small nephew.
No, Hamzah shook his head slightly—children, responsibility, the past—those were places he wouldn’t revisit. Because then he’d start
thinking about . . .
Bite on darkness.
The revolver’s handle looked odd, held upside down like that, with three of his fingers wrapped round its ivory stock and one curled tight
across the trigger. All but one of the chambers were empty, because he’d only need the single bullet, the one waiting for the fall of the
hammer.
Watch the knuckles whiten.
Every step of his life had been leading to this point. From a shack on the Nile’s bank to a study panelled in pale English oak in a vast stone
villa, on the edge of Glymonopolo Bay. Symmetry was what his daughter Zara would have called it. Perhaps a paradigm. She was fond of big
words and bad politics.
From nothing back to nothing.
Only he couldn’t do it, for reasons as ugly as the reason he had to do it in the first place. All that was left for him was to accept what came.
Hamzah yanked the taste from his mouth, spun his study chair in a half circle and blasted the head off a taut-hipped marble girl with the
blank eyes of a victim and the tight buttocks of a Renaissance catamite.
Flying splinters from her crystalline hairdo ricocheted off bombproof glass in the far window and splintered English oak panelling. Alarms
exploded and before the marble dust had even begun to clear Hamzah could hear running footsteps in the corridor outside.
Alex would be upset. His wife would be furious. And her French chef would be quietly disapproving. The only one Hamzah cared about
was Alex. Good bodyguards were hard to find in North Africa and he was going to need one.
“Boss.” The big Russian skidded to a halt, automatic already drawn and laser sight lit. A red dot danced across the walls, coming to rest when
Hamzah’s bodyguard realized the wrecked study was empty.
“Nothing to kill,” said Hamzah. “Unless you want to slot her?” He jerked his heavy chin towards the damaged dryad and blinked as Alex
blasted off first one arm, then another. Finishing with two rapid shots that took the statue off at her knees.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” Hamzah coughed. “Pretty good.”
The statue was a fake, a Victorian copy of a Renaissance original, provenanced from the Russell-Coates museum in Bournemouth, which
apparently was a spa somewhere in England. Hamzah had loathed the carving on sight, buying it only when he realized how much it would
upset his wife. She thought all statues were an abomination in the eyes of God, never mind naked ones, and still hadn’t forgiven her husband
for having his portrait painted.
“You bored, Boss?” The ex-SovietSpetsnaz had taken in the empty glass on the table. “You want maybe we should have some fun . . . Check
out one of your clubs?”
“What clubs?”The small woman in the doorway glared at Hamzah’s ruined statue, then at Hamzah. “You told me you’d got rid of the clubs.”
Madame Rahina wore her wealth in gold bangles up both arms and in large sapphire earrings that made up in sheer worth for what they
lacked in elegance. And even over the acrid dust, her cologne was heavy and obvious.
All her irritation was focused on her husband. Somewhere down life’s journey from local schoolmaster’s daughter to wife of a major
industrialist she’d learned the essential Iskandryian art of walking into even the most crowded room and seeing only people who mattered.
Five years on, she was still smarting from the only time she’d been invited to one of the General’s soirées and Koenig Pasha had chosen not
to see her.
“Well?” demanded Madame Rahina. “Did you sell the clubs or not?”
Hamzah nodded. Yeah, he’d sold them all right. To himself in another guise, then leased them straight back.
“Yes, of course I did.” Well, thehimself in this case was actually a DJ called Avatar. Partly his choice of the boy was sentiment, and Hamzah
knew he was sentimental (he’d yet to meet a gangster who wasn’t), but mostly it was plain common sense. He’d needed to reward Avatar for
an essential service the kid had performed three months earlier, one summer night near the beginning of July. When the shit was still
waiting for someone to switch on the fan . . .
CHAPTER 3
___________
7th July
At the eastern end of the city’s sweeping Corniche,where the expensive Palladian villas built from imported limestone boasted gardens that
reached down to the sea, a girl swam under a warm dome of summer stars.
She was naked and out of her head on redRiff. Which was better than a few years back when her crutch of choice had been amphetamine
sulphate, the pharmaceutically pure kind dished out by the sort of diet clinic that double-checked your credit rating and forgot to measure
your weight.
The blond man leaving the grandest of those villas had yet to notice her because he had other things on his mind, like being wanted for
murder. But he would.
Inside the villa that Ashraf al-Mansur had just left, a boy tossed silver dreadlocks out of eyes that were angry and forgot about the flick-knife
he’d been using to clean his nails.
Avatar had stolen that habit from an old film, but Hamzah already knew this. Recognizing his own faults in somebody younger either made
for Hamzah’s losing his temper or keeping it. He was working hard to keep his.
“Zara’s out there. You got that?”
Hamzah Effendi nodded.
“And you know she’s, like . . .”
Hamzah said nothing but, yes, he knew. She was naked. They were discussing Hamzah’s only daughter, the one who was meant to be upstairs
in bed, asleep. The girl who’d recently been dumped, very publicly, by the very man Hamzah had just sent down to the beach.
“Well . . . whatever.” It was Avatar’s turn to shrug. Things he thought would worry the old man sometimes didn’t . . . And things Av
considered nothing often did. So the boy trod carefully but tried hard not to reveal the fact.
“You heard what Ashraf Bey said?” asked Hamzah, his voice hoarse with good cigars and better whisky.
Yeah, Avatar had.
“You believe him?”
The boy shrugged. How did he know who looked like a killer and who didn’t . . . ? The bey was some blond-haired princeling, half Berber
and half somethingnasrani; all silk suits and Armani shades. That put him way outside Avatar’s frame of reference. Until Hamzah’s daughter, in
the early days of her “Comrade Zara” phase, had tracked Av down and dragged him off the street, he’d thought sleeping in his own bit of
doorway was posh.
“Me,” said Avatar, “I believe nobody.”
Hamzah smiled.
Avatar had entered via a window seconds after Raf exited through the French doors, headed without knowing it towards the rocks where
Zara swam, phosphorescence smoothing across her adolescent body like slipstream.
“Kamil . . .”
“DJ Avatar, Av, Avatar, 2Cool Kid,” the boy corrected his father without even thinking about it. The options tossed out machine-gun fast. He
didn’t answer to Kamil, any more than he used the door at Villa Hamzah. This last was his present to the man who sat on the other side of
the desk.
Four years back—after Avatar had kicked her—Madame Rahina, the woman who very definitely wasn’t his mother, had made her husband
promise never to let Avatar through the door of Villa Hamzah again.
So Hamzah hadn’t.
“Av . . .” Hamzah Effendi paused and picked a cigar. Remembering just in time to use a tiny gold guillotine to circumcise its end. A life’s
worth of biting off the end and spitting was a habit he found hard to break. Hamzah wanted to explain to Avatar exactly why he’d sent the
bey out of that door, down to where his daughter swam naked: but he couldn’t put“needs must” into words. At least not words he found
acceptable. So instead, the big man took another pull on a Partegas and thought about his lawyer waiting nervously in the hallway.
He could wait. Whatever it was Avatar had come to say wouldn’t take long.
“You need money?”
Avatar grinned. Of course he needed dosh. Didn’t everyone? Apart from the industrialist who sat in front of him. All the same, that wasn’t
why Avatar was there.
“Some journalist’s been asking about you . . .”
“Anasrani ?” It had to be. Hamzah already kept most of the local press in his pocket, and the few who were not lapping up his hospitality
missed out, not from any misplaced moral backbone but because he already had them by the balls.
“English. Well, probably. You know . . .”
Hamzah knew. It was unfashionable to say so, but telling one from another was difficult untilnasranis started flashing round their passports or
local currency.
“So let me guess.” The big man smiled and let cigar smoke trickle towards the ceiling, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes and a breeze
through the open window dissipated the smoke before it reached the height of a picture rail.
“Organized crime the Ottoman way?”
Avatar shook his head.
“Well it can’t be the refinery because then they’d just go through my press office . . .” His refinery was situated to the west of Isk, at the
point where slums met desert. In an industry working hard to improve its image, Midas Oil was an entire lap ahead. Bursaries, research
grants, third-world scholarships, a whole marine-biology, antipollution programme at Rutgers.
Accidents got apologized for the moment they happened, critics were greeted with open arms, research papers were put to peer review and
released, copyright free, straight onto the Web. It was a long-term game and, as Hamzah had hoped, it was driving even the softest ecological
pressure groups insane.
“What then?”
“Your childhood . . .”
To the man’s credit, Hamzah did little more than blink.
“Think you can deal with this?” Hamzah asked Avatar.
“Sure,” said Avatar. “You want him killed?”
Hamzah raised his eyebrows, amusement driving out the last echoes of anger.
“No,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want him killed. Whatever you’ve heard, whatever the police whisper, that’s not how I do things.”
Avatar looked for a brief second like he wanted to disagree. Then he shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said. And left without glancing back,
exiting through a window larger than the front door of most of the places in which he’d lived.
CHAPTER 4
___________
Sudan
“Safety off,” said the gun.
Standing beside Sergeant Ka, Zac said nothing. He’d spoken little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he talked even less . . .
Ka thought that strange, because Zac’s sister Ruth had also said little from the time she’d been captured to the moment she died. But now she talked so much that Ka
couldn’t concentrate on watching the growling trucks that rolled across the scrub towards him.
“Distance?”
“Half a klick and closing . . .”
Status and range. That was all the plastic H&K/cw could manage. It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the boy with the bone cross, feather amulet and boots several
sizes too big didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered.
There was meant to be some way to turn off the voice but to do that you needed to be able to read. So instead Ka had ripped the tail from his shirt and tied it to the stock,
right over the little plastic grille behind which the speaker hid.
Before Ka began this mission, Colonel Abad had ordered him to be sure to check his weapons each morning. Then, when that was done, to inspect the weapons of the rest
of his troop. Only there was no rest any longer. At least, Ka didn’t think so.
He was it.
So Ka inspected his own weapons, trying to remember what he was meant to be looking for . . . Dirt, maybe, and rust. Except rust wasn’t a problem because it hadn’t
rained in a year in this part of wherever he was, somewhere between Bahr el-Azrek and the Atbarah. At least, that’s where he thought he was.
Untying the lanyard that fastened a revolver around his neck, Ka checked it. It was as clean as any weapon could be in a country where most of the earth had turned to
red dust and half of that had been stripped away from the rock beneath. The revolver was his favourite. He’d have liked it even more if any of the bullets he carried in his
truck had been the right calibre.
H&K21e clean and freshly oiled. Tripod fixed and belt ready. H&K/cw . . . spotless. His knife wasn’t clean but that was because Ezekiel’s blood had ruined the leather
of its handle. Everyone had warned Ezekiel not to pick up bomblets, but the boy was six and the cluster bombs came in red, green and yellow.
摘要：

EFFENDIArabesk02JonCourtenayGrimwoodADFBooksNERDsReleaseEFFENDIABantamSpectraBook/September2005PublishedbyBantamDellADivisionofRandomHouse,Inc.NewYork,NewYorkVisitourwebsiteatwww.bantamdell.comThisbookisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,places,andincidentseitherareaproductoftheauthor'simaginationorare...

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