Raf nodded again.
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Raf stopped. “Because that’s the way things work in Iskandryia.” He ignored the doubtful expression on her face. “What can I tell you? What the General says goes.”
“Koenig Pasha?” Hani looked suddenly relieved. “Not Zara’s idea? Not yours . . .”
Raf shook his head, his half smile a reflection of hers.
Hani nodded. “I was worried,” she said, “that it was Zara. If it’s Koenig Pasha who says we must lie, then that’s different . . .” Her shrug was almost comically adult. “Lying is his job.” For a second, she sounded almost exactly like her late unlamented Aunt Nafisa.
There were, it turned out, two entirely separate levels of morality in Hani’s world. One occupied by those, like him, her and Zara, who weren’t meant to lie, and another given over to those destined to massacre the truth.
Pushing himself to his feet, Raf wondered what would happen when the child finally realized that if he was a spy, then she’d got him filed under the wrong group.
“Where are you going?” Hani demanded.
“Out,” said Raf.
“The murder?”
Raf shook his head. “Something else . . .”
Hani regarded him carefully. “I thought you were going to leave finding Avatar to someone called Eduardo?”
“Hani!”
“So I listened,” said the child. “Anyway . . . you need me to help with the search.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes you do,” said Hani.
“There is no way,” said Raf, his voice firm, “that you’re coming with me.”
“Who wants to come with you?” Hani said dismissively. Scrambling to her feet, she waved one hand in front of her screen and watched it blink back to life. A pass of her thumb over a floating track ball and the active window closed, revealing an aerial shot of the city.
“He’s locked in a cellar,” said Hani, voice casual. “There’s stale water outside.”
“What kind of stale water?”
“So you do want my help?”
Raf sighed.
“Ali Bey ordered the Mahmoudiya Canal built in 1817,” Hani said carefully. “On the far side, a green tram comes towards the window, then turns left . . .”
“Anything else?” Raf didn’t know what else to say.
Hani nodded. “Turbini. No.” She stopped, correcting herself. “Not turbini. Freight trains, long ones that rattle, somewhere behind the room. Which means he’s . . .” She touched the picture, pulling up a tight lattice of streets, where tramlines ran south along Rue Amoud, before turning into Avenue Mahmoudiya. At the bottom of the picture, on the other side of the canal, a fat ribbon of track ran towards a rail yard. “Somewhere round here.”
“And you know this how?”
Hani nodded to a toy tortoise gathering dust in one corner of her bedroom. It was old, with overrounded edges and what proved to be fractal patterns playing constantly across its shell, like swirling clouds. Someone had applied a sticker of a cartoon rabbit, then tried to peel it off sometime later, leaving a sticky patch and half a smug, bucktoothed face.
The tortoise was so ancient that it connected by cable to the wall feed, with another cable run round the edge of Hani’s room to her screen.
“I used Herbert,” said Hani.
It was possible . . . In theory, CCTV cameras covered all the main streets in the city. Trams, trains, even licensed taxis carried vidcams by law. Face recognition software was notoriously flawed, but could probably just about pick a dreadlocked DJ with facial piercings from the crowd of suits or jellaba-clad market traders.
“Really?”
Hani turned away, killing her terminal with a snap of her fingers.
Conversation over.
“Hani.” Raf dropped to a crouch in front of the small girl, and she let him take her pointed chin in his hands and turn her face back, so they stared straight into each other’s eyes. Dark brown and palest blue. Strange cousins.
“I need to know, honey. Please?” Honey was what Zara had taken to calling Hani, before Zara and Raf’s quarrel meant Hani stopped seeing the older girl.
“Not fair,” said Hani, her voice suddenly cross. She shook free her head. “Do I ask you about the fox? No, I don’t. Ever . . .” The child was unmistakably upset.
“Sorry,” said Raf, backing away. It looked like an impasse, pure and simple, except that nothing would ever be pure in Hani’s life, or simple. And they both knew she’d already answered him, in her own way. What Hani saw when she looked inside her head was not what he saw, obviously enough, but it was not what anyone else would expect to see either.
With one final apology, Raf left Hani to her tight and angry silence.
CHAPTER 15
9th October
Eduardo was worried about his Vespa. It was genuine Italian and had belonged to his uncle. The torn seat had only just been replaced with a new one made from red leather, while the old two-stroke petrol motor had been swapped for a Sterling unit that ran on pretty much anything. Mostly, Eduardo had been feeding his Vespa with the cheapest grade of jaz, a brandy so rough that even Frisco refused to drink it, but the unit seemed happy to work with anything vaguely flammable.
He’d left his bike near the canal, watched over by an urchin in a blue jellaba who squinted badly and carried a stick too small to frighten away anyone. Five lila, the boy had asked. Five. Grandly Eduardo had offered him ten to keep an extraspecial watch and the small boy’s smile had been vulpine, as if seeing straight through Eduardo’s generosity.
This was the first time that Eduardo had visited a proper brothel and it wasn’t nearly as grand as he’d been hoping. For a start, the huge entrance hall tickled his nose with dust and carpet cleaner, rather than with rose petals or expensive Parisian perfume. There were no chandeliers, few paintings and the Iskandryian rugs were old but not valuable. Though there were looking glasses, great big gilt ones on the walls, but these just showed Eduardo back to himself, a small man in a too-big leather coat.
At least the small cubicles above the bus station were easy to reach. Even if the beds were dirty and bare. Maison 52, Pascal Coste, was so out of Eduardo’s way that he’d got lost just getting there.
“Excellency.” The voice came from a narrow doorway, one Eduardo had dismissed as belonging to a cupboard. In it stood a blonde woman with a face so white she could have walked out of one of those Japanese pantomimes. Her mouth was a slash of Chanel, red as a wound. Behind her shoulder bobbed other heads, fair-haired and fair-skinned and way, way younger.
“Our girls, Excellency.”
He wasn’t an excellency and it seemed cruel to Eduardo to keep calling him one. True he wasn’t exactly a felaheen, but neither was he rich or well connected. No one called on him for patronage. He was just some pied noir who’d recently found work and been told by the man to come to 52 Rue Pascal Coste.
“I’m due to meet . . .”
“All in good time, Excellency.” The old woman swayed into the room, her feet compressed into tight pumps and her body wrapped in a fringed cocktail dress nearly as old as she was. A matching shawl hid most of the crêpe lines that marked her shoulders, chest and neck. “First you need to choose one of our delightful girls . . .”
They trooped silently into the hall. A few looked at him with vague curiosity but most just stared at the carpets or examined their nails. There were ten in total. Blonde or brunette. Two of his age and five somewhat younger. The last three were almost children and the prettiest had a dark frown on her face and a bruise across one soft cheek that no amount of makeup could hide.