Sit down, stand up, sit down. . . Every time they did what Raf ordered, the imprinting got stronger; that was how the human psyche worked . . . Had Raf been about to kill them, it would have been the right time. He assumed they were bright enough to understand that. And yet they were still way too casual.
“You do know who you’ve kidnapped?” Raf looked at the boy, the one who’d shivered under the gaze of Raf’s gun. Not only was he the youngest, he was also less obviously stoned. What Raf got by way of reply was a slight shake of the head. Though that turned out to be not in answer to the who part of Raf’s question but the what. The kid was arguing definitions.
“We didn’t kidnap anybody. We’re just guarding him.”
“And that’s meant to make a difference?”
The boy shrugged.
“It’s DJ Avatar,” Raf said. “Hamzah Effendi’s kid.”
The kid looked suddenly shocked. But even that wasn’t straightforward. It turned out he liked Avatar’s music. Hamzah didn’t figure.
“He’s been fucking arrested,” said the old man. “For torturing a nasrani to death.”
“Raped her first,” the boy’s father added. “He’s in prison.”
“Really?” Raf asked. “Who arrested him?”
“Ashraf-fucking-Bey. It happened yesterday.”
“No,” said Raf. “That’s not what happened. Believe me.”
“Yes it is . . .” The old man’s pupils were dilated beyond their natural limit, expanded so much they looked like the eyes of someone with a fatal head wound, fixed at that point when the pupils explode. Whatever the man’s poison, it was serious stuff.
“On his own beach,” added the boy, sounding suitably outraged.
They left via a back door into a rear alley, having collected both their lookout and Ismail, two men with evil headaches but no worse. The kind of small-time fry, all of them, evolved by every ghetto to fit the niches that others reject. Life’s bottom feeders; too disorganized to mastermind their own events, at least not ones that worked, and not hard enough to handle real trouble. That they’d been hired to guard Avatar made no sense at all.
Pulling his automatic from its holster, Raf prowled the house, leaving the locked cellar until last. The roof was deserted and the attic empty. So Raf took the few remaining bulbs from their sockets and locked the roof door before sweeping the level below, where bedrooms had once been. Four empty rooms, filled with acrid dust and silence. Broken chairs filled the far corner of one. In another, some clochard had started a small fire on tiles that had cracked. A handful of Thunderbird cans lay blackened in the ashes. Taking each bulb in turn, Raf locked those doors too, using the iron mortise locks common to North Africa. Just to be on the safe side he pocketed the keys.
Empty houses were a familiar sight south of Mahmoudia. At least they were on that stretch west of Rue Menascae, where an area of almost sufficiency surrendered to the dank touch of institutionalized poverty. For streets to be derelict there was as normal as finding crack houses at crossroads, or overcrowded tenements that overlooked unsafe playgrounds, dead trees standing reminder to unmet aspirations.
Travel companies did a good line in offering the “real Iskandryia” from the safety of air-conditioned coaches. As if the arrondissement ’s simmering resentment somehow made it more real than the old wealth of the Greek District or the comfortable red-bricked mansion blocks near the fish market.
“Enough already,” said Raf, adding his varied collection of keys and bulbs to the weapons discarded by Avatar’s guards. There was nothing he needed in the empty kitchen. It was time to find the cellar.
The Daimler-Benz parked below theFOR SALE sign had smoked windows and whitewall tyres, newish but dusty from trawling through too many back streets. The vehicle had hire car written all over it.
Seconds after its headlights died, the near-side rear door opened, briefly lighting the inside. What interested Raf was the woman who got out.
“You know her?” Raf asked, yanking Avatar to his feet and dragging him across to the cellar’s high window. Had he had more time, Raf might have been kinder, gentler . . . The story of his life really.
“You’re drunk!” Avatar said, belatedly realizing the obvious. He sounded surprisingly shocked.
“Not entirely,” said Raf. “Now . . . you know her?”
Avatar shook his head.
“Well, I do. Last time I saw her she was standing behind your sister, waiting to climb onto a restaurant car.” The boy didn’t ask what Raf was doing watching Maxim’s. Which was a fair trade-off, because Raf didn’t ask what made Avatar throw in his job as Raf’s driver.
Zara had that effect on both of them.
“So what happens now?” whispered Avatar, watching the woman walk towards the house, her silhouette looming large above the bars of the cellar’s only window. Behind her walked a driver.
“We dance,” said Raf. “Then I go find whoever dumped a dead girl in your dad’s garden.”
He saw surprise on Avatar’s face. “This is just the sideshow,” Raf explained apologetically, looking at the drugged and swaying boy. “Just a sideshow.” Quickly drawing the black blade from its sheath on his right ankle, Raf checked the point and tried out a couple of steps.
“Well,” he amended, “I dance.”
Raf hauled Avatar over to a soiled mattress opposite the door. “You lie down here and pretend to be ill.” Flipping round the blade so that it pointed upwards, Raf stood with his back to the doorframe. All it took to embed the blade lightly in the wood was to flip up his hand and step away, leaving the knife protruding from the frame behind him. There were probably better ways to guarantee having a blade ready for use while leaving both hands free; this just happened to be the one that I & I had taught him.
The next few minutes Raf reconstructed later from sounds alone, beginning with the scratch of a key. The Yale on the front door was oiled but even so the tumblers grated a little. There was the click of a light switch, followed immediately by a grunt of irritation. A snatch of Arabic fired into the darkness was repeated, louder this time, irritation becoming anger as the woman caught her hip on the corner of a table in the hallway, the table scraping across tiles.
Already her breathing was less steady.
Raf caught the exact point her anger turned to worry. It came just after her driver banged open the kitchen door and found the room deserted, silent and dark. What little light came through the front door obviously revealed nothing except the fact her guards were gone.
“Fetch a torch.”
Heavy treads crossed the floor above Raf’s head, then came the clash of metal heels on the front steps. The creak of a car door. A slam. Moments later the driver was back, his tone apologetic.
The woman swore, louder than was wise. And Raf heard the click of a gas lighter, then heavy footsteps descending towards the cellar door.
“Fucking ragheads,” said the woman. “You can’t get them to do anything . . .”
The driver muttered something that might have been agreement. He was still muttering as he stepped through the door and dropped his lighter. Screaming was out of the question given that Raf’s garrotte had already crushed the cartilage of his larynx, so the man gurgled instead.
“Come in,” Raf told the woman. “Unless you want me to finish off your driver . . . ?”
Not a problem apparently.
Finding her wrist in the darkness, Raf pulled her hand, gun and all, from her side pocket. The weapon she held was tiny, impossibly elegant and looked very expensive. Twisting it from her rigid fingers, Raf tossed it into Avatar’s slop bucket, adding a splash and liquid clank to his collection of sounds.