"And just why would they do that?" the Emir asked.
"Because they're nasrani," Kashif Pasha said through gritted teeth. "Because one of them just shot an undercover member of military intelligence."
"Undercover? I thought we'd agreed. . ."
Kashif Pasha scowled at his father's mimicry and the Emir smiled. "Arrest them if you must," he said, "but release them afterwards." He held up one hand to stop his son from interrupting. "Understand me. None of them are to disappear."
CHAPTER 31
Wednesday 2nd March
Hani, three seats away from where Eugenie got shot, eyes locking on his, too frightened to be puzzled at not recognizing a face so familiar.
Raf reran that sequence in his head, letting Alex, Nicolai and Eugenie tumble endlessly in time to his own, real-world punches. To turn back like this, to attack an enemy was probably the last thing anyone hopelessly outnumbered was meant to do . . . But then, as he'd spent a lifetime telling himself, Raf wasn't anyone.
He was the guy with an eight-thousand-line guarantee and weird-shit eyes, batlike hearing and a sense of smell acute enough to revolt a dog. A man with pixel-perfect memory for every last one of those bits of his life he was able to remember. And ice-cold gaps where the rest should be.
Slamming the soldier's head against a wall, Raf lowered a limp body to the ground and began stripping it. The tunic was too tight across Raf's shoulders and the trousers short. The boots were good, though, and the cap fitted. After dressing the conscript in his discarded trousers, shoes and shirt (the waiter's tunic having already been dumped), Raf dragged the unconscious man into position against an alley wall.
"Drunk," said Raf as he stood over the body. He sounded disgusted but not quite disgusted enough. Pushing his fingers down his own throat, he retched across the other man's chest and down into his lap. Alcohol and scraps of food stolen from serving plates being taken back into the kitchens.
"Who's that?" demanded a voice. An NCO stood behind him in the entrance to the alley. Ahead of them both was a side door into the Domus Aurea.
"Some filthy drunk," Raf said and kicked the body.
Originally, way back, the dar had been built for some half-Alicantean taifa. Isabeau had told Raf its history as they both helped Chef Edvard set up his makeshift kitchen in a small yard off the bait bel kebu. The red-and-white horseshoe arches that provided access to the dining room, the carved capitals in Mudejar style, gilded stucco muqarnas work across the ceiling, the intricate, impossibly complex tiling. All had been purchased with the spoils of piracy. It was like discovering that Dick Turpin held up stagecoaches because he had a passion for snuffboxes and French enamel . . .
"Keep looking," ordered the NCO.
"Yes, sir," Raf said.
There were days now–whole days, sometimes days that ran into each other–when Ashraf Bey understood that he'd created the fox. What had happened when he was seven was his responsibility alone. He had chosen to walk out across that girder, the soles of his school slippers melting with every step. Just as he'd chosen to steal a fox cub from its cage and hide in the attic. Not knowing that the fire he'd set would reach his hiding place. And certainly not knowing it would burn down his whole school.
He'd wanted to destroy the biology building. An ugly block of cheap polycrete faced with pine slats like some tatty ski lodge. That was where the animal experiments were done. Where frogs were dissected and roadkill skinned to reveal underlying muscle structure. Where he'd been made to peg out the pelt of a badger and rub salt into stinking leather, having first scraped it so thin that in places it looked almost translucent. "What's done is done," Raf told himself and headed into another alley, stopping at a door to kick it open. "So why cry?" The question was rhetorical, Raf accepted that. But he answered it all the same.
"No reason."
He was beginning to see how it worked. Every question he'd ever asked the fox he answered for himself. Pulling information from memory to provide those clinically precise, unhelpful answers. Sweating the small stuff to make the big stuff go away. His life had been one long refusal to take the real facts and make them add up.
Raf searched the house swiftly, five rooms on three floors, saying nothing to the frightened inhabitants. On his way out he shook his head at a couple of conscripts on their way in. "Empty," Raf told them. "No one hiding."
Why was he upset? Good question.
Tiri had been kept in a wire cage at the rear of the biology block. Most of the smaller animals lived inside. Hamsters and rats, mice bred for so many generations that generations of biology masters had lost count. A black widow spider permanently catatonic with cold. Sickly stick insects. Guppies in water thicker than fog. And a single, magnificent Siamese fighting fish, all broken fins and ragged tail.
Raf freed the rats and shook the stick insects onto grass at the front of the block. This had seemed like a good idea at the time. Although later, looking down from his burning attic at fire trucks lining up on the lawn he realized he hadn't given them a better life at all. He hadn't known what to do with the fish so he removed most of the water from the guppies because their tank was dirtier than that of the Siamese fighting fish, then tipped one tank into the other. If Raf couldn't free the fighting fish he could at least give it a decent meal.
He'd never liked guppies anyway.
Some soldier had lit the spotlights around Domus Aurea but these only did what they were meant to do, threw walls into relief or picked out aspects of architectural interest.
There were trucks on the road beyond the medina, circling the old city walls with soldiers hanging from their open doors. Kashif Pasha's men. All of them searching for him. A grinding of gears came from a square ahead, more trucks arriving for the hunt. From Raf's left came shouted orders. Farther away, to his right, beyond a low line of workshops, more orders, more shouting. Engines racing and truck doors that slammed.
This was no way to track a fugitive. Even without the fox Raf knew that. Or rather he knew that without needing the fox, because he was the fox. One and the same. Separated not at birth but standing on that burning girder. What Raf knew (such as it was), he knew for himself and in himself. Just as Raf knew that he needed to get out there. To become himself. A man with responsibilities and a life.
And if not a man, then whatever he was.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 32
Wednesday 2nd March
On the dirt track a group of hunters struggled with a dead boar. They had its carcass lashed to a pole and slung between two of their party. A third man had a Ruger across his back and carried the rifles of the first two, one slung under each arm. Behind those three walked two more men, rifles ported across their broad chests.
Gravel crunched beneath their boots and each wore a loden coat with broad belt, tweed plus fours and long woollen socks.
Every last one of them watched the Bugatti Royale grind past. All their guns had telescopic sights and featured extended magazines that came only as an (expensive) optional extra. The man at the back had two dead rabbits hanging from his belt.
"Season ends in about three weeks," said Hani. She waved to the hunters, who stared back, eyes hard. The Bugatti, one of only seven ever made, had been climbing for the last five minutes towards a distant farmhouse that kept vanishing behind the hill. The track over which it rattled was rough, edged with thorn and a few bare oaks unwilling to accept that spring was due.