Chapter Thirty-four
10-11th July
Saturday began hot, the early-morning sun turning the Corniche to a burning silver strip that flared along the shore and separated the city from its beaches and low-lying headlands. But even early, with the sun hanging low over Glymenapoulo to the east, the air was too heavy and too sticky for blue sky to last.
A headache settled over the city, dogs growing restless and feral cats slinking from the shade of one shabby tenement to another. Policemen pulled at their high collars as they tried to relieve the itch, women scratched discreetly and men at café tables casually adjusted their balls. Through endless shuttered windows came the sound of toddlers whining, being slapped and whining louder still.
Under their glass roofs the souks overheated, peaches turned bruised and rancid in the open markets and at the taxi rank on Place Orabi a driver killed two passengers in an argument over his tip.
The storm came in at noon, as muezzin were calling the faithful to prayer. It fell on Iskandryia in a rolling landslide of dark clouds that slid down the coast, vast and soot-hued, banked so high that the outer edge of each cloud turned back on itself and still kept climbing. Looking up was like staring down into a bottomless canyon.
And with the clouds came a chill that cooled the air until the only heat was latent, radiating back from alley walls and parked cars. But Hani didn't notice the sudden chill at the time because she was too busy in the haremlek throwing 'rubbish' clothes into a black plastic bag ... Rubbish meant anything neat, anything fussy, anything that Hani's aunt had made her wear ...
Now they were up in the attic, rubbishing that without quite saying so, Raf had decided to get the al-Mansur madersa swept clean of ghosts and rearranged by the close of the weekend. Some ghosts need exorcism. Some die, shrivel in the daylight or let time brick them off into the little-visited rooms of memory.
His own were mostly sterilized and labelled, neatly hidden away by the fox or secure behind emotional safety glass as the regime at Huntsville had demanded. But Hani's ghosts ... Raf intended to kill those with a bucket and mop, black bin liners and the scrape of clumsily moved furniture.
'It's dark ...'
'I know,' said Raf, glancing round. 'The electricity's out again.'
'No.' Hani stood in a doorway, holding a torch. 'I mean it's dark outside. The whole sky's gone black ... Come and see.'
'Let me just finish this,' said Raf, picking up a chair. He was sorting through an attic, which led out onto a flat roof. A room stuffed with ancient china, wall hangings, carpets and old chairs, domestic detritus to which people had been too attached or too lazy to discard. The space was also home to a wasps' nest, high in one corner, and a tribe of mice that left markers in a spread of oily seed-like droppings.
They'd gone up there to find new furniture for the qaa, after Hani had rejected the original stuff on the basis that Aunt Nafisa liked it. Raf had seconded her opinion on the grounds that the silver chairs, at least, were unbelievably uncomfortable.
There were undoubtedly very good reasons why it was a psychologically bad move to let Hani discard her smart clothes and the qaa chairs on the sole basis that they had been liked by an aunt whose death she should have been mourning. And no doubt any child psychologist could have told Raf exactly what those reasons were but, since he'd had enough of psychologists as a child to last both of them a lifetime, he didn't care.
As Hani waited, the first heavy droplets of rain hit the flat roof outside. 'It's beginning,' she announced and then she was gone, stepping though a sudden steel-grey sheet of rain that closed off the open doorway like a bead curtain.
'Hani!'
He was too late. By the time Raf reached the door, Hani's hair was plastered to her face and her green tee-shirt had turned dark and heavy with rain. She was laughing.
'Come on.'
The water was warm and the drops huge, falling so heavily that they bounced off the tiles until the guttering that drained the roof could no longer cope and a skim of water built up across the surface of the roof to swallow the rain.
'Does this happen often?' Raf had to shout to make himself heard above the noise.
Hani grinned. 'Not like this.' She spread her arms wide, welcoming the torrent. 'This is wild.' And it was.
Walking to the edge, she leant over the parapet to watch rain racing through a storm pipe at her feet and fall in a heavy stream on Rue Cif below. Waves of racing water drove down the middle of the road, sweeping rubbish before it.
'The carpets,' said Raf, suddenly. 'Come on.'
With Hani's help, he dragged a heavy roll of cloth out onto the flooded flat roof of the madersa, discarding his shoes and socks to trample back and forth across the unrolled bokhara until grey water seeped between his toes and was washed away by rain. By the time he'd dragged out his second rug, Hani had ripped off the Nikes he'd bought her the day before and was trampling hell out of a small carpet of her own.
It rained ... and then it rained some more. Fresh clouds rolling in over Iskandryia to replace those that were empty. Until they too were spent. By the time the storm had burnt itself out, four carpets were clean and two wall hangings were refreshed enough for the dark smudges across their middle to be revealed as mounted archers chasing what might have been antelope.
'It's over,' Hani said, looking up at the clearing sky.
Raf nodded. The air was cool — and smelt completely clean for the first time since he'd arrived in El Iskandryia. The pressure was gone, too, the city's headache lifting, with the storm clouds. Above the street swallows swooped, nymphing on newly hatched insects. Coming in low and fast, flying in formation, their shrill cries rising and falling as they swept by.
Felix rolled up the next evening in his Cadillac and dumped the car with its keys in the ignition, two wheels on the road and two on the sidewalk.
'You trying to get it stolen?' Raf demanded, opening the new front door to greet the fat man.
Felix glared at the nearest fellaheen who stepped into the road rather than try to push past the fat man or his car. 'No one would dare,' he said. It took Raf a moment to realize Felix wasn't joking.
'We've got a problem,' said Felix. He dug his hand into a pocket and pulled out a black G-Shock special, the kind people bought on planes. This yours?'
Raf nodded. Anything else seemed pointless.
Thought it was hideous enough. Want to tell me when and where you lost it?
'I didn't even ...'
'... Know it was gone. So I take it you don't admit to making a quick trip to my HQ in the last twenty-four hours?'
Raf just looked at him.
'We've lost some plastique,' Felix said flatly. 'It happens. Someone at the precinct cuts a block in half, amends the evidence docket and usually sells it back to one of the crime families. Or to someone with a grudge ...'
He was speaking openly, Raf realized, because the reality of who Felix saw was obscured by a fantasy CV that let the fat man treat Raf as more than equal.
The problem is the plastique was lifted from Mushin Bey's office.' Felix paused, long enough to let that sink in. 'And your watch was found in the corridor outside.'
'Shit.'
'Oh, it gets worse,' said the fat man as he pushed past Raf and started up the recently uncovered stairs. Raf was still wondering how everyone who came in knew exactly where to go when the answer hit him in the face. All large houses of a certain period followed a rigidly defined floor plan. There was nowhere else those stairs could go.