'Lady Jalila.'
'Well?' The woman's eyes flicked from Zara to dark drips on the floor behind her. And when she stayed silent, Lady Jalila sighed. 'Leave it to me,' she said, reaching into her pocket. 'Just leave it to me.'
The rest Hani and Zara reconstructed from memory. Remembering most a pas de deux faster and more intricate than any they'd seen on a newsfeed.
Sound travels relatively slowly but, being cool-loaded and thus subsonic, Lady Jalila's first bullet travelled more slowly still, which meant it wasn't quite the surprise to the ballerina that it might have been. Though by the time Hani looked up, the German's blonde hair had finished streaming out behind in a sticky white, grey and red plume.
The .38 hollow-point entered the ballerina's head just below the jaw, passed through her soft palate and removed what had until then been the back of her skull, sucking out blood, bone fragments and grey jelly to splatter them over the brick wall behind.
A split second after her head flicked back, the woman's bowels and bladder loosened and her body stepped back, exploded blue eyes staring blindly at nothing. The crash the ballerina made as she hit the boards was loud enough to echo through the almost empty building.
'Mid-period,' muttered Lady Jalila, surveying the wall. 'Maybe mid-to-late ...' Her eyes swept over the attic to take in Hani with her rag dog, the dead ballerina and finally, scornfully, Madame Sosostris hog-tied on the couch.
'Murderer.'
Before Zara could protest, Lady Jalila brought up her gun and yanked the trigger three times. Hollow-points took Madame Sosostris in the upper body, splintering ribs into bone fragments. Lungs collapsed as the first two bullets blossomed into sucking wounds in her side, the final shot taking Madame Sosostris sideways through the heart and blasting her off the couch onto the floor.
The gurgling stopped.
'She hired the German to kill Ashraf,' Lady Jalila said as if that explained everything, though whether it was said to Zara or herself wasn't clear. Walking over to the dead woman by the bed, Lady Jalila lifted a scalpel from a metal dish and slashed the twine binding her arms and feet. Then she rolled the sticky twine into a neat ball and dropped it into her pocket. She placed her own .38 in the dead herbalist's hand.
'We'll tell the police they shot each other.'
It wasn't a suggestion.
'Just leave the official stuff to me,' said Lady Jalila. 'Okay... ?' Without waiting for Zara's answer, Lady Jalila walked across to where Hani sat, hugging her knees and clutching her rag dog.
'Time to take Ali-Din home.'
Hani shook her head. 'You killed her,' she said, voice empty.
'Of course I killed her,' said Lady Jalila. 'There was no choice.'
Only the child wasn't talking about the blonde German, Zara realized. Or about Madame Sosostris. And everything fell into place as if the answer had always been right there, just waiting for Zara.
Cold.
Staggers.
Hallucinations.
'The pen was a side issue,' Zara said without thinking. 'Lady Nafìsa died from poisoning.' And she suddenly knew exactly how the woman standing in front of her had done it. Except that by then Lady Jalila was crouching beside the dead herbalist, taking back her own gun.
The next bullet she fired took Ali-Din through the head.
Chapter Fifty
1st August
Always count the guns.
Crouching by the window, company to fat-toed geckos that had grown used to his stillness, Raf whispered it again — just in case he forgot. Counting the guns had been rule one, according to Hu San; and Raf had made a special point of remembering the things Hu San told him.
The automatic would belong to the ballerina, only she was dead. Raf had heard that happen. Lady Jalila had the revolver, subsonic slugs but unsilenced barrel, because silencing a revolver was a contradiction in terms. From an empty plastic coke bottle taped to the muzzle to the most expensive hand-turned tungsten mutetube, nothing actually worked. Some of the shock wave always forced its way between cylinder and chassis.
If you needed to mute a revolver then the answer was to self-load the brass and use less charge, which was what she'd done. Whether or not in imitation of Thiergarten dogma, Raf didn't know. But, either way, just knowing how to do it made her a professional in his eyes.
The ex-ballerina had a gun, so did Jalila and so did he ... Three in total, if he didn't count the one he'd lifted from the dead dancer. Which made it four functioning weapons. Quite how knowing that helped him Raf had forgotten.
'Enough already ...'
Old words but true ones. Bats echo-located around him through the warm night air, taking moths in mid-flight, each curving strike almost surgical in its precision. Their echo bounced off shutters, refracted from high walls or vanished through open windows to return milliseconds later. Cold and mysterious, like some distant music of the spheres.
There was a tom cat lurking in the dirt of the alley floor far below, its heavy shoulders hunched and thick muscles locked in anticipation as it walked, oblivious, round Raf's discarded jellaba and shades, tracking whatever vermin hid behind the rubble. If the cat was dimly aware of the spiralling almost-mice, it didn't allow them to put it off the prey within reach.
Yet another city within a city, world within world. A metropolis of wild dogs and feral cats, rats breeding beneath grain silos and mice infesting the cotton bales that waited to be loaded into containers along the dock. Spiders, scorpions, and millipedes fat as callused thumbs, safe from the frail, fly-hunting geckos that haunted the twilight edge of street lights.
Raf twisted his head to one side, easing an ache in his neck. Just holding himself secure in that gap between walls took effort. And if he waited much longer he'd have no strength for what must happen next.
Dead boy.. .It was an odd nickname for a man to give a child. He remembered the man well, with his faltering monitors and flat-lining neurofeedback machines. Remembering never had been Raf's problem. His first identity number, its position over a battered metal hook that took his school coat, the exact marble pattern of tiles along a hospital corridor — he knew them all. Far better than he knew himself, because Raf had been afraid there was no self.
We are the hollow men ... Maybe now, but not back times ... Back then he was just a hollow child, not English/not American, not rich/not poor, not wanted except for his logic skills. He could easily have passed that test. But he thought that if he failed they'd let him go home.
Live with it, as the fox would have said.
The silver rain was finished, almost twenty years before.
While Hani was in there. Zara, too.
And he was out here.
And they both undoubtedly believed he was dead and some days he still was. Some days it surprised him he even had a shadow or that when he stared in the mirror there was a reflection waiting to scowl back. But those days got fewer.
And the fear was gone, burned out. The fox dying too. He was going to have to make his own decisions. And this was the first of them ...
Grabbing the rusty metal bar that had once supported a pulley, Raf kicked off from the spice house wall and let gravity swing him through the open window towards which he'd been climbing.
Things to do, people to become.
Hani was sure she saw a smoke-grey animal leap into the room, becoming Raf as it hit the ground and rolled. When he came upright, Raf's gun was already cocked, its muzzle pointed straight at Lady Jalila's stomach. What Raf didn't do was pull the trigger.