Hu San glanced from the boy to the Korean and then nodded.
The growling got louder.
'Call the police,' ZeeZee's voice was hoarse, way too high. He took a slow breath to steady himself. 'Call them ...'
Most of his weight ZeeZee rested on his left heel, leaving his right leg forward and heel slightly raised, as he took up the two-handed position taught at school. Man with gun versus man with sword. In theory it was a straight stand-off, but the idea he might actually have to use his blade raised questions of the kind the boy didn't want to answer.
'Fuckwit,' the Korean said flatly. He was talking to ZeeZee, or rather he was talking at ZeeZee, because his hand was already bringing up the revolver.
Sun flashed on metal, time slowed, and a katana blade slid through flesh and bit through bone showering the boy with hot rain.
'Bow,' ordered Hu San.
For a second the Korean's severed head remained on his neck. Then it tipped forward and fell to the floor. Death smoothing away the man's sudden expression of disbelief.
The Korean would probably have crumbled forward anyway, though to ZeeZee it looked as if the blood pumping from the man's neck was what forced him to his knees. It rained down around ZeeZee as he stood staring in shock at the razor-sharp blade resting unused in his hand.
'Could you have killed him?' Hu San asked as she wiped her own blade on a comer of her jacket.
Could he? ZeeZee didn't find the question odd. But then there was very little in life that he found odd. And it was a good question, even if he didn't yet know the answer. He'd never killed anything, not a fish from a lake or a sparrow with a BB gun, and yet...
He shrugged.
'No matter.' Hu San, elder sister of the Five Winds Society, pulled a tiny Nokia diary from her blood-splattered jacket and flipped it open. Her conversation was soft, unhurried and authoritative. ZeeZee didn't understand a word. Just as he didn't really understand how a middle-aged Chinese woman could manage to vault a counter and unsheathe a sword in less time than it took the Korean to raise his gun.
Stepping round the blood-splattered boy, Hu San walked to the shop door and flipped round a simple sign, from open to closed. Then she pulled down two bamboo blinds and locked the door. 'Shut for stocktaking,' she announced lightly.
Chapter Twenty-six
7th July
Lady Jalila blinked as the crypt's darkness gave way to sudden daylight. Beside her walked Madame Mila, head turned slightly towards the older woman. There was probably only five years' difference in their ages, but the Minister's wife had a confidence that came with money, good clothes and power, even if that power was vicarious and by right belonged to her husband.
By contrast, Madame Mila felt ill at ease and bitterly resented the fact. She had intellectual brilliance, striking looks and an unbroken run of victories in court from her recent career as a public prosecutor. What she lacked was connections. Lady Jalila knew that. They talked, or rather the Minister's wife talked and the younger woman listened intently, occasionally nodding.
Both of them were headed towards where Raf and Hani sat in the shade of their borrowed cork tree, backs pressed hard against another family's tomb. Reluctantly Raf climbed to his feet and brushed gravel from his suit. Hani clambered up after him.
She didn't look at her aunt or the coroner-magistrate.
'You have my sympathy,' Lady Jalila told Raf. 'And, of course, if there's anything I or the Minister can do to help ..." She smiled, then shrugged as if to stress she wished there was more she could offer. But Raf still caught the point when her eyes slid across to Hani and noticed that the child was clinging to his hand, her fingers glued firmly inside his.
'Thank you,' Raf said politely, nodding first to Lady Jalila and then at the stony-faced woman stood beside her. 'I'd better get Hani home ...'
'Your Excellency ...'
He was the person addressed, Raf realized, turning back. The coroner-magistrate was staring after him, her elegant face at once flawless and utterly cold. Her eyes between darkness and a void.
The woman was attractive and regretted it. Her brittleness a warning at odds with the warmth of a perfume that featured musk mixed with some botanical element so elusive Raf decided it had to be synthetic. Chemical analogues that fell midway between spices and fruit were big business, even in a city that prided itself on having the finest spice markets in North Africa. He'd seen the hoardings on his way through Place Orabi.
'... Yes?' Raf said finally.
'You didn't know your aunt very well, did you?'
'I hardly knew her at all.' Raf kept his voice cool, matter-of-fact. 'Why?'
'Madame Mila was just wondering,' Lady Jalila said.
The younger woman nodded. 'She must have been surprised when she first heard from you. Pleased, obviously ...'
'She didn't hear from me,' said Raf. 'Until last week I didn't even know she existed ...' And here came today's understatement. 'My father's family isn't something my mother talks about ...'
'So how did your aunt know where to find you?'
How indeed?
'Good question.' Raf let his gaze flick over Madame Mila, taking in the neat row of tiny plaits, her perfect skin and her scrupulously simple suit, which was immaculately pressed but nothing like as expensive as Lady Nafisa's outfit or the suit he was wearing. It was a gaze Raf had watched Dr Millbank use at Huntsville to bring unexpectedly difficult inmates into line. And the beauty of it was that its effect was almost subliminal.
'I believe my father keeps an eye on my progress.'
This time when Raf walked away no one called him back.
Felix offered to drive them home from the necropolis. But his drive home turned out to be an extended tour of the city that involved a slow crawl along the Cornìche, beginning at the crowded summer beaches at Shatby and taking them past the grandeur of the Bibliotheka Iskandryia (where a rose-pink marble faqade hid 125 kilometres of carefully ducted optic fibre) round the elegantly curved sweep of Eastern Harbour so Hani could see the fishing boats and horse-drawn caleches and then north along the final stretch of the Corniche towards the new aquarium and out along the harbour spur towards Fort Qaitbey, which had once been the site of the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world.
Pointing with one hand and steering with his other, the fat man kept up a running commentary that made up in jokes for what it occasionally lacked in historic accuracy. He didn't stop or even suggest they stop, except once on the return trip, when he pulled over an ice-cream van and Hani was given her first ice cream.
Heading south down Rue el-Dardaa at the end of Felix's impromptu tour they hit afternoon traffic. Squat, brightly carapaced VWs, sleek BMWs, the odd Daimler-Benz mixed in with an occasional bulbous-headed Japanese vehicle, apparently designed around some idealized memory of a Koi. By then, the kid was asleep on the back seat, her head against Raf's side, and Raf was running over his future options and getting nowhere fast.
There'd be a will to be read. Legal requirements to be observed. But he already knew from something the fat man had said that he was the sole heir. The house was his and so, it seemed, was responsibility for Hani.
'Sweet Jeez.' The fat man grabbed a hip flask, gulped and put it back under his seat. 'Can't be doing with this.' He spun the wheel hard and Raf suddenly found himself out of the crawling traffic and cutting the wrong way up a one-way route. The fish van headed in the other direction very sensibly mounted the sidewalk and scraped a wall rather than tangle with Felix.