Effendi

CHAPTER 27 17th October

If anybody else in the computer room had been stuffing their face with a Big Mac and large fries, chocolate shake and a side dish of onion rings, Madame Roden would have thrown her out, if not banned her altogether.

Because it was Hani, who’d knocked first, asked if she might come in and then smilingly thrust a carton of fries at the fastidious systems manager for the night shift, Madame Roden had politely taken a lukewarm reconstituted fry and chewed it as if sampling a priceless Perigord black truffle.

“Shouldn’t you be at home asleep?” No sooner was the comment made than Madame Roden winced at her own lack of tact. If she’d been recently orphaned like that, she’d have wanted to follow her new uncle everywhere too.

“Uncle Ashraf came back to get some papers,” said Hani, apparently oblivious to the woman’s faux pas. They weren’t really papers, of course. Most of the bey’s day-to-day files downloaded direct to his watch. But a few, the really important ones, he had to sign for with a handprint before collecting them from the precinct’s central datacore.

Madame Roden was responsible for the night running of the core, but it more or less ran itself and most of her shift was spent stopping uniforms from slopping coffee on their keyboards and preventing them from trying to reach unsuitable photographs archived by the morales.

Pictures snatched by police photographers played a big part in most immorality cases. Though, of course, to the morales the grabs were just evidence. Well, to most of them.

Madame Roden shook her head. She shouldn’t even be thinking such stuff with a small child around.

“Could I use a terminal?”

The elderly woman was doubtful. Nothing in police regulations actually forbade it, but then, nothing said it was all right either. As for previous precedents, nine-year-olds wanting to use her computer room were a novelty. Come to that, civilians this side of the front desk were a novelty, full stop. Children or not.

“I saw Kamila on the way in,” Hani said suddenly. “I told her I was coming up here and she said to say hello . . .” Hani grinned. “Hello.”

Madame Roden smiled. She could remember when Kamila was this age. More than ten years ago, though it seemed far less. These days her daughter was a pathologist, reporting direct to Madame Mila, unbelievable though this was.

“Can I?”

Madame Roden blinked. “Yes, of course,” she said, slightly bemused. Hani had that effect on her. Actually Madame Roden had noticed the child had that effect on most people.

“Thank you,” said Hani and scrambled up onto a seat to tap the space bar in front of her, waking the terminal.

“Do you want me to help you find something to play with?”

Hani shook her head. She liked the neatly dressed elderly woman, but that didn’t mean she felt guilty about tricking her. Life had long since taught her that all adults existed to be tricked, except maybe Ashraf, but her uncle was different.

“No, thank you,” Hani said politely. “I’m going to write another fairy tale.”

“Another?”

Hani smiled. “About Suliman the Magnificent and the angry djinn . . .”

As soon as she had the screen to herself, Hani went to her postbox, grabbed a half-finished story she’d started months before and pasted it into the precinct’s basic word-processing package over a scuzzy parchment background. Rubbish page texture and rubbish font. At home she had fifty-three kinds of illuminated capital alone, most of them lifted from a university archive in Al Qahirah.

Minimizing Suliman’s Dream, trope III and twisting her screen slightly so that it was no longer overlooked, Hani did a double log-in, remaining as a guest but adding a window that knew her as Mushin Bey, husband to her dead aunt Jalila, not to mention Minister of Police, thus Ashraf’s theoretical boss.

One rumour said Uncle Mushin was at home, sitting in darkness grieving for his dead wife, another had him in a clinic getting over a long-term alcohol habit. Hani preferred the second theory.

No one had thought to cancel Mushin Bey’s network access. No one had even changed his password, which inevitably was Jalila.

Top access, obviously. Superuser status. Hani doubted her uncle even knew what that meant or entailed. Flicking her fingers from key to key, Hani called up a current crime list and highlighted only the ones that had been mentioned on the news by Ferdie Abdullah.

Then she decided to read about the girl found on Hamzah’s beach and changed her mind two paragraphs in. A lot of the medical words were strange to her, but enough of the others made sense enough for her to close the file.

“I wonder,” said a voice, “have you seen . . .”

“In the computer room, Ya Bey.” Madame Roden never quite knew whether or not to smile when she met Ashraf al-Mansur. True, he was her husband’s boss, which meant she should. But then there was all that sad stuff with his dead aunt. And Kamila’s boss Madame Mila apparently hated him. And it was said poor Mushin Bey couldn’t hear the name al-Mansur without falling into a rage. As if the bey could have saved everyone from those terrible assassins.

His Excellency looked positively ill with exhaustion, poor man.

At the door, Raf turned. “I should thank you,” he said. “For letting Hani use a machine.”

“A pleasure.” The small woman blushed.

“Do you know what she’s doing?”

“Writing another story, Your Excellency, so she says . . .”

“That sounds about right.” Raf nodded to Madame Roden and went to his office, where a black bakelite phone was trying to wake the dead. The telephone had to be some kind of joke. At least, Raf assumed it was. Felix had definitely been making a statement of some kind.

Raf had moved straight into the fat man’s office. Not bothering to get the place redecorated first. Claimed the man’s desk too. In the bottom right drawer, behind a box of nanopore gloves, was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, more than half-full. Four empty bottles occupied the drawer on the left. That seemed to be about the extent of the old Chief’s filing skills.

Raf was about to pick up the receiver when the phone went dead and a bulb lit, signifying that his assistant had finally arrived. He checked his Seiko—8.30A .M., Sunday morning. Raf sighed.

“Caffeine,” he demanded, punching a button on a bulky office intercom. Another of Felix’s joke purchases, presumably. “Please,” Raf added as a belated afterthought.

“Your coffee, Excellency . . .” The thin girl put down a tray and straightened it, so that the marquetry along one rim aligned exactly with the edge of his huge desk. “And you have . . .” Her voice was nervous. “You have three calls to return.”

“Is that all?” Most days, even Sundays, he had several dozen backed up and waiting not to be answered.

“Three you need to deal with, Excellency,” said the girl, as she carefully poured a tiny brass cup of coffee. He thought her name was Natacha Something. The fox had spotted her coming out of an interview room carrying papers and got Raf to ask someone her name.

Quite why, Raf still wasn’t sure; except that the girl had deep eyes, skin the colour of dry chamois and a body toned from evenings spent in an expensive gym. But what both he and the fox had really noticed, on their first glance down the corridor, was long dark hair, falling to her narrow hips. Utterly straight and midnight black.

Next time Raf had seen her, the girl was opening the door of his office for him and handing him a coffee and that morning’s crime sheet. Someone, somewhere in the precinct had translated his casual enquiry into the fact he wanted the girl as his new PA. So now she handled his post, made him coffee, kept his diary and did other stuff he knew less than nothing about, all the while watching him nervously from the corner of her eye.

Wondering when I’m going to proposition her probably, Raf thought with a sigh.

“Trouble, Your Excellency?”

Raf looked up. She was . . .

“How old are you?”

Natacha blushed. “Eighteen, Excellency.”

And now working for the new Chief of Detectives, even if she had fallen into that job by accident. No doubt she dressed carefully outside the office, but in here she wore black jeans and a white cotton blouse, black leather shoes with lowish heels and matching belt. The neck button of her blouse was unfastened and her sleeves folded back, like in the magazines, to make it obvious that she was ready to work hard.

A year ago, from what Raf gathered, those bare wrists would have been fine. Now they were only just acceptable. A year from now, dressed like that, she might well be breaking some official code. Of course, a year from now she could be unemployable in any office in the city, just on the basis of her gender.

“What are the important calls?” Raf’s voice was more abrupt than he intended and he could see the girl try to work out exactly what she’d done to offend him.

“Hamzah Effendi was the first. Then his daughter Zara.” The girl paused. “She left a new number. Apparently she’d had the old one changed and forgotten to tell you.” Was there an element of disapproval in that face?

Raf thought that, on balance, there might be . . .

“And the third?” he asked gently.

“The General.”

Just what he needed. Raf glanced at the report open on his screen. Stomach ripped, heart and lungs missing, slashed stops to the long strokes of the cross, the initials H.Q. cut into her wrist . . . It was getting so Raf could recite the litany of wounds in his sleep. Only sleep wasn’t currently an option. Not if it meant letting the fox disappear again.

“Tell them all I’ve gone to breakfast,” said Raf. “That is, should they call back.”

Natacha’s shock almost made him smile. Hamzah Quitrimala was rich and everyone in Iskandryia knew Raf had been meant to marry Zara. But the girl’s horror was reserved for the fact that he might refuse to jump when the General ordered. Koenig Pasha’s main advantage was that no one dared underestimate his power, with the result that the old man barely had to use it.

“Just tell them,” said Raf.

Felix’s old Cadillac sat in the fat man’s bay. That is, the sign still readFELIX ABRINSKY,CHIEF OF DETECTIVES because the paperwork needed to change the sign was sitting on Raf’s desk awaiting his signature. Since Raf wasn’t too sure about sticking with the job, he’d been ignoring the forms. And besides, he got some weird kick out of seeing the sign still there. Like Felix was about to come shambling out of the lift onto the garage level and head for his car, trailing whisky fumes, litter and bad advice.