Effendi

CHAPTER 3 7th July

At the eastern end of the city’s sweeping Corniche, where the expensive Palladian villas built from imported limestone boasted gardens that reached down to the sea, a girl swam under a warm dome of summer stars.

She was naked and out of her head on redRiff. Which was better than a few years back when her crutch of choice had been amphetamine sulphate, the pharmaceutically pure kind dished out by the sort of diet clinic that double-checked your credit rating and forgot to measure your weight.

The blond man leaving the grandest of those villas had yet to notice her because he had other things on his mind, like being wanted for murder. But he would.

Inside the villa that Ashraf al-Mansur had just left, a boy tossed silver dreadlocks out of eyes that were angry and forgot about the flick-knife he’d been using to clean his nails.

Avatar had stolen that habit from an old film, but Hamzah already knew this. Recognizing his own faults in somebody younger either made for Hamzah’s losing his temper or keeping it. He was working hard to keep his.

“Zara’s out there. You got that?”

Hamzah Effendi nodded.

“And you know she’s, like . . .”

Hamzah said nothing but, yes, he knew. She was naked. They were discussing Hamzah’s only daughter, the one who was meant to be upstairs in bed, asleep. The girl who’d recently been dumped, very publicly, by the very man Hamzah had just sent down to the beach.

“Well . . . whatever.” It was Avatar’s turn to shrug. Things he thought would worry the old man sometimes didn’t . . . And things Av considered nothing often did. So the boy trod carefully but tried hard not to reveal the fact.

“You heard what Ashraf Bey said?” asked Hamzah, his voice hoarse with good cigars and better whisky.

Yeah, Avatar had.

“You believe him?”

The boy shrugged. How did he know who looked like a killer and who didn’t . . . ? The bey was some blond-haired princeling, half Berber and half something nasrani; all silk suits and Armani shades. That put him way outside Avatar’s frame of reference. Until Hamzah’s daughter, in the early days of her “Comrade Zara” phase, had tracked Av down and dragged him off the street, he’d thought sleeping in his own bit of doorway was posh.

“Me,” said Avatar, “I believe nobody.”

Hamzah smiled.

Avatar had entered via a window seconds after Raf exited through the French doors, headed without knowing it towards the rocks where Zara swam, phosphorescence smoothing across her adolescent body like slipstream.

“Kamil . . .”

“DJ Avatar, Av, Avatar, 2Cool Kid,” the boy corrected his father without even thinking about it. The options tossed out machine-gun fast. He didn’t answer to Kamil, any more than he used the door at Villa Hamzah. This last was his present to the man who sat on the other side of the desk.

Four years back—after Avatar had kicked her—Madame Rahina, the woman who very definitely wasn’t his mother, had made her husband promise never to let Avatar through the door of Villa Hamzah again.

So Hamzah hadn’t.

“Av . . .” Hamzah Effendi paused and picked a cigar. Remembering just in time to use a tiny gold guillotine to circumcise its end. A life’s worth of biting off the end and spitting was a habit he found hard to break. Hamzah wanted to explain to Avatar exactly why he’d sent the bey out of that door, down to where his daughter swam naked: but he couldn’t put “needs must” into words. At least not words he found acceptable. So instead, the big man took another pull on a Partegas and thought about his lawyer waiting nervously in the hallway.

He could wait. Whatever it was Avatar had come to say wouldn’t take long.

“You need money?”

Avatar grinned. Of course he needed dosh. Didn’t everyone? Apart from the industrialist who sat in front of him. All the same, that wasn’t why Avatar was there.

“Some journalist’s been asking about you . . .”

“A nasrani?” It had to be. Hamzah already kept most of the local press in his pocket, and the few who were not lapping up his hospitality missed out, not from any misplaced moral backbone but because he already had them by the balls.

“English. Well, probably. You know . . .”

Hamzah knew. It was unfashionable to say so, but telling one from another was difficult until nasranis started flashing round their passports or local currency.

“So let me guess.” The big man smiled and let cigar smoke trickle towards the ceiling, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes and a breeze through the open window dissipated the smoke before it reached the height of a picture rail.

“Organized crime the Ottoman way?”

Avatar shook his head.

“Well it can’t be the refinery because then they’d just go through my press office . . .” His refinery was situated to the west of Isk, at the point where slums met desert. In an industry working hard to improve its image, Midas Oil was an entire lap ahead. Bursaries, research grants, third-world scholarships, a whole marine-biology, antipollution programme at Rutgers.

Accidents got apologized for the moment they happened, critics were greeted with open arms, research papers were put to peer review and released, copyright free, straight onto the Web. It was a long-term game and, as Hamzah had hoped, it was driving even the softest ecological pressure groups insane.

“What then?”

“Your childhood . . .”

To the man’s credit, Hamzah did little more than blink.

“Think you can deal with this?” Hamzah asked Avatar.

“Sure,” said Avatar. “You want him killed?”

Hamzah raised his eyebrows, amusement driving out the last echoes of anger.

“No,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want him killed. Whatever you’ve heard, whatever the police whisper, that’s not how I do things.”

Avatar looked for a brief second like he wanted to disagree. Then he shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said. And left without glancing back, exiting through a window larger than the front door of most of the places in which he’d lived.