“I was,” said the man bitterly.
“And you gave up when?”
The man’s leonine mane of white hair rippled as he nodded towards the frozen screen, where the dead boy still lay with one fist in his open mouth. “I gave up after that,” he said. “How could I not?”
“And you became what?” Raf asked, glancing again at his notebook.
“I founded Sanctuary,” said Jean René, staring at the judges. His gaze bathed St. Cloud, the Graf and Senator Liz in ill-hidden contempt. “So long as countries like yours fight their wars by proxy there will always be work for people like me.”
Senator Liz opened her mouth but shut it again at a glance from St. Cloud.
“Excellency . . .” St. Cloud’s tone made it clear Raf could continue.
Only Raf was thinking, of nothing.
Less than nothing.
“Excellency . . .”
Raf came awake with a start, glanced at the judges and realized it was still his witness, but he had no questions for Jean René. Not real ones. Hamzah had been there, DNA matching marked him out as the soldier found on the battlefield by the Red Cross. His fingerprints, taken by a teenage Jewish nurse who hoped to reunite the boy with his parents, had identified Hamzah as the person who loaded and fired the HK21e machine gun.
If that wasn’t enough, the boy’s inky thumbprint validated a typed confession found locked in a Chubb in Koenig Pasha’s study; typed, it seemed, on an old Remington Imperial, to ensure no trace was left on any datacore. The confession had been witnessed by a certain Major Koenig Bey. A copy of this rested among the documents piling up in front of the three judges.
As for the defendant himself, guilt oozed from Hamzah’s skin like sweat. Expensive and overtailored though his clothes might be, they still hung from his diminished body like a beggar’s rags. Everything about the man conceded defeat.
There was very little chance that Raf could blow this case. And inside his own head, Raf was already writing his closing speech, the winning address he’d make once all the evidence, both direct and circumstantial, had been heard. Once the transcripts, old newsfeeds and actual weapons had been examined.
The press were already his, Raf could tell that just from watching them. The public gallery were glued to every unfolding moment. It was undeniably time to wind up his examination of this witness and let Zara take the floor.
Flicking his eyes from the photograph on-screen, back to where Jean René stood in the makeshift witness box, Raf opened his mouth to thank the man and did what he’d been avoiding doing all morning, somehow allowed his gaze to shift past René to where Zara sat.
Pain.
Absolute loneliness.
Enough of both to rock the courtroom around Raf.
If ever he’d needed the fox it was now. The fox would have known what to do because the fox always knew what to do. That was why it existed. To take from Raf the need to make those kind of decisions.
Ashraf al-Mansur, sometime ZeeZee, shuddered at this sudden understanding. Or else the courtroom shuddered. Whatever, something did as his eyes adjusted. And the rococo magnificence of the ballroom, with its borrowed ceiling, faux marble and fat gilded cherubs faded to a pixillated blur.
“Safety off,” said a gun.
Raf blinked at the words in his head and felt the cherubs reappear. Nothing had changed except for him and that change was so small, he wasn’t even sure it was real. But then, he’d never been too sure about anything. Mostly he just accepted things. Accepted, then assimilated the accepting. Whatever he needed to become he became . . .
Some people regarded that as a psychologically adaptive advantage. Others knew it as negative capability. A few said, without quite realizing what they said, “There but for the grace of . . .”
And then Raf found himself inside a battle.
Standing beside Ka, Zac said nothing. He’d talked little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he spoke even less . . .
Ka thought that strange.
“Distance?”
“Half a klick and closing . . .”
It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the kid with the amulets didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered. But then the kid was just that, a kid. Someone too young to make the link between action and . . .
Everything that Raf had ever read about The Hague Convention suddenly ran like water through the parched soil of his mind.
“Did you actually photograph this man?” Raf turned to point at Hamzah who, for the first time since the trial had begun, lifted his head and looked around the well of the court. Maybe it was something in Raf’s voice or else he too could hear clouds growling low like thunder.
Justice. That was what a court was supposed to provide. And he was Ashraf al-Mansur, Ottoman bey and supposedly Governor of El Iskandryia, for the next few hours at least. Raf looked at Zara, then inside himself.
The living saint looked puzzled.
“It’s a simple enough question,” Raf insisted. “Did you photograph Hamzah Quitrimala?”
“Back then?”
“Yes,” said Raf heavily, “back then . . .”
Jean René nodded.
“You photographed Hamzah Effendi as a child?” Raf said slowly, as if trying to get something straight in his head.
“I did. Yes.”
“Describe him.”
Puzzled, the elderly man glanced from Raf to the row of judges who sat watching from their raised bench. Above and behind them, alone at a higher bench sat the Khedive.
“Hamzah’s over there,” said Raf. “Not on the judicial benches. That is, if you need to take another look.”
Jean René hesitated.
“Tell us,” demanded Raf. “How did he look?”
They stared at each other across the well of the court. And somewhere at the back of the bey’s mind, thoughts continued to resonate until their growl manifested as a shiver that ran the length of his spine.
“Nothing unusual,” Jean René said finally. “Scruffy. Wearing a man’s shirt, trousers held up by a broken belt.”
“Broken?”
“The buckle was missing. The belt was tied round his waist. He had bare feet but then they all did. After a while, hot sand and gravel baked their feet to leather . . .”
“You’ve looked at this photograph recently?”
Raf paused, seeing Jean René look uncertain. “It’s a simple enough question,” he said. “Did you dig out your photograph of this murderer?”
“Objection . . .” Zara was on her feet.
The Khedive shook his head. “Objection overruled.” He turned to Raf, eyes hard. “Presumably you have sound reasons for this line of questioning . . . ?”
Raf nodded. He had reasons all right. Half a dozen within his own head. Plus another, still standing, glaring at him. Although his main reason sat at the back of the court beside Khartoum, her eyes spilling over with tears as they flicked between him and Zara.
What was justice anyway?
Nothing most people would recognize. Nothing Hani had ever been given.
“Find the photograph,” Raf demanded. “I want the court to take a good look at this killer.”
Finding the shot took a minute or two of skipping forward and backward, looking for the right image. And all the while, screens flickered with figures that came and went as Jean René trawled angrily through his notebook’s data sphere.
A girl half-buried in a sand dune.
Camels starved to a sack of fur and protruding bone.
A burned-out Seraphim driven by something reduced by flame to the texture of bitumen. Teeth grinning from a lipless mouth.
Images enough to make the ballroom fall silent and its gilded elegance suddenly appear frivolous and out of place. And finally, when it seemed not even the judges could stand another close-up of a dead child, Jean René found the picture for which he’d been looking.