“Go to her, Excellency,” said Donna, “and talk.”
“And say what?” His question sounded weak even to him.
The old woman shrugged. “That you will not be going away. That you don’t plan to die.” Her lips twisted into a sour smile at Raf’s expression.
“Well, does Your Excellency?”
Raf shook his head.
“No,” said Donna, crossing herself. “Somehow I didn’t think so.”
“Go away.” Hani didn’t bother looking up from her screen. On the floor beside her chair sat an untouched toy dog, still in its packaging. It was the most expensive model Raf had been able to afford.
“It smells in here,” said Raf.
She did look round at that.
“Old clothes,” he said, gesturing to a bundle on the floor. “Old clothes and misery . . .” Raf pulled back the inner shutter of a mashrabiya and autumn sunlight washed into Hani’s bedroom, through her balcony’s ornately carved screen.
“Now I can’t see my monitor.”
“You can use it later,” Raf said, “but first we need to talk.” He sat on the red-tiled floor, his spine hard against the edge of her metal bed. The springs were rusted and the mattress so old that horsehair poked through holes in its cover. Changing the thing was absolutely out of the question, apparently.
“Sit by me . . .”
Hani sighed and made a great show of turning off her machine, even though they both knew it would have gone to sleep at a simple voice command. Then, surprisingly, she did as he asked and parked herself next to Raf, her own back pressed into the side of the bed. Dust flecks danced in the afternoon sunlight in front of them. Their ersatz randomness actually the result of immutable laws of heat and motion.
“I saw a body yesterday morning.”
Hani grew still.
“It was at Zara’s house. A stranger . . .” Raf added hurriedly.
“You’ve seen bodies before,” Hani said.
He nodded, they both had. Aunts Nafisa and Jalila. Those deaths were one of the things that bound them together.
“When you were an assassin . . .”
“Hani!” They’d been through this before. “I was an attaché . . . Nothing more.”
“Attachés are spies. Spies kill people. Everyone knows that.”
Raf sighed.
“Who was he?” Hani asked.
“She,” Raf corrected. “And we haven’t found out yet.” Obviously enough, he didn’t mention the mutilation, which was actually a cross potent according to the pathologist, who’d looked it up.
Toxicology showed heavy traces of an mdma clone in the victim’s blood and alcohol in her stomach. The girl had been alive and conscious from the start of the attack until near the end. And swabs taken from her oral, anal and vaginal mucosa indicated that she’d first been raped, then cut. So Raf now had a file to read on crosses coupe, which had apparently been the mutilation of choice during something called “the little war.” There was one bite mark, below her right breast, but that was faded and the bruise yellow. So either it happened before she arrived in Isk, it was the result of a casual holiday romance or her boyfriend had come with her but had yet to step forward.
Which, at least, would give Raf one sensible suspect. Provided the boyfriend could be shown to have nerves of steel and a reasonable grasp of anatomy.
“The trouble,” Raf told Hani, “is in realizing when facts aren’t related . . .”
He halted himself there, wondering whether to begin again and decided not to bother with the talking. With luck, sitting next to Hani would be enough, because when he was a child, the point at which adults started in on explanations was the moment he stopped listening.
“Everything is related,” said Hani. And glancing sideways, Raf realized her face was screwed up in thought. “That’s what Khartoum says . . .”
The kid was nine, whipcord thin, with the body of a child younger still and eyes old before their time. Lack of sleep, bad dreams and night sweats, he remembered them all well. Although, these days, if Raf worked at it, he could go for months without recalling them once.
“Maybe he’s right,” said Raf finally. “Maybe everything does connect.”
“You don’t know?” Hani looked interested.
“No.”
“I thought spies knew everything.”
“Not me.” Raf shook his head. “Me, I know nothing, except that I’m not going to send you away, I’m not going to leave you and nobody is going to kill me . . .”
“Aunts Jalila and Nafisa were killed . . .” She waited for Raf to nod, which he did. “But the reason’s a secret . . .”
Raf nodded again.
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Raf stopped. “Because that’s the way things work in Iskandryia.” He ignored the doubtful expression on her face. “What can I tell you? What the General says goes.”
“Koenig Pasha?” Hani looked suddenly relieved. “Not Zara’s idea? Not yours . . .”
Raf shook his head, his half smile a reflection of hers.
Hani nodded. “I was worried,” she said, “that it was Zara. If it’s Koenig Pasha who says we must lie, then that’s different . . .” Her shrug was almost comically adult. “Lying is his job.” For a second, she sounded almost exactly like her late unlamented Aunt Nafisa.
There were, it turned out, two entirely separate levels of morality in Hani’s world. One occupied by those, like him, her and Zara, who weren’t meant to lie, and another given over to those destined to massacre the truth.
Pushing himself to his feet, Raf wondered what would happen when the child finally realized that if he was a spy, then she’d got him filed under the wrong group.
“Where are you going?” Hani demanded.
“Out,” said Raf.
“The murder?”
Raf shook his head. “Something else . . .”
Hani regarded him carefully. “I thought you were going to leave finding Avatar to someone called Eduardo?”
“Hani!”
“So I listened,” said the child. “Anyway . . . you need me to help with the search.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes you do,” said Hani.
“There is no way,” said Raf, his voice firm, “that you’re coming with me.”
“Who wants to come with you?” Hani said dismissively. Scrambling to her feet, she waved one hand in front of her screen and watched it blink back to life. A pass of her thumb over a floating track ball and the active window closed, revealing an aerial shot of the city.
“He’s locked in a cellar,” said Hani, voice casual. “There’s stale water outside.”
“What kind of stale water?”
“So you do want my help?”
Raf sighed.
“Ali Bey ordered the Mahmoudiya Canal built in 1817,” Hani said carefully. “On the far side, a green tram comes towards the window, then turns left . . .”
“Anything else?” Raf didn’t know what else to say.
Hani nodded. “Turbini. No.” She stopped, correcting herself. “Not turbini. Freight trains, long ones that rattle, somewhere behind the room. Which means he’s . . .” She touched the picture, pulling up a tight lattice of streets, where tramlines ran south along Rue Amoud, before turning into Avenue Mahmoudiya. At the bottom of the picture, on the other side of the canal, a fat ribbon of track ran towards a rail yard. “Somewhere round here.”
“And you know this how?”
Hani nodded to a toy tortoise gathering dust in one corner of her bedroom. It was old, with overrounded edges and what proved to be fractal patterns playing constantly across its shell, like swirling clouds. Someone had applied a sticker of a cartoon rabbit, then tried to peel it off sometime later, leaving a sticky patch and half a smug, bucktoothed face.
The tortoise was so ancient that it connected by cable to the wall feed, with another cable run round the edge of Hani’s room to her screen.
“I used Herbert,” said Hani.