Under his tatty jacket the unconscious man wore a shoulder holster and nestled inside that, still locked in place by a Velcro strap, was a snub-nosed revolver, with letters engraved along its chassis that readgenuine Colt, made in USA . The sharp edges to that lie made it obvious that the actual place of origin was some local sweatshop.
Which worried Raf a lot.
That there were two sides to Hamzah Effendi was common knowledge. The family man and the crime boss, Jekyll Effendi to Felaheen Hyde. Offend the first and he’d buy out your company and close it down. Offend the second and he’d slaughter your children, bulldoze your house into the ground and sow that ground with rock salt. There was something very biblical about some of those reports on file.
Kidnapping Hamzah’s child, even a bastard born without property rights, was the crime-world equivalent to standing on the rails at Masr Station and trying to hold back an incoming train. There might not be quicker ways to commit suicide but there were undoubtedly a dozen ways that were more pleasant.
So why do it? And why do it with cheap labour?
“Up you go.” Raf waved his hand at the cat, which had just taken to sharpening its claws on the edge of a banister. The grey cat left via the roof stairs without a backward glance.
Raf telescoped the cosh and put it in his pocket. The fake Colt got stuffed into his belt. One cosh and three guns—his own, the Browning from the roof and now the fake—plus a black glass blade, its edge ground so sharp as to be almost fractal. That was what the advertising promised anyway. The fawn jacket he stripped off the unconscious man and shrugged his way into, feeling the cloth flop round his shoulders.
Holding a gun in each hand, Raf stamped his way down the flight of steps, pulling the clumsy tread of the other man from memory. He remembered in time to bang into the upright at the bottom and casually shoulder open the kitchen door rather than use its handle. Two men and a boy glanced up, boredom becoming alarm when they realized that whoever Raf was he wasn’t one of them.
“No,” said Raf, twitching one gun, “don’t get up.” He spoke Arabic, his accent understandable if atrocious. “And there’s no need for anyone to die . . .” Just for a second the dark void of his gun’s muzzle hovered over the heart of the boy.
“Unless that’s your choice?”
They’d all shaken their heads before Raf had time to finish his question.
“Good,” said Raf, and found that he meant it. He also found he’d been wrong about them cooking. It was takeout he’d been able to smell.
In front of them, on a cracked pine table stood a foil plate filled with gristle and mutton bones, beside an even larger container that had held couscous. A half-empty jar of harissa sat nearby. As did unleavened bread and a jar lid’s worth of stubbed-out roaches and twists of torn cardboard.
Carbohydrate and kif, two good ways to waste one’s edge. Not that any of the three gave much sign of having had an edge to start with.
“Weapons on the table . . .”
A motley collection of go-faster revolvers and flashy switchblades piled up next to the foil containers. All fake pearl handles and fuck-me electronic sights that looked great and did nothing constructive.
“All of them.”
A couple of boot knives and a pair of brass knuckledusters joined the growing pile. It reminded Raf of the trash that he used to take off teenagers at the door of BonBon, back in Seattle, in the days before Raf fell out with Hu San, leader of the local Triad, and had to become someone else.
“And the rest . . .”
The middle one, whom Raf had figured for the boy’s father and the old man’s young brother, pulled out a one-shot throw-down from the back of his belt and sullenly placed it next to his knife.
“Now put them into this,” said Raf, pushing across the foil container that had held couscous. Obediently, the three began piling up weapons, taking care not to point the guns anywhere near Raf.
Sit down, stand up, sit down. . . Every time they did what Raf ordered, the imprinting got stronger; that was how the human psyche worked . . . Had Raf been about to kill them, it would have been the right time. He assumed they were bright enough to understand that. And yet they were still way too casual.
“You do know who you’ve kidnapped?” Raf looked at the boy, the one who’d shivered under the gaze of Raf’s gun. Not only was he the youngest, he was also less obviously stoned. What Raf got by way of reply was a slight shake of the head. Though that turned out to be not in answer to the who part of Raf’s question but the what. The kid was arguing definitions.
“We didn’t kidnap anybody. We’re just guarding him.”
“And that’s meant to make a difference?”
The boy shrugged.
“It’s DJ Avatar,” Raf said. “Hamzah Effendi’s kid.”
The kid looked suddenly shocked. But even that wasn’t straightforward. It turned out he liked Avatar’s music. Hamzah didn’t figure.
“He’s been fucking arrested,” said the old man. “For torturing a nasrani to death.”
“Raped her first,” the boy’s father added. “He’s in prison.”
“Really?” Raf asked. “Who arrested him?”
“Ashraf-fucking-Bey. It happened yesterday.”
“No,” said Raf. “That’s not what happened. Believe me.”
“Yes it is . . .” The old man’s pupils were dilated beyond their natural limit, expanded so much they looked like the eyes of someone with a fatal head wound, fixed at that point when the pupils explode. Whatever the man’s poison, it was serious stuff.
“On his own beach,” added the boy, sounding suitably outraged.
They left via a back door into a rear alley, having collected both their lookout and Ismail, two men with evil headaches but no worse. The kind of small-time fry, all of them, evolved by every ghetto to fit the niches that others reject. Life’s bottom feeders; too disorganized to mastermind their own events, at least not ones that worked, and not hard enough to handle real trouble. That they’d been hired to guard Avatar made no sense at all.
Pulling his automatic from its holster, Raf prowled the house, leaving the locked cellar until last. The roof was deserted and the attic empty. So Raf took the few remaining bulbs from their sockets and locked the roof door before sweeping the level below, where bedrooms had once been. Four empty rooms, filled with acrid dust and silence. Broken chairs filled the far corner of one. In another, some clochard had started a small fire on tiles that had cracked. A handful of Thunderbird cans lay blackened in the ashes. Taking each bulb in turn, Raf locked those doors too, using the iron mortise locks common to North Africa. Just to be on the safe side he pocketed the keys.
Empty houses were a familiar sight south of Mahmoudia. At least they were on that stretch west of Rue Menascae, where an area of almost sufficiency surrendered to the dank touch of institutionalized poverty. For streets to be derelict there was as normal as finding crack houses at crossroads, or overcrowded tenements that overlooked unsafe playgrounds, dead trees standing reminder to unmet aspirations.
Travel companies did a good line in offering the “real Iskandryia” from the safety of air-conditioned coaches. As if the arrondissement ’s simmering resentment somehow made it more real than the old wealth of the Greek District or the comfortable red-bricked mansion blocks near the fish market.
“Enough already,” said Raf, adding his varied collection of keys and bulbs to the weapons discarded by Avatar’s guards. There was nothing he needed in the empty kitchen. It was time to find the cellar.
The Daimler-Benz parked below theFOR SALE sign had smoked windows and whitewall tyres, newish but dusty from trawling through too many back streets. The vehicle had hire car written all over it.