“I’m sure you will,” said Raf gently. “But the trial will be held in Iskandryia. Not in The Hague or Paris or Berlin. And I’m relying on you to be a judge . . . The court will be calling Jean René . . .”
Ernst von Bismarck nodded knowledgeably.
“The photographer who filmed the aftermath of the massacre,” Raf explained. “I should also inform you,” he added, pulling Hani’s scribbled note from his pocket, “that my intelligence officers tell me Hamzah Effendi may call a character witness from his own brigade.”
“Impossible,” the Graf said. “Every one of them died except Hamzah. I’ve read the report.”
“If that’s true,” said Raf with a smile, “it should make for an interesting trial.”
The Graf frowned. “I will inform Berlin of the situation.”
“How?” Raf asked and watched the Graf realize that doing so would be less simple than he’d imagined. “How will you go about informing Berlin?”
“By letter. There’s a passenger service to Syracuse . . .”
“If it runs.”
Both ferries would run, Raf already knew that, because one of the first things he’d done was send Hakim to Maritime Station to find out which of the regular boats had been caught in the blast and which, if any, had been lucky enough to be at sea.
They were currently two Soviet liners without electricity, a worthless aircraft carrier, and half a dozen expensive yachts that now needed a partial refit. The people who owned those could afford the damage. It was worse for the fishing boats. Almost all of those had lost their navigation systems and sonar. They also had engines that now wouldn’t start.
“Oh,” said Raf, “if you do write, be sure to tell Berlin that I’m closing the city. A total curfew is being imposed. Other than mine, all cars are banned, assuming any still work. No one comes in or leaves without my written permission . . . My handwritten permission,” he added grimly. “Except for those travelling under a diplomatic passport or a carte blanche, obviously enough. And the accredited press. They can come in. They can even bring cameras. Leaving, of course, is another matter.”
“How long . . . ?”
“Until we catch the bombers.” Raf rose from his chair, waited until the Graf realized his meeting was over, then walked the young German to the chamber door.
“I have a city in meltdown,” he told the boy, “a natural gas plant that can’t pump natural gas, a petroleum refinery that isn’t refining crude, no electricity, no telephones. The few computers that still work are dying by the minute. Most cars don’t run, garages can’t dispense gas . . . You know what that means? No working hospitals, no schools. Think about it.”
Raf ushered the Graf through the hall and out into the rain. Good-byes said, he went back into the darkened chamber and listened.
“You can come out now,” he said.
Very slowly, Zara appeared. “You knew I was here.” It was half question, half statement.
“I heard you.”
“Across that distance?” She stared in disbelief from where she stood to where Raf and von Bismarck had been sitting.
“I can hear the heartbeat of a bat,” he told her simply, “and see a hunting cat across Zaghloul Square at the dead of night. Everything that has ever happened to me I remember. Everything . . .”
I can’t die, he added in his head. I can only be killed. But he kept those words where they belonged because her smile was already gone, shocked out of being by his honesty, her shock coloured round the edges with unease, even fright.
“You mean it, don’t you?” said Zara.
Did he? Raf nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid I do.” He didn’t mention that he could smell expensive scent oxidizing on the inside of her wrist, an overlay of white willow extract from her shampoo and something underneath all that, much more animal.
“You remember everything?” Zara asked in disbelief.
“Exactly as it happened.” Raf stopped opposite the girl and caught the point at which her eyes widened and she remembered that night they’d spent on her father’s boat. Her mouth had tasted of olives and her breasts had rested heavy in his hands, salt with the memory of a wine-dark sea and blood from where she’d bitten his lip.
There had been more, but not much, not as much as he wanted. Now things between them were broken and the memory was what he had left.
“I’d better get off to bed,” said Raf.
“What about me?”
“Choose a room, use it. Call it protective custody,” Raf suggested. “Find Khartoum,” he added when Zara looked blank. “Tell him to find you something or else share Hani’s room. She’d like that . . .” Raf paused, took a deep breath. “Alternatively, there’s always mine . . .”
“What about seeing the French ambassador?” Zara asked. Which wasn’t exactly what Raf expected her to say.
“What about him?”
“Isn’t he waiting . . . ?”
“Undoubtedly.” Raf shrugged. “I don’t want to see the man,” he said. “And besides, St. Cloud hired a man to have me killed.”
Raf smiled at her surprise.
“The night I first arrived,” he said. “Someone tried to knife me . . . I told Felix. It was one of the things he was investigating when he died . . .”
“What happened to the someone?”
“He attacked me, so I killed him.”
“And that’s the scar?” Zara said when Raf had finished hanging his jacket in an old rosewood cupboard. In her hand was a wineglass, still half-full of white Rioja. It was Raf’s glass. Her own was long since empty.
She pointed to a seam visible along his wrist.
“No,” said Raf, pulling off his shirt. “This is the scar.” He traced a line across his ribs with one finger and felt the faintest echo of hardened tissue. “It was only a flesh wound, nothing more . . .
“What?” he asked when Zara smiled, a little sadly.
The room was lit by a single candle that sat, fat and pale in a dish turned from a single section of monkey puzzle, the ancient wood so thin that the candle’s dancing flame made it translucent. The monkey-puzzle dish sat on an oak table beside a metal bed so old that its horsehair mattress rested on wire mesh. Since the room Raf had chosen was originally meant for the General’s personal use, the choice of bed undoubtedly held some special significance.
Raf had selected the room because Hani had one next door. A small dark space that might once have been a dressing room to this, though the entrance between rooms had been bricked up long enough for the Persian wallpaper that covered it to have faded to faint horsemen who hunted in shadow.
“Blow out the candle.”
“I can see in the dark,” Raf warned Zara.
“Maybe,” she said, “but I can’t.” And so Raf blew out the single candle and the room’s cool air flooded with acrid smoke.
“How?” Zara demanded suddenly. “How do you see in the dark?”
“My eyes adjust . . .” Raf thought about it. “No,” he said, “I adjust my eyes. There’s a difference.”
“Then don’t.”
Raf looked at her.
“Stay blind.”
“If that’s what you want.” The last thing Raf saw before he tuned the room into darkness was Zara unbuttoning the front of her short dress. She wore no bra and her body was as perfect as his memory of it.
He met her clumsily in space that waited between them, neither one quite certain of where the other stood in the darkness. Zara felt his hands reach up to grip her naked shoulders and he felt her fingers brush against his face. And this time their kiss was slower, much less frenzied than that time when they were drunk and tired and on her father’s boat.
Zara’s breath tasted of wine and her throat of salt. He got colours and memories with each kiss, though they might have been imagined. Putting both hands around her, Raf followed her spine with his fingers, pausing only when he reached the silk of her thong.