South from Place Zaghloul ran Rue Missala, a thoroughfare lined with restaurants. And right on the corner, with entrances on both Zaghloul Square and the rue sat Le Trianon, Iskandryia's most famous Art Nouveau café. On its walls were equally famous paintings, a series of seven increasingly unlikely tableaux depicting full-breasted dancers, naked save for open shirts and jewelled slippers.
The fox didn't like the paintings. But then, the fox was a purist and had problems with Orientalist kitsch. And the fact that the fox was invisible to everyone but ZeeZee didn't make it any less real. Though it wasn't real, of course, not in the way the yellow cabs lurching along Rue Missala were real. ZeeZee had come up with a number of explanations for its existence. The fox's favourite was that it was an autonomous construct of unprocessed dark memory.
In other times it might have been regarded as a ghost ...
Sitting outside Le Trianon in an area roped off from pedestrians, the thin blond observer with the flowing beard and tangled dreadlocks washed down his second croissant with the dregs of his third capuccino: and wished that what passed for breakfast at the madersa where he was staying would feed more than a stray mouse.
Ashraf al-Mansur — known as ZeeZee to the police, his therapist and a Chinese Triad boss who was undoubtedly even now searching the world to have him killed — had hated the interior of Le Trianon on sight. But since he'd needed to find somewhere to spend his mornings, this café was where he'd taken to eating. Now he just found the interior irritating.
'Another capuccino, your excellency?'
Adjusting his Versace shades and brushing pastry flakes from the sleeve of his black silk suit, the young man nodded. 'Why not,' he said slowly. It wasn't like he had anything else to do.
'Very good, your excellency.' The Italian waiter bustled away, totally ignoring two English tourists who'd been waiting ten minutes for him to take their order. It was Saturday morning, four days after he'd arrived in the city, two days after he'd first met the industrialist Hamzah Quitrimala and one day after he'd finally agreed to marry the man's 'difficult' daughter. And every day, bar the the day he'd actually arrived, he'd visited the café.
So now he was being treated as a regular. Which made sense, because by treating him as such, the patron hoped that was what he would become. Besides, once the patron had discovered that the excellency with the matted beard and odd hair would be working upstairs, it became inevitable that ZeeZee should take his place in a magic group who got tables when they wanted, exactly where they wanted them.
Situated directly over the café were the offices of the Third Circle of Irrigation, famous as the department where Iskandryia's greatest poet, Constantine Cavafy, once worked. What the Third Circle actually did ZeeZee had no idea, despite having arrived on time at the offices every morning for the last three days. He was beginning to think they did nothing.
Certainly his assistant had looked deeply shocked that first morning when ZeeZee suggested he be told how the office operated. Politely, speaking English with an immaculate accent, the older man had made a firm but smiling counter-suggestion. His excellency might like to try Le Trianon, which was where many of the other directors spent their mornings — and their afternoons, too, come to that.
ZeeZee's office occupied a corner site and his excellency had done enough corporate shit in the US to know the prestige that carried. What was more, it overlooked Zaghloul and Missala, making it prime real estate. And everyone in the office was polite, way too polite, which meant Hamzah Quitrimala had a big mouth. Albeit no bigger than ZeeZee's own, because his had been the throwaway comment that started a rumour-become-certain-fact that he was a traumatized survivor from one of the greatest fundamentalist atrocities in living history.
'Your Excellency ...' It was the patron himself, rather than the waiter who'd taken the original order. Putting the capuccino carefully on the table, the patron picked up a crumb-strewn plate and hesitated.
'Did your excellency enjoy breakfast?'
ZeeZee nodded, adding, 'Mumken lehsab,' as he instinctively scrawled an imaginary pen across an imaginary payment slip in the universal demand for the bill.
'Of course ... Although perhaps his excellency would like to keep a tab?'
'Perhaps he would.'
Make like a chameleon. Acclimatize, was what the fox said. If you had time, that was, and ZeeZee was making time. Whether his position with the Third Circle made the difference or the fact that he ranked as a bey, life in El Iskandryia was proving easier than he'd ever dreamed possible when he stepped off the plane. But then, after prison, almost anything was going to be an improvement.
He just wished he could remember at what point the fox had disappeared. He was pretty sure it had been there right up to the point they hit Immigration. And ZeeZee always hated it when the fox went invisible on him. It was like suddenly not being able to see in the dark.
Chapter Three
29th June
Tiri had definitely been there when ZeeZee first landed in Iskandryia, twisting itself in and out of people's legs, sometimes so thinned by distance that ZeeZee lost track of everything but the fox's silver tail and hacking cough.
Too many cigarettes, a biology master had told him years before, when ZeeZee had asked why a cub stood choking in a distant field, shoulders hunched as it tried to throw up a splinter of bone. The other men present had laughed and one had rumpled the small boy's blond hair.
My own little wild animal, the visitor called him. That was just before ZeeZee decided to fail all his exams ...
'Read this.' An immigration officer in khaki thrust a green embarkation card into ZeeZee's hand and waved him towards the end of a queue. There were several queues, all moving inexorably towards a row of desks where simple polygraphs stood waiting, their guts exposed to the air. A golem-featured man from the line alongside glanced over and ZeeZee thought for a moment he was going to nod or say something. But he just stared at ZeeZee's matted hair and then looked away.
It was one of those evenings.
On the card was a list of statements to be read aloud, in a choice of French, Arabic, German or English ...
He wasn't a drug addict.
He wasn't infectious.
He didn't plan to overthrow the khedive ...
So far so good. ZeeZee skimmed his eyes down the next three prohibitions against entering El Iskandryia.
He wasn't planning to purchase for export any classical or Pharaonic artefacts.
He didn't belong to a proscribed fundamentalist group.
He'd never been charged with murder. Except he had ...
It might have been the last prohibition that made ZeeZee sweat, or it could have been the lack of air-conditioning. Whatever, he was still sweating when he reached the head of his queue to find himself facing a middle-aged man who wore a fez, an oiled moustache, a gold lapel pin shaped in the name of God and a rectangular tag that announced he was Sergeant Aziz.
'Where did your journey begin?' demanded the sergeant.
'America,' said ZeeZee and Aziz nodded. Given the bleached dreadlocks, hobo beard and beige elephants stampeding across an ill-fitting sports shirt it was unlikely the thin man came from anywhere else.
'Make your declaration,' the sergeant said. So ZeeZee put his hand on the plate and let Aziz click shut a wrist band. Then he swore his beliefs away, only stumbling when he reached the final prohibition.
'Again,' demanded the sergeant.
'I have never murdered anybody,' said ZeeZee flatly and every diode on the cheap Matsui lie detector stayed green. On the far side of the desk the fox grinned like the fox he was and, without thinking, ZeeZee grinned back.