And, in a sense, the tenements and sprawl of empty warehouses didn't exist for most people in Iskandryia: for them, the slums were invisible and unnoticed, except by felaheen who didn't vote or would only have voted the wrong way if they did. America might stack its urban poor one family on top of another in high-rise blocks but in North Africa the poor were marginalized in a more literal sense ... They lived at the barren edges of its cities or in occupied unwanted spaces like this one — which existed between a tramline and the dockside railway, was edged along its third side by a canal and slid, on its one good side, from squalor through poverty to the almost picturesque as it finally meshed with the souks of the El Gomruk ...
'Up here,' said Raf, reaching a ladder. His voice echoed inside the empty warehouse the way kicking down its door had echoed off derelict buildings outside.
Above was a prefabricated office, slung between two steel girders originally added to strengthen the brick walls of the warehouse. The spiral staircase that should have led up to it was missing, so maybe Zara's tale of an upset hotel was untrue.
'Can't see,' Hani protested. She sounded cross and upset, but at least she'd started talking.
'I can,' said Raf. 'I'll go first and you follow after.' Part of him wanted to do it the other way round — so that he could catch Hani in case she slipped — but it was impossible to know what he might find in the office, so he went first. He could have made her stay below, of course, but he knew the child would like that even less.
'How can you see?' Hani asked scornfully. 'It's dark.'
'Ali-Din can see in the dark.'
'That's different.'
'Why?'
'Because Ali-Din is only ..."
Her voice trailed away and Raf started climbing. Left hand pulling him up the ladder, his right tightly gripping the fat man's revolver.
The prefab was empty of people and full of kit. Each wall was smothered with cheap Ikea shelving, the bolt-together kind. Metal tables were pushed hard against the shelves. The only gap on the walls was a window, that would have looked north along the dockside towards Maritime Station if someone hadn't covered it over with tar paper and taped along all the edges. There was a sourly mechanical, almost chemical stink to the place, underlaid with stale tobacco.
Most of the kit in the room was instantly recognizable, like two stand-alone Median PCs and an Apple laptop with a fold-out satellite dish, which was definitely illegal. Plus a stack of vinyl piled next to a Blaupunkt mixing desk. The rest of the apparatus was far weirder. Starting with a full scuba suit, matching quadruple oxygen bottles and a shrink-wrapped box of sterile 1000ml beakers stacked next to the entrance hatch.
And someone had gone to the trouble of dragging plastic drums of distilled water up to the office. But that was the least of it. In one corner was a Braun freezer, wired to a bank of car batteries. In the opposite corner, a cupboard made of glass had an extractor hood taped and double-taped to its top, with a duct leading straight out through an outside wall.
On a table by the cupboard a long glass spiral of tubes fed down to a sealed beaker and every ring in the spiral was joined to the next with a ground-glass joint. Jammed between two of the rings was a half-smoked packet of untipped Cleopatra, while a battered paperback copy of Uncle Fester's Organic Chemistry leaned against the beaker. The Fester's was the edition with a skull on its cover.
Inside a medical chest placed on the floor next to the table were bandages, burn salve, spray skin, surgical glue, a small canister of Japanese oxygen and a box of surgical gloves. There were also a dozen more packets of untipped Cleopatra.
'What have you found?' Hani demanded.
'A kitchen,' said Raf as he returned to the trap door and put out a hand to help her up, 'but not the kind you know.' He tried not to mind that the child flinched away from his grip.
'Wake up,' said Hani.
Raf came to on his feet. Banging into shelving as he spun, hand going for his shoulder holster before he remembered he didn't wear one these days and the gun was in his pocket.
Instinctively, he checked the fat man's revolver, fast-flipping the cylinder. Out and in. The weapon was one shot light — as if he could forget.
Still, with luck, whoever Ali-Din said was coming wouldn't know that.
'Ali-Din ...?'
Raf stopped.
'How does Ali-Din know someone's coming?
In answer, Hani put her puppy on a table by the taped-over window. The rag dog shuffled round and swung its large head until its eyes stared at where the tenements would be visible in the early-morning daylight, if only plyboard and tar paper hadn't replaced the glass. When its head stopped swaying, its blue-buttoned tail started to wag, like a faulty metronome.
'Don't tell me,' Raf said. 'The nearer the person, the faster the wag?'
Hani nodded.
'So it's a friend?'
Hani's eyes went wide, impressed at his grasp.
'A friend?' Raf stressed, even though he already knew the answer.
Whoever had given the toy to Hani had chosen an expensive model. Though the mechanics couldn't be that difficult. To greet or growl the unit wouldn't even need satellite tracking — not the visual kind, anyway. Simple band scanning could check numbers on a mobile against basic visual recognition software and have the wag or growl defined either by how the child had reacted visually to that person before, or else, if the unit was really expensive, by reading off stress levels or beta waves.
There'd be a time lag of a few seconds but nothing too difficult to hide.
'Tell me,' said Raf, as he pocketed the revolver and headed for the trapdoor. 'Wag or growl? Which did Ali-Din do when he saw Aunt Nafisa?' Hani still hadn't answered when he reached the bottom of the ladder ...
'Sweet fuck.' Raf forgot all about saying hello to Zara. Instead he stepped out into the morning glare, scrabbling for his dark glasses. He still couldn't get used to the North African sun, not after the grey skies of Seattle and the equally soft skies of Switzerland and Scotland before that.
Zara was dressed in tight black jeans, matched with a white silk shirt with long sleeves, no bra and only flip-flops on her feet. But it was her split lip he noticed.
'Leave it,' she said, when he tried to check the swelling. She stopped outside the warehouse door, refusing to go any further. 'I want to know why you shot Felix ...'
'He was already dying. I just speeded it up.'
Zara sighed. 'How very macho.' She pulled a print of Iskandryia Today from under her arm. 'You sure it wasn't because he told the truth about Lady Nafisa's suicide?'
'How do you ... ?' Raf demanded.
'The whole city knows,' said Zara and shoved the front page in his face. Felix stared out, looking fifteen years younger and a hundred pounds thinner than when Raf had last seen him. There was no picture of Raf, though the words Suicide, Lady Nafisa, and Ashraf Bey made cross-heads down two columns on the right.
'Nafisa didn't commit suicide,' Raf said flatly. 'She was too devout, too respectable.' He put heavy stress on the last word, and knew it to be true. Delete and discard were functions his unconscious had never had to master. He could actually see Lady Nafisa, alive inside his head, retiring to her room five times a day for prayers. See her reprimanding Hani for playing with Ali-Din that first Friday when the child should have been reading quietly or practising needlework.
Suicide was a sin.
Besides, she was too selfish, too in love with who she was to throw over worldly grandeur without a fight. Lady Nafìsa didn't cast herself into darkness. Someone forced her through that door ...
'There's been a couple of people on the radio who agree it wasn't suicide,' said Zara. 'They say it was you.'