Jon Grimwood - Effendi

He listened in silence, nodding seriously now and then like a man agreeing with a particularly pertinent point. Not everyone had an elegant Silver Seiko that double-encrypted conversation and screened itself from vanP hacking.

“ Na’am, I understand.” Eduardo did too—really—but just to be sure he asked the man to repeat his instructions more slowly.

Eduardo liked his new job. He even had an office, a third-storey walk-up off Place Orabi, above a haberdasher’s at the back of the bus depot. With the office and watch came new shoes, new trousers and a zip-up leather jacket that looked old and tatty unless you got really close, when it was possible to see that the scuff marks were printed onto the animal hide.

The man who gave Eduardo the jacket had pulled out a gravity knife, dropped its blade and driven it hard into the leather. The sharp point of the blade hardly even left a mark.

“Mesh,” he told Eduardo, “ultrafine, from spiders that shit steel.” Eduardo didn’t know whether the man was making fun of him or not. All the same, Eduardo liked what he now did. Which was mostly sit in cafés and talk politics, something he wasn’t sure he really understood. Listening to the counterarguments, Eduardo had discovered a talent for separating half-truth from mere wish. A cast-iron, built-in bullshit detector, the man called it, speaking as if such a machine might actually exist.

Eduardo imagined it as small, with cogwheels that whirred and narrow brass pipes that grew hot from circulating water. When Eduardo was a child he lived in a small burg in Namibia and the local train, to Windhoek and back, had run on coal and wood, dried dung too when the shortages began, though dung didn’t work that well.

“Mmm . . .” Eduardo said, nodding. “Sure thing.” He tossed a handful of silver onto the table. Time to go. His watch didn’t need him to shut down the connection, because it did that for itself. It did other things too, like bring him the latest football results and forecast that it was going to rain.

“Things to do,” he said to Frisco, speaking Ladino. “Deals to make.” Iskandryia was a city with a number of languages that might claim to be the lingua franca, of which Spanish Hebrew was just one. The other man nodded. Frisco had told Eduardo his real name but Eduardo kept forgetting, though he remembered that the man claimed his forefathers were moriscos, expelled from Spain.

When Eduardo started coming to the café, he and Frisco had played a few games of chess but now the old man made excuses not to play, probably because Eduardo kept losing.

Inside Eduardo’s office the air was cool, which was a miracle given his desk fan had fused and the October sun beat direct on an outside wall; but the walls were thick, built decades before from limestone blocks stolen from a Coptic church three streets away. And anyway, closed shutters kept out much of the brightness. There was also an air-conditioning unit attached to one wall, a brown box that stuck its metal arse out into the street, as if threatening to shit on pedestrians beneath. Unfortunately that had been broken ever since someone hid a wank mag up the air outlet. When Eduardo first took the box apart to see if anything obvious was broken, he’d been left with frayed wires, rusting iron pipes and mildewed, disintegrating pictures of pale nipples and shaven pudenda.

So he’d put the casing back together and pushed the mags back where he found them, and now tiny mushrooms grew in clusters on the grey carpet, right below where the unit dripped water.

A Sony Eon3 sat on an otherwise clear desk. A simple Luxor terminal, he’d chosen it at random in a souk at the back of Rue Faransa. Glued to its side was an anonymizer, which had been given him by the man. On the ’mizer was a label,PROPERTY OF EL ISKANDRYIA POLICE DEPARTMENT: NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM CHAMPOLLION PRECINCT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Punching a key, Eduardo started random number software and waited. Without him having to ask, the terminal popped up a comms screen and Eduardo keyed in the number he’d just been given. Then he did what the man had told him to do.

Eduardo didn’t know that he was being rerouted or that, at the receiving end, his call was logged as having come direct from Fez; all Eduardo knew was that a tiny icon on the screen’s task bar lit green and a connection got made.

The person who picked up at the other end said nothing to introduce himself, which was fine, because that was what Eduardo had been told to expect.

“I’m taking the contract.”

“Who gave you the details?” The voice was gruff.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“What guarantees do I have that the job will be done?”

“None.”

“By the day after tomorrow or the line of credit closes.”

“Tomorrow night,” said Eduardo and broke the connection.

“Don’t you like pastries?” Hani sounded puzzled instead of angry. She’d been ploughing her way through a dozen basbousa, stuffing them into her mouth with sticky fingers at the start, then eating more slowly and finally nibbling, mouselike around the edge, once she realized Raf wasn’t going to tell her to stop.

Her lunchtime vitamin stood untouched by her plate.

“What?”

Raf glanced up to find dark eyes staring at him from a pinched face. He tried to make sure he and Hani ate together at weekends, while Donna bustled around in the background, banging together pans and clattering knives into a double stone sink, each side large enough to be a horse trough.

The kitchen took up most of the ground floor of the al-Mansur madersa. Outside was a tiled courtyard with a fountain and beyond that a stone garden house, then a walled garden, roofed over with glass.

Above the kitchen was the qaa, where important guests were greeted. This had a large marble floor and smaller indoor fountain. The haremlek was a suite of rooms above the qaa and Raf’s floor was at the top, above the haremlek.

The madersa was vast, old and badly in need of repair, but no other room was as large as Donna’s kitchen, which seemed to spread in all directions.

It had taken Raf a while to realize that Donna’s clattering wasn’t irritation at finding him cluttering up her space, which was so big a crowd couldn’t have cluttered it; she objected to his presence for different reasons. People like Hani and His Excellency were meant to eat upstairs, at a marble table in the elegant qaa, waited on by others.

“You’re not listening to me . . .” Hani said crossly.

“I’m sorry . . .” She was right. He wasn’t.

There wasn’t much else Raf could say. But Hani wanted more. Something dismissive of her concern, something adult. He could see that in her eyes, the wish for a fight so that she could stop being worried for him and go back to being angry.

“Look,” he said softly, “let it go, okay?”

By the time the noise of her falling chair had finished echoing round the kitchen, Hani was out of the room and racing up the outside steps to the qaa . Raf listened to her shoes slap the floor overhead, then heard Hani slam a hand against the button for the lift. Seconds later the madersa’s ancient Orvis creaked into action.

Raf put his head in his hands. When he looked up again Donna was sitting on the other side of the table and in front of him was a tiny cup of Turkish coffee. It was the old woman’s cure for everything.

“The child’s young, Your Excellency.”

Raf nodded.

“And she’s scared.”

“That I will send her away?”

Donna shook her head and discreetly rubbed her crucifix. “That you will die.” The old woman’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Since her aunt . . . She dreams all the time. That you die and she be left here alone.” Donna shrugged. “They would not let people like me look after Lady Hana. They would not let me live here . . .”