Jon Grimwood - Effendi

“Here,” said Avatar as he passed over a bottle of cooking brandy. The name was French, the label printed in Isk and the grapes grown in Algiers. Ersatz identity. Coming from nowhere. As fucked up as the city. “Take a drink.”

The man did, gagging on the raw spirit.

“And again.”

When the bottle was almost empty, Avatar walked the man up the darkened stairs to the loading bay and stood him in the middle of a concrete floor that was by then awash with spilt oil, methylated spirits and smashed bottles of brandy. The gas cylinders stood like sentries around the edge.

Using coins, Avatar jammed open the butano valves and, as soon as the smell of gas was strong enough to overpower the stink of evaporating alcohol, he told the man to count down from a hundred and then, when he reached zero light himself a cigarette. The other thing Avatar did before he slammed the bay doors and hiked the volume on his earbead was skim the sushi knife across concrete so it came to a halt beside the bloody relics at the man’s feet.

It was only later, when Avatar was driving his camper van back to Club Neutropic, alibis already building in his mind, that he realized he should have questioned the German before killing him.

If anybody else in the computer room had been stuffing their face with a Big Mac and large fries, chocolate shake and a side dish of onion rings, Madame Roden would have thrown her out, if not banned her altogether.

Because it was Hani, who’d knocked first, asked if she might come in and then smilingly thrust a carton of fries at the fastidious systems manager for the night shift, Madame Roden had politely taken a lukewarm reconstituted fry and chewed it as if sampling a priceless Perigord black truffle.

“Shouldn’t you be at home asleep?” No sooner was the comment made than Madame Roden winced at her own lack of tact. If she’d been recently orphaned like that, she’d have wanted to follow her new uncle everywhere too.

“Uncle Ashraf came back to get some papers,” said Hani, apparently oblivious to the woman’s faux pas . They weren’t really papers, of course. Most of the bey’s day-to-day files downloaded direct to his watch. But a few, the really important ones, he had to sign for with a handprint before collecting them from the precinct’s central datacore.

Madame Roden was responsible for the night running of the core, but it more or less ran itself and most of her shift was spent stopping uniforms from slopping coffee on their keyboards and preventing them from trying to reach unsuitable photographs archived by the morales .

Pictures snatched by police photographers played a big part in most immorality cases. Though, of course, to the morales the grabs were just evidence. Well, to most of them.

Madame Roden shook her head. She shouldn’t even be thinking such stuff with a small child around.

“Could I use a terminal?”

The elderly woman was doubtful. Nothing in police regulations actually forbade it, but then, nothing said it was all right either. As for previous precedents, nine-year-olds wanting to use her computer room were a novelty. Come to that, civilians this side of the front desk were a novelty, full stop. Children or not.

“I saw Kamila on the way in,” Hani said suddenly. “I told her I was coming up here and she said to say hello . . .” Hani grinned. “Hello.”

Madame Roden smiled. She could remember when Kamila was this age. More than ten years ago, though it seemed far less. These days her daughter was a pathologist, reporting direct to Madame Mila, unbelievable though this was.

“Can I?”

Madame Roden blinked. “Yes, of course,” she said, slightly bemused. Hani had that effect on her. Actually Madame Roden had noticed the child had that effect on most people.

“Thank you,” said Hani and scrambled up onto a seat to tap the space bar in front of her, waking the terminal.

“Do you want me to help you find something to play with?”

Hani shook her head. She liked the neatly dressed elderly woman, but that didn’t mean she felt guilty about tricking her. Life had long since taught her that all adults existed to be tricked, except maybe Ashraf, but her uncle was different.

“No, thank you,” Hani said politely. “I’m going to write another fairy tale.”

“Another?”

Hani smiled. “About Suliman the Magnificent and the angry djinn . . .”

As soon as she had the screen to herself, Hani went to her postbox, grabbed a half-finished story she’d started months before and pasted it into the precinct’s basic word-processing package over a scuzzy parchment background. Rubbish page texture and rubbish font. At home she had fifty-three kinds of illuminated capital alone, most of them lifted from a university archive in Al Qahirah.

Minimizing Suliman’s Dream, trope III and twisting her screen slightly so that it was no longer overlooked, Hani did a double log-in, remaining as a guest but adding a window that knew her as Mushin Bey, husband to her dead aunt Jalila, not to mention Minister of Police, thus Ashraf’s theoretical boss.

One rumour said Uncle Mushin was at home, sitting in darkness grieving for his dead wife, another had him in a clinic getting over a long-term alcohol habit. Hani preferred the second theory.

No one had thought to cancel Mushin Bey’s network access. No one had even changed his password, which inevitably was Jalila.

Top access, obviously. Superuser status. Hani doubted her uncle even knew what that meant or entailed. Flicking her fingers from key to key, Hani called up a current crime list and highlighted only the ones that had been mentioned on the news by Ferdie Abdullah.

Then she decided to read about the girl found on Hamzah’s beach and changed her mind two paragraphs in. A lot of the medical words were strange to her, but enough of the others made sense enough for her to close the file.

“I wonder,” said a voice, “have you seen . . .”

“In the computer room, Ya Bey.” Madame Roden never quite knew whether or not to smile when she met Ashraf al-Mansur. True, he was her husband’s boss, which meant she should. But then there was all that sad stuff with his dead aunt. And Kamila’s boss Madame Mila apparently hated him. And it was said poor Mushin Bey couldn’t hear the name al-Mansur without falling into a rage. As if the bey could have saved everyone from those terrible assassins.

His Excellency looked positively ill with exhaustion, poor man.

At the door, Raf turned. “I should thank you,” he said. “For letting Hani use a machine.”

“A pleasure.” The small woman blushed.

“Do you know what she’s doing?”

“Writing another story, Your Excellency, so she says . . .”

“That sounds about right.” Raf nodded to Madame Roden and went to his office, where a black bakelite phone was trying to wake the dead. The telephone had to be some kind of joke. At least, Raf assumed it was. Felix had definitely been making a statement of some kind.

Raf had moved straight into the fat man’s office. Not bothering to get the place redecorated first. Claimed the man’s desk too. In the bottom right drawer, behind a box of nanopore gloves, was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, more than half-full. Four empty bottles occupied the drawer on the left. That seemed to be about the extent of the old Chief’s filing skills.

Raf was about to pick up the receiver when the phone went dead and a bulb lit, signifying that his assistant had finally arrived. He checked his Seiko—8.30A .M., Sunday morning. Raf sighed.

“Caffeine,” he demanded, punching a button on a bulky office intercom. Another of Felix’s joke purchases, presumably. “Please,” Raf added as a belated afterthought.