Jon Grimwood - Effendi

Raf did, but he wasn’t about to say so. “And the wounds,” he said, “no change at all?”

A blank look.

“Upward slash from pubis to throat, a right to left across the rib cage, entrails disturbed . . .” And if ever there was an appropriate word disturbed was it. Three psy-profilers had been busy from the start trying to explain exactly what that shit with the ripped guts might signify. So far, their sole conclusion was that the mutilation was historically interesting.

Madame Mila nodded, tight-lipped.

“You took a close look?”

Another nod.

Which probably explained the tightness in her eyes, thought Raf. She had slight sweat marks under her arms and tiny beads of perspiration where her dark hair was pulled into a shape nature never meant it to hold. By anyone else’s standards Madame Mila still looked immaculate: judged by her own, the woman was a wreck.

“Go on,” said Raf. “Get out of here.” He meant it kindly but that wasn’t how his comment was taken.

Instead Madame Mila bridled. She actually pulled herself up to her full height, slight though that was.

“Out,” Raf said, finally losing his patience. “I want all of you out of here . . . Except for you,” he added and pointed to a uniform at random. “You get to finish taping off the crime scene and chase sightseers away.”

The uniform glanced at his young lieutenant, who glared at Raf, caught between outrage and a growing unease. Madame Mila just felt the outrage, which was how she got her question in first.

“Just who do . . .”

“. . . oes he think he is? . . . interesting question.” The fox had Raf take out his two-line letter and hand it to the furious woman. “. . . erson giving orders, like it or not.”

Raf shut his eyes.

He was standing, dead on his feet, in an almost deserted car park, outside a firebombed casino, in a city undergoing meltdown, with five different flavours of police, none of whom knew his real name, his record or that he was meant to be serving time for . . .

Well, welcome to the Apocalypso . . .

Except that was a club, wasn’t it? Somewhere in downtown Zurich. He used to be driven past it on his way from the airport to school.

“. . . ap out of it,” hissed the fox.

“Why?”

Madame Mila stared at him. “Why what?” Somehow she managed to add Your Excellency to the end of that sentence, as she handed back his letter. Though she did it through gritted teeth.

Raf ignored her. “Why?” he demanded, only this time when he spoke it was inside his own head.

“. . . ause you need to sleep and I’ve got to go.”

“No.” Raf’s silent refusal was loud enough to set his own teeth on edge. “You can’t go.”

“. . . y to stop me,” the fox whispered, its voice fading. And Raf wasn’t sure if that was a threat, a plea or a simple suggestion. Whatever, he had to try.

“You,” Raf said, turning to the lieutenant. “You carrying any meth?”

“No, sir.” The shake of the head was emphatic.

No use asking her.

Stamping past Madame Mila as if she didn’t exist, Raf reached one of the cherry tops just as its driver slid into gear. The crime-locale tech pulled back into neutral when Raf rapped on the glass. A whir of electrics and cigarette smoke billowed from a suddenly open window. Smoking was illegal on duty for all ranks in all departments, but neither of them bothered with that.

“Meth, got any?”

Dark eyes looked at Raf from behind dark glasses. If the tech thought Raf couldn’t see his expression, then he hadn’t allowed for the Chief recalibrating his vision.

“Me, personally, Your Excellency?”

“Evidence, stuff on the way to a lab?”

“I’m not . . .”

“Redeem yourself,” said Raf and held out his hand. Sometime or other, he was going to have to find out their names, what jobs they did, official stuff like that.

Raf weighed the evidence bag, appreciatively. Fifty ready-made origamis of . . .

“What is it?”

“Dunno, Your Excel . . . Boss.” The techie shrugged. “We haven’t taken it to the labs.”

“You mean,” said Raf, “you haven’t taken it to the labs yet .”

The techie nodded.

Ripping open a fold, Raf tasted the earth-grey powder and felt the tip of his tongue disappear. “Ice,” he told the tech, “about sixty percent pure . . .” Raf debated cutting out a line and finding himself a clean note to roll but that seemed too much like hard work. So he just tipped the entire origami into his mouth and chewed, crunching crystals like sherbet. There was a synthetic sweetness that said someone had cut the dose with sorbitol.

Great, so tomorrow or the next day he was going to get the runs as well as suffer some hideous come-down . . . Or maybe not. There was enough in that bag to keep him up for . . .

Lights wrote themselves round fire-twisted trees. Broken casino walls suddenly became brighter, almost fluorescent. The slow sweep of the revolving cherry top looked positively alive, lambent. Even the rain fell like music.

Raf took a look at the plastic bag he was holding. There had to be enough ice in there to keep him up until the end of the world, which, according to Koenig Pasha, came the Tuesday after next, or some such. Raf still needed to get to the bottom of that one.

“You know Kamila?” Raf pulled the name from memory. “Works at the mortuary.” They had to know her, the woman’s father was one of them. A uniform. That was what Felix had said.

He took their silence for assent.

“Tell her to expect a couple of bodies. Tell her not to start without me.”

Avatar slid his finger under the flap and ripped.

He wasn’t sure what he anticipated from the envelope addressed to his sister on the cabin’s dressing table . . . Not a love letter from the Khedive, because even the Khedive wasn’t that stupid. Maybe an invitation to something aboard the SS Jannah that Zara would now miss.

Which would worry her no more than it would worry Avatar, so long as the Khedive didn’t expect him to attend instead. It was bad enough that Zara had suggested that Avatar take her place aboard.

And she was wrong to try to remake him; to force on him the opportunities she felt he needed. Avatar belonged where he belonged, he knew that. And he was much too proud of what he’d learnt in his fourteen years to change.

Shaking the contents of the envelope out onto his cabin’s pink bedspread, Avatar’s eyes widened. Whatever else he’d expected Zara to be sent, an engraving of a naked, full-breasted woman bent backward, scuttling across the dirt on limbs that turned to those of a spider was not on his list. On the back in elegant copperplate pen was the word Judecca . Beneath this, Welcome to limbo .

Nothing else whatsoever.

With a shrug, Avatar screwed up the envelope and tossed it out of a porthole, watching the wind that caught his crumpled offering and kept it for a few seconds from the embrace of the waves.

Maybe he should do the same with the naked spider? Avatar had dismissed the possibility before he’d finished thinking it. He was going to send the pervy engraving to Zara. As her just reward for getting Hamzah to agree he should take her place.

Avatar sighed heavily and wished he was somewhere else. The palm in the corner of his cabin was hideous. The size of a child and planted in a Chinese container that was painted with a ridiculous number of waterfalls and colts kicking their heels on a mountainside.

Pot or palm by itself would have been bad enough, but together they constituted an insult. It was all Avatar could do not to tip the plant, pot and all, after the envelope into the Mediterranean below.