Jon Grimwood - Effendi

“It’s been fried,” said Raf. “Along with the relay stations. Please tell the Graf that I’ll see him for ten minutes, an hour from now, in the council chamber.”

“Your Excellency . . . The ambassador was hoping . . .”

“That I’d go there. Too bad.” Raf watched the clerk debate with himself which it would be most dangerous to offend, the Germans or Iskandryia’s new governor. His decision quickly became clear when the man snapped off a smart salute and stepped back from the car.

“You scare them, don’t you?” Zara’s smile was thin.

“It’s the aftertaste of the General.”

Zara shook her head. “It’s you,” she said. “Take a good look at yourself in the mirror.”

“I don’t do mirrors,” said Raf.

“That’s what I mean.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that so, once Khartoum had opened Raf’s door, Raf walked round to the other side of the car and opened the door for Zara.

“And I wish you’d stop that,” Zara said with a scowl. “All this heel-clicking shit.” Her scowl lasted until she reached the mansion’s steps, at which point Hani came bundling out of the big front door.

“Zara!”

“Hello, honey.”

Hani grinned. “How are you?” she added as an afterthought; visibly remembering her manners.

“Okay, I suppose. And you?”

“Terrific.” Hani suddenly opened both arms to embrace the ink-black sky. “Someone’s killed the lights. All of them. You can see what’s happened better from the roof.” Hani turned to go, then swung back, remembering something. “You and I,” said the child, looking serious. “We need to talk . . .”

“You know Colonel Abad stole someone else’s face?”

Zara didn’t.

“On the badges,” said Hani. “It’s not him. The face belongs to someone who died years and years ago. You know what that means? It means he kept himself to himself, or people would have noticed he wasn’t the same as his picture . . .”

Hani nodded. “I’m right, aren’t I?” She looked at the older girl, then frowned. “Don’t you like clues?”

Zara stared round at the governor’s study, her face doubtful. Official papers were piled in untidy heaps, encyclopedias, old history books, ancient maps of the Sudan. A bookcase along one wall had half the volumes pulled out and dumped on the floor. It looked like a whirlwind had hit the place. And the whirlwind was about four paces away, laying a fire and asking riddles.

“Honey, we really shouldn’t be in here.”

“You want to save your father?”

Do I . . . ? Zara stared at the child, throat tight.

“Thought so.” Hani walked over to Zara, gave her a quick hug and went back to work, crunching old financial reports into tight balls and pushing them under kindling.

“Clues,” Hani said firmly, putting a match to a computer printout. “Crosswords, logic puzzles, number grids, those stupid MENSA things in the papers . . . Do you like them?”

“Sometimes.”

Hani sighed. It was late. Raf was still furious about something, and Zara was so busy trying not to get upset in front of her that she wasn’t really listening to a thing Hani said. Even Khartoum was useless. She’d tried to talk to him but he’d just excused himself, then come back later with matches and a jug of water from the kitchens.

Which was less than no help.

It was hard being the only one who could think properly. Especially if you were nine. Or maybe ten, there was some doubt about that.

“In a moment,” said Hani, “I’ll make you some cocoa.” She blew on the flames until the kindling caught, added a couple of wooden candleholders from the mantelpiece and all the pencils from the General’s desk tidy.

Uncle Ashraf’s desk tidy, Hani corrected herself. Taking a half-eaten bar of Fry’s chocolate from her pocket—it was possible for a human to last a week on a single bar, she’d read it in some magazine—Hani broke cubes off the chocolate and dropped five or six into the water jug. She should probably have heated the water first, she realized, looking at the lumps lying there at the bottom.

Still, it was a bit late to decide that now. Pushing the copper jug into the middle of the flames, Hani sucked her fingers where they’d got singed and went back to the real problem.

“Did you bring your weird picture?”

“Did I . . . ?” Zara was shocked. “Honey, how did you know about that?”

“It must have been sent to you,” Hani said firmly. “I’ve asked everyone else. The General sent you something from Dante’s Purgatorio . . . A Doré engraving. Am I right?”

Hani pulled a yellowing page from her jeans pocket and smoothed it out on the desk. “He sent this one to Raf. It’s from Inferno .”

The engraving showed the man with his chest sliced open. His hands gripping the edges of the wound, not to close it but to pull it apart. From her other pocket, Hani extracted what looked like a photocopy but was actually a printout of a low-rez scan.

“I couldn’t get the original,” said Hani, “because that’s locked away. But Uncle Ashraf had this copy on computer in an evidence file. When he still had a working computer,” she added thoughtfully.

“It was the General who sent this to my father?”

“That’s Koenig Pasha’s writing,” said Hani, turning over the printout to show Zara the handwriting script on the other side. “So I guess so . . . In Raf’s file it says Effendi asked the General for help.”

“For help!” Zara’s laugh was hollow. “How do we know that’s the General’s writing?”

Hani shrugged. “I had a look at his diary,” she said, pulling a notebook from a desk drawer and handing it to Zara, who shook her head and gave it straight back.

“You read his diary?”

“No. It’s in German,” said Hani. “I don’t know German . . .”

This was where the conversation paused, while Hani kicked off one silver Nike, pulled off the sock underneath and used it as an oven glove to lift the copper jug from the fire. The jug she put on the hearth to cool and the sock got tossed in the fire. It had started to smoulder anyway. When they drank the cocoa, it tasted more of water than chocolate, but neither Zara nor Hani mentioned the fact.

“You got a Doré engraving from the General?”

Zara shook her head, so Hani started again.

“You got an engraving?”

Zara nodded.

“Are you sure the General didn’t give it to you?”

“It was sent by fax,” said Zara, “from the SS Jannah .”

“Jannah,” said Hani. “What does that mean?”

“It means garden,” Zara said, puzzled. Hani had to know that.

“Garden.” Hani wrote the word in pen on a clean piece of paper. “So who do you think sent the picture?” She sounded like Raf at his most serious.

Zara blushed. “I thought it was the Khedive . . . But it could have been Avatar. I let him go in my place.” Which, like Raf at his most serious, couldn’t have been too popular with His Highness.

“Have you got the engraving?”

Zara nodded.

“Can I have a look?” Hani asked, once it became obvious that Zara intended to leave it at that. “It would be useful . . .”

“It’s . . .” Zara hunted for the right word. “Very rude.”

“So’s the angel,” said Hani, nodding to the bare-breasted woman with wings and a discreet drape of cloth across her broad, Victorian hips.

“This is ruder,” Zara said, but she went to get the picture anyway . . .

“Mmm,” said Hani. She did her best to sound grown-up, but the slight widening of her eyes and a growing grin gave away her shock. “She’s a spider.”