Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

For Isk was hermaphrodite, ageless. A vampire of a city. Venerable and elegant, with a taste for fresh blood — a taste that it kept hidden behind stately boulevards and impeccable manners, in daylight at least. Night-time found the city stretching itself and yawning to reveal ancient fangs. Though the half-smile never left its face and the dark glint never left its eye.

And to assume Isk had a single identity was to misunderstand the Gordian complexity of its personality. The vampire existed parallel to the blonde innocent-eyed victim, the virgin inside the whore. There never had been only one city at any time in El Iskandryia's history. And for all its ancient glory, there were days when Isk was afraid of its own shadow, of the tarnished side of the mirror it held up to the world.

Days like now, when all that showed inside on Le Trianon's bar screen was a rerun of that morning's executions in Riyadh. A Saudi paedophile and a Sudanese found guilty of sorcery, both losing their heads in the flash of a sword blade, then losing them again in slow motion.

Family.

Ashraf al-Mansur, who was doing his best not to think of himself as ZeeZee, rolled the word round his mouth and spat it out. He'd never had one and wasn't sure why he'd want to start now. As a child, in Zurich, he'd known boys at the Academy with families. Seen the strange effect it had on them. They cried from homesickness at the start of term and then no longer felt at home when they went back for the holidays. Their parents were worse. The kind of people who talked about roots and forgot those were what kept vegetables in the ground.

Besides, Raf didn't need roots. He came with a 8000-line guarantee that promised his genetic heritability would always outweigh social calibration. Whatever the fuck that meant.

At first, given the number of zeros after the first number in the price, Raf thought that his mother must really love him ... But later, when he looked at her accounts for the year of his birth, he found that ninety-five per cent of the cost of the genetic manipulation had been met by Bayer-Rochelle and the rest she'd written off over five years against tax.

Oh, and the pharmaceutical company had totally funded her next three expeditions and made a sizeable one-off donation to a pressure group for which she was official photographer. It was around that time she'd stopped campaigning against non-transparent genome research.

On the evening he arrived Lady Nafìsa had made clear the payment she intended to collect for digging him out of Huntsville. Though what she talked about was the need for family members to help each other, to accept their responsibilities.

'I don't have a family,' Raf had said. 'I had a mother. And when I wanted to talk to her I'd call her agent.'

Lady Nafisa had looked at him. 'Your father is my brother-in-law. That makes us family.'

Her brother in law ... 'My father was a backpacker,' said Raf. 'From Goteborg. My mother didn't even get his name.' The man had apparently been hired for a week to drive his mother across the Sahel when she was filming the Lybian striped weasel, probably because she was too wasted to steer the vehicle herself.

'No.' Lady Nafisa shook her head. 'You must listen to me. The Emir of Tunis is your father.'

'Yeah, right,' said Raf. That well-known Swede.'

'Blue eyes, white hair, high cheekbones. You're Berber,' Lady Nafisa told him crossly. 'Look it up ... And while you're at it, take a good look at this.' Only Raf didn't need to take a good look because he'd seen the picture before — the palm trees, the minaret, the man with the drop-pearl earring.

'Your father,' said Lady Nafisa.

Raf wanted to say that she was talking to the wrong man: but then suddenly realised he was the one who'd got it wrong. It wasn't his responsibilities they were discussing — or not just his — it was her responsibilities to him. An odd and uncomfortable thought.

'I knew he had a brat by an American,' Lady Nafisa said. 'And that he paid your mother a small allowance, but he does that for all his bastards, he can afford it. But he also told me you were illegitimate. And he lied.'

She handed Raf a letter.

Beneath the words Isaac and Sons. Commissioners of Oaths, a rush of Arabic flowed right to left across expensive paper like iny waves. Raf could no more read it than fly. 'What does it say?' Raf asked, handing it back.

'On 30 April ... Pashazade Zari al-Mansur, only son of the Emir of Tunis, married Sally Welham at a private ceremony in an annex of the Great al-Zaytuna Mosque,' Lady Nafìsa recited from memory. 'She was his third wife. He divorced her five days later.'

'My mother was already married.'

Lady Nafisa made no pretence of scanning the paper. 'My informant says not ... Your real name is Ashraf al-Mansur. Under Ottoman law you hold the rank of bey, which entitles you to a senior post in the Public Service.' She glanced up. 'We'll talk about that later. You have carte blanche anywhere in Ottoman North Africa from Tunis to Stambul and you have diplomatic immunity everywhere else in the world, for any crime except murder ...'

Raf pushed his empty coffee cup aside and prepared to stand, but the moment he began to ease back his chair a waiter materialized at his side and shifted it for him. Seconds later the patron himself appeared.

'Will we be seeing Your Excellency soon?'

'Monday morning, I would imagine,' said Raf and the small man smiled.

'I'll reserve your table.' He glanced at the English-language newspaper Ashraf had downloaded from a stall. 'And I'll have a copy of The Alexandrian waiting ...'

A sluggish breeze rolling lazily off the sea faded as Raf headed inland. Away from the Corniche the hot midday air was muggy, with humidity high enough to merit a warning on the local newsfeed. Common sense said grab the nearest air-conditioned taxi, but Raf ignored the sweat beginning to build under his thick beard and headed south on foot towards Lady Nafisa's house.

Between Le Trianon and Rue Abu Dadrda, Raf found one boulevard, four rues and a quiet tree-lined place named al-Mansur, historical detritus of the family to which he now belonged.

And Raf was more than halfway across the place before he finally realized why Nafisa's roofed-over garden inspired in him such hatred.

Out at Huntsville the rain did more than merely drum on glass: it fell like buckshot. But before there could be Huntsville, the city of Seattle had to exist — and the fox blamed that on a man called Asa Mercer.

On 16 January 1866, Mercer left New York with thirty-four unmarried girls bound for a new settlement at Puget Sound on the Pacific coast. He'd hoped to bring more than 700 but, all the same, it was an improvement on his first expedition to collect marriageable women. Then he had persuaded only eleven to make the dangerous trip. Maybe it had been the rumours of rain that put them off, maybe it had been the distance, or the fact that the war was only recently over ... Whatever, that had been then and this was later.

It still rained though, because in Seattle this was what the weather did — even ZeeZee knew that. And the rain drummed off city sidewalks, or beat on sun canopies raised in hope over empty tables outside cafes.

But out at Huntsville the rain did more than merely drum, its buckshot fell on the glass roof of the jail, twenty-four/seven. At least, that was what it felt like to ZeeZee those first few months he was there. Until the snow came and with it silence.

A masterpiece of nineteenth-century iron and glass, built twenty-five years after Paxton first led the way by using prefabricated sections for London's famous Crystal Palace, Huntsville Penitentiary was a monument to man's ingenuity — and stupidity.