Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

'So,' said Hamzah, trimming the ragged edges of his cigar into a crystal ashtray. 'What else do you want to know?' Smoke swirled around his head like evaporating dry ice around some pantomime devil. The effect was studied, Raf understood that. Everything he'd seen told him Hamzah was making a Herculean effort to be something he wasn't — quiet, urbane and softly mannered. What interested Raf was Why? He was already impressed: the house and its very location saw to that.

'Well,' Hamzah growled, 'you going to ask? Or just sit there and look at my decorations ... ?' A flick of his hand took in the dark oak panels and carved marble fireplace, the polished floorboards and Art Nouveau windows that stretched from ceiling to floor.

'It's about my aunt ...' Raf drained his cup and sat back in a red leather chair. Intelligence told him to approach the matter obliquely, so he did. By asking a direct but different question.

'What did she hope to get out of my engagement?'

'You're a bey,' Hamzah said flatly. 'I'm rich. What the hell do you think she got out of it?' He was no longer smiling.

'But the dowry gets held in trust,' said Raf, trying to remember what he'd learned from an afternoon in front of Hani's screen, skimming legal sites. 'To be returned in case of divorce, if the marriage is unconsummated or not blessed with children. All that's on offer is interest and that would have gone to me ..."

'She had heavy expenses.'

'You paid her?'

'In this city,' said Hamzah, 'everyone takes commission.' He stubbed out his cigar and took another one from the mahogany humidor. This time, though, he remembered to remove the end using his little gold guillotine. 'She took two and a half million US dollars.'

'Two and a— What proportion of that was her commission?'

Hamzah Effendi just looked at him. 'That was her commission. The dowry itself was a billion ..."

Raf whistled. As responses went it was entirely instinctive.

'And you,' he asked. 'What did you get out of it?' Given the massive villa, the Havana cigars, the uniformed maid and frock-coated bodyguard, it seemed extremely unlikely that Hamzah's need was anything physical.

'Respectability,' Hamzah said bluntly. 'You'd be surprised what a title can do ..."

No, thought Raf, thinking back to Felix's reluctance to let the coroner-magistrate sweat him properly, he wouldn't be surprised at all. 'The khedive can't take the effendi back?'

Hamzah's grin was wolfish. 'I'd like to see him try ...'

Raf nodded, slowly, carefully considering his words. 'I've got a problem,' he said, 'and so have you. Actually, I've got two problems, both complicated. But yours is worse.'

'Tell me mine first, then.'

'The police. Khartoum heard you threaten Lady Nafisa.'

'I threatened you, too,' Hamzah reminded Raf. 'That was my daughter you rejected.'

'But I'm still alive,' said Raf. 'And Nafisa's not. The police are going to pull you in at dawn tomorrow. See what they can pin on you.'

'How do you know?'

'Chief Felix told me.'

'And now you're telling me ..." The man paused to stub out his second cigar and didn't light another. 'You're certain?'

Raf nodded.

'Get me Sookia, Son and Sookia.' The order was barked at a Sony unit on a table by the wall. Seconds later a little flat screen flickered into life. The conversation was short and one-sided, and ended when Hamzah clicked his fingers so the screen went dead, cutting off a pyjamaed young lawyer in mid flow. The man would arrive at the villa within the next half-hour as Hamzah had demanded, Raf had no doubt of that.

'What will you do?' Raf asked.

'Go down to the station tonight, with my lawyer, and sort this out. What do you think ... Okay,' said Hamzah. 'Now it's my turn. You've got thirty minutes to tell me your two problems and if I can help I will, whether my wife likes it or not.'

'First off,' said Raf, 'do you know if Lady Nafisa had debts?'

'No idea. Why?'

'Because her account is empty.'

Hamzah blinked. 'Gone?' he asked. 'Two and a half million just gone?'

'One million in and out on the same day, according to her notebook ...'

Through a one-use-only blind account?

Yeah, according to Nafisa's book that's exactly how it was done. Raf nodded his agreement. Not stopping to wonder what Hamzah knew about one-use accounts because he'd realized instantly that it was probably rather a lot.

'And the other one and a half?' Hamzah asked.

'Not even mentioned.'

The industrialist nodded. Those were drafts from Hong Kong Suisse,' he said. 'Redeemable anywhere.' And for a few seconds they both thought about redeemable bankers drafts and didn't like where it was leading.

'What was your other problem?'

'Can you recommend a good builder?

They talked for the remaining ten minutes about what Raf wanted done in the qaa, which was to get rid of Nafìsa's office altogether. For all its smoked-glass pretensions it was no more than an expensive prefabricated hut dumped down in one corner of a large living space. He'd like to have got Hani out of the madersa completely but Felix thought that would look bad. Besides, Raf had another problem that made it a bad idea.

When it came down to it, Raf's salary from the Third Circle was no more than token. He had no money and owned nothing except the suit he wore: at least, not until the will was granted probate and, even when that went through, all he'd have would be a ramshackle house and no means to maintain it.

None of which he mentioned to his host, the man who'd put the price of a billion dollars on his daughter's dowry. With Hamzah, he stuck to practicalities like explaining what he wanted doing with the qaa, and why ...

So when Hamzah suggested getting the qaa blessed and then immediately amended his suggestion to getting the whole house blessed, Raf was surprised. He didn't have the industrialist pegged as religious. It turned out that Hamzah wasn't, but it was a good point all the same.

'My mother died in a fall,' said Hamzah. 'It was only after a mullah blessed the site I could bear to go back into the garden. I was nine. At nine you can see things that aren't there.'

And at twenty, thought Raf ruefully, and twenty-five. And, for all he knew, thirty ... Maybe for life. Maybe with some things, once they were in there, they were in there for ever, like Tiriganaq. Further conversation was cut off by a distant bell. The lawyer had made it from one side of the city to the other inside twenty-five minutes.

'Look,' said Hamzah, 'I can't pretend I liked your aunt but Hani's okay, so here's what I'll do for you ...' He smiled at his own words. 'I'll get a team over there tonight. Because what's the use of owning a construction company if you can't rustle up a few builders?'

Walking over to a pair of French windows, Hamzah shot two bolts, then neutralized an alarm by tapping five digits into a small keypad next to the window frame. Raf's time was up. 'Leave this way,' he said, opening the door to let in a warm night wind. 'You'll find the walk more interesting.'

For the girl in the water, illumination came not from the city lights strung out along the shore nor from far-distant stars whose distance was measured in countless millennia, because those were half hidden behind fat clouds. No, illumination dribbled from her fingertips in fractured Morse and spun in nebular swirls around her feet. Whole constellations burned around her shoulders and flowed over her skin like glittering smoke in a high impossible wind. She was the night and the night was her.

Zara had been coming to this beach to swim at night since she was seven, though it wasn't until three years ago she'd started smoking blow to make the liquid constellations come closer.