Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

She'd brought Avatar out here once, one evening just before she went to New York. Some ideas needed to be left as ideas and that was one of them. He'd hated the water, he hadn't wanted to get undressed in front of her and one of his new ear-studs had rusted and given him an infection. And later, when she was on a plane and it was too late to say sorry, she realized he'd resented being asked to come out to the villa anyway. So would she, if she'd been born in a slum and Villa Hamzah was where she wasn't allowed to live.

So Zara went back to only coming here late and only coming alone.

Getting here from her room was easy. A short drop from her window, little more than her height even back then, five easy paces across a strongly made tiled roof, then down a short length of heavy iron drainpipe, the old-fashioned kind complete with regular brackets bolting it to the wall. Chance worked in her favour sometimes.

Swimming like this had been the one thing she'd missed while living in New York. No pool came close. As a child, she used to believe that she'd have been happiest being a street kid, if she could still have come here at night. Now she knew it was only money that gave her the freedom to swim like this, in the salt dark, alone, naked ... But even money had its flip side, though you probably had to be there to believe that.

This was her world. Alone, untroubled, with the whole amniotic Mediterranean as an immersion tank. Her mother hated the sea.

Zara sank under a wave, letting warm blackness close over her head as air dribbled from her lips, and felt herself slip slowly until her toes touched the bottom. The rocks were velvet with algae, seaweed flicked around her calves and ankles like sharp grass.

Raf was shouting, only he didn't shout, he never shouted ... He stopped, thought about that for a split second and then started shouting again. Waves lapping dark rock were his only answer.

Triangulation: he had the concept before he had its name. Noting where he now stood, Raf next glanced back to where he'd been standing, triangulating the position of the head when he first saw it.

It should be ...

Eyes skimmed the dark water until they saw a figure break surface. Somewhere nearby the shouting started again. And inside his head came a rolling litany, mostly composed of Oh, fuck, shit and God ...

'Present and correct,' said the fox.

Raf's suit ripped across the shoulder as he yanked off his jacket, sleeves revealing red silk as they turned inside out like snake skin. Kicking off his shoes Raf pulled the black tee over his newly cropped head, dropping cloth onto wet rock without thinking. His heart was a steady hammer.

'Chill,' ordered the fox and Raf's cardiac rhythm steadied. He couldn't see the animal but it sounded near. Sounded full-size, too, as tall as he was, with a voice that stuck its claws into his memory and ripped.

'Nictate your inner eyelids.' Raf did what the fox suggested. Experience showed this was usually safer. 'Now get out there.'

The water was warmer than Raf expected, salt like blood, and phosphorescence clung to him as he swam. The swimmer was further out than Raf had thought and the heavy cloth of his trousers dragged Raf back like a chute, slowing him down. But he swam steadily, closing the distance between them.

Clear the mouth of vomit, lift the chin ... pinch the nose, take a deep breath and blow ... take your mouth away and watch the chest fall...

He was pretty sure he could do mouth-to-mouth. Resuscitation too, if necessary. Find the top of the arch of the ribs ... two fingers on it and heel of the hand on breastbone , .. press hard on the lower half of breastbone ... The number of apparently random facts Raf could pull out of his head always surprised him. Not least because he'd never been that good at turning up to lessons

When Zara broke the surface she was behind him. She didn't stop giggling until Raf turned and moonlight suddenly lit his face.

'You.' Zara sounded genuinely shocked.

'Yeah,' said Raf tightly. 'Me ...' He was about to say something truly vicious but Zara's shoulders broke the surface as a wave sucked back in the undertow. Bare skin, no strap for her costume. It took Raf a second to process what his eyes had seen and his adrenal system had reacted to already.

She swam naked.

'Who did you think it was?' Raf demanded.

She didn't answer, not at first. 'This is my beach,' Zara said finally. 'You're trespassing.' That's who she thought it was, some idiot trespasser.

Raf shook his head. 'Your father told me to ...'

Shit and double shit.

Did Hamzah expect this — and what did it say about him if he did? Raf lent back into the water and kicked for shore, still swearing at his own stupidity. Back on shore, he didn't bother with shoes, jacket or tee-shirt, just rolled them into a untidy ball and stamped off towards the Villa. He didn't care how many lawyers the man had in there.

'Where are you going?' Zara shouted from the water.

To get a lift home,' Raf said angrily. 'You think a taxi's going to pick me up in this state?'

Try walking,' she called. 'It's what ordinary people do.'

Raf turned back and stared. 'Hani's at home,' he said coldly. 'Her aunt got murdered yesterday. This morning Hani left the house for the first time ever, to watch her aunt be buried. We're sleeping in the courtyard because she's too frightened to go back indoors. It's late. I've been away longer than I said I would. Which bit of that don't you understand?'

Raf's face was ice, his words utterly uninflected. He could have been talking to a particularly stupid child, except he would never talk to any child in that way.

'Five minutes,' said Zara. 'Meet me at the gate.' When she hit the beach it was thirty paces up shore, where her clothes waited in a neat pile. Then she was running for the Villa and swearing inside her head, mostly at herself.

It was the sun that did it. Sports convertibles were big in North Africa, even locally made ones. Morocco had its own air-cooled Atlas, Algeria imported a three-wheeled Soviet Benz knock-off and the Ottoman countries made do with a sub-licensed Ford that leaked oil, belched smoke and was so simple to service it could be stripped back by a ten-year-old and repaired by a blacksmith.

Of course, almost everybody who could afford something more upscale imported a Japanese machine. One of those enamel-and-chrome cut-down copies of old American beasts, all retro fins and goggle headlights. They looked great, told you when they needed gas and practically booked themselves in for servicing, never mind downloading their own tweaks for tuning. Which, with twelve tiny cylinders and forty-eight valves, was just as well.

Zara's car was different. Its 240-horsepower V6 engine had been turbocharged way up beyond three hundred. The headlights were sharp multi-element clusters, using light-guide technology. A speed-tuned aerofoil in the nose and a fixed diffuser tunnel at the rear kept the wheels glued to the road.

It was low, silver and spartan inside. The two-seat cockpit was stripped back, a simple array of controls with an unmistakable utilitarian elegance. The fascias, fillings and switches were machined from solid aluminium. It was the first racing F-type Jaguar that Raf had seen outside of the one in Seattle Museum.

'Get in and hold on.'

Raf grabbed a side handle and she was away, ramming the clutch through a crescendo of rapid gear changes rather than use automatic. Then it was near-silent running all the way, the Jaguar's engine never rising above a growl as the F-type burned up night traffic on the Corniche, hung a tight left into Place Orabi, tyres leaving burned rubber on the blacktop.

Khedive Mohammed Ali appeared and vanished in a blur of grandeur, the Place des Consuls streaming by on either side. A right skid down a short alley between Catholic and Greek Orthodox cathedrals fed her through to Rue Kemil. The unlit shops either side reflecting only each other in darkened glass windows, until the car roared between them, headlights picking out peeling script over locked doorways.