Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

'Later,' said ZeeZee and the fox grinned toothily, saying nothing.

The man didn't believe in omens and of his many childhood demons only the arctic fox remained untamed. And Tiriganaq was more afraid of him than ZeeZee was of the fox. Because, if necessary, ZeeZee could stop answering and then it wouldn't matter if the fox called itself Tiriganaq, Smoke or Earl Grey Malkin, it would be alone.

Still, they'd always faced trouble together before, so ZeeZee couldn't imagine how he might have thought the fox would lie low this time.

Above them both, three storey walls gave way to a thin night sky, softened and faded by a sodium glare that didn't stretch far enough down to reach the side walk, had there been one.

East of El-Gomruk and south of Manshiya, but way too far north to be Karmus or Moharrem Bey, ZeeZee wasn't sure what this district was called. It had been blank of any name on the map at the tram station, its streets cross-hatched to tell cash-rich tourists that here was where they could find Iskandryia's famous souks.

ZeeZee could see the map clearly in his head, right down to the pink cross-hatching, but that meant nothing. There was very little from his life that he couldn't see in his head once he'd remembered where it was filed.

The entrance ZeeZee wanted turned out to be a narrow arch between two shops, one of which sold beaten brassware, the other old computers in shades of pastel. Between them was a door without a knocker. At head height was a peeling sign that read On ne visite pas.

Straightening his shoulders, ZeeZee rapped hard on the ancient door and then regretted it as noise crashed like thunder down both sides of the street. So he knocked again, more gently this time.

'What do you want?'

At least, ZeeZee imagined that was what the man on the other side of the door said, though he didn't recognize the language.

'I'm looking for Lady Nafisa,' said ZeeZee.

Nafisa. The voice turned the word over as if tasting it.

'Yes,' said ZeeZee. 'My aunt.'

'Why didn't you say so?' In the space where the door had been stood an old man, the stub of a cheroot gripped between his right thumb and skeletal first finger. Dark eyes examined ZeeZee's face and then the man stepped to one side. 'Our house is your house.' This time round he spoke in French, with a voice raw from a lifetime of cheap cigars.

There were five bolts on that door and the old man secured them all, including one that fixed straight up into the top of the arch and another that drove into the worn surface of a stained flagstone.

'This way.'

An arch in the side of the entrance room led left, followed by an immediate right turn through a second arch, which was when ZeeZee realized the shabby corridor he was in was really the start of a small, very simple maze leading to an ugly, obsessively-neat garden immediately beyond.

On either side of the garden stood open-fronted rooms, little more than flat roofs supported by sandstone pillars over a cracked terracotta floor. And at the far end of the garden was an ornate marble arch set in a simple brick wall. Once the formal garden had been naked to the sky but someone, years back, had roofed it over with steel and glass, panes of which were now cracked and dirty.

That the glass roof was old was obvious, because the frame supporting it was riveted to crossbeams that were held in place by cast-iron pillars, and a century's worth of paint had crusted round the rivets and smoothed the Doric decoration on the plinths to a bland ripple.

'This way.' The old man vanished through the marble arch into a cavernous, empty room where water didn't so much fall from a fountain as run bubbling down a free-standing slab of marble.

'Shazarwan,' announced the man and ZeeZee guessed he was naming the strange object.

Open arches on the far side of the room led into an open courtyard, smaller than the garden and tiled with white stone. In the centre stood a fountain carved from a single block of horsehair marble. But what ZeeZee noticed was the impossibly ornate four-storey house that rose at the far end of the courtyard.

Soft uplights pulled detail from a carved balustrade and threw its huge arches into shadow. If the al-Mansur madersa was meant to impress, then it succeeded.

Jerking his chin towards stairs that started up the outside of the madersa, then turned in under an arch to continue inside, the thin man stood back.

'Nafisa ...' He said simply.

ZeeZee went.

'You're late,' said a voice that ZeeZee tracked to a small woman angrily pacing near the top of the stairs. Backlit by wall lights, Lady Nafisa looked thin and birdlike, a neat faceless shadow but an angry one.

'Am I?' ZeeZee's first reaction was to apologize, then insist his flight was late, even though she'd know from her driver that this was untrue. But he didn't let himself do either. Instead, he shrugged and kept climbing, as if not caring if he walked straight through her.

'Shit happens,' he said as he reached the top and stared round at a huge room, open to the night through its arches on one side. Since heights and he didn't agree with each other, he didn't go look at the view. 'And besides, someone wanted a word.'

Lady Nafisa stopped suddenly. 'You saw somebody you knew?'

'Other way round,' said ZeeZee. 'He thought he knew me.'

They spoke French because that was the language Lady Nafìsa had first used. Yet when it came, her switch to English was so fluent ZeeZee wasn't even certain she was aware of making it.

'I sent a car for you. A stretch Daimler-Benz.' She was doing her best to smile but there was real anger in her eyes. Which was fine with ZeeZee because he was pretty sure that, behind the expensive anonymity of the Versace shades she'd unwittingly bought for him there was real anger in his too.

Families had that effect on him and no family more strongly than his own. If she really was family, which remained to be proved.

'I make my own way,' said ZeeZee.

The woman stared at him. And behind the fashion-plate suit she saw ghosts of her husband backed up like reflections in a mirror. 'Later,' she said hastily. 'We can deal with this later..."

As iron cue, the skeletal porter from the rear entrance strode in clutching a brass tray that he placed on a three-legged wooden contraption which seemed to be waiting for it.

'This is Khartoum,' said Lady Nafisa, as if talking about a dog. 'He's from the Sudan so you can say anything you like in front of him.'

Meaning he didn't speak English, presumably.

'Unless, of course,' said ZeeZee, 'I say it in French, Arabic or whatever that other language was.'

Nafìsa sighed. 'German,' she said heavily. 'I can see you're going to be like your father.'

Father? ZeeZee stared at her.

'Precise to the point of irritation.'

ZeeZee hadn't meant to be precise, merely glib. And since he'd never met his father and the last time he'd seen her, his mother still regarded the truth as something so fluid that identical sentences could mean opposite things on different days, he had no idea if Lady Nafisa even knew who his father was. Somehow he doubted it. Some undiscovered theory of chaos seemed to be the only thing that made sense of his family life to date.

Aim to please, shoot to kill. That had been one of Wild Boy's phrases back before Huntsville when he and Wild were still not quite enemies. 'We aim to please,' said ZeeZee.

'We?'

Yeah, we ... ZeeZee clicked his heels and bowed slightly, almost as if he meant it. Me and the fox.

'Stupid that is,' the sudden voice behind ZeeZee was cutting in its contempt. 'Clicking your heels. No one really behaves like that in Iskandryia. I knew you'd be stupid.'

'Hana.'