Effendi

CHAPTER 13 8th October

“Eduardo?”

Eduardo nodded from instinct. It didn’t matter that the person talking was half a city away and Eduardo’s watch wasn’t toggled to visual. He still nodded.

“ Na’am. . . This is me.” Eduardo folded his broadsheet and placed it carefully on the table. He would have preferred one of the Arabic-language tabloids but he had his position to consider, so he always downloaded L’Iskandrian.

The Frenchman and Frisco were watching him from the corners of their eyes. He knew they’d both decided his watch was a fake and his new job just empty words, but they were wrong. Instinctively, Eduardo straightened in his café chair and ran one hand though his thinning hair, then discreetly rubbed his fingers clean on the side of his black chinos.

He listened in silence, nodding seriously now and then like a man agreeing with a particularly pertinent point. Not everyone had an elegant Silver Seiko that double-encrypted conversation and screened itself from vanP hacking.

“ Na’am, I understand.” Eduardo did too—really—but just to be sure he asked the man to repeat his instructions more slowly.

Eduardo liked his new job. He even had an office, a third-storey walk-up off Place Orabi, above a haberdasher’s at the back of the bus depot. With the office and watch came new shoes, new trousers and a zip-up leather jacket that looked old and tatty unless you got really close, when it was possible to see that the scuff marks were printed onto the animal hide.

The man who gave Eduardo the jacket had pulled out a gravity knife, dropped its blade and driven it hard into the leather. The sharp point of the blade hardly even left a mark.

“Mesh,” he told Eduardo, “ultrafine, from spiders that shit steel.” Eduardo didn’t know whether the man was making fun of him or not. All the same, Eduardo liked what he now did. Which was mostly sit in cafés and talk politics, something he wasn’t sure he really understood. Listening to the counterarguments, Eduardo had discovered a talent for separating half-truth from mere wish. A cast-iron, built-in bullshit detector, the man called it, speaking as if such a machine might actually exist.

Eduardo imagined it as small, with cogwheels that whirred and narrow brass pipes that grew hot from circulating water. When Eduardo was a child he lived in a small burg in Namibia and the local train, to Windhoek and back, had run on coal and wood, dried dung too when the shortages began, though dung didn’t work that well.

“Mmm . . .” Eduardo said, nodding. “Sure thing.” He tossed a handful of silver onto the table. Time to go. His watch didn’t need him to shut down the connection, because it did that for itself. It did other things too, like bring him the latest football results and forecast that it was going to rain.

“Things to do,” he said to Frisco, speaking Ladino. “Deals to make.” Iskandryia was a city with a number of languages that might claim to be the lingua franca, of which Spanish Hebrew was just one. The other man nodded. Frisco had told Eduardo his real name but Eduardo kept forgetting, though he remembered that the man claimed his forefathers were moriscos, expelled from Spain.

When Eduardo started coming to the café, he and Frisco had played a few games of chess but now the old man made excuses not to play, probably because Eduardo kept losing.

Inside Eduardo’s office the air was cool, which was a miracle given his desk fan had fused and the October sun beat direct on an outside wall; but the walls were thick, built decades before from limestone blocks stolen from a Coptic church three streets away. And anyway, closed shutters kept out much of the brightness. There was also an air-conditioning unit attached to one wall, a brown box that stuck its metal arse out into the street, as if threatening to shit on pedestrians beneath. Unfortunately that had been broken ever since someone hid a wank mag up the air outlet. When Eduardo first took the box apart to see if anything obvious was broken, he’d been left with frayed wires, rusting iron pipes and mildewed, disintegrating pictures of pale nipples and shaven pudenda.

So he’d put the casing back together and pushed the mags back where he found them, and now tiny mushrooms grew in clusters on the grey carpet, right below where the unit dripped water.

A Sony Eon3 sat on an otherwise clear desk. A simple Luxor terminal, he’d chosen it at random in a souk at the back of Rue Faransa. Glued to its side was an anonymizer, which had been given him by the man. On the ’mizer was a label,PROPERTY OF EL ISKANDRYIA POLICE DEPARTMENT: NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM CHAMPOLLION PRECINCT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Punching a key, Eduardo started random number software and waited. Without him having to ask, the terminal popped up a comms screen and Eduardo keyed in the number he’d just been given. Then he did what the man had told him to do.

Eduardo didn’t know that he was being rerouted or that, at the receiving end, his call was logged as having come direct from Fez; all Eduardo knew was that a tiny icon on the screen’s task bar lit green and a connection got made.

The person who picked up at the other end said nothing to introduce himself, which was fine, because that was what Eduardo had been told to expect.

“I’m taking the contract.”

“Who gave you the details?” The voice was gruff.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“What guarantees do I have that the job will be done?”

“None.”

“By the day after tomorrow or the line of credit closes.”

“Tomorrow night,” said Eduardo and broke the connection.