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Pashazade: The First Arabesk

• ISBN: 9780671773687
• Author: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
• Description:
  Cool SF thriller - Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET as science fiction El Iskandria is the most famous and cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Egypt in the 21st century. Ashraf Bey travels there to escape an American prison, but ends up the main suspect in a murder, hated by the woman he is supposed to marry and responsible for the welfare of a nine-year-old cousin...In a world where Germany won the First World War, in a world where the Ottoman Empire still dominates the Middle East, in a world where Zeppelins drone overhead...Ashraf Bey has to survive and discover answers to questions about himself and the city he has come to live in. The answers may be factually accurate, but are they true? First of a series which is an SF version of Lawrence Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET, in which El Iskandria is as much a character as any human. Excerpted from Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 6th July The sound of fountains came in stereo. A deep splash fromthe courtyard below and a lighter trickle from the next room,where open arches cut in a wall over-looking the courtyard hadmarble balustrades stretched between matching pillars.It was that kind of house.Old, historic, near-derelict in places.‘Ambient temp eighty-one Fahrenheit, humidity sixty-twoper cent . . .’ The American spoke clearly, reading the datafrom the face of his watch, then glanced through a smashedwindow to what little he could see of the sky outside.‘Passing cloud, no direct sunlight.’Dropping clumsily onto one knee, Felix Abrinsky touchedthe marble floor with nicotine-stained fingers, confirming tohimself that this statement was correct. The tiles werewarm butnot hot. No latent heat had been stored up from that morning’ssunshine to radiate back into the afternoon air.Bizarrely, it took Felix less effort to stand than it had doneto kneel, though he needed to pause to catch his breath all thesame. And the silver-ringed hand that came up to wipe sweatfrom his forehead only succeeded in smearing grease acrosshis scalp and down his thinning ponytail.Police regulations demanded he wear a face mask, surgicalgloves and – in his case – a sweatband to stop himself fromaccidentally polluting biological evidence. But Felix was Chiefof Detectives and so far as he was concerned that meant hecould approach the crime scene how he liked, which wasloose, casual and lateral. Not to mention semi-drunk. All thevirtues that first got him thrown out of the police in LosAngeles.Besides, if you wanted to talk about should have been, thenhe should have been on holiday. And he would have managedit, too, if this particular buck hadn’t been bumped up the lineso fast it practically hit the wall parking itself right outside hisoffice door.The body in the chair was fresh, still warm to his touch.Stiffness had set in to the arms – but then, rigor happened fastwhen a victim was borderline anorexic. And even without thewoman’s thinness there was North Africa’s heat to add into theequation. Heat always upped the rate at which rigor gripped acorpse.On his arrival Felix had considered obtaining an immediatebody temperature. But habit made him do the crime-scene grabsfirst, then work a grid through the victim’s office, tweezeringup clues. And technically, since she was obviously dead, he’dalready broken his own regulations by checking under her jawfor a carotid pulse.‘Covering the body prior to site shots.’Some cities used electronic observers, 360 degree fish-eyevids, wired for movement and sound. El Iskandryia used thehuman kind, when it bothered to use observers at all. Thesilksuit Felix had selected stood in the doorway, doing exactlywhat he’d been told, which was shut up and stay out ofthe way.From a foil packet Felix extracted a sheet of tissue-thin gauzedesigned to protect the woman’s modesty in death, as surelyas a scarf round her head would have hidden her hair on thestreets in life. Except there was no scarf, because the womanhad been stabbed in her own house, at her own desk, in herown office . . .‘Starting location shots,’ said the fat man and lifted an oldSpeed Graphic. The camera was linked to his even more ancientLAPD-issue chronograph, which would back up each shot as itwas taken, just as the camera would automatically stamp time,date and orientation across the bottom edge of each new shot.15.30:July 6:SouthSouthWest.All the same, Felix dictated a description of what he wasdoing, working fast to photograph the little office from everyangle. Only when this was done could he start work on thebody.‘Exposure five. Al-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior. Westwall and corner of office taken from door. Speed GraphicDigilux. Fifty-millimetre lens. K400-equivalence.’The dictation did no more than tell the court what camerahad been used, what the shot showed and what the light waslike: something the camera readouts told them anyway. But he’dlearned his craft back when Speed Graphics still took acetateand defence attorneys jumped on any conflict of technicalinformation, no matter how small. And besides, Felix spokenot really to his camera or watch but to himself.These days defence attorneys weren’t an issue. If the Chiefof Detectives said someone had committed a crime that wasusually good enough for a judge. The suspect went down.Unfortunately it had taken Felix a few months to realize thisand there were three cases from his early days in El Iskandryiawhich still gave him sleepless nights – four cases, if he wasbeing unusually hard on himself.‘Exposure eleven. Al-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior.Open door to office, taken from broken mashrabiya windowin south wall adjacent to Rue Sherif . . .’Mashrabiyas were, originally, shaded balconies where waterjugs could be left to cool. But the term had long since cometo signify both the balcony and the ornately carved screenthat hid those in the balcony from the street below. Marblewas commonplace for the screen, as was gilded or paintedwood.The smashed mashrabiya at the al-Mansur madersa had beencarved two hundred years before from a single slab of alabasterand now lay in shards on the floor, apparently kicked in fromoutside. That the balcony was fifteen feet above a traffic-laden street only made the break-in more unlikely. Unless one factoredin the Thiergarten who apparently could move unseen,kill silently and climb walls like flies . . .Felix sighed. Whatever else Berlin had to buy for its agentsabroad, their deadly reputation came free. An extract from Pashazade, copyright © Jon Courtenay Grimwood, 2001

• Pages: 384
• Format: Paperback
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Rating: Not yet rated

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• Notes about this copy:
  good condition, slight crease to bottom middle pages.

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