“. . . egs,” said the fox. “. . . gn of a good VSOP.” Raf could remember being told about legs by one of his mother’s lovers, the Animal Channel producer probably. Speaking to the boy about brandy while really trying to impress a drunk obsessive, being too stupid to realize the only thing likely to impress Raf’s mother was money to fund her films.

“What . . . ?” Raf looked at the General who stood waiting.

“My definition of courage,” said the old man. “You know it?”

“Dying well?”

“Acting as if you believe, even when you don’t.”

“Same thing,” said Raf as he put down the General’s glass, this time on top of a folded paper that sat on the desk between them.

A fuzzy picture showed a missing teenager, her long blonde hair uncovered as she stood grinning on a street corner in some city that wasn’t El Iskandryia . . . Paris, maybe, judging from a sugary white basilica behind her.

What little text there was screamed its certainty that this girl was the butcher’s most recent victim. No underlined links pretended to go somewhere, because Saiyidi wasn’t downloaded from a news vendor. It was run off an old-fashioned press in a cellar somewhere in Karmous and read by those without paid access to newsfeeds or money for vendors. The same kind of urban poor who listened to pirate stations and recognized souk rumour for the truth it was.

“You promised me the killer was already dead.”

“She is . . .”

“She?” Koening Pasha raised his eyebrows at the pronoun. “Whoever told you that was wrong. Sack your informant.”

“No one told me,” Raf said crossly. “The woman’s dead. I killed her.”

“So who did it this time?” demanded the General. “Her ghost?” His laugh was bitter, tired also. “Drink,” he said.

Raf shook his head, then realized that wasn’t an invitation but an order. Glancing round, he found a large bottle of Hine sitting on a semicircular marble table, balanced on top of a fat pile of intelligence reports.

Half the cognac was gone and its cork was missing. Raf was still looking round for a glass when the General grunted with irritation.

“Not you, idiot, me . . .” He held out his brandy balloon while Raf filled it halfway to the top. Then, turning unsteadily towards the French windows, the old man stamped back into his garden, not bothering to check that Raf was ready to follow.

Which he very definitely wasn’t. Raf was too busy skimming an intelligence report, the one under the bottle. It was concise, factual and loaded. According to some second attaché at the temporary Consulate in Seattle, a local triad, represented by a button man named Wild Boy, was offering $1,000,000 for news of someone known as ZeeZee. The man had been tracked to an Ottoman Airways flight bound for Zanzibar. Unfortunately, enquiries at the Ottoman Airways office in SeaTac/Seattle had failed to identify the name under which ZeeZee had travelled or whether his journey had been broken en route.

What was known, was that the man had travelled on a diplomatic passport, probably issued by Stambul. Though, regretfully, the woman on the check-in desk had not actually looked inside.

“Remind you of anyone?”

Raf looked up to find the Khedive standing in the hall doorway, face quizzical.

“No,” said Raf. “Afraid not.”

The boy smiled. “Me neither.”

Under the biggest cypress tree was an ornate bench. Between the cast-iron bench and a nearby oak stood a rain-streaked statue slightly taller than Raf. The statue showed a rudimentary metal tree with a naked girl falling headlong between its stark branches.

“Pike sverer mellom grenene,” said the General. “Gustav Vigeland—1907. You know what it represents?”

Eyes wide, mouth open, small fists clenched. Raf could take a reasonable guess. But the General got there first, answering his own question as if he’d been the one asked.

“Whatever you want it to represent . . . So the next question,” said the General, “is who decides exactly what we represent . . . ?”

He didn’t wait for the answer to that either.

“Because I don’t and you sure as hell don’t . . .” The old man raised his brandy balloon and suddenly the dark eyes that stared at Raf over the top of the glass were anything but drunk.

“The city decides.”

Raf thought he should do something about now, so he nodded.

“You’ve probably heard them all. Isk the whore and Isk the virgin. The city of glass. Solid and ephemeral, transient and timeless. The city within the city. Every cliché from every guidebook. The old man used the analogy of a card house as belief . . .”

Koenig Pasha was talking about the Khedive’s father, Raf realized. The man who sat for fifteen years in a small teahouse on an island off El Muntaza, which was how long it took him to die. The teahouse became his bed, the island his ward and the Haremlik across its narrow bridge became his hospital, filled with specialists from around the world.

“And he stole the card-as-belief metaphor from his father . . . An old-fashioned, outdated man.” The General’s voice was uncharacteristically bitter. “But one who was nonetheless intelligent.”

Seeing the blank look on Raf’s thin face, the General began to explain himself, his long fingers and narrow wrists twitching as he mimicked adding and subtracting playing cards to a card house that wasn’t there.

“Knock down a couple of cards at the top and only the top rocks. Maybe the top falls, maybe it stands. And if that level falls, it can be rebuilt, using the same cards if you must. But take a card from the bottom and the whole edifice is in danger. No matter how secure the top. Once the lowest level goes, everything goes. The old man knew this. I know this. Felix knew this. Even the boy in there knows this. It seems you don’t.”

“Iskandryia isn’t a pack of cards,” said Raf.

“No, it’s myth layered with history, so stiff with legacy code that life barely runs. A free city that half the free world would like to see abolished. Berlin mistrusts us, Paris too . . . Washington. Well, Washington hates us. The only thing still keeping us standing is that we’re too stupid to know we’re dead. You know what our Unique Selling Point is?”

Raf shook his head.

“Inertia. Iskandryia’s been a free city for so long no one can quite imagine how North Africa might operate if we weren’t. Well, take a look at the newsfeeds. People out there are beginning to imagine it . . .” The General swallowed back the last of his cognac and breathed in, inhaling the fumes. By the time he’d finished coughing he’d apparently reached a decision.

“So far as I can see,” said the General, “as Chief you have three main problems.”

“I have?”

“The first,” said the General, “is personal. The way life works is public virtue, private vice. You keep doing it the wrong way round. The remaining two problems are more serious . . .” Koenig Pasha’s voice was harsh but thin, its determination at odds with an old man’s frailty. “One big problem, one slightly smaller. First, find out why tourists are being butchered.”

“We think . . .”

The old man sighed heavily. “The problem,” he said, “is that you don’t . . . You’re going to tell me the killer’s dead, again. Burned up in that fire. You think I don’t get reports from your office? Forget finding out who carried out the latest atrocity. I told you to find out why it happened.”

“And how do you suggest I do that?”

“Break heads. Use the Army. Take whatever you need from the treasury . . .” The old man looked for a moment as if he might be about to rescind that last suggestion, but instead he shrugged. “Just find out. And keep it out of the papers and off the newsfeeds.”

“That’s the big problem, right?”

The General’s smile was wintry. Flicking a curled leaf from the arm of the bench, he followed its brief and twisting fall. Then he told Raf what Senator Liz really wanted and exactly why he, the General, couldn’t give it to her.