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an imaginary pen across an imaginary payment slip in the universal demand for the bill.
    “Of course… Although perhaps his excellency would like to keep a tab?”
    “Perhaps he would.”
    Make like a chameleon. Acclimatize, was what the fox said. If you had time, that was, and ZeeZee was making time. Whether his position with the Third Circle made the difference or the fact that he ranked as a bey, life in El Iskandryia was proving easier than he’d ever dreamed possible when he stepped off the plane. But then, after prison, almost anything was going to be an improvement.
    He just wished he could remember at what point the fox had disappeared. He was pretty sure it had been there right up to the point they hit Immigration. And ZeeZee always hated it when the fox went invisible on him. It was like suddenly not being able to see in the dark.
     
CHAPTER 3
    29th June
    Tiri had definitely been there when ZeeZee first landed in Iskandryia, twisting itself in and out of people’s legs, sometimes so thinned by distance that ZeeZee lost track of everything but the fox’s silver tail and hacking cough.
    Too many cigarettes, a biology master had told him years before, when ZeeZee had asked why a cub stood choking in a distant field, shoulders hunched as it tried to throw up a splinter of bone. The other men present had laughed and one had rumpled the small boy’s blond hair.
    My own little wild animal, the visitor called him. That was just before ZeeZee decided to fail all his exams…
    “Read this.” An immigration officer in khaki thrust a green embarkation card into ZeeZee’s hand and waved him towards the end of a queue. There were several queues, all moving inexorably towards a row of desks where simple polygraphs stood waiting, their guts exposed to the air. A golem-featured man from the line alongside glanced over and ZeeZee thought for a moment he was going to nod or say something. But he just stared at ZeeZee’s matted hair and then looked away.
    It was one of those evenings.
    On the card was a list of statements to be read aloud, in a choice of French, Arabic, German or English…
    He wasn’t a drug addict.
    He wasn’t infectious.
    He didn’t plan to overthrow the khedive…
    So far so good. ZeeZee skimmed his eyes down the next three prohibitions against entering El Iskandryia.
    He wasn’t planning to purchase for export any classical or Pharaonic artefacts.
    He didn’t belong to a proscribed fundamentalist group.
    He’d never been charged with murder. Except he had…
    It might have been the last prohibition that made ZeeZee sweat, or it could have been the lack of air-conditioning. Whatever, he was still sweating when he reached the head of his queue to find himself facing a middle-aged man who wore a fez, an oiled moustache, a gold lapel pin shaped in the name of God and a rectangular tag that announced he was Sergeant Aziz.
    “Where did your journey begin?” demanded the sergeant.
    “America,” said ZeeZee and Aziz nodded. Given the bleached dreadlocks, hobo beard and beige elephants stampeding across an ill-fitting sports shirt it was unlikely the thin man came from anywhere else.
    “Make your declaration,” the sergeant said. So ZeeZee put his hand on the plate and let Aziz click shut a wrist band. Then he swore his beliefs away, only stumbling when he reached the final prohibition.
    “Again,” demanded the sergeant.
    “I have never murdered anybody,” said ZeeZee flatly and every diode on the cheap Matsui lie detector stayed green. On the far side of the desk the fox grinned like the fox he was and, without thinking, ZeeZee grinned back.
    Drugged or drunk, Aziz decided, his eyes flicking from the passenger’s darkened armpits to his bead-slicked forehead. Either way, he was suspect.
    “ID card?” Irritation made the sergeant snap his fingers.
    “I’ve got this,” ZeeZee said apologetically. The document he proffered was unmistakable, its cover pure white and hand-stitched from Moroccan