The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (22 page)

“Let me see,” said Felix. “Your aunt arranges a marriage that comes apart before it happens. Hamzah threatens to kill her. She dies. We decide to bring him in for questioning. With me so far…?”

Yeah, he was.

“And then, very strangely, you tip him off and a few hours later his boys are demolishing large chunks of the al-Mansur madersa. Conveniently destroying a crime site in the process.”

“It gets worse,” said Raf. “My aunt took Hamzah for $2,500,000 in commission on that deal. It’s missing.”

“Sweet fuck.” The fat man’s cigarette went head first into the table, dying in a shower of sparks, and out came a hip flask. Felix examined the thing as if he’d never seen one before and thrust it angrily back in his pocket. “You wanna coffee?”

An old Otis hauled them up to ground level and they left together, walking under the oppressive grandeur of the precinct’s entrance portal. On their way through, every officer at the front desk stared at Raf until he stared back and ten people looked away at once. “Get used to it,” said Felix. “Where do you want to go?”

“Le Trianon.”

“Should have guessed,” said Felix and clicked his fingers for a taxi. It was only 9:30 in the morning, but the fat man still recognized when he was right over the limit.

Raf was shown to his table only seconds after two Americans were ejected to make space. The New Yorkers stood on the other side of the red silk rope, glaring and muttering until Felix went to talk to them. They left quickly after that.

“What did you say?”

“Me…?” Felix waited until the maître d’ had finished arranging his plate so one octagonal edge exactly aligned with the table.

“Which one would Sir like?” The man asked, nodding to a trolley filled with pastries.

“All of them,” Felix said bluntly. “But I’ll take those three.” He pointed out three pieces of baklava dusted with crushed almonds. “And bring me a proper-sized cup of coffee…”

“Well?” Raf asked.

Felix looked down the street as if he might still see the departing New Yorkers through the press of bodies filling the sidewalk. “Said you were the Khedive’s personal hit man and they’d been hogging your table… You’re not, are you?” Before Raf could answer, Felix flipped up his hand. “Don’t feel you have to answer that, obviously.”

Huntsville had been simple. Raf had understood the rules. Most of which he’d kept and a few of which he’d broken. He’d taken who he’d become on remand and kept the identity, because it worked. The freaky hair and biker beard had been good protective camouflage. But trying to understand his new life was like pushing water up a hill. Every time he got near the top the fox curled up inside his head warned him it was the wrong hill or the water was gone. Raf was tired, more scared than he dared admit and he was alone in a city that got more, not less weird the more he knew about it. And then there was Hani…

“Look,” said Raf, “can I tell you something?”

Felix bit off another chunk of baklava and Raf took this for assent.

“That piece of paper,” said Raf, “it’s crap, all of it. I don’t have weapons training. I’m not in the Sultan’s employ. I’ve never even been to Stambul…”

“Yeah, right.” Felix asked, swallowing his mouthful. “So what
were
you doing in America?”

Raf didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Felix sighed, but whatever he wanted to say was cut dead by a sudden buzz from his watch. “You’d better get home,” he told Raf as he tapped the
off
button. “Madame Mila’s turned up again.”

“She
called
you?”
It sounded unlikely even as Raf said it.

“No, that was Hani.”

“How did she know I was with you?” Raf asked.

The fat man scooped up the last sticky crumbs of baklava and stuffed them into his open mouth. “More to the point,” he said, “how did the kid get my number?”

CHAPTER 31

Seattle

“And where do you think you’re going?”

ZeeZee paused on the steps while a doorman raked him with the gaze that hotel staff everywhere reserve for tramps, hawkers and delivery boys who’ve come to the wrong entrance.

“Got this.” ZeeZee lifted the cardboard crate a little higher and waited. What people expected to see was usually what they saw: it cut down on thinking time. ZeeZee had been about five when he’d worked that out. The doorman expected elegant diners and the occasional delivery boy too idiotic or ignorant to find his own way to the service entrance at the rear.

Which was what ZeeZee gave him.

“Where do you want it?” ZeeZee might sound stupid but he was being intelligent, more than intelligent… Unintelligent people who disappointed Hu San usually ended up having accidents. While people intelligent enough to be disappointed in themselves mostly decided to suck on a gun barrel, to save Hu San the trouble.

ZeeZee didn’t intend to do either: but nor was he stupid enough to try to hightail it out of Seattle. His only route to safety was to face up to Hu San in such a way that he was both alive and forgiven when the confrontation ended. And since getting to Hu San
before
Wild Boy had been an impossibility, success depended on meeting the woman later, in a place Wild Boy didn’t go.

That Hu San knew nothing about the upcoming meeting was obvious. Her evenings at SHC were private, a shrine of calm in the busy wilderness of her day, and it had never occurred to her that anyone might dare interrupt.

Getting unnoticed into SHC took a pair of overalls, a Mariners baseball cap worn back to front, bad attitude and a case of vintage Mumm. Not that ZeeZee could afford twelve bottles of champagne, but any price that saved his life was cheap.

“Round the back, idiot.” The doorman glared at ZeeZee, then stepped quickly back as a thin woman in Arctic fox climbed the steps and nodded for the doorman to start the revolving door.

“Good evening, Madame. I do hope you have a pleasant
—”
That was as far as the man got before ZeeZee pushed forward.

“Just tell me who gets this, okay?”

Both fox-fur and doorman turned in shock.

“Look,” said ZeeZee. “Somebody has to sign for this crap.” He shifted the clinking box higher still, until it half blocked his face. “Come on…”

The woman stared at him. She had the taut manner of a judge or maybe an upstream divorce lawyer. Someone prosperous, someone who expected lesser species like delivery boys to show her respect. “Who do you work for?”

“Why?” ZeeZee borrowed the look he gave her straight from Wild Boy. A hard-eyed stare that ended in a deceptively gentle smile. “What’s it to you?”

The doorman was giving ZeeZee directions and a name before the boy even had time to return his attention to the uniformed flunky. “There,” said ZeeZee, “that wasn’t too hard…”

Darkness, silence and cats. His three favourite things. Or maybe the three things that made him feel safest. The stink he could have done without. Scrawny grey shadows fought over an empty foie-gras tin fallen from a sodden cardboard box, pencil-thin backs crooked in anger. Along one side of the courtyard was an open loading bay, along the opposite side were trashcans, all overflowing.

Either the garbage union were on strike or SHC hadn’t heard of recycling. Whichever, the courtyard stank of rotting food and cat piss. Seattle’s most exclusive dining club had two faces and this was the other one.

“Elmore,” ZeeZee demanded of an elderly Hispanic sitting on the edge of the loading bay, pulling heavily on a cigarette. Dead butts littered the ground below his dangling feet like empty cases from an over-active machine-gun.

The man jerked his thumb behind him, towards darkness.

ZeeZee adjusted his eyes. The darkness was large and empty, overlooked by internal windows and stained across its scuzzy floor with food spills and scabs of old chewing gum.

Choosing a door at random, ZeeZee kicked it open and staggered down a passage past the open door to a kitchen, case clutched firmly in his hands. Heat blasted out at him, along with the stink of grilled fish. Somewhere inside the kitchen a radio was playing an ancient Daniel Lanois track, the soft rock drowned beneath a crash of plates and the clatter of table silver.

A swing door at the end of the passage flipped ZeeZee from one world to another: the back-of-house peeling green paint changing to distressed wooden panelling, as the old linoleum underfoot became carpet, not deep pile but expensive and exactly matched to the pale colours that swirled down the room’s long hand-made curtains. He was staring across a foyer and through a revolving door, straight at the back of the uniformed doorman.

It was time to change identities.

Dumping his overalls in a swing-top bin next to old-fashioned porcelain urinals, ZeeZee crammed his champagne crate in an under-sink cupboard beneath the powder room’s row of stone basins. Of course, he had to flip the cupboard’s brass lock with the blade of his pocket knife, but the damage was minimal and a twist of torn-off paper jammed the door shut again.

The figure that straightened up in the mirror was smart. Unquestionably young but neatly dressed in white shirt and Hermes tie bought for the occasion. His blond hair was just slightly too long but combing was enough to turn the look from unacceptable to merely louche. A fat cigar was all it took to finish the part of rich boy about town…

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Madame.”

Hu San looked up from her notebook to see an Armani-clad barman hovering nervously at her elbow.

“One of our new members is most insistent about joining you.” The Turkish boy’s nod was discreet, but there was no mistaking he meant the young man who stood at the bar, smoke spiralling up from a
Romeo y Julieta
held tightly between the fingers of one hand.

Dark eyes locked onto ZeeZee’s face. There was no shock or outrage, barely even surprise. It was, thought Raf, like looking into a deep well and not even knowing if there was water at the bottom. “Send him over,” said Hu San. “But tell him to lose that cigar first…”

Around the edge of the room, on black leather banquettes, slouched Seattle’s wealthy. Tall and blond or dark, handsome and unfortunately not tall at all, elegantly dressed or expensively dishevelled, both women and men talked intently or stood to shake hands and air-kiss briefly. The Brownian motion of money.

The woman with the fox fur was repeating her story of meeting a horrible delivery boy on the way in. She was telling it for the third time and her partner was still pretending to be shocked.

Only a few of those in the room showed their age in a surgical tightness around the eyes, the regrettable side effects of having reached middle age before the start of nanetic surgery. The rest had that youthful permanence which came from being able to afford faces that were constantly rebuilt from the inside.

Hu San sat in the middle of the room, in her own exclusion zone. Expensive hair, simple jewellery. Anyone who was close enough to her table to smell her scent or see the tiny silk characters embroidered on her black jacket was too close. And getting too close to Hu San was dangerous. Only, in ZeeZee’s case, staying away was more dangerous still. She was vaguely impressed that the boy had been able to work this out for himself.

“What will you drink?” Hu San demanded.

“A Budweiser.”

“Green tea,” she told the waiter, “and bring a glass of house white for our newest member.”

“So, tell me why you’re here,” said the Chinese woman once the drinks had arrived and ZeeZee had pulled up a chair of his own.

Very carefully, the English boy placed his long-stemmed glass onto the white tablecloth between them and—despite being seated—put his hands together, bowing as best he could. “I wish to apologize,” ZeeZee told Hu San. “Haruki has told me how badly I have disappointed you.” He used Wild Boy’s real name when talking to Hu San, but then, everybody always did. “I am truly sorry.”

Hu San nodded. “Drink your wine,” she said. “I’m going to make a call.”

No mobiles allowed, not even in the bar. ZeeZee could understand that, especially in a dining club that thought stone basins were smart and didn’t serve beer. And that was the last thing he bothered to think until her return was signalled by a hand resting lightly on his shoulder, the merest brush. Probably no more significant than reaching out to pat a stray.

“I’ve booked us a table for supper…” said Hu San. “A waiter will bring your drink.” And she nodded to the Turkish boy behind the bar who watched them go. Not openly but almost proprietorially, as if noting, with slight bemusement, that two rather disparate people had made friends in his bar.

“Wow,” said ZeeZee, stopping in the doorway of the dining room. A low ceiling was hung with swathes of cream silk that made it look lower still. The floor was blond wood, probably beech, the gold walls anything but straight, rippling round the large room in soft, almost Gaudiesque curves. The effect was of dining within a vast, impossibly expensive tent.

Hu San smiled. “I own both this club and the hotel,” she said, answering a question ZeeZee hadn’t asked. “The city may not like me, but without my money this place would have shut years ago.” She nodded towards a window and the dark glittering water of the harbour beyond it. “Five floors, original building, right on the waterfront, less than two hundred members… It costs me over a million a year in lost revenue.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Work it out.” Hu San’s smile went cold.

“Influential people, increasingly valuable location…” The boy stood just inside the door and watched money rise off the other diners like steam. “And inside information,” he added finally, afraid that Hu San would be angry. Instead the Chinese woman just nodded.