The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (23 page)

“Good,” she said, “Not just a pretty face after all. Now,” she clicked her fingers lightly, “let’s eat…”

Hu San ordered for both of them. Anorexic food for anorexic appetites. It certainly wasn’t what got served in the cafés and bars he used. The soup was Savoy cabbage, a teaspoon of sour cream swirled into a tablespoon’s worth of lightly puréed cabbage, the whole thing covered with fine shavings of black truffle. It came in a large white bowl that appeared badly chipped round the rim but was probably meant to look like that. After the soup came a sandwich, except that Hu San ate hers with a fork, so ZeeZee did the same.

Mimic, reflect, replace—if nothing else he knew his own strengths. Mind you, that was because he’d seen them laid out—boxed off and numbered—in a guarantee the fox had shown him. It was all there, zipped up tight inside his own head. And, given his mother’s belief in the purity of nature, he was lucky she hadn’t gone for high design, or he’d probably have had bug eyes. Except that all his augmentations seemed to be mammalian. Well, almost all of them…

“Eat,” said Hu San, spearing a sliver of warm pork that had been hidden under a paper-thin square of bread slow cooked until it was dry enough to crumble at the touch. Holding together the pork and bread like glue was a mustard mayonnaise mixed with shredded rocket.

Hu San drank a Californian Chardonnay with the Savoy cabbage, switched to an Australian Shiraz for the pork and finished with a chilled ’38 Sauternes, which she used to wash down a tiny vanilla cream baked with armagnac prunes. She drank one half glass from each bottle and left the rest, without offering any to the boy who sat opposite and nursed his house white until its contents were blood-heat.

Occasionally she’d look at him and smile. And at the end she leaned forward and brushed his hair out of his eyes with a single finger. “It’s time for you to go,” she said. “Remember to leave the way you came in…”

They were waiting for him in the loading bay. Which he could have guessed, had he bothered to think about it.

They were fast, efficient and professional. But then, that was their job. ZeeZee didn’t get in even one blow, one kick… He was too busy fighting the length of wire that had been flipped over his shoulders from behind and now held his arms helpless at his side.

“Fuckwit.”

Until a punch caught him in the stomach, ZeeZee had assumed the person holding the wire was Wild Boy. But Wild Boy was working the gloves. Stepping out of the shadows in best street-punk fashion, his leather collar turned up against the night wind, his hair elegantly dishevelled. Both fists wrapped in neoprene gloves that were weighted along the knuckles with lead shot.

“Wrong place, wrong time…” Wild Boy took ZeeZee’s face between thumb and finger and squeezed, gouging the pressure points. “You know what you did? Wrong, wrong, wrong.” The first two punches caught ZeeZee in the stomach, the third slid between the English boy’s rib cage and hip, causing a blood-red poppy of pain to flare inside ZeeZee’s head and then wilt slowly, from the petals inwards. Only the wire kept him on his feet.

“Bastard.”

“Aren’t I?” Wild Boy drew back his fist and grinned.

“Not the face,” snapped the man holding ZeeZee upright. Fear was behind the sudden anger in his voice. “You know what she said. Not the face.”

“Shame,” complained Wild Boy, stepping up to ZeeZee to knee him through a breaking scream into…

In the beginning there was darkness and the fox comprehended it not. So it ran some diagnostics and the darkness was revealed as syncope, relating to abrupt cerebral hypoperfusion. A quick and dirty check on syncope and hypoperfusion convinced the fox that the problem was both local and diminishing, so it shut down again to save energy. The fox fed off neon mostly, because its nine other power options had failed.

Of course it featured telemetry, self-check integrity and various other measures designed to ensure permanence (with five intra-optic LEDs to warn the carrier in case of a system fault) but these had also failed. But then the Seimens-Oakley was a very early model and only intended to run for seven years in the first place.

So now it worked in the background on a need-to-know basis. If the host needed to know, it popped up, otherwise it could run silent for months, even years. The fox lived in ZeeZee’s skull. Not his brain but his actual skull, housed in a compact ceramic case because ceramic allowed uninterrupted transmission and had high mechanical strength and identical hardness to the surrounding bone.

It had numerous functions, expressed in its own guarantee as a complicated menu of sets and subsets. But its primary function was obvious. The fox existed to keep its host alive. “Well balanced” and “happy” hadn’t been options on the early models. And anyway, the marker for genius doubled as a marker for dysfunction: that had always been made quite clear.

ZeeZee took a shower, long and hot enough to bring out the bruises, then walked over to the mirror to take a look at the damage. He had a flowering of broken skin over his ribs and above one hip. His balls felt the size of oranges, though they looked no worse than dark and swollen plums. And dark weals circled his upper arms where the wire had held him tight.

What interested him most, though, was a raw, weeping graze down one cheek of his depressingly adolescent face. A surface wound only, probably from where he had hit the filthy concrete floor on blacking out. That seemed most likely. But wherever the injury had come from, it was bleeding—which was a start.

The tub of ibuprofen in his bathroom cabinet suggested one 200 mg tablet, increased to two if the pain didn’t go. ZeeZee gulped four, washed them down with a couple of bottles of cold Bud from the fridge and waited impatiently for both beer and analgesic to bite on his vomit-emptied stomach. He wasn’t brave enough to beat himself up while sober.

The first blow ZeeZee threw did no more than make his eyes water, which was less than useless, so he went back to the fridge. Maybe you had to be furious or drunk to be able to hurt yourself properly.

As a fourth Bud followed the third down the boy’s gullet and the alcohol finally began to flood his veins, ZeeZee found the courage to punch his own face. Or maybe it was the idiocy. Whichever, he slammed his face down into an upcoming punch and felt an eyebrow split.

When he stopped swearing and crying, he watched the eye socket beneath the split brow close up in front of him, as he looked into a wall mirror, seeing a naked boy squint hazily back. Now was the time to wrap ice in a dishcloth or use a packet of frozen peas. But ZeeZee did neither. Instead, he took an old Opinel knife out of a kitchen drawer and yanked open the blade. Without giving himself time to think, ZeeZee lifted the knife to his face and slashed across his chin, opening a two-inch long cut that curved under his jaw.

All he needed now was a plaster and sleep…

Winter rain against the window of ZeeZee’s bedroom woke him with a steady roll of sound, too fast to be defined as drumming. Occasionally the clatter rose as gusting wind hurled droplets like gravel straight against the glass. The temperature inside his apartment was cold enough to make even him huddle under a fourteen-tog quilt.

It was partly that his only radiator was broken but mostly the cold came from an open window. He had his years at Scottish boarding school to thank for that. In Switzerland there had been individual rooms, shower cubicles and underfloor heating. None of his Scottish dormitories had even been heated and all the windows were forever open, even when snow was falling. Fresh air and healthy living were the reasons given. Neither was true. Shut the windows and the stink of fifteen adolescents became unbearable; made worse by clouds of cheap deodorants and too much aftershave. Open windows made up for lack of washing and a once-weekly bath.

Rolling slowly out of bed, ZeeZee pulled back the curtains to give himself light and white walls that had been lost in darkness washed yellow, in the sudden sodium glare of the wet city outside. All he needed was enough light to piss—that, and another dose of analgesics. One day, of course, he’d get a real life. Probably around the time he got measured for a coffin.

Underneath its plaster, his cut had joined cleanly, the edges already lightly bound together by insoluble threads of fibrin. And now that his hands were steadier ZeeZee took time to cut and apply the neatest possible butterfly plasters. Hu San liked neat so that’s what he’d give her. As promised on the box, the plasters slowly took on the colour of his skin until they were almost invisible. All the boy could now see was a clean, neat edge to the cut beneath.

Better than perfect.

What came next? Ribs, transport and clothes. Winding a long crepe bandage round fractured ribs wasn’t something he recommended. Mostly the pain just froze his lungs but sometimes, as ZeeZee reached for the unravelling roll of bandage, neural lightning caught at his heart as well. By the end, pinpricks of sweat prickled his hairline and his whole upper body felt as if it had been bound into a nettle corset. So he chewed yet more ibuprofen, though this time round he passed on the iced beer.

Usually ZeeZee had no trouble with stuff like which clothes to wear: he bought five of everything and rotated it. But today was different. Hu San wouldn’t be expecting him at the breakfast meeting and, even if she was, she’d expect him to turn up in the usual dark suit, white shirt and red tie like he always did. Well, he was going to borrow a few of Wild Boy’s feathers.

“Seattle Taxi Service,” said a woman after he punched nine digits on his home phone from memory. “How can we improve your day…?”

“A cab from here to the Seattle Harbour Hotel,” said ZeeZee. Then told the woman where he was and when he wanted the car, which was right then.

The line went silent. “Yeah, we can do that. You going to let me see you?” This was a sight check, to see if he looked like some dustout or merely sounded like one.

“Sure.” He hit visual on his phone and the woman yelped.

“You’re naked.”

“Yeah,” agreed ZeeZee. “But I’ll be dressed by the time the cab arrives.”

Her laugh was abrupt but not really unkind. “You’d better be. Five minutes max…”

Which was what he needed, ZeeZee told himself. A countdown. He skipped on shaving because one, it would hurt and two, Hu San was obviously into rough trade. All the same, he took a razor to his jaw line. Black jacket, because that was the only colour he wore. A PaulSmith leather job, tailored but not tight. From right at the back of his small cupboard, he pulled a slate-grey silk shirt he’d bought but never worn and matched it to a pair of deep red trousers some Polish girl had given him two weeks before they split. She’d also been responsible for the silk shirt. He couldn’t recall her name but he remembered the snakeskin bag he’d bought her, the by-product of one of his random attacks of senseless guilt.

Black shoes, black tie, and finally a pair of Armani shades with smoke-grey lenses that he’d found left forgotten on a café table near Hu San’s shop. ZeeZee was dressed before the taxi arrived.

A porter rushed to open his taxi door and ZeeZee slipped the man $10. Maybe it was meant to be more, but that was what he had and it seemed quite enough to do the trick.

“HS Export,” he told the girl at the desk.

“They’ve already started,” said an older man, materializing behind her from some cubbyhole where assistant desk managers lived. He was trying hard not to stare at the cut on ZeeZee’s face and not doing a good job.

“No problem,” said ZeeZee lightly. “Have they actually started breakfast yet?”

The man looked at the girl who picked up an old-fashioned desk phone. “Yes,” she said, “I’m afraid so.” She nodded as she spoke, emphasizing the fact.

“Then perhaps you could order me Earl Grey and toast and have it brought straight in…” ZeeZee smiled before turning away. He knew which door to head for because there was a sign on it saying
HS Export—meeting in progress
and, besides, it was the same conference room every week…

“My apologies.”

Hu San looked up, saw the English boy standing stiffly in the open door and almost smiled. Saving face was something she understood.

Safe behind his shades, ZeeZee skimmed the room, editing out Victorian landscapes, Persian rugs, a large silver samovar and other examples of instant antiquity, probably bought by the yard. What ZeeZee was interested in was his audience. The one he was about to wow by doing precisely nothing.

Mostly they were suits. A couple of enforcers. Plus Wild Boy and Hu San. All sitting round a table in front of their almost-finished breakfast. Same as it ever was.

“You’re late…”

“I overslept,” ZeeZee’s voice was languid. The kind of drawl for which he used to beat up kids at school.

“Overslept?” Hu San did smile at that. “Sit down,” she told ZeeZee shortly and he did, taking the only place still free. At the other end of the long walnut table, directly opposite her.

Timing was everything in life, so the fox once said. ZeeZee waited until Hu San was in mid flow, running down a list of recent successes and the very occasional failure, pulling facts and figures alike out of her head, and then he slowly and silently took off his shades and watched her words slow, falter and finally dry up.

When she spoke her face was utterly impassive. That was how everyone sitting round the table instantly knew she was furious, though most of them still assumed it was with ZeeZee.