Pashazade a-1

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  She'd brought Avatar out here once, one evening just before she went to New York. Some ideas needed to be left as ideas and that was one of them. He'd hated the water, he hadn't wanted to get undressed in front of her and one of his new ear-studs had rusted and given him an infection. And later, when she was on a plane and it was too late to say sorry, she realized he'd resented being asked to come out to the villa anyway. So would she, if she'd been born in a slum and Villa Hamzah was where she wasn't allowed to live.

  So Zara went back to only coming here late and only coming alone.

  Getting here from her room was easy. A short drop from her window, little more than her height even back then, five easy paces across a strongly made tiled roof, then down a short length of heavy iron drainpipe, the old-fashioned kind complete with regular brackets bolting it to the wall. Chance worked in her favour sometimes.

  Swimming like this had been the one thing she'd missed while living in New York. No pool came close. As a child, she used to believe that she'd have been happiest being a street kid, if she could still have come here at night. Now she knew it was only money that gave her the freedom to swim like this, in the salt dark, alone, naked ... But even money had its flip side, though you probably had to be there to believe that.

  This was her world. Alone, untroubled, with the whole amniotic Mediterranean as an immersion tank. Her mother hated the sea.

  Zara sank under a wave, letting warm blackness close over her head as air dribbled from her lips, and felt herself slip slowly until her toes touched the bottom. The rocks were velvet with algae, seaweed flicked around her calves and ankles like sharp grass.

  Raf was shouting, only he didn't shout, he never shouted ... He stopped, thought about that for a split second and then started shouting again. Waves lapping dark rock were his only answer.

  Triangulation: he had the concept before he had its name. Noting where he now stood, Raf next glanced back to where he'd been standing, triangulating the position of the head when he first saw it.

  It should be ...

  Eyes skimmed the dark water until they saw a figure break surface. Somewhere nearby the shouting started again. And inside his head came a rolling litany, mostly composed of Oh, fuck, shit and God ...

  'Present and correct,' said the fox.

  Raf's suit ripped across the shoulder as he yanked off his jacket, sleeves revealing red silk as they turned inside out like snake skin. Kicking off his shoes Raf pulled the black tee over his newly cropped head, dropping cloth onto wet rock without thinking. His heart was a steady hammer.

  'Chill,' ordered the fox and Raf's cardiac rhythm steadied. He couldn't see the animal but it sounded near. Sounded full-size, too, as tall as he was, with a voice that stuck its claws into his memory and ripped.

  'Nictate your inner eyelids.' Raf did what the fox suggested. Experience showed this was usually safer. 'Now get out there.'

  The water was warmer than Raf expected, salt like blood, and phosphorescence clung to him as he swam. The swimmer was further out than Raf had thought and the heavy cloth of his trousers dragged Raf back like a chute, slowing him down. But he swam steadily, closing the distance between them.

  Clear the mouth of vomit, lift the chin ... pinch the nose, take a deep breath and blow ... take your mouth away and watch the chest fall...

  He was pretty sure he could do mouth-to-mouth. Resuscitation too, if necessary. Find the top of the arch of the ribs ... two fingers on it and heel of the hand on breastbone , .. press hard on the lower half of breastbone ... The number of apparently random facts Raf could pull out of his head always surprised him. Not least because he'd never been that good at turning up to lessons

  When Zara broke the surface she was behind him. She didn't stop giggling until Raf turned and moonlight suddenly lit his face.

  'You.' Zara sounded genuinely shocked.

  'Yeah,' said Raf tightly. 'Me ...' He was about to say something truly vicious but Zara's shoulders broke the surface as a wave sucked back in the undertow. Bare skin, no strap for her costume. It took Raf a second to process what his eyes had seen and his adrenal system had reacted to already.

  She swam naked.

  'Who did you think it was?' Raf demanded.

  She didn't answer, not at first. 'This is my beach,' Zara said finally. 'You're trespassing.' That's who she thought it was, some idiot trespasser.

  Raf shook his head. 'Your father told me to ...'

  Shit and double shit.

  Did Hamzah expect this — and what did it say about him if he did? Raf lent back into the water and kicked for shore, still swearing at his own stupidity. Back on shore, he didn't bother with shoes, jacket or tee-shirt, just rolled them into a untidy ball and stamped off towards the Villa. He didn't care how many lawyers the man had in there.

  'Where are you going?' Zara shouted from the water.

  To get a lift home,' Raf said angrily. 'You think a taxi's going to pick me up in this state?'

  Try walking,' she called. 'It's what ordinary people do.'

  Raf turned back and stared. 'Hani's at home,' he said coldly. 'Her aunt got murdered yesterday. This morning Hani left the house for the first time ever, to watch her aunt be buried. We're sleeping in the courtyard because she's too frightened to go back indoors. It's late. I've been away longer than I said I would. Which bit of that don't you understand?'

  Raf's face was ice, his words utterly uninflected. He could have been talking to a particularly stupid child, except he would never talk to any child in that way.

  'Five minutes,' said Zara. 'Meet me at the gate.' When she hit the beach it was thirty paces up shore, where her clothes waited in a neat pile. Then she was running for the Villa and swearing inside her head, mostly at herself.

  It was the sun that did it. Sports convertibles were big in North Africa, even locally made ones. Morocco had its own air-cooled Atlas, Algeria imported a three-wheeled Soviet Benz knock-off and the Ottoman countries made do with a sub-licensed Ford that leaked oil, belched smoke and was so simple to service it could be stripped back by a ten-year-old and repaired by a blacksmith.

  Of course, almost everybody who could afford something more upscale imported a Japanese machine. One of those enamel-and-chrome cut-down copies of old American beasts, all retro fins and goggle headlights. They looked great, told you when they needed gas and practically booked themselves in for servicing, never mind downloading their own tweaks for tuning. Which, with twelve tiny cylinders and forty-eight valves, was just as well.

  Zara's car was different. Its 240-horsepower V6 engine had been turbocharged way up beyond three hundred. The headlights were sharp multi-element clusters, using light-guide technology. A speed-tuned aerofoil in the nose and a fixed diffuser tunnel at the rear kept the wheels glued to the road.

  It was low, silver and spartan inside. The two-seat cockpit was stripped back, a simple array of controls with an unmistakable utilitarian elegance. The fascias, fillings and switches were machined from solid aluminium. It was the first racing F-type Jaguar that Raf had seen outside of the one in Seattle Museum.

  'Get in and hold on.'

  Raf grabbed a side handle and she was away, ramming the clutch through a crescendo of rapid gear changes rather than use automatic. Then it was near-silent running all the way, the Jaguar's engine never rising above a growl as the F-type burned up night traffic on the Corniche, hung a tight left into Place Orabi, tyres leaving burned rubber on the blacktop.

  Khedive Mohammed Ali appeared and vanished in a blur of grandeur, the Place des Consuls streaming by on either side. A right skid down a short alley between Catholic and Greek Orthodox cathedrals fed her through to Rue Kemil. The unlit shops either side reflecting only each other in darkened glass windows, until the car roared between them, headlights picking out peeling script over locked doorways.

  'I didn't do that for you,' said Zara firmly, as the car screeched to a halt at the entrance to Rue Cif. And then she was crunching her way through the gears again,
leaving him alone on a street corner, fifty paces from where Hani waited on the other side of a wall.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Seattle

  All matter moved. At a basic, base level atoms resonated, electrons could simultaneously occupy contradictory positions in space. What the eye regarded as solid was anything but... Of course, at a human level, movement was also what you got when people were too empty to stay still. That was the fox's opinion, anyway.

  Wild Boy rode a red 650cc with a custom-built exhaust pot no larger than the silencer on a Ruger rifle. The bike was Japanese like Wild Boy himself, which had no significance (the same bike was ridden by ZeeZee, standard issue for all lieutenants in Hu San's street militia). And Wild Boy was on his way to see ZeeZee, which did .. ,

  The Japanese kid dressed smart but flashy in silk suits that flattered his rough-cut hair and emphasized his slim shoulders and narrow hips. At the front, Wild Boy's hair was razored to frame wide green eyes and high cheekbones. That was the way Hu San liked it.

  He wore a brushed-steel Tag Heuer, lace-up Louis Vuitton boots, cotton shirt from Abercrombie & Fitch, a white Moschino coat over his dark suit and wide Alain Mikli spectacles fitted with tinted glass. Even his cigarettes were Gitanes, carried in a black enamel case with a Gucci clasp. Everything about Wild Boy had a label except the position he occupied in the Five Winds.

  It took ZeeZee two months to work out what Wild Boy did. At first he figured Wild Boy and Hu San were somehow family, then that Wild Boy was her bodyguard. Though why Hu San would need a bodyguard when she could wield a blade that way wasn't clear. Unless it was a matter of face. As it was, ZeeZee didn't really work it out for himself at all. Hu San's Croat enforcer Artan told him. 'They're lovers, fuckwit, he's her pretty boy ...' Wild Boy didn't protect Hu San. She protected him.

  Wild Boy hated ZeeZee from the start.

  Maybe it was simply the fact that Hu San took ZeeZee on at all. Given he was the only Caucasian in Five Winds, except for Artan and Artan didn't count. Hu San got through enforcers like Wild Boy got through Chinese take-out, which was often how her enforcers ended up looking after she'd sent them to a disputed area of town. Though those areas got fewer by the day.

  The only branded thing ZeeZee carried was a small .357 Taurus, with a rib grip and two-inch ported barrel, in matte Spectrum blue. And even then he carried that in a cheap $10 neoprene holster from Gunmart. He didn't want the revolver and only carried it because Hu San insisted. Unlike Wild Boy's gun, ZeeZee's weapon was legal, clean, licensed and never-before-fired, and ZeeZee aimed to keep it that way.

  The job Hu San had chosen for him was pig-simple. A hundred years back, in a harbour-side bar, an English ex-policeman called Charles Jardine met a Seattle attorney named Angus Bannerman. Several whiskies later they came up with Jardine&Bannerman, an agency that would handle both the legal and investigative sides of life's personal problems, plus deliver subpoenas and do a little underwriting of bail bonds on the side.

  By the time ZeeZee became a junior partner, the legal and investigative side was a memory held only in mouldering ledgers in the basement, bail bonds were a minor side-line and thrusting subpoenas into dirty hands made up the bulk of the business, especially subpoenas that were hard to deliver. On paper, which really meant on microfiche at a warehouse out on the city edge and on a thumb-smeared DVD in City Hall, the company was recorded as stand-alone and independent; majority-owned by its partners. In practice, Hu San owned and ran it, and always referred to the company as Jade&Bamboo, smiling at the words. As with most of her jokes, ZeeZee didn't get the punchline.

  All ZeeZee had to do was dress neatly, present himself at the reception desk of some gilt-edged outfit in Houston, Los Angeles or Seattle (though mostly it was Seattle) and talk his way up to whatever floor was necessary. Either that or stroll casually through the doors of some exclusive club as if he belonged. His English accent and manners usually did the rest.

  Once inside, he apologized for disturbing his quarry, handed them the court order and, whipping out a tiny Nikon, immediately apologized again for snapping a shot of them holding the papers. There would be a click, a faint ping and the evidence would be uploaded to J&B's secure databox before the person holding the subpoena had even worked out what was happening.

  And all the time, ZeeZee thought people were polite because he was polite, not realizing until he was in Huntsville that the bulge of a revolver slung under his left armpit said more about him than a floppy haircut, elegant clothes or any credit card ever could.

  For a year or so, what Hu San got out of owning J&B eluded ZeeZee. Until he began to realize that for every fifteen or twenty supposedly difficult subpoenas he managed to deliver, there was always one job where the target had vanished like early-morning mist before the sun. Sometimes the target left his or her old life behind in uneaten toast or unwashed clothes. And sometimes their possessions were gone as well, gutted out of an apartment or house that echoed with absence.

  There seemed no logic, at first, to which person on the list would suddenly vanish but slowly ZeeZee began to develop a sixth sense. So one autumn morning he reversed the order of two jobs and turned up early at an art brut concrete lodge outside Seattle.

  ZeeZee left his red Suzuki and black crash helmet at the top of a rough earth track that fed off the crumbling backtop and walked down towards the house and Puget Sound's pale waters beyond.

  The man on the jetty wasn't expecting to see him. That much was obvious from the way he froze, heavy suitcase still clutched in one hand.

  'Sorry to disturb you ...'ZeeZee held out his hand and when Micky O'Brian put down his suitcase, ZeeZee slipped the court order into the hand that reached out, watching the fingers close from instinct. ZeeZee relied on that reaction a lot in his line of work.

  'Smile.'

  By lunchtime the sudden breakdown of Micky O'Brian was leading the local news and had third slot on Sky. A feeding frenzy was about to begin. Ravaged by drugs, or maybe by pleurisy brought on by Aids, by alcohol and painkiller addiction, by paradise syndrome ... Journalistic diagnoses were made from positions of absolute ignorance; conflicting, contradictory, as many irrefutable facts offered as there were commentators.

  Shots of a private ambulance with blackened windows appeared first on Celebrity Update. As did footage of a grey-haired woman in a white coat who spoke sincerely and at great length to the camera without actually giving out any information at all. Confidentiality got a name check, so did courage, hope and recovery. The name of the clinic got mentioned three times, but that information was redundant. Everyone watching the CU channel already knew where celebs got their lives, health and shit back on track.

  The fact was, Micky O'B would be in there forty-eight hours max, seventy-two hours at a push. The clinic operated a high-profile arrivals policy, while arranging the world's quickest and most discreet departures.

  The only thing on which every single commentator agreed was that Micky O'Brian's agent had signed him into a clinic that morning and the head of the clinic was now refusing to let cameras past the gate. That Micky had recently been served with a summons regarding a major drugs bust went unmentioned.

  Wild Boy slid to a halt outside ZeeZee's apartment as dusk hit, rolling darkness and soft mist through the streets. Hanging his helmet from a handlebar, the Japanese boy took the stairs two at a time on his way up to the third floor. He didn't knock, just kicked the door out of its frame with some fancy footwork and stood in the gap, glaring.

  'Hey, fuckwit ...'

  Been here. Fear filled ZeeZee's throat like mercury rising in an old-fashioned thermometer.

  '... Who the fuck do you think you are?'

  It was the wrong question. But only because ZeeZee couldn't answer it. So Tirìganaq answered it for him. Using the English boy like a puppet.

  'Iknow who I am ...' said ZeeZee's voice, 'and I don't give a fuck who you think you are.' Then ZeeZee found himself scrambling off the bed to grab his holster and yank free
the Taurus.

  When ZeeZee woke up he was standing in an approximation of Wild Boy's usual stance, shoulders relaxed and one hand hanging loose at his side. In the background, on a screen next to the damaged door, the newsfeed kept running unwatched; flickering like a sad ghost at the edge of his vision. It was old footage of Micky O'Brían, back when he could still act.

  Wild Boy looked at the gun and smiled. 'You don't have the balls.'

  The click of a hammer being thumbed back was ZeeZee's answer. Some of Hu San's people filed their hammers flat to stop the point snagging on clothes. Not ZeeZee. His revolver was factory-perfect. And when ZeeZee had first started working for Five Winds, Wild Boy had delivered a box of fifty bullets. Only seven of them were missing. They were the bullets in his gun.

  'Try me,' said ZeeZee, and raised the gun. The Arctic fox's growl behind his eyes was enough to make the world resonate like a struck glass. He could feel Tiriganaq's grin leaching through onto his own face.

  'I've got a message,' Wild Boy said. 'Hu San is very disappointed in you. And she thinks you should be disappointed in yourself.' He hooked a long strand of dark hair out of his eyes, concentrated on delivering his message and tried not to worry too much about the weird smile on ZeeZee's face. Then he left.

  Chapter Thirty

  8th July

  Hamzah kept his promise. The builders arrived at five the next morning in a Mack diesel with HZ Industrial logoed down the side. They parked up in the Rue Sherif and aTaureg foreman in a striped jellaba walked round to the back where he hammered on the door until Raf appeared, bleary-eyed and squinting.

  Khartoum should have gone but he sat unmoving in one corner of the courtyard, not far from where Hani slept. From what little he'd said, Raf gathered he was terrified the killers might come back.

  The young Taureg glanced doubtfully at Raf's tattered dressing gown, which came from an old wardrobe on the second floor and was a testament to the late Lady Nafisa's private frugality. Anyone else would have thrown it in the bin. 'Your Excellency?'