Arabesk (95 page)

It was said, at least it was by Tiri, that a full-grown seal was able to sense the wake of a single fish ten minutes after that area of water had become empty. So too could people sense the ghost echo of long-gone events.

If only they knew how.

Looking at Eugenie, really looking, Raf saw a courage unusual for the world in which they lived. Not in the small holster casually clipped to her belt or in the steadiness of her gaze and her refusal to be the first to look away. Her courage showed most in the way she wore her hair, long and unashamedly grey.

The woman was old and made no pretence to be anything other.

A strength that gave her a crueller kind of beauty.

“Your mother…” Eugenie said once the waiter had brought the coffee.

“What about her?”

“Can you still recall what she was like?”

Raf lifted his shades, though to do so hurt because even with clouds to filter out the sun his pupils were reduced to tiny, steel-hard dots. “Total recall,” he told Eugenie coldly. “That’s what I’ve got.”

“About her?”

“About everything…”

Eugenie nodded, like that made sense and she didn’t feel it necessary to challenge what he said or have him justify the statement. “Yeah,” she said, “I suppose you do.”

They sat in silence after that. Raf hidden again behind his shades and Eugenie openly watching the occasional tourist couple stroll hand in hand down Rue Missala. It was too early for the Easter crowd, too late for those who’d come over New Year. The hotels were cheap, the cafés mostly empty. Out of the dozens of horse-drawn calèches that usually plied the Corniche, that great sweep of seafront stretching from Fort Qaitbey down to where the fat seawall of the Silsileh sat in the shadow of Iskandryia’s
bibliotheka
, only a handful were working and those had their leather roofs up, their drivers wrapped in coats against the chance of rain.

“Do you like it here?”

“Yes,” Raf answered immediately, leaving himself wondering if he actually meant it. In many ways Seattle had been better and Huntsville had a certain charm, even though it had been a prison. “Mostly,” he said, amending his answer.

“And you intend to stay?” Eugenie’s smile was part knowing but mostly sad, as if she had reasons for doubting it, reasons she wasn’t entirely sure Raf was yet ready to hear. Her attitude irritated the fuck out of him.

“What do you actually want?” Raf demanded.

“Help,” said Eugenie, “pure and simple. Your help protecting the Emir.”

“I thought that was your job?”

For a split second Eugenie’s face glazed, the way faces do when people retreat inside their head. “I’m getting old,” was all she said. “The Emir doesn’t listen to me like he did and I know he would listen to you.”

Reaching across the table, she took Raf’s hand, oblivious to the waiters hovering and German tourists on the far side of the rope that separated Le Trianon’s terrace from the street. She had a surprisingly hard grip for a woman her age.

“I knew her, you know…” said Eugenie. “Right back at the beginning.” She was talking about his mother.

“What was she like?” Raf’s question came unbidden, sliding its way into being before Raf had time to snatch it back.

“Beautiful,” Eugenie said simply. “Fractured even then. Wild as an animal and as dangerous. She was wanted, you know…”

“Wanted?”

“By the FBI and Interpol. I think even the Japanese had a warrant out. Something about a bomb in a research vessel.”

“What kind of research?”

“The kind that turned minke whales into sushi.”

Despite himself Raf smiled. “How did the two of you meet?”

“Oh,” Eugenie’s mouth twisted. “I was there when she first arrived at the labs. Stupid bitch came trawling out of the desert in a battered Jeep, I almost shot her… Should have done,” she added softly. “Might have made life a whole lot easier for the rest of us.”

Raf wasn’t sure he was meant to hear that bit.

Flashback

“What you thinking?” Atal asked, slamming the door
on Singh’s yellow taxi.

“About our friend Wu Yung,” said Sally. “About the islands.”

Atal blushed and they both knew why.

As light began fingering the palms that edged the beach, Sally had splashed her way onto the sand and stopped to retrieve her sarong, wrapping red-and-white dragons loosely round her narrow hips, then padded her way along a winding path between rampant bushes of sea almond and wild orchids until she reached the kampong.

At the entrance of her hut Sally stopped again to kick white sand from her heels and, glancing across the kampong saw Wu Yung leave a house on stilts that Atal had chosen. An empty wine bottle in his hand, the camera around his neck.

She ate breakfast alone that day but at lunchtime she joined the others by the jetty, sitting topless while Atal swam and Bozo chilled under a palm, spliff growing cold between his fingers as he stared in wonder at a cluster of coconuts above, any one of which could have killed him.

On the jetty itself Wu Yung worked a barbecue made from an oil drum cut open end to end and welded to the old frame of a metal table. He had two fish the length of Sally’s arm crisping on its griddle, fat spitting on the glowing coals, their eyes gone opalescent with heat…

“You okay?” Atal asked.

“Sure,” said Sally as she watched Singh’s cab roar away. “Just remembering how we got here.”

Bozo grinned. He knew exactly how he got there, by Boeing 747 from KL to Idlewild, paid for by the weird Chinese guy and with $1,000 spending money in his pocket. “We going to do this, or what?” he said, putting on a fresh pair of gloves.

Almost opposite the Church of Our Saviour stood the Hotel Kitano. A lovingly restored fifteen-storey redbrick hotel that majored in rollout futons and sunken hot tubs for its mainly Japanese clientele, or so Atal said, then got embarrassed when Bozo asked how he knew. And that was where Sally, Atal and Bozo went—across the four-lane, cop-car howl of Park Avenue. Although they detoured round the block to let them approach the hotel from a different direction.

Getting in meant staying confident, what with the riots and everything.

“I need to use your bathroom,” said Sally before the uniformed doorman even had time to speak. Whatever the man had been about to say got lost inside her smile.

“It’s on the right, down some stairs.” He’d been about to call her lady but the kid’s accent was just too upscale for that.

“Wait in the bar,” she told her companions. Shuffling the Balenciaga bag so it sat higher on her shoulder, Sally headed for a dark wood door without looking back.

The woman who exited the chrome, glass and slate bathroom wore Dior lipstick the colour of dry blood, a small pillbox hat, and a dress of tissue-thin black silk that rustled over her small breasts and made obvious her lack of a bra. The bag was gone, tossed into a chrome trash can, and with the bag her shades and Atal’s jacket, all three spoof-bombed against DNA tests with crud vacuumed up from the backseat of a bus.

It looked on first glance as if she wore no knickers at all. It looked that way on second glance too.

“Champagne,” she told the barman, “chilled not frozen.” He didn’t get the reference. That was the problem with using English tag lines, few Americans ever did. “And some olives,” Sally added. “Preferably in brine.”

Over at his table, Atal smirked.

“You both know what to do?” Sally asked, grabbing a chair and leaning forward, so that her dress gaped at the neck. On cue, the eyes of her two companions flicked from their beers to the swell at the top of her breasts.

That worked then.

“Well?”

“We know,” insisted Atal, his eyes still fixed on her front.

“Glad to hear it.” Sally sat back, picked up her drink and smiled. In ten minutes’ time she’d be meeting a fiftyish WASP, probably done up in dress-down Fridays twenty years too young for him so he didn’t get coshed by protestors. And the man wasn’t going to listen to a word she said, which suited Sally fine since she was planning to busk that bit of the routine.

“Finish up,” she said. “We’re on.”

The Bayer-Rochelle office was two blocks from Hotel Kitano. Stuck between the Sterling Building and Doctors Mutual International. There were uniformed guards on the door, four of them, and they’d taken the mayor at his word and armed themselves with something more deadly than nightsticks.

Although their Glocks were still holstered, not drawn or combat held like guards outside one of the banks they’d driven past earlier.

“Annie Savoy,” announced Sally, flicking on her smile and one of the uniforms unbent enough to check his clipboard.

“Not on the list,” he said and turned away, conversation over.

“Could you check with Charlie?” Sally’s voice was saccharine sweet.

Despite himself, the guard turned back, question already forming on his lips.

Got you, thought Sally. “Charlie Savoy, my godfather…”

The man looked at Sally, whose sun-bleached hair was now swept back in an Alice band, black to match her dress. Comparing and contrasting the rugged, well-known looks of billionaire Dr. Charles Savoy (son of H. R. Savoia, a cheesemaker from Basilica) with the very English girl standing on the sidewalk, waiting to be invited inside.

He’d had jobs in Lower Midtown long enough to recognize expensive clothes and he knew, as you were meant to know, that only the very rich got away with wearing so little with so much elegance.

“Your name’s not on today’s approved list,” he said apologetically. “But I’ll call his PA.” The nod he gave the other three was perfunctory, more a reminder to stay alert than any apology for leaving them.

“Your boss?” Sally asked.

One of them nodded.

“Doesn’t like doing door duty, right?”

Another nod, more emphatic this time.

“All hands to the pump I guess. What with anarchists trashing everything of value…”

Behind Sally, Bozo turned a snort of laughter into a hasty cough and swallowed his smile inside a hastily grabbed silk handkerchief. The handkerchief was blue. It matched his stolen suit.

“There’s a problem…” The returning guard sounded more apologetic than ever. “Your grandfather’s not here at the moment.”

“Godfather,” Sally corrected. “My godfather. What about Mike Pierpoint?” That was the fiftyish WASP she actually needed to meet, the one with receding hair and a weight problem. She knew this because she’d seen a shot of him in the back of Harpers, a moon-faced academic in rimmed glasses out of his depth at some black tie do for ethical genome research…

“He’s on the phone,” the guard recited from memory. “He sends his apologies and asks you to wait.”

“No problem,” said Sally. Sliding past the guard, she strolled towards a bank of lifts and punched the correct button without needing to look at the list displayed in a brass frame on the wall. A puff piece in the local business press had already revealed the right floor.

Gazing down from his twenty-second-floor office, billionaire Charlie Savoy can almost see the tiny corner shop where his father…

“He meant wait down here.” The guard’s voice faltered as Sally turned, her face suddenly worried.

“If we must,” she said, sounding less than happy. “Although I’d feel safer waiting in his office.”

They rode an Otis to the twenty-second floor, thanked the lift politely when it wished them a profitable day and had to wait for Atal to get over his attack of giggles. As the doors shut Atal was still grinning. The man who came out to greet them wore Gap chinos, canvas deck shoes and a striped sweatshirt with an anchor on the pocket.

“Annie…”

Sally shook his hand warmly, holding her grip for a second longer than strictly necessary and the man smiled politely, but only after noticing her nipples.

“Beautiful dress.” Mike Pierpoint blushed as he said this.

“Dior,” Sally agreed. “A present from my father.” And the bald man nodded as if he knew who she meant.

“I don’t think we’ve met?” he said, his question just the wrong side of anxious.

“We did,” said Sally. “But you won’t remember. I was much younger. More of a kid really.”

Mike Pierpoint wanted to say she was still a kid, Sally could see it in his eyes. But he resisted the urge, helped probably by the half glances he kept throwing at her tits.

“At a baseball match or company barbecue,” Sally added, busking it.

“Barbecue,” Mike said with certainty. “It must have been a barbecue. Your godfather hates baseball with a passion.”

Sally smiled.

“I don’t want to keep you,” she said. “If you can just show me the way.”

The room was everything Wu Yung had led Sally to expect. A huge corner office full of heavy furniture and carpeted in burgundy, with blue washed-silk wallpaper between faux marble half pillars that supported a panelled ceiling probably made from embossed card, although a century’s worth of paint would need to be cut away before anyone could be sure. In the six-foot drop between the ceiling’s ornate coving and a slightly less ornate picture rail, bare-breasted nymphs hit stucco tambourines and flicked their hair in a static wind.

Charlie Savoy’s desk was equally imposing. Solid not veneer, made from some wood so oxblood it was undoubtedly endangered.

Atal nodded. “Meranti,” he said, “from the shorea tree.” He looked at the wood, considering it carefully. “Probably thought they were buying teak.”

On top of the desk stood an old-fashioned PC, a stand-alone Dell, lacking even a modern connection. Beside the PC a newish laptop slotted into a docking bay that bled wires in a waterfall to the floor. Atal switched on both machines without Sally having to say a thing.

“Too worried about being phreaked to go infrared,” said Atal, pointing to the wires, his dismissive grin that of someone who’d once read a complete stranger’s dear
john e-mail across a crowded railway carriage, using a basic Van Eck box.