Halcyon The Complete Trilogy (100 page)

Shifrah rolled her eye at him. Aker had been so much simpler than Kenan. Sure, they’d both been younger and simpler all around back then, but even still, Aker had never shown much depth in his virtues or his vices. “I suppose we should start with the brothels.”

“Brothels? Here? I thought they frowned on that sort of thing.”

Shifrah pushed away from the wall and led Kenan into the slow stream of bodies moving east down the boulevard. “In general, yes. The Aegyptians and their Eranian masters both frown on the sex trades, but not everyone here is a Mazdan, and not all the Mazdans are good Mazdans. So what happens when you make something illegal?”

“It goes underground,” Kenan muttered. “Are we talking about basements, back alleys, abandoned warehouses, and condemned mansions?”

“Only for the poor people.” Shifrah grinned at him over her shoulder. “Hey, get up here and walk next to me, not behind me.”

He quickened his pace to come alongside, which made it a bit harder to slip through the crowd but it couldn’t be helped.

“How long were the two of you together?” the detective asked.

“A year or so. We ran little jobs for Omar here in the city. We would pose as brother and sister, or newlyweds, or vagabonds, whatever was needed to get the job done.”

“To kill people?”

“Yes, Kenan, to kill people. I think it’s time you moved past all that.”

He was quiet for half a minute. “I thought you had moved past all that.”

“Of course not. In Tingis, I took my cues from you. I set up my own business. People hired you to find lost loved ones or to find evidence of wrong-doing, and people hired me to kill their enemies. If it makes you feel better, I usually only killed bad people. You would have approved of most of my jobs, I think.”

“No, I wouldn’t!”

“Really?” She ticked them off on her fingers. “A factory supervisor who pushed a worker into a furnace. A father who beat his son to death. An importer who doubled his sales volume by cutting his wine with toxic chemicals. A mother who locked her children in a basement to starve them to death. I saved the children, by the way. A student who bullied three schoolmates into committing suicide. I was surprised. I really was. After everything I had heard about it, I didn’t expect Marrakesh to be such a cesspool.”

“Shut up.” Kenan rubbed his eyes. “Just stop.”

“Why? Because it turns your world upside-down to think your society isn’t pure and beautiful? That your civilized people are just as cruel and monstrous as us dirty barbarians?”

Kenan sighed and squinted around the street. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. I just needed to move my legs.” Shifrah took a long breath as she looked around them.

If I was Aker, where would I be? So, I’m Aker. I’ve just killed an Espani fencer, fled a country, started a gang war, and now I need…what? To hide, or run, or just brag about the whole thing?

“I want you to give it up.”

Shifrah stopped dead and turned slowly to look at him. “What?”

“You heard me. Give it up. Stop the contracts. Stop killing. If you want to help people, you can work with me to do it the right way, to work within the law,” Kenan said.

“No.” Shifrah started walking again.

Kenan kept pace beside her. “Why not? Damn it, why not? I want us to be together, I want to make this work, but you’ve got to meet me in the middle on this.”

“The middle? How is giving up my career the middle? I’m pretty sure giving up my career is your side.” She kept walking. There was a familiar itch in her fingers, the itch to solve the problem at hand with a stiletto under the arm straight into the heart. But there was no rage.

Why not? I was always angry at Aker and Salvator. Why not Kenan?

“Whatever the middle is, it has to be no more killing,” he said.

“No.” She walked a little faster, still scanning the crowd with one corner of her mind wondering where she should be going.

I got angry at Aker because we were always competing, always trying to outdo each other, always vying for Omar’s approval. I got angry when he won, or made me doubt myself. It seems like I was angry at him more days than not. But not Kenan.

“Why not? Why not give it up, if not for your own safety then for me?”

She stopped and looked back at him. He had stopped a few paces behind. “If this is how you feel, why are you even with me?”

He looked lost, his eyes searching the hot cobblestones for answers, his empty hands making small half-hearted gestures, his shoulders rolling in a serious of confused shrugs. Then he looked straight at her. “Because I love you.”

She looked straight back at him. “You love me? But not where I come from, or how I grew up, or who I’ve been with, or what I’ve done, or how I live, or how I feel about how I live? Is that right?”

If it was possible, he managed to look even more lost. “Yes.”

“If none of that, then what? What about me do you love?” She walked back toward him and tapped her eye patch and the scarred skin around it. “Do you love this?” She groped her breasts. “Or maybe these?”

“Stop it.”

“Then what?” She stared at him, waiting. When he had no answer, she turned away and continued walking.

I got angry at Sal because he was so damned good at everything. Languages. Swords. Knives. Lying. Stealing. Planning. Singing. And everything had to be his way, his rules, his orders, and I put up with him because he opened the right doors for me. It was fine at the beginning, but by the end I was ready to leave his headless corpse in a ditch. But not Kenan.

A moment later she glanced back and saw that Kenan was once again following her a few steps behind. As she studied his face, she tried to define what it was that she thought of him, what she felt about him. But only a great echoing silence answered her. Once upon a time, he had been exciting and different, young and dangerous. She had thought to follow him into strange places and exotic adventures. In the space of a week she had seen him defy his commanding officer, cleverly free two captives from an Espani jail, cold-bloodedly sabotage a warship to send a thousand men to their deaths, defy another commanding officer, and then renounce his commission and establish his own private investigation firm.
In one week.

But since then, nothing. The same work. The same home, the same food. No more defiance, no more adventures. She had accepted that. For a time, it was convenient. A place to sleep and a pair of trustworthy eyes to watch her back, and a competent pair of hands to mind the rest of her body. But it was over now. They could blame time or fate or Aker, but it was over.

“Go home, Kenan,” she called over her shoulder. “We’re done here.”

“Home? Did you say
go home
?” He raced up beside her again and when she glanced at him this time there was a gleam of that old fire in his eyes. “What home? I can’t go home, thanks to you and your damned Aker. The police saw me, they know it was my home, and I had that Espani medallion in my hand!”

“If you believe in Mazigh law and justice, you have nothing to fear. Go home and tell the truth and go back to your old life. And leave me alone.”

“You know damned well they’ll imprison me for the murder of Don Lorenzo! Conspiracy, or aiding and abetting!” He grabbed her arm.

Shifrah had both hands on him in an instant, snaked her foot behind his leg, and hurled him to the ground. He stared up at her with a bright spot of blood on his lip. She stepped back. “I said we’re done. Leave me alone.”

Kenan stood up again, slowly but steadily. There was no shrugging or aimless searching or meaningless waving now. At his full height he was still several inches shorter than her, but at that moment he seemed larger somehow. He rested his hand on the butt of his black revolver and gazed at her face, his mouth drawn tight in a small line, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes adding a few more years to his bearing. “Then we’re done. Fine. But I can’t leave without Aker. He’s a wanted man. And I’m going to bring him in. So I’m staying with you.”

“When I find Aker, I’m taking him to Zahra.”

“And when she’s done with him, I’m taking him to Tingis.”

Whatever you say, detective.

Shifrah gave him one final, fatally brief glance and then focused on the road ahead. They were in the central corridor of the city, a series of markets and bazaars and shops and dark alleys full of nervous eyes and loose knives.

Aker, Aker, who has the Aker?

She ducked into a tavern, glanced about, and continued on. She poked her head into the next wine shop, and the next ale house. Every place had its own smells and its own costumes and its own accents. Songhai, Kanemi, Bantu, Puntish, Hellan.

But never Samaritan. Not ever.

Shifrah wondered if anyone else had ever left the city of Nablus at the foot of Mount Gerizim as she had. They’d all been dumbfounded at her leaving, all so certain that she would soon return. They’d been so certain of so many things.

 She paused to sniff the air. Something sweet and fragile wafted by, the scent of hay tinged with the edge of burnt paper. She smiled.

Oh Aker, could it really be this easy?

Shifrah followed the smell across the street to an open door and then inside into the shadows of a small room lit only by the sunlight falling through the doorway and the tiny yellow glowing eyes of the incense. The light wavered on the faces of the water pipes, distorted and discolored as it glanced off to illuminate the walls. A thin gray haze filled the upper half of the room and Shifrah ducked low as she stepped inside and let her eyes adjust to the darkness.

The bodies came into focus slowly. Men and women lay on the floor, slouching against the walls, reclining on pillows, and even sitting bolt upright on decaying couches covered in moth-eaten blankets and torn shirts and colorless rags.

No Aker here.

She turned and pushed past Kenan back into the street, now moving twice as fast as before in search of that scent again.

Where are you? Where are you hiding?

An hour later she stood triumphant in the center of yet another darkened den. The smells were more muddied here, no doubt due to more exotic leaves and herbs in the pipes. She didn’t recognize them, but she recognized the grinning lips and glassy eyes, and she recognized the man in the corner.

“Aker.”

He stared blankly at her. “Zahra?”

She smiled down at him. “Soon enough.”

Kenan was more than willing to pull the Aegyptian out of the corner and propel him out the door into the blinding glare of the afternoon sun. The Mazigh detective seemed to take a particular delight in contorting Aker’s arms behind his back to keep him yelping and gasping and babbling to be let go. Shifrah eyed the short sword on the Aegyptian’s hip, but she did not touch it.

She guided the two men across the city, staying on the busiest streets and in the center of those streets, and many of the passersby who saw them coming made way for them and then kept their eyes elsewhere.

“They look scared,” Kenan said.

“Who?” she asked.

“Everyone. Look around. It’s like we have the plague.”

“We do. A green plague, and its name is Osiris.”

She plunged on through the crowds, her hands never far from her blades, but they reached The Cat’s Eye without incident. Shifrah counted five men of various unfriendly bearings loitering outside the restaurant, some pretending to be looking elsewhere and others not bothering to pretend. But they didn’t raise a hand to stop the prisoner from being escorted inside.

The stern-faced waitress led them straight back through the crowded dining room to the private office where Shifrah found Zahra holding council just as she had that morning. The Aegyptian woman’s face brightened at the sight of the man in green. Shifrah noted the look in her eyes.

I expected her to be angrier, or at least cruelly pleased. Not…delighted.

They held Aker upright in front of the long table so everyone could see the man clearly enough. Shifrah said, “Well, here he is, as promised.”

“Where was he?” Zahra asked in Eranian.

Shifrah switched languages to match. “In a dark, smoky corner.”

Zahra stood and circled the table to stand face to face with Aker. “You caused quite a stir this morning, Aker. You upset my clients and partners. You broke one of my nice chairs. And then you had the gall to run away like a little child. Why?”

Aker blinked and exhaled slowly. He tried to straighten up a bit, to pull free of his captors, but Shifrah held him quite still. He cleared his throat, “Well, after the last time, I wasn’t sure how forgiving you were going to be.”

She smiled.

I don’t like that smile
. Shifrah said, “You don’t need me here for this. I just want my information and I’ll be on my way.”

Zahra kept her eyes on Aker as she spoke to the Samaritan. “I knew you’d find him quickly. He’s often spoken of your time together. I knew you understood him better than my men would. It was very kind of you to offer to help.”

“Oh? I don’t really think either one of us deals in kindness.” Shifrah tried to catch Kenan’s attention with her eye, but he was too busy glaring at the guards in the corners. “So if you could just tell me what I want to know, I’ll be on my way.”

With a long sigh, Zahra finally looked at the taller woman. “Omar? You know, you haven’t been gone very long. It hasn’t left my people much time to look into the matter.”

“Do you have anything?” Shifrah frowned.

I’ll take anything at this point, as long as I don’t have to come back here again. And why is she still looking at him like that?

“Scraps of rumor, nothing more.” Zahra waved over her shoulder and the older gentleman with the ink-stained fingers blinked to life and cleared his throat. “Ahem. Eight years and three months ago, Omar Bakhoum was here, in this very office, setting up The Cat’s Eye.”

Zahra sighed. “But he called it The Wandering Eye. Go on.”

The gentleman lifted a small scrap of paper. “Shortly thereafter, Master Omar left Alexandria on a west-bound train after informing Master Rashaken that he was going to investigate a theory.”