When Gravity Fails (30 page)

“Yasmin, look, I got a million things to do, and you’re going to have to stay at your own place for a few days, okay?”

She looked hurt again. “You don’t want me around?” Meaning: you got somebody else now?

“I don’t want you around because I’m a big, shiny target now. This apartment is going to be too dangerous for anybody. I don’t want you getting into the line of fire, understand?”

She liked that better; it meant I still cared for her, the dizzy bitch. You have to keep telling them that every ten minutes or they think you’re sneaking out the back. “Okay, Marîd. You want your keys back?”

I thought about that a second. “Yeah. That way I know where they are, I know somebody won’t lift them from you to get into my place.” She took them out of her purse and tossed them toward me. I scooped them up. She made going-to-work motions, and I told her twenty or thirty times that I loved her, that I’d be extra crafty and sly, and that I’d call her a couple times a day just to check in. She kissed me, took a quick glance at the time and gave a phony gasp, and hurried out the door. She’d have to pay Frenchy his big fifty again today.

As soon as Yasmin was gone, I started putting together what I had, and I soon saw how little that was. I didn’t want either of the freezers to pop me in my own house, so I needed a place to stay until I felt safe again. For the same reason, I wanted to look different on the street. I still had a lot of Papa’s money in my bank account, and the cash I’d just gotten from Hassan would let me move around with a little freedom and security. It never took me long to pack. I stuffed some things into a black nylon zipper bag, wrapped my case of special daddies in a T-shirt and put it on top, then zipped the bag and left my apartment. When I hit the sidewalk, I wondered if Allah would be pleased to let me come back to this place. I knew I was just worrying myself for no good reason, the way you keep pushing at a sore tooth. Jesus, what a nuisance it was, being desperate to stay alive.

I left the Budayeen and crossed the big avenue into a rather pricey collection of shops; these were more like boutiques than like the souks you’d expect. Tourists found just the souvenirs they were looking for here, despite the fact that most of the junk was made in other countries many thousands of miles away. There probably aren’t any native arts and crafts in the city at all, so the tourists browsed happily through gaily colored straw parrots from Mexico and plastic folding fans from Kowloon. The tourists didn’t care, so nobody had any kick coming. We were all very civilized out here on the edge of the desert.

I went into a men’s clothing store that sold European business suits. Usually I didn’t have the money to buy half a pair of socks, but Papa was staking me to a whole new look. It was so different, I didn’t even know what I needed to get. I put myself in the care of a clerk who seemed genuinely interested in helping customers. I let him know I was serious—sometimes
fellahîn
go into these shops just to get their sweat all over the Oxford suits. I told him I wanted to be outfitted completely from the ground up, I told him how much I was willing to spend, and let him put the wardrobe together. I didn’t know how to match shirts and ties—I didn’t know how to
tie
a tie, I got a printed brochure about different knots—so I really needed the clerk’s help. I figured he was getting a commission, so I let him oversell me by a couple of hundred kiam or so. He wasn’t just putting on an act about being friendly, the way most shopkeepers do. He didn’t even shrink away from touching me, and I was about as scruffy then as you could get. In the Budayeen alone, that takes in a wide range of shabbiness.

I paid for the clothes, thanked the clerk, and carried my packages a couple of blocks to the Hotel Palazzo di Marco Aurelio. It was part of a large international Swiss-owned chain: all of them looked alike, and none of them had any of the elegance that had made the original so charming. I didn’t care. I wasn’t looking for elegance or charm, I was looking for a place to sleep where no one would sizzle me in the night. I wasn’t even curious enough to ask why the hotel in this Islamic stronghold was named after some Roman son of a bitch.

The guy at the desk didn’t have the attitude of the salesman at the clothing store; I knew immediately that the room clerk was a snob, that he was paid to be a snob, that the hotel had trained him to raise his natural snobbery to ethereal heights. There was nothing I could say to crack his contempt; he was as set in his ways as a sidewalk. There was something I could do, though, and I did it. I took out all the money I had with me and spread it out on the pink marble counter. I told him I needed a good single room for a week or two, and I’d pay in cash in advance.

His expression didn’t change—he still hated my guts—but he called over an assistant and instructed him to find me a room. It didn’t take long. I carried my own packages up in an elevator and dumped them on the bed in my room. It was a nice room, I guess, with a good view of the back ends of some buildings in the business district. I had my own holo set, though, and a tub instead of just a shower. I emptied the zipper bag onto the bed, too, and changed into my Arab costume. It was time to pay another call on Herr Lutz Seipolt. This time I took a few daddies along with me. Seipolt was a shrewd man, and his boy Reinhardt might give me problems. I chipped in a German-language daddy and took along some of the body-and-mind controls. From now on I was only going to be a blur to normal people. I didn’t plan to hang around anywhere long enough for someone to draw a bead on me. Marîd Audran, the superman of the sands.

Bill was sitting in his beat-up old taxi, and I got in beside him on the front seat. He didn’t notice me. He was waiting for orders from the inside, as usual. I called his name and shoved his shoulder for almost a minute before he turned and blinked at me. “Yeah?” he said.

“Bill, will you take me out to Lutz Seipolt’s place?”

“I know you?”

“Uh huh. We went out there a few weeks ago.”

“That’s easy for
you
to say. Seipolt, huh? The German guy with the thing for blondes with legs? I can tell you right now, you’re not his type at all.”

Seipolt had told me he didn’t have a thing for
anybody
anymore. My God, Seipolt had lied to me, too; I tell you, I was shocked. I sat back and watched the city scream by the car as Bill forced his way through it. He always made the trip a little more difficult than it had to be. Of course, he was avoiding things in the road most people can’t even
see,
and he did it well, too. I don’t think he smacked a single
afrit
all the way out to Seipolt’s.

I got out of the cab and walked slowly to Seipolt’s massive wooden door. I knocked and rang the bell and waited, but no one came. I started to go around the house, hoping to run into the old
fellah
caretaker I’d met the first time I’d come out here. The grass was lush and the plants and flowers ticked along on their botanical timetables. I heard the chirping of birds high in a tree, a rare enough sound in the city, but I didn’t hear anything that might mean the presence of people in the estate. Maybe Seipolt had gone to the beach. Maybe Seipolt had gone shopping for brass storks in the
medînah.
Maybe Seipolt and blue-eyed Reinhardt had taken the afternoon and evening off to make the rounds of the city’s hot spots, dining and dancing under the moon and stars.

Around the big house to the right, between two tall palmettos, was a side door set into the whitewashed wall. I didn’t think Seipolt ever used it; it looked like a convenience for whoever had to carry the groceries in and the garbage out. This side of the house was landscaped with aloes and yucca and flowering cactus, different from the front of the villa and its tropical rain-forest blossoms. I grabbed the doorknob, and it turned in my hand. Somebody had probably just gone into town for the newspaper. I let myself in and found myself looking down a flight of stairs into an arid darkness, and up a shorter flight into a pantry. I went up, through the pantry, through a well-equipped and gleaming kitchen, and into an elaborate dining room. I didn’t see anyone or hear anyone. I made a little noise to let Seipolt or Reinhardt know I was there; I wouldn’t want them to shoot me down, thinking I was spying or something.

From the dining room I passed through a parlor and down a corridor to Seipolt’s collection of ancient artifacts. I was on familiar ground now. Seipolt’s office was just . . . over . . .

. . . there. The door was closed, so I crossed to it and rapped on it loudly. I waited and rapped again. Nothing. I opened the door and stepped into Seipolt’s office. It was dim; the drapes were closed across the window. The air was stifling and stale, as if the air-conditioning wasn’t working and the room had been shut up for a while. I wondered if I dared go through the stuff on Seipolt’s desk. I went up to it and riffled quickly through some reports on the top of a stack of papers.

Seipolt lay in a kind of alcove formed by the bay window behind his desk and two file cabinets against the left-hand wall. He was wearing a dark suit, stained darker now with blood, and when I first glanced over the desktop I thought he was a charcoal-gray throw rug on the light brown carpet. Then I saw a bit of his pale blue shirt and one hand. I took a few steps toward him, not really interested in seeing just how badly cut to pieces he was. His chest was opened from his throat to his groin, and a couple of dark, bloody things were spilled out on the carpet. One of his own internal organs had been crammed into his other stiff hand.

Xarghis Moghadhîl Khan had done this. That is to say, James Bond, who worked for Seipolt. Until just recently. Another witness and lead obliterated.

I found Reinhardt in his own upstairs suite, in the same shape. The nameless old Arab had been murdered on the lawn in back of the house, as he worked among the lovely flowers he nurtured in defiance of nature and climate. All had been killed quickly, then dismembered. Khan had crept from one victim to the next, killing fast and quiet. He moved more silently than a ghost. Before I went back into the house, I chipped in a few daddies that suppressed fear, pain, anger, hunger, and thirst; the German daddy was already in place, but it looked as if it wouldn’t be very useful this afternoon.

I headed toward Seipolt’s office. I intended to go back in there and search through the desk. Before I got to the room, though, someone called out to me.
“Lutz?”

I turned to look. It was the blonde with the legs.

“Lutz?”
she asked.
“Bist du noch bereit?”

“Ich heisse Marîd Audran, Fräulein. Wissen Sie wo Lutz ist?”
At that point my brain swallowed the German add-on whole; it wasn’t as if I could just translate the German into Arabic, but as if I was speaking a language I’d known since early childhood.

“Isn’t he down here?” she asked.

“No, and I can’t find Reinhardt either.”

“They must have gone into the city. They were saying something about that over lunch.”

“I’ll bet they’ve gone to my hotel. We had a dinner engagement, and I understood that I was to meet him here. I hired a car all the way out here. What a damn stupid thing. I guess I’ll just give the hotel a ring and leave a message for Lutz, and then call another taxi. Would you like to come along?”

She bit her thumbnail. “I don’t know if I should,” she said.

“Have you seen the city yet?”

She frowned. “I haven’t seen
anything
but this house since I’ve
been
here,” she said grumpily.

I nodded. “That’s how he is, he drives himself too hard. He always says he’ll take it easy and enjoy himself, but he works himself and he works everybody around him. I don’t want to say anything against him—after all, he’s one of my oldest business associates and dearest friends—but I think it’s bad for him to keep going the way he does. Am I right?”

“That’s just what I tell him,” she said.

“Then why don’t we go back to the hotel? Maybe once we’re there together, the four of us, we’ll get him to relax a little tonight. Dinner and a show, as my guests. I insist.”

She smiled. “Just let me—”

“We must hurry,” I said. “If we don’t get back quickly, Lutz will turn around and come back here. He’s an impatient man. Then I’ll have to make still another trip out here. It’s an awful ride, you know. Come along, we don’t have any time to spare.”

“But if we’re going out to dinner—”

I should have guessed. “I think that dress suits you perfectly, my dear; but if you prefer, why, I beg that you allow me to accommodate you with another outfit of your choice, and whatever accessories you feel are necessary. Lutz has given me many gifts over the years. It would give me great pleasure to acknowledge his generosity in this small way. We can go shopping before dinner. I know several very exclusive English, French, and Italian shops. I’m sure you’d enjoy that. Indeed, you might choose your garments for the evening while Lutz and I take care of our little business. It will all work out beautifully.”

I had her by the arm and out the front door. We were walking up the gravel drive to Bill’s taxi. I opened one of the car’s rear doors and helped her in, then I walked around the back of the cab and got in the other side. “Bill,” I said in Arabic, “back to the city. The Hotel Palazzo di Marco Aurelio.”

Bill looked at me sourly. “Marcus Aurelius is dead, too, you know,” he said as he started up the taxi. I got a frosty feeling wondering what he meant by “too.”

I turned to the beautiful woman beside me. “Pay no attention to the driver,” I said in German. “Like all Americans, he is mad. It is the will of Allah.”

“You didn’t phone the hotel,” she said, giving me a sweet smile. She liked the idea of a new suit of clothes and jewelry just because we were going to dinner. I was just a crazy Arab with too much money. She liked crazy Arabs, I just knew it.

“No, I didn’t. I’ll have to call as soon as we get there.”

She wrinkled up her nose in thought. “But if we’re
there
—”

“You don’t understand,” I told her. “For the common run of guests, the desk clerk is capable of handling matters like this. But when the guests are, shall we say, special—like Herr Seipolt or myself—then one must speak directly with the manager.”