by Tanith Lee
On this site there was far weightier promotion, and an Arabian Nights Market of clothes, jewellery, materials and furniture of the most extreme ethnic glamour, carefully bowdlerised for a dumbed-down popular non-ethnic palate.
Qirri also found there various pictures and side notes. She found a shot of one of the company directors, a handsome youngish man with, on his arm, the same attractive Jazz-Jasmina from Jazz’s own blog. It seemed they were engaged, these two. A long engagement, to fit their busy business world. One day there would be a full-scale wedding in some more suitable land - sun, heat, joy - scarlet, indigo.
Qirri persuaded (or coerced) a couple of people she still kept up with at the TV studios, to help her break through Eastern: West’s organisational layers and make a contact. She did not get quite to the top, but she did reach a top PA - Amir.
Qirri inquired of Amir if Mr Khal, (Jazz’s fiancé), would consent to an interview for a programme Qirri was hoping to produce for BBC 2. Amir was very cautious. What sort of programme? Qirri explained, sweetly, diffidently, temptingly, inventively, giving everything the sort of spin she had heard others give their selective piles of crap. Additionally she offered to send a small, also partly invented, profile of herself to Eastern: West, which would include, although she did not say so, a stunning photo. By then, unlike the cowed spotty kid of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Qirri had great faith in the ability of her looks. Generally her confidence was well-founded. Only one day after the CV must have arrived with Amir’s emails, he got in touch. Why not meet? He could give no guarantee that Mr Khal would agree to anything, but maybe if Qirri, (at this time Kit), outlined her ideas to Amir more fully, he could try, himself, to see if Khal would be willing. Amir evidently already was. He was so much friendlier. He suggested they meet at seven at a bar off Ferrer Street. It was, he said, members only. But he would get her in. She wore a short black suit.
They drank champagne cocktails, the sort that mixed Bollinger with malt whisky.
Kit-Qirri was careful both to restrict her drinking, but also to pretend she was more effected by the alcohol than she was. She had also taught herself long ago to blush to order, and did so when first she looked into Amir’s eyes.
“So tell me about yourself,” said Amir. He seemed very pleased with her, and was himself immaculate and good-looking.
“Oh,” she said, and shrugged. Then told him modestly a miniature pack of lies or skewed truths, about her father in banking and her mother who had been an actress - no, Amir would probably never have seen her. “She gave it up - she loved Daddy, just wanted to be a proper wife to him.” Amir did not seem to mind, or fault, this old-fashioned goal. She did not mention Granny Jonquil, or the accent-correcting drama school, or Greece. She mentioned the BBC sufficiently knowledgably to lend some credence to her claims. She said she really liked Eastern: West, both their wares and their pitch. And added Mr Khal was extremely photogenic.
Amir, at this, gave a - resentful? - frown. Kit-Qirri wondered for a second if he might be more fun than she had thought. But business before pleasure.
By now they were on their fourth cocktail, or he was; she had stuck half through her second, the extra drinks standing ready. But she sparkled back at Amir, who said, rather ominously and with a suave amusement, “Khal, I have to tell you, is well involved. A girl from the home town, if you get me.”
By this time too Amir was generally relaxed, peacock-tail displaying his dull gold Zaive watch and the nacre cuff links in his specialised Armani shirt.
Qirri glanced away from him as if abruptly unnerved. Her soft glitter slackened. She picked up her second glass and drank quite a lot of it.
“Something wrong, Kit?”
“Oh - no. Well…”
“Don’t tell me you fell for Khal?”
“No. He’s very attractive, but obviously, when I was checking Eastern’s site, I saw he has a significant other, a woman he means to marry.” Qirri then named Jasmina, deliberately, as “Jazz”.
And Amir rewarded Qirri by frowning again. “Is that the way her name is on the site? Didn’t think she even used that on her blog …”
“Oh, it isn’t and she doesn’t. Sorry. No - Oh God,” said Qirri, raising her Claudia eyes pathetically to his, “Oh Amir, I feel so awful about this… I’ll have to tell you…”
Amir looked alarmed, lost his cool. “What, for fuck’s sake?”
Qirri bowed her head. Holding her all-at-once empty second glass, sad as a little girl who had always thought love and honesty ruled the world until, just recently, she found out to the contrary, she told him the terrible secret she had only realised she was party to after scanning Eastern’s website this very morning. Kit began to elaborate rather breathlessly.
“You see I interviewed this awful guy for this other feature I was working on. We’re still waiting to see if it goes out. Of course, his identity’s hidden, even his appearance - and I can absolutely assure you, Amir, he never names anyone on camera. The feature involves sex workers.”
“A call-boy,” said Amir, bemusedly. “A pro.”
“Yes. That was what the feature was about - male prostitutes - escorts - for men and for women, both sorts.”
“So what?”
“He boasted, Amir. It was foul. Oh, not during the filming. Not to anyone but me. We went for coffee, and he went on and on about what he did, and then he boasted about this classy woman called Jazz, or Jasmina – and her second name - who was one of his…” Qirri had momentarily looked as if she might throw up - “clients. Believe me, I really was only there with him to discuss some final tie-ups for the show. I didn’t want to be there. And frankly, I found his attitude to women filthy.”
Amir looked suspicious.
“Did you sleep with him?”
“Me?” Qirri’s eyes had flashed, then calmed. “No. I don’t just do that. My only lovers have been men I could respect. And this beast, this Nicolas Lewis, definitely wasn’t one of them. I tell you, I may even have to meet him again for work. I am trying to get out of it. And incidentally, I don’t have to pay a man to - escort me.”
Amir solemnly assured her he would not have thought so either. “But you’re saying this guy was telling you he had sex with Jasmina…?”
“He was. He was, as I said, bragging about it. And she paid him. She was a regular. God, Amir, it’s probably lies. I mean, a woman like that - and if she has someone like Khal… it’s crazy…”
“What was he like? I mean the whore. I mean to look at.”
“Oh, OK. Quite good in a pretty sort of way. Sort of slim and - I don’t know - really pale, blond hair and light blue eyes - too - too pale. He made my skin crawl.”
Amir’s face had abruptly smoothed itself. The information seemed to have been labelled, swallowed and filed for use. Soon, or she hoped so. She had covered herself, up to a point, should anything happen while she was with Nick - she then would not, after all, have been able to get out of the last interview… it was rather dangerous perhaps. Perilous… what she liked. She would use Jonquil’s flat though. Keep trouble away from home.
“Made your skin crawl, did he?” Amir repeated. “Do I?” he skittishly asked her, leaning forward.
Qirri let her own face smooth over too. She gazed at him with smoky, dreamy eyes. “Oh no,” she said. “No, you don’t.”
She read in the English papers, delivered weekly to the island, if late and out-of-date, of Nick’s stabbing.
Khal’s lot had taken their time, if it had been them. But almost decidedly it had been them. After all. Who else?
So she had achieved her whim, there.
When she put down the poison she had not met Nick. She had known simply that she would meet and mess him about, as she had messed Serena about, and had meant to mess about Laurence before she learned what he was to her.
They could have killed Nick. Maybe they meant to and got it wrong. Would Qirri have liked it better if they had?
(God knew what had been done to Jasmina. Qirri did not
bother to check Jasmina’s site to see if she had survived. Jasmina was unimportant.)
Qirri enjoys thinking about the stabbing. In a funny, back-to-front way it has almost joined in her sexual fantasies, her time with Nick and the former time with Amir in the luxurious hotel bedroom, every move mingling with the understanding of violence to come.
Maybe one day she will tell Laurence. When they are back together, and Joss is dead, and any money has come to Qirri, as Joss has already intimated it will, since his elder son, Laurence, is deceased - all this was discussed before the circling webs of dementia began to cluster close on Joss’s awareness. Of course, it may not happen, the money. But then, she has her own. The one thing Claudia did for Qirri. Apart from allowing her to live.
When the idiotic painters’ dinner is over, about midnight, and the Heineborgs and the French bitches and that shit the Czech have left, Qirri goes up to her rooms and has another shower.
The night, seen from her balcony and on this side of the island, seems timeless and ancient, speckled with bats, and higher up with stars. The summer wind is scything along the hill-sides, spiteful, clawing at things. Qirri does not mind the clawed wind.
She opens a drawer, and looks at the Augusta pin, the fake ivory which had held the Secops tracking device, as she now knows.
Next to the pin, the other thing lies. The small, ivory-coloured, unmarked square that Laurence gave her that last night in London, as he had said because he forgot to bring the pin. Now helpful stupid Nick has delivered the pin too. It is worthless, but might be sellable in an ignorant market. From where though had the ivory square been dug up?
Qirri picks the square out and holds it against the light of an electric lamp turned low. The light glows through. Is it ivory? What is it?
She kept it because Laurence had held it, and given it to her in one of their games. As he later gave her the golden ring that she wears, for now, on a chain around her neck. Soon she will see Laurence. A flood of excitement surges in her, dies unwillingly away. She must ask him then about the ivory square.
During the moments she is considering this, Laurence is lying far off, asleep and dreaming of a fearful face, inhumanly long and wreathed in a white smoke of moonlit breath, out of which glare two green neon eyes, and above which rise two towering bare trees of antler. He wakes howling. And Crang is not there to pat his shoulder.
But now, anyway, Qirri drops the unidentified square back into the drawer and pushes it shut.
The Venetian replica of the house is silent. Presumably asleep, all the people who inhabit it, letting go and drifting, no longer quite real.
The blackness of the night spills over the sky and the world. Out to sea, a little herd of fishing boats tries for a nocturnal catch. The thin moon rose long ago, and now is almost gone. Itself a flake of ivory, or a shaving off a human bone, it lies embedded in the shadow of the west. The spiteful wind spits across the island. But what does any of it mean?
Afterword
The room in Paris is hot.
The air-conditioning has failed again. They may fix it, or they may not bother.
It is over a month since Nick left Athens.
There has been some monetary muddle Nick was advised of, stocks, shares, the state of the economy, the prolonged episode they now call the Credit Crunch. But all that bores him, and he has put off contacting his accountants again. Nevertheless, it does mean he is in this hotel, in the back streets below and behind Sacre Coeur.
Nick stands at the long glass windows inside the black wrought-iron rail. Baked grey, the buildings march away on either side. The early evening sky is gunmetal blue. Down the street a pink-grey church and some dark grey-green trees.
There are a number of things he supposes he should do, even excluding talking to the accountants. But he does nothing much. It has become, has it?, a pattern.
In a quarter of an hour the sun will tilt towards the west. Then the moon will come up and gradually do the same. Life is like this, arising, moving on a predestined course, sinking down. Over and over.
Now and then Nick wonders abstractedly about the flat in London. He assumes the gang have made their offer, and that eventually he will be informed by the estate agents, doubtless angry at the low amount. Or had he decided they, (the gang), might not, due to all the publicity caused by the attack on him? He cannot recollect.
This morning Nick bought le Figaro, (he finds he can read French better than he can speak it), and also a couple of English papers. On the second page of one of these he had found that a woman called Angela Hazel Gloria Lewis had committed suicide, (the usual method, tranquilisers and alcohol) following the tragic sudden death last year of her husband, the well-known writer, archaeologist and TV personality, Laurence Lewis. Nick had read this item without, for a short while, quite realising who any of these people were.
He finds he is still rather puzzled by the notion of Angela killing herself.
There is nothing he has seen in any paper, since leaving England, that refers to Serena or himself.
Nick considers the merits of suicide. He finds it difficult to sleep now, although he is continually tired. To die, therefore, to sleep… But this is only a thought, almost academic. He assumes, vaguely, the obscene and ludicrous coincidences that have beset him, none of them having any reason or logic behind them, have exhausted him. He will just wait it out, whatever it is. It will pass. Then he may feel as he had done.
But then again, how had he ever felt? The light had gone out, or deadly dimmed, so long ago. He had admitted it to himself in Greece. But even the admission, the perhaps educative glimpse he had gained of his condition, now seems unimportant. He feels what certain others have reported on entering a valley surrounded by colossal mountains, or when staring up into the limitless vista of the starry night of space - diminished, insignificant, meaningless, forgotten. Yet he does not put the meaning into words. It too - means nothing.
Last night, after he had walked through Mont Martre and eaten a meal in some restaurant, and crossed and re-crossed the Seine, and looked at illuminated bâtons-mouches, and the acid green of leaves against street lamps, and the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre - last night, standing looking out into the lit dark of the city, with a single light burning behind him by the hard, sausage-bolstered bed, Nick had seen a strange image reflected in the window-glass. The hotel room had appeared to be full of stacked canvasses, oil paintings, and sketches in ink and watercolour, also a sidelong bookcase with a line of books.
Nick, while conscious this was an optical illusion, caught the impression both the art and the books were his own. For a few seconds he was shifted in time and place. It was another room he saw, and looking back at his own reflection, another version of himself. This other Nick was perhaps a little older, if not by much. He was a little thicker in build, his hair a little longer and cut a different way.
A doppelganger again - this time his own? What did it want to tell him - that he might have been another man had his life taken other routes, or had he forged for himself a separate path? A cliché then. To cap all the meaningless coincidences, and the sodden aftertaste of loss, a brainless truism. A platitude. Or maybe this triumph of creation was to come. Christ, he would have to work night and day to build up such a plethora of finished works. And he never worked now. He did not bother with any notebooks. He did not, if it came to that, respond to any woman. The girl in Athens - what had been her name? - was the last. And even she had had nothing to do with his other vocation.
Angle his head, widen or narrow his eyes, he could not make out the subject of any of the paintings, nor any title on a single book.
Some cars ran down the afternoon road below. He returns into the present. Soon, he thinks, it will be time to go out for an aperitif, for dinner if he can be bothered. Does he need to change? Perhaps he should change. Or why not stay as he is.
As he steps into the corridor, for some reason he thinks of the first piece of ivory, the tiny whitish counter about twenty millimet
res square, which he had found in that drawer left in the foyer of the flats. The ivory about which he lied to Laurence. The curious thing is, quite suddenly he is utterly convinced he had not found it in the drawer at all. If not, where had it come from? But then he is clear of the room, and walking down the stony stairs of his hotel. Beyond the main door the sky is deepening; lamps are beginning to come on. Nick leaves his key at the desk, and goes out of the doorway into the forgetting dusk.
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Also by Tanith Lee
Birthgrave
The Birthgrave (1975)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1977) (aka Shadowfire)
Quest for the White Witch (1978)
Novels Of Vis
The Storm Lord (1976)
Anackire (1983)
The White Serpent (1988)
Four-BEE
Don’t Bite the Sun (1976)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)
Silver Metal Lover
The Silver Metal Lover (1981)
Metallic Love (2005)
Tanaquil
Black Unicorn (1989)
Gold Unicorn (1994)
Red Unicorn (1997)
Blood Opera
Dark Dance (1992)
Personal Darkness (1993)
Darkness, I (1994)