Lord Vishnu smiled, this time ruefully, as if something tragic about humanity had been confirmed to him yet again.
My smartphone rang.
Saved by the cell.
“Excuse me,” I said, and stepped out into the hall to answer it.
“All right, Ravi? How’s it hangin’? We have you on speaker.”
“Ken? Clive? What’s up?”
“Just checkin’ in. You know your Mrs. Dhewan is in the middle of a gang war, yeah?”
Ken was unnervingly chipper in his tone.
“What? No.”
“Well, we just wanted to let you know everything’s under control,” Clive said.
“Why wouldn’t it be? Are my parents safe?”
“You wanted us to keep an eye on your folks, yeah?” Ken said. “Well, to do that, we inserted ourselves into Mrs. Dhewan’s scenario, as it were. Then your mum played it a bit close.”
“What happened?”
“She’s a right firecracker, yer mum. Roped yer dad into it, too,” Clive said.
“What? Roped into what?”
“Don’t worry. We got it under control,” Ken said.
“What? What was it that you needed to get under control?” My voice was starting to crack.
“Calm the fuck down, mate,” Ken said. “It’s over. Your mum and dad are safe and sound and in bed as if nothing happened. They insisted on going out on the hunt with us.”
“Hunt? What do you mean, ‘hunt’?” I said. “Ken, you’re speaking in bloody code.”
“All right, keep yer knickers on,” Ken said. “Long story short, we did a bit of diggin’ for Mrs. Dhewan. She wanted to know which gang was stealing from her food bank. Mark chipped in and traced them to Hammersmith. Gang of teenage small fry callin’ themselves the King Street Massive.”
“So what did my mum and dad have to do with that?”
“Your mum insisted on coming along to make sure things didn’t get out of hand,” Clive said.
I groaned. Of course she did. She was still a schoolteacher at heart, and she wasn’t going to let a bunch of kids go all the way down the dark side.
“So of course your dad insisted on comin’ along,” Ken said.
“With his cricket bat, right?” I asked.
“Yeah. So we head down to the King Street Massive’s little gaff, me and Clive with Mrs. Dhewan’s nephews, and your mum and dad.”
“Did it kick off?” I said.
“Of course it did,” Clive said. “It was bloody glorious. Like one of those old-school skirmishes Clive and I thought didn’t happen anymore.”
No wonder Ken and Clive were in such a good mood. They’d had a bit of violence to feed their bloodlust at last.
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourselves,” I said through gritted teeth. “Where were my mum and dad in all this?”
“We left ’em in the car to wait, of course. Once we had the little bastards on their knees, your mum came stormin’ in and stopped Mrs. Dhewan’s boys from breaking their knees. It was beautiful. She was givin’ them a right bollocking right there. Then your dad started on the King Street Massive. He laid down a lecture about morality and second chances, and how this was their chance to start from a clean slate. Now I see where you got it all from, mate.”
“So what the hell happened?”
“Your mum made these kids promise to give up on the gang shit and volunteer at the food bank,” Ken said, laughing. “She negotiated with Mrs. Dhewan not to break their legs to send a message, but to turn them into part of the community outreach program. In return, they could help themselves to some of the supplies at the food bank.”
“This all sounds a bit neat,” I said.
“Well, Mrs. Dhewan’s boys were holding machetes,” Clive said. “And they were going to be there as security to make sure there was no thievin’.”
“Machetes,” Ken said.
“Ah,” I said. “So it’s over, then?”
“Our work here is done,” Clive said. “Mrs. Dhewan was well chuffed. She said to thank you for sendin’ us to her. Job well done.”
“Thanks, chaps,” I said. “For looking after my parents. I owe you.”
“One day we’ll collect on that,” Ken said.
At the time, I didn’t think that ominous at all. Given the situation I was already in, it didn’t occur to me that Ken and Clive promising to call in a favor was going to come back and bite me on the arse later on.
We hung up.
“Is that a British accent I hear?”
The bedroom door opened and a slightly haggard man in his thirties emerged. He wore designer slacks and a rumpled but expensive golf shirt, like he’d been plucked off the golf course and spirited to this safe house. His dark features were chiseled, a hint of plastic surgery to smooth them out to a more bland handsomeness that many people in Los Angeles seemed to favor.
“Mr. Mahfouz, I presume?” I shook his hand. “We’re from Golden Sentinels Investigations and Security.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of you lot. What brings you here?”
“It’s a long story, but we had to retrieve the guns Gossamer Rand Ross was holding for you before the brush fires got them.”
“Oh God! Those bloody guns!” he cried. “They’re going to be the death of me!”
He himself had a hint of a British accent, which meant he’d gone to school in the UK.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone other than these bloody killing machines for days!” he exclaimed. “Please! Come in! Talk to me!”
“What would you like to talk about?” I asked.
“I may die in the next twenty-four hours,” he said. “I need someone to hear my story! I don’t want to be forgotten, and these private military nutters don’t give a toss!”
“Bearing witness,” Julia whispered.
“Why not?” I sighed. “It’s not like we have anything better to do. And I’d rather not sit in the living room watching the Home Shopping Channel with those bastards.”
“At the rate things are going, this is probably going to turn into another case,” Julia said.
And it did.
THE RELUCTANT DESPOT
ONE
Tammy was blowing me in my suite when it came on the news: my father had been overthrown,” Hamid began.
“I remember the news on the telly,” I said.
“I was coked to the gills at the time,” Hamid said. “A martini in my hand and savoring Tammy’s tongue-work so the words from the dude on CNN barely registered. I glanced up from Tammy’s bobbing head at the footage of the rioting protesters marching down the capital and thought, ‘Huh. That looks awfully like home.’
“When they marched the sour-faced, gray-haired man in the military uniform out of the presidential palace and proceeded to string him up from a lamppost, I remember thinking, ‘Huh. That looks awfully like my dad.’ Then my head cleared a bit and I realized, ‘Oh. That is my dad.’ ”
“So you watched it all live on the news?” Julia asked.
Hamid nodded.
“It is a testament to the quality of my dealer Loo-Loo’s cocaine that not even the spectacle of my dad’s not-undeserved demise shown live on satellite television dampened my hard-on one bit. Tammy didn’t notice any reaction from me other than maybe a slight twitch that hardened my hard-on even further a split-second before I came. Not once did she even bother to look at the TV as she wiped her face with a Kleenex. The rest of the evening was a bit of a haze. Tammy collected her money from the glass coffee table and bid me good night. I sank farther into the leather sofa and threw my head back. I contemplated the lights of Los Angeles as they twinkled on the horizon.”
“Well,” Julia said. “I’m glad you were able to keep your priorities straight and not be distracted by something so trivial as your father’s execution.”
I looked at her sharply. That was a rookie mistake, to judge someone you were interviewing as a prospective client. That had been drummed into me when I was starting out, but then Hamid M
ahfouz wasn’t really a client yet. We were just talking. However, he might decide to become a client.
“When the protesters set my father’s twitching body on fire,” Hamid said, “the first thought that came to my head was that I was free . . . free at last. As I sank into sleep, I didn’t know how utterly, tragically wrong I would turn out to be.”
“Where were you before you ended up here?” I asked.
“The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills,” Hamid said. “I have a suite there. It’s practically my home.”
Hamid explained that he had over ten million in the bank from a trust fund his parents had set up. He owned a couple of Michelin three-star restaurants here in Hollywood that gave him some decent passive income, and was also a partner in a production company that produced four successful shows for kids and teenagers that were a nice little earner for him. He and his sister were the youngest in the family and his two older brothers had always been the ones considered next in line to rule. Hamid had thought himself lucky to be spared a life of politics, even if his life of privilege was funded by blood money.
“Our family CIA guy paid me a visit the next morning,” Hamid said. “I was hungover and recovering from the last night’s coke and booze, but he at least waited for my first cup of coffee to get me lucid enough for a sit-down. He didn’t mind the ramshackle state of my hotel suite. I had the feeling he’d been witness to even worse and more depraved debauchery in his time and what I got up to was positively vanilla compared to what he’d seen.”
“I’ve found that CIA people have that trait in common,” I said.
“So we had an unmade bed, some empty bottles, dirty dishes on the room service cart, and I’d managed to shower and change into a clean Hugo Boss shirt and jeans before he arrived. There wasn’t any blood on the walls or dead hookers for him to clean up, and I hoped he was grateful that I didn’t go for that kind of thing. Moderation was always my motto, even when it came to being a decadent playboy douchebag.”
“You have a remarkable self-awareness for someone in your position,” Julia said.
“Thank you,” Hamid said. “I should have known something was up when the Company liaison had to come see me first thing in the morning. I’d known Carl Burdecker most of my life. He was my father’s CIA contact since before I was born. He was always reassuring my father that the family was protected, since Dad was a valuable ally and asset. I assumed Carl was just here to purr the usual assurances, but something was up.
“ ‘Terrible business,’ Carl said, shaking his head. ‘What they did to your father.’
“ ‘Uncle Carl,’ I said. ‘Since when has the stringing up and burning of someone ever been “pleasant” business?’
“ ‘Oh, off the top of my head, I could think of a few instances,’ he said, a wistful look in his eyes. Then he decided it wasn’t a good idea to go there and returned to the topic at hand.
“ ‘Hamid,’ he said, fixing me with his pale eyes the way he must have been trained to do to engage someone and make them think he was the most empathetic man in the world with their best interests at heart. ‘You have my personal assurance that you and what’s left of your family are still under our protection, so your safety is assured.’
“ ‘Even my sister’s?’ I asked.
“With that, Carl went silent. I just couldn’t resist that little dig. You could say what happened to Kareena was as much his fault—or rather, the Company’s fault—as my dad’s.”
“What happened to your sister?” I asked.
“Not much,” Hamid said. “Other than the fact that she joined the insurgents who led the overthrow of my father and brothers. Anyway, Uncle Carl told me my mother managed to fly to Switzerland a week before they overthrew my father, so she’s perfectly safe now. I’m sure her first stop will be Chanel for some retail therapy. Surviving a revolution can be stressful work. Then Uncle Carl said the Swiss authorities had frozen both her and my father’s accounts and assets.”
“I think that might be protocol,” I said.
“Poor mum,” Hamid said. “Just how is she going to survive on the Krugerrands and bearer bonds that I’m sure were in her emergency suitcase?”
“I’m sure she’ll manage,” Julia said.
“Then Uncle Carl got a bit serious and asked me if I knew what had happened to my brothers. I didn’t want to admit that earlier in the evening, my homies and I were playing Call of Duty on the Xbox, so CNN was not being followed. Carl told me to brace myself, then didn’t even wait before he gave me the full report. Kabil had been pulled out of his Lamborghini by protesters in the capital town square and, well, they ran him over with his own car. Thirty times.”
Julia and I winced.
“Well, he did love that car,” Hamid said. “More than he loved anybody or his country. That was ironic. The other thing about Kabil was, well, you know that joke I made about dead hookers in hotels that needed to be cleaned up? For my older brother, it wasn’t a joke, more a hobby. The sex workers of the world, especially in Las Vegas, New York, Monte Carlo, Bangkok, and Dubai, are suddenly a lot safer now. I wonder if the Lamborghini is going to be shared by the local community from now on. I really don’t think people are that magnanimous when it comes to luxury goods. Would the car be claimed by the first guy who pulled my brother out of it or the first guy who got behind the wheel to drive over him? That’s something the new society was going to have to decide on. I have a feeling no one is going to commemorate the spot on which Kabil had become permanently affixed as a red smear. They’re probably just going to hose it clean by next week.”
“What about your other brother?” I asked.
“Mirza? He was convinced he was going to lead the army and quash the insurrection and take over from my father.”
“Didn’t the army decide they were on the people’s side when the rebellion started?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Hamid said. “Mirza wouldn’t have had many options left other than join our dad in the panic room in the basement of the palace. I think you can guess that the protesters managed to breach the panic room.”
“How did they do that?” I asked.
“It seems an insider gave them the pin number to the keypad.”
“You look like you know who the insider was,” Julia said.
“Uncle Carl didn’t need to tell me who that might have been,” Hamid said. “My sister Kareena. Dad always thought her hatred of him was just a passing phase, but then he always did underestimate his youngest, and for her being a girl. One thing he and my brothers never understood was that women were world-class champions at bearing grudges, far more than men.”
“True,” Julia said.
“So what did Mirza do?” I asked. “Did he try to save his own arse by throwing Dad to the dogs and declaring he would be a people’s champion when he took over?”
“That’s what I heard he did,” Hamid said. “Again, there was Mirza’s fatal mistake: assuming he would be accepted as leader when he spent his years as a virtual prince abusing, raping, and casually murdering his fellow countrymen for fun. I asked Uncle Carl what they did to him. I’d fallen asleep by then and was no longer following the news. He said the insurgents got him. They took him before the crowd could, since they were the ones with guns. As I slept, they streamed the trial they held for him on the Web.”
“Is that video still online?” I asked.
“Yes,” Hamid said. “I practically leaped for my MacBook Pro and did a search. Sure enough, virtually every news site was carrying the vid, with the advisory that viewers may find the footage disturbing. I clicked PLAY without hesitation. They held the makeshift trial in the town square, right under the lamppost where hung the still-smoking remains of my dad. Mirza had been forced to kneel while the leader of the Maoist Liberation Movement read out the charges against him, nothing the whole country didn’t already know: rape, murder, assault, theft. Mirza was being tried as a proxy for the whole family. The symbolism was deliberate and preplanned. T
he leader announced that sentence would be passed henceforth, as the country needed catharsis from the thirty-five-year nightmare of my father’s reign. The Maoist soldiers were dressed in green military fatigues and berets, very Che Guevara. They began to pass out baseball bats to the people nearest to them and told them to have at it. I always had a feeling Dad’s attempt to popularize baseball in our country as part of his ploy to suck up to America might come back to bite him in the arse. The members of the eager public who were lucky enough to get a bat proceeded to use Mirza as a piñata for the next ten minutes. Most of the news sites cut the video off before the first swings went down, but I found a site that played the whole thing through uninterrupted.”
Again, Julia and I didn’t say anything.
“Uncle Carl and I knew straight off that the speech had obviously been written by Kareena. She and I had talked about political symbolism and acts of catharsis years ago when we were in college here in the States and we were hanging out smoking a joint together, talking about Political Science 101. She was right there in the video, standing behind the leader in her own green fatigues and black beret, the power behind the man. The leader wouldn’t have been able to wipe his own arse, let alone write a coherent speech, without her. She was the power behind that throne. Of all the extreme leftist movements, I never understood why she chose to be a Maoist as opposed to a Leninist, Trotskyist, or Stalinist, not that most Americans would be able to tell the difference between them, considering most of them have never met a real extreme leftist or Communist in their lives, and if they did, it would blow their minds. Kareena had succeeded in translating her daddy issues and hatred of men into epic, mythical proportions, and this looked like the culmination of her lifelong war with our dad. From sheltered princess to rebel princess. Go Sis, I guess.”
TWO
I looked at Hamid Mahfouz, this rueful man, and how he and I had ended up here, together in this safe house in North Hollywood, surrounded by a literal ring of fire above us in the hills. One of the tenets of spirituality was to look for the commonalities you share with another man to achieve empathy and understanding of yourself and others, but this was well over-the-top. We seemed like distorted mirror images of each other, both here, someplace neither of us wanted to be. His family was even more dysfunctional than mine. He even had an evil sister, where mine was merely opinionated. Was I just rambling and drawing these comparisons between us because I was knackered and stressed out about my current predicament? Oh, great. Kali was in here with us, listening. Of course she was enjoying this.
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