Lillian had always been able to turn her own guilt into strategy against the thing that caused it. If something hurt her, she picked it apart to find the critical thread, and then pulled.
“Maybe,” she said, a plan assembling in the theatre of her mind. “Maybe it’s time he learned.”
“What?”
“Help me,” she said. “Flagg wants me to … to inform on Memmediv. If he and Satri are working together, we double our odds. I know you aren’t intimate, necessarily, but you’re family. She likes you well enough, doesn’t she?”
He shrugged. “She tolerates me.”
“Well, get as close as her tolerance will allow. You visit her estate sometimes, correct? If you get anything good and I can use it, I’ll … you can see Stephen.”
“For five minutes at a cocktail party, politely saying goodnight to all his mother’s guests before he goes to bed?” Jinadh sneered, but it was the anger of animal pain: defensive, terrified. “I won’t do that again.”
She hadn’t been proud of that, but she had needed something to cement his cooperation. Flagg had agreed to bring Stephen home during last spring’s Equinox, for just that purpose.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know how we’ll manage it. I don’t think … eight is too young to keep that kind of secret. But we’ll make you a part of his life. Somehow.”
He was quiet too long, and she began to worry she had erred in telling him anything. But finally, he looked into her eyes. Her breath didn’t catch, but it was a very near thing. “This means that we will be a part of each other’s lives as well.”
This time, the terror was hers. “Like I said: we’ll manage.”
* * *
The multitude of cocktails Aristide had consumed during intermission struck him full force about twenty minutes from the end of the film. He knew he was laughing at inappropriate moments, and the smart remarks he insisted on making to Pulan were most likely asinine and far too loud. But it all seemed very far away, at a further remove from reality than the scenes played through the projector.
The festivities following the film were catered. Aristide filled a plate then promptly forgot where he had set it down, so replaced it with another cocktail. The room—he thought they might be in a hotel ballroom, or perhaps some civic building, though he did not remember how he had arrived—spun dizzily, and the various faces of actors, critics, investors, and hangers-on blurred together into a collage of bright white smiles and banal chatter. Except for Lillian—she stood out like a beacon in the throng.
He tucked himself into an alcove behind a fountain and watched her through the falling water as she talked with Phoebe Francis, the actress who had played Margaretta DePaul. They looked nothing alike. He laughed at that. A photographer waved her arm for them to smile and pose. Silk and crystal beading hissed as they arranged the trains of their gowns and linked their arms. The photographer made a flirtatious remark and everyone laughed. Flash spots haunted Aristide’s field of vision, skating across the swirling surface of the world.
Daoud found him some time later, wedged into a corner he didn’t remember retreating to.
“I will take you to your car,” he said. “But I must stay with Pulan for a while. Business. I will come see you before I go to bed.”
“You’re not my dolly bear,” said Aristide. “I can fall asleep without you as long as I’ve got pills.”
But he didn’t. And Daoud arrived at his hotel suite an hour or so later, heralded by a soft knock on the door. He did not wait for Aristide to answer. «I have bad news about our holiday,» he said, slipping out of his shoes. «Pulan needs me back at Hadhariti tomorrow.»
“That lying skink.” Aristide raised his glass of brandy, only to find it empty. “I’ll tear her forked tongue out of her face.”
“I will not tell her you said that.” Daoud crossed the room, padding over the thick carpet.
“I don’t care if you do. I made some very tricky reservations for us, you know.”
“I am sorry.” Daoud moved Aristide’s abandoned book and empty glass and took a seat beside him. “I was looking forward to it.”
Aristide was silent a moment, working out a translation. It felt more honest to say what came next in Porashtu. «You were going to be bored stiff.»
«I was going to be bored.» Daoud pulled the tails of Aristide’s shirt from his waistband. «You were going to be stiff.»
«Because I am old?» asked Aristide, taking over his own unbuttoning.
“Nuance,” said Daoud, guessing rightly Aristide wouldn’t know the word in Porashtu.
Aristide sighed. “Oh, I hate not to get a joke. I really am clever in my mother tongue, you know.”
“I believe it,” said Daoud. “Since you are so clever with your own.” His fingertips skimmed the sweat-damp seam of linen between Aristide’s legs.
Aristide twisted free of his shirt and turned Daoud’s strategy back against him. Once the boy’s breath began to hitch, Aristide said, “Why didn’t Pulan tell me about Ms. DePaul?”
“She knew you would be upset.” Daoud’s fist caught at Aristide’s hair, but he couldn’t get a grip. It didn’t feel strange anymore, the featherweight of his short crop, but tonight it sent a lance of nostalgia through him, and regret.
“She was planning it all along, I assume, even if she only sent the cable yesterday.”
“Hells, Aristide, she has cost me my holiday and it is to be business all weekend. I do not want to start early.”
“Well, I wish anyone had ever started with me at all.”
“The premiere is finished,” said Daoud. “Let it be.” He unhooked the tab of Aristide’s trousers and reached for the zipper, but Aristide snatched his hand away.
“And next time?” he asked. “And after that? Will she keep dropping these little surprises into my lap indefinitely?”
Daoud flung his arms up. “Talk to her! She is the woman in command. I am just her little secretary!”
“Didi—”
But Daoud had scrambled from his lap and was tugging his clothing straight. “I will see you back at Hadhariti, when you are done drinking your way through the week.” He shut the door softly when he went, out of deference to the hour, but the decisive click of the latch echoed in the quiet.
* * *
Repetition should have made the task easier, but knocking on the door between their rooms cost Lillian even more dearly than before.
When he answered, Memmediv had shed every item of clothing he could spare without complete indecency—still not used to the heat—and went barefoot with his shirt open at the collar.
“Nightcap?” asked Lillian. She’d ordered a bottle of fig brandy to her room, and a healthy portion of it had gone to prepare her for this. “If you’re done packing. We have an early train tomorrow and I don’t want to distract you.”
“I had a call this evening,” he said. “I won’t be going back to Myazbah with you. There’s a small crisis down the coast; I need to liaise with one of my contacts. I’ve already let Flagg know.”
“Oh,” said Lillian. “Well. Will you still take a drink?”
He cocked an eyebrow, but ceded space so she could step into his room.
Tomorrow’s suit was laid out on the valet stand, conservative tie hanging between gray linen lapels. Every other personal effect had been carefully packed away into the open black leather valise at the foot of his bed, which remained unrumpled beneath a canopy of delicate mosquito netting. There were no pyjamas in evidence on top of the coverlet, or in his open valise.
Porachis was hot. One only covered what one needed to.
“I’ll just…” Lillian waved the two tumblers she’d brought in, then set them on the vanity to pour. “Don’t tell Flagg? I wouldn’t want word to get around that the public face of the OSP in Porachis is a lush behind closed doors.”
Memmediv took a glass. “Of course not.” Lifting it, he offered, “To closed mouths and closed doors. And the secrets safe behind them.”
“Eloquent,” said Lillian, and settled onto his sofa with her drink. Already tipsy, she landed more heavily than she meant to. Patting the cushions, she said, “Come sit?”
He did, though the crooked line of his mouth showed more humor than desire. His bemusement wasn’t ideal, but it was better than refusal. Why did she have to be yoked with this burden? She had never been a skilled seductress.
“I hope you’re not upsetting anyone’s expectations in Myazbah with this last-minute trip,” she said. “Wife, mistress? Maybe a boy? I wouldn’t tell.”
“No,” he said, uninflected, and drank his brandy.
Lillian clenched her jaw hard enough that her teeth squeaked. “Good,” she said. And then, because stress had turned her into a veritable teakettle and alcohol had loosened her control, a little burst of steam squeaked out. “Because you certainly upset a few of the administration’s. I saw you talking with Sekibou.”
“Please.” He snorted. “It was a film premiere, not a battlefield. Not even a negotiation table.”
“Everything is a negotiation.” It came out more sharply than she meant it to.
That got his attention. He finally met her gaze and his bemusement was gone, replaced by surprise. She wasn’t sure if that was worse or better.
Getting a grip, she amended her outburst with an apology. “The OSP hasn’t made my job very easy lately, approving foreign aid packages that go straight to the republican army in North Liso.” Inspiration caught her, and she resented it but let it drag her along. “I’m sorry for my temper,” she said, and put her hand on his thigh.
He looked down at it, and she saw the edge of a smile in the shadow of his collar. “What’s this?”
“I’m under a lot of strain,” she said, and pressed softly into the wool of his trousers, the give of his flesh. “You’re not hard to look at. And it’s been some time since … well. I can’t afford to be caught at something like this, and I don’t have time for it anyway.” All truth, bent in service of a lie.
“You’re not afraid I’ll mention it to Flagg?”
Her laugh, too, was genuine. “Speaking of closed doors, Regional Affairs has a formidable lock. Even if you do say something, Flagg won’t mind it if it stays in the chancery.”
“No,” said Memmediv. Amusement deepened the cadence of his accent, made it purl like a stream. “I am certain he would not.”
That turned her cold with apprehension. He might simply be agreeing with her sentiment, but he might also be alluding to a plot he wasn’t supposed to be aware of. She pleaded with whatever powers might be listening—the heavens, the holy stones, the Wandering Queen, and any form of divinity or providence as yet unknown to her—that it was only a subordinate’s humor of solidarity, and nothing more sinister.
“I have to admit,” Memmediv went on, “this is not what I was expecting when I volunteered to come along.”
“No?” she asked, proud of how smoothly she slid into the opening. “What were you expecting?”
He looked at her strangely then, and her hand on his leg felt so painfully obvious, so contrived. His dark eyes, deeply set beneath skeptical brows, were too keen for comfort.
“A show,” he said. “And I’m certainly getting that.”
He wasn’t going to give her a better entrée, so she leaned in and kissed him.
She caught his mouth and held it long enough to taste a trace of the brandy she had poured for him, and the lingering acrid breath of cigarette smoke. His smooth face spoke of the recent pass of a razor, and his bitter aftershave filled her nose with vetiver and hyrax.
After waiting slightly too long for him to reciprocate, she pulled away. He was already watching her, inscrutable.
“Thank you for the drink,” he said. “As you said, you have an early train.”
Summarily dismissed, she collected her glass from the table, her bottle from the vanity, and wished him a good night.
“I hope your meeting down the coast is productive,” she said, retreating into the formal cordiality that was her true professional strength.
“Thank you,” he said. Then, just before she shut the door between their rooms, “Perhaps we might see one another again?”
It surprised her, so much so that she might have said yes even without Flagg’s demands hanging over her. “Of course,” she said. And then, gathering her wits enough to make a play at sultry, she added, “I look forward to it.”
For a long time that night, she lay awake under the canopy of mosquito netting, watching for the faint breeze in the folds, the shifting moiré patterns of warp over weft. She had failed in the task that Flagg had set for her, but still, she had forged some tenuous connection with Memmediv. Where that might lead her, and why in the Lady’s name he had asked to see her again, she had no idea.
Her hopes lay mostly, ironically, with Jinadh. And while they were no longer lovers, her intentions toward Memmediv felt uncomfortably like betrayal.
She bit the raw inside of her lip. She had never cried over Jinadh. Not then, and not once over the long years in between as Stephen’s face lost its baby roundness and lengthened into a narrow-jawed likeness of his father. But seeing him again, without warning, on this night of all nights? Blood salted her teeth and tongue.
Familiar dead-end “what if” scenarios began to play in her head like one of Satri’s silver nitrate dramas. She was a foreign diplomat from a state whose relationship with Porachis was less than friendly. He was the favorite nephew of Her Resplendent Majesty Queen Yaima. That was one strike against each of them. And Porachin taboo was very strict about widowers remarrying. Tradition had grown lax in recent decades, and women in Porachis picked up widowers all the time. Sometimes even married them. But Jinadh was noble, and the sin would be one of hypocrisy if it could be tied—even tenuously—to the queen.
Years ago they could have been together back in Gedda, but Lillian refused to leave Myazbah for him, not when she was doing a job she loved, excelled at. Besides, she didn’t know how to have a family, or a marriage. Her own parents had spent almost all their time apart, working themselves to death for the foreign service and the courts of law. And her brother hadn’t exactly been a model of familial virtue.
Even if she and Jinadh had left together, her home country would not have remained welcoming for long. If only she could pretend it had been prescience that kept her in Porachis, instead of pride.
She had very little left now, and knew he would forgive her, because he’d never had any to begin with. But Flagg had told her early on, in no uncertain terms, she must stay far away. He wouldn’t risk his eyes and ears in the Porachin court blinded and made deaf by scandal.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Aristide woke late the morning after the premiere, sore and cotton-mouthed. Daoud was gone; the sheets were rumpled, but cool. Aristide wondered if he’d left late last night or early in the morning. Neither fire nor earthquake nor flood could rouse Aristide from the dreamless coma of his sleeping pills, let alone a featherweight boy slipping out of his bed.
Then he remembered that they’d quarreled, and levered himself up to face the day alone, wincing as a piece of his spine popped into place.
In rumpled, candy-striped red seersucker, with a silk parasol over one elbow and Kuravic’s collected critical essays in his hand, he descended to the hotel mezzanine, the restaurant, and a breakfast of lamb confit and poached eggs with sumac, which he hoped would subdue his hangover.
At the next table, a woman in a yoked tunic and narrow trousers sipped coffee, reading her morning paper. Over the tops of his reading spectacles, which softened everything at a distance of six feet or greater into illegibility, Aristide caught a glimpse of the photograph above the fold:
Lillian DePaul, behind a podium, rather more soberly dressed than she had been last night. Opposite, a delegation of Lisoans inspecting troops at stiff attention. Royalist or republican, he couldn’t tell.
When the woman set aside the front pages in favor of lighter f
are, he caught a different photograph entirely: last night’s emcee, arms open to cede the floor, and then Pulan, Aristide, and Lillian again, this time in her revealing satin gown.
The women were both smiling. Pulan as though she had just eaten something particularly indulgent, and Lillian like visiting royalty: distant, kind, and unimpeachable. By comparison, Aristide’s expression looked blank. Some people might mistake it for pained arrogance, but he knew his own face. Here, it had been rendered affectless by shock.
Disgusted with himself, he left the restaurant and went down to the lobby, where the concierge informed him that Ms. Satri had left a car for his convenience. He discovered it was not the one they had driven up in, and wondered where it had come from before deciding that he truly, deeply didn’t care. She had five; she could spare this one.
His watch read half eleven. There were hours to dispose of between now and dinner—in a private room at the decadent Najaloor—followed by Srai Sin’s performance of Maihu’s new art song cycle.
Aristide had heard the acclaimed Asunan contralto perform once in his life, and she was so exceptional that he had put aside painful doubts born of past circumstances to hear her again. He did not have many misgivings, and had convinced himself this meant that he had none. Facing the prospect of the concert on his own, abandoned by another lover—albeit in less dire circumstances—he wished he had given his doubts more credence.
Cyril had been late to that particular party; he had missed the music. Still, it would be hard to listen to Srai Sin with Lillian’s laughter haunting him, harmonizing with art songs and arias to conjure more deeply buried ghosts.
He regretted the box seats now. At least he’d be alone; no one to see him wince. Or, plague it all, to see him weep.
Since he didn’t have a companion to help fill his time, he could, he supposed, go by the office. Or maybe the soundstage the studio rented in the city. Most of the real work they did on Pulan’s estate, where she’d built everything a film might need. But Chitra was auditioning dancers today for Galatar ul Walibi, which was due to start shooting on location two weeks from now, in the windy steppes of Tzieta. Roughly translated, the title meant Song of the Sky, and there would be plenty of both in the fantastical romance.
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