Armistice

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  He opened his mouth to reply, but over the sound of the surf Cordelia made out the roar of an approaching engine. From Aristide’s suspended retort, she figured he heard it, too.

  “Lady’s name. It’s getting to be like a livery garage around here.” He pursed his lips and stared at her, eyes narrowed, the pad of his thumb making considering circles around the base of his cigarette. “I suppose we’d better go see who it is. Unless you’re afraid they’re turning over stones.”

  * * *

  She followed him, at a little distance, not liking the tack his attitude had taken. In the city, he’d been fun and games, dinner and drinks, money over the spillway. All his, of course, which she could hardly stomach. She tried to look on it as reparations, but there wasn’t a set of swags in the world that would set her hands to rights again. He’d put his hackles up whenever she mentioned old times.

  Now he was coming too close to asking questions, and there was a brimstone curl of the old Ari’s wickedness rising off him, trailing in his wake, even in the way he walked across the hall. It came on stronger when he caught sight of the new arrival.

  “Mr. Addas,” he said, pitching his voice for the stage. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  The man stood backlit on the threshold, a loose white tunic billowing around his legs in the breeze. Even as she spotted him, a couple of domestics were coming to take his bags and close the doors behind him.

  “Neither did I.” His voice hit the same false note that Ari’s had, and rang as brightly. “But I had several days free, and after a successful premiere my cousin is always a generous host. Is that correct?” Without the sun glare, she could see his face, and its angle: He was looking up at the gallery that ran around three sides of the hall. Cordelia followed his eyes and saw the older woman from the front steps: the one who’d pinned Ari so hard when they arrived. Must be Pulan Satri, the boss of the operation.

  Jinadh said something in Porashtu—fast and musical, coming out of a grinning face. Pulan’s answer came in Porashtu also, sharper and shorter, ending on an up note like a question. Jinadh came back a little wheedling, and Cordelia watched Pulan’s expression change from harried to sly. Then, it bloomed like a bursting four o’clock into over-the-top delight.

  Mother and sons, she was hemmed in on all fronts by stagefolk. And they didn’t turn it off when the curtains came down. They didn’t have curtains. They walked their lives on the boards.

  Pulan swept down the stairs, now chattering sweetly as a mockingbird. Jinadh laughed and opened his arms for an embrace. When they parted, Cordelia saw the camera hanging around his neck, just in time for him to lift it and snap a photograph of Pulan, who flirted and mugged at the camera.

  At the click of the shutter, Cordelia’s stomach clenched.

  “How long will you be staying?” Aristide thrust his question into their pantomime like a greenhorn busting onto the scene too early, and it was about as jarring. Cordelia caught the moment of irritation on both their faces, and wondered if they were in some kind of racket together or headed for two different ends and just playing off each other to get there.

  “A few days, I think. If Pulan will have me?” Jinadh had got his grin back on by now. He was good-looking, she’d give him that, and his smile had her about ready to join in. Catching, like measles, and probably as dangerous. She read him as the kind of man who could get you to go along with his schemes.

  “Of course,” she said. “Go get settled in. Cocktails on the terrace around half seven. Aristide, you and…” Pulan’s outstretched hand paused, gesturing faintly to Cordelia.

  “Nellie,” Ari answered for her.

  “Nellie,” repeated Pulan, rolling the ls luxuriously over her tongue, as if to test their sound. “You are of course welcome to join us. There might even be music if we can persuade Djihar to bring out the gramophone. Perhaps dancing?” Then she turned to Jinadh and started speaking in Porashtu again, following him up the stairs and down the hall.

  That left Cordelia alone with Aristide again.

  “Who in the holy stones is that?” she asked.

  Aristide rolled his eyes. “Pulan’s horrible cousin. Nobody you need to worry about.”

  The echo of the camera’s shutter still ringing in her ears, she wasn’t so sure about that.

  * * *

  Straight away, Cordelia didn’t trust Jinadh, though Ari had dismissed him out of hand, and Pulan seemed pleased to use him as a distraction. The way sparks flew every time she and Ari spoke to each other, they were pinning each other sharp.

  There was something too slick about him. Something too silly. Like he wanted them to think he was just there for a song and some snaps. He drank like an actor, gossiped like a grandmother, and all the time had a chip of flint in his eye whenever Cordelia caught it.

  She couldn’t understand why nobody else noticed. If they’d been on easier terms, she might have asked Aristide. But he’d turned into a hot ball of needles and if she brought it up with him he’d only use it as another avenue to pick at the wide weave of her story. And she didn’t know Pulan well enough to approach her, didn’t have any kind of trust to trade on there.

  So after enduring a day on the run from that camera and those casual, too-keen questions, she cornered Pulan’s tiny secretary, Daoud. The one Ari might be knocking. Speaking of sparks, he’d been flint on steel with Ari since they arrived. Apparently, where went Pulan, he went after. If he and Ari were keeping each other up, it wasn’t worth as much to him as his position in this organization, whether it really was a film studio, or something less legitimate.

  She was up late, looking for something to eat down in the cavernous kitchen of the servants’ quarters, which she’d mostly found by luck and sense of smell. The halls all around carried traces of garlic and onions and spice, and the scent had gotten stronger as she got closer. She’d been skipping most meals to avoid socializing and the hard squeeze that Jinadh brought to it, and wasn’t pleased to find a few days of good eating had broken her down. She couldn’t go hungry so long anymore.

  As she was pouring herself a cup of some kind of kefir out of a glass pitcher from the refrigerator—she’d never even seen one, only heard of ’em—the overhead light snapped on and she froze. A few spatters of thick yogurt struck the countertop, shaken loose by the sudden clench of her grip on the pitcher handle.

  “Ms. Hanes,” said Daoud. “You are awake late.”

  Carefully, she set down the pitcher. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Ah.” He stepped into the room. “I wish that I could say the same, but I have not even tried yet.”

  “Business?” she asked.

  “Yes.” But he didn’t give details. “May I?”

  She put the pitcher into his outstretched hand, and he took a glass from a shelf above the massive basin of a sink.

  “Can’t you just call a domestic for something like that?” she asked.

  “At this hour? I would not think of it.” He tipped his head back and drank. “I grew up with good manners and few advantages. While I have gained the latter, I retain the former.”

  “Your Geddan’s good,” she said.

  “Ms. Satri saw to that, as she did to many other things. Though, I have a gift for languages. Perhaps because I learned two early. My parents are from the Belqat tribes; we spoke Belqati at home, though I rarely use it now.”

  “The who now?”

  “Caravaners.” He took a long drink of his kefir, and licked it carefully from his lips, which were full as bee stings. “Bad enough to be a man, and turned; no one needs to know I am a dust heel as well.”

  “Ari’s a man,” she said. “He seems to do all right here.”

  “He is foreign. It is different.” There was a note of longing in his voice.

  “And … what, turned? That mean what I think?”

  He raised a meaningful eyebrow.

  “Mother’s tits,” she said, to the expression. “You deserve each other. So they don’t like that kind of
thing here?”

  “Among women, it is expected at certain times.” He shrugged. “Men? It is mostly not talked about. Lots of things men do are not talked about, except among ourselves. Women do not often care to know.”

  “Is that why nobody in this pile seems to give three dried shits about Jinadh and his rotten questions? ’Cause he’s got hanging tackle?”

  Daoud cocked his head. A cowlick had come loose from his pomade and stuck up on the back of his head, so the gesture gave him the look of a fancy parakeet. “Mr. Addas is a journalist,” he said. “Well, a gossip columnist. His curiosity is annoying, but not unusual. Does he disturb you? I could speak to Pulan.”

  “No,” she said, too fast. “That’s all right.”

  “Perhaps you should talk to him,” said Daoud. “Publicity has helped to secure Aristide’s position here. It might be good to show your face.”

  She snorted at that, and said goodnight.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Early in the morning—just as she was coming from the washroom with her teeth freshly cleaned, ready to do her morning dhusha routine—Lillian got a call from a car service.

  «Amil would have taken you,» said Waleeda, when she relayed the message. «You should have said.»

  «I didn’t want to get him out of bed so early,» said Lillian, wondering where she was headed, and who wanted her there.

  She forewent dhusha, and her sports clothes, changing directly into the suit Waleeda had laid out for the office. By the time she had packed her last paper into her briefcase, a black car was idling at the curb.

  «Don’t tell Amil,» she said to Waleeda, smiling conspiratorially. The smile expired as the door shut behind her.

  Curtains were drawn down over the windows in the rear of the car. Lillian felt a stab of apprehension. When she touched the door handle, her hand slipped against the metal and she realized her palms had begun to sweat.

  «Good morning,» said Jinadh, once she opened the door.

  She let out a breath that had sat too long in her lungs, and slipped into the seat beside him. «You kept me from my dhusha.»

  «You still practice?»

  «Every morning. Just like my teacher.»

  «Then you know I skipped mine as well, to be here so early.»

  «It was very neatly done. Is this your car?»

  “No,” he said, switching languages. “It is a regular cab. And the driver is a regular citizen. As far as I know, he does not speak Geddan.”

  “You won’t drop me at the chancery, will you?”

  “I thought we would play at being regular citizens ourselves,” he said. “The driver is under the impression we are attending a meeting together, in the Sheerwolla Complex.”

  “So we’re stockbrokers today?”

  “Or some other variety of remora, yes. Chii bhale.” This last was a Porashtu exhortation to the driver, who pulled into the empty early-morning street.

  “What do you have for me?” she asked, nodding to the satchel between them on the seat.

  “I developed them myself,” he said, taking out an envelope. “In the master bathroom. And I cleaned up well enough I don’t think the housekeeper will suspect anything. Can you picture me on hands and knees scrubbing the tile?”

  “Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes as if savoring the image. It was too easy to do this with him—to relax, and joke, and take full breaths.

  “Then I wish you were less imaginative.” Jinadh tapped her knee with the envelope. “Here, look at them.”

  The photographs tipped out into her hand, slipping against each other and threatening to spill across the leather upholstery. There weren’t many of them.

  “I only made prints of the relevant ones,” he said.

  There were three, to be exact. “He isn’t in any of these.”

  “I missed him by half an hour, maybe. I passed Sekibou leaving on my way in, and a black car, closed. I did not see the driver, but he is my best guess.”

  “So what are these?” She spread them like playing cards. In one photograph, Satri posed for the camera with a cocktail shaker. There was a gramophone behind her, and Makricosta had just slid a record from its sleeve to play. They were both out of focus, in favor of a woman mostly hidden by the gramophone horn. She was shorter than Makricosta, by a significant margin, but that was all Lillian could tell from the image.

  In the next, taken from above and behind, the same woman stood at the railing of a terrace, looking over the sea. Jinadh had tried for an angle that captured her profile, but he had come just short. A curl of dark hair had fallen into her eyes, further obscuring her face. She wore a loose collared shirt—white, or some light color—and pleated trousers over bare feet.

  The third photograph showed her behind several other people again, this time sitting in a rattan chair, holding a highball. Blurry shoulders and heads blocked most of the view, but Jinadh had managed to catch her eyes over the rim of her glass, and she had seen him do it. She stared straight into the camera, brows lifted, expression the blank mask that preceded panic.

  “After I took that,” he said, “she got up and left. She avoided me very neatly most of the time.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Pulan’s new assistant choreographer. An old friend of Makricosta; definitely Geddan. She did not speak Porashtu, and had an awful accent—very nasal. And when I say new, I mean that she showed up the same day I did. I was not able to get him for you, but I was able to get her.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and put the photos back into their envelope, which she placed in her briefcase.

  “Will they be useful?” he asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “Good.”

  She turned to look out the window, away from his hopeful eyes.

  The car crossed the Hilazi Bridge, over the waters of the Shadha. Above the upper cataract, the river ran unobstructed; there were no rocks or sandbars to churn it into whitewater. It was deceptively placid before it reached the struts of the bridge, green and sparkling in the rising sun. She felt a moment of kinship with the river, whose untroubled surface was a thin glaze over the brutal current beneath. Foreign anglers had a habit of dying in its clutches, mistaking its outward countenance for a truthful representation of its internal workings.

  “If I need you again,” she said, to the window glass and the bridge and the precipitous drop beyond its railings, “should I call the house? And who am I, if I do?”

  “You can be a new source on Inaz Iligba. Everyone wants stories on her now, after Pulan’s film. It would be credible enough to fool my staff.” They were drawing close to the Sheerwolla buildings now, a banking complex as arched, frescoed, and gilded as a temple. Which, Lillian supposed, it was: dedicated to the pandenominational god of commerce.

  The cab pulled up at the main entrance, a lapis-tiled arch framed by potted palms. Jinadh got out and came around, held the door for Lillian. She let him, faintly vexed at the absurdity of ritual in a way her job didn’t often allow for. That was the moment she realized she’d forgotten she was working.

  “Will you?” asked Jinadh, as they entered the gate.

  The question, without context, threw her. “What?”

  “Need me again?”

  She almost said I hope so, but she had caught herself earlier and now managed to say, “I’ll know soon.”

  They parted in the foyer, him to the left and her to the right, from the center of a mosaic chrysanthemum the color of sunrise. Outside, the sky had turned the same. Lillian blinked away the glare and hailed another cab, this one empty of old lovers and conspiracy.

  * * *

  “He couldn’t get quite what you wanted,” she said, and put the envelope square in the center of Flagg’s desk.

  He raised an eyebrow. “But he got something.”

  Lillian nodded, and didn’t avail herself of the chair until Flagg said, “Sit, please.”

  The leather stuck to the backs of her legs, and she wished state
secrecy allowed for open windows. In the corner of the office, a fan whirred valiantly behind its metal cage, but it didn’t accomplish much beyond riffling the occasional paper.

  “The original subject of your interest,” said Lillian, tipping her head toward the door of Flagg’s office to indicate Memmediv, seated just outside, “left just as my source arrived. I have reason to believe they passed one another in the drive.”

  Flagg paused in opening the envelope, and the quiet in the absence of crinkling paper pressed on Lillian’s ears. He was staring at her.

  “You’re not joking,” he said.

  The muscles of her face were sore when she tried to smile for him. “I rarely do.”

  Flagg shook his head, eyes cast heavenward.

  “The photographs,” said Lillian, and he brought his gaze to the envelope again.

  They slid into his hands as treacherously as they had hers, but he caught them more firmly and laid them out one by one across the black leather of his desktop. The terrace, the ocean, the cocktail glass.

  “Is it her?” asked Lillian. “From what he said, I thought it might be, but—”

  “What’s the story?”

  “New choreographer. Assistant choreographer, sorry. She has some connection to Makricosta, though it’s unclear exactly what. Geddan, definitely, and from the description of her speaking voice I’d say urban Amberlinian. Very urban.”

  He took the photograph from Lehane’s file and placed it above the three Lillian had brought him. “I’m not sure. I’d like to say yes. It seems probable.”

  “Even if we don’t have solid facts,” said Lillian, “I can announce in a press conference that we suspect Satri is harboring a terrorist. We may be on shaky ground with Porachis, politically, but the queen will still need to save face. We can demand an investigation of Satri’s activities and business interests, and—”

  “—end up with our faces in the midden. If Memmediv is involved in Satri’s conspiracy and we ask the Porachin government to investigate her, we’ve as good as cut our own switch.”

  Damnation. “Well, what do you want me to do?”