“But you couldn’t just … she ain’t got a husband, does she?”
“No,” said Jinadh. “But there is a taboo against widowers remarrying. Stephen could not be made legitimate, and I very likely would have been disowned. And I would have let Auntie do it, too.” Here he sliced a sideways glance at Pulan, like a street magician flashing a card face-out between two fingers. “I did not care. But Lillian would not part with her career. She would never have gotten another posting if the story came out, she said.”
Cordelia shook her head. DePauls. Seemed like they could blow a spark into a scorching fire, but they couldn’t tend the coals.
“You … you…” Pulan’s hands came down between the bowls and cups, rattling ceramic against mosaic tile, splashing coffee into saucers. Elbows stiff, she plunged her weight through her palms so the table legs squealed. “Did you never consider the risk to … all of us? The danger…” Here, Geddan apparently failed her, and her rage vented forth in Porashtu so liquid and blistering that it flowed together like a stream of molten lava.
Jinadh almost looked amused. To Cordelia, he said, “I made myself a liability: that is what she is saying. To the royal family, the government, the entire country. That I made it possible for a hostile foreign power to peer into the entrails of palace life: gossip and strategy and politics. It is true.”
“And all for the sake of a woman who was not your wife!” Pulan spat it out; it was the first time Cordelia had seen her less than elegant. She looked not just furious but disgusted, as if Jinadh had squatted to take a shit on the terrace.
“My wife is dead.” Jinadh was fighting now, Cordelia realized. There was an anger in him that struggled against hobbles, and it made him shake, but his voice didn’t rise. Cordelia was amazed, and thought—for just a moment—of the few times she’d seen Ari really pinned. That kind of fury wasn’t anything you wanted aimed your way. “I loved Lulita, and I respected her very much. But she has been gone for thirteen years and I am still here.”
They faced each other across the table, across Pulan’s bills and scripts and business correspondence, breathing hard.
It was Cordelia who finally said, surprised at her own meekness: “So they got your son.”
They both startled at the sound of her voice, their breath catching in unison, and then they turned to stare at her.
“Why are you here, telling us?” she went on, wishing she had stood already, but unwilling to get up in the middle of what she had to say. “And what does it have to do with me?”
Jinadh nodded, once, then looked back at Pulan.
“Are you selling guns to Vasily Memmediv?” he asked.
Her plush lips pulled into a painted slash.
“This is not the time for pettiness,” he said.
“He is the representative of a larger group.”
Jinadh tucked his chin. “Lillian has been set up by a man in the embassy to catch him, because they know their traditional networks to be compromised. When Memmediv realized—”
“He offered her son,” said Cordelia. “Your son. He’s in Gedda.”
The fact that she already knew seemed to knock him back for a moment. He sat, heavily, in one of the iron chairs at the table, and stared unseeing at a bowl of broken pistachio shells.
“She accepted his offer,” said Pulan. “Which, I might add, he made without consulting me. Luckily, Ms. Lehane revealed herself in time to take up that snarl in the thread.”
“I think I know some people who could help me get him,” she said, which was just this side of a lie; she hoped she knew some people who she hoped could help her get him. “Catwalk folk, in Amberlough. If they ain’t got drug in yet. It’ll be tricky but it’ll be worth it, if Pulan makes good on her offer. We grab him after school is out, and once the kid’s across the border, I bring home a load of goods.”
He looked like she’d stuck a boot hook in his gut and torn his liver out. Making a soft sound, he put his face into his hand.
“What,” she said, “that ain’t a song you want to hear?”
The breath he hauled in came out ragged. “She did not do it.”
“Did not what?” Pulan looked ready to strike him.
“The offer. She did not think he could deliver, and took it straight back to her handler in the chancery. It was, she said, the only way that Memmediv would trust her: if she appeared to join his conspiracy.”
Pulan sat opposite him, just as heavy, and swore. Cordelia didn’t know the word, but she knew the tone. “And the photographs?”
“Lillian asked for my help. She knew Memmediv was here but she needed to prove it.”
“But you gave them my picture,” said Cordelia.
“Yes.” He wiped his hand across his face, pushing damp curls back from his forehead. “She asked me to … investigate any new hires at the studio, especially if they were Mr. Makricosta’s friends.”
Cordelia made fists, and her left hand ached. “Somebody screeched on me.” Well, it had only been a matter of time. Opal or Luca, one of them had been drug in, or both, and broken under the blows. She didn’t blame them. If she had, the pain in her wrist would have been a harsh reproach. “So what are you doing here now? Come to say you’re sorry?”
“Lillian did not believe Memmediv could fulfill his promise,” said Jinadh. “She was not willing to take a risk.”
“But you are.” A little flame of admiration lit in Cordelia’s chest, like a lighter, or a wavering match. “You’re brave.”
“Or reckless,” said Pulan, but even she looked impressed.
“I am neither,” said Jinadh. “I only want to see my son.”
* * *
Pulan sent Djihar down to tell the cook it was four for dinner, rather than three, and they passed a tense hour or so on the terrace as they waited for the meal. Pulan called Daoud in to take notes. Cordelia was starting to get used to the idea this kid knew everything Pulan did, and kept track of the details better. It was a little strange, to trust her secrets to somebody she wasn’t dealing with directly, but Pulan obviously thought he could keep his jaw clamped if it came to it, so she made her peace.
Cordelia quizzed Jinadh about details of Stephen’s schedule, who usually picked him up from school at the end of term. “You know anything about how they handle this?”
But he had about as many details as she did. Broke her heart. And every time she said Lillian’s name, or called Stephen Jinadh’s son, she saw Pulan tense, or flinch, or give one of those skin shudders like a horse shedding flies. Jinadh noticed, too, and the longer he tried to pretend he didn’t, the tighter his smile got, the more pinched the skin around his eyes.
She couldn’t think of anything that bent her nails back like this did Pulan’s. The woman had coolly discussed dynamiting office buildings, destroying railroad junctions, shipping tons of ammunition and explosives. Now her cousin had a kid, and it wasn’t even who he had a kid with that seemed to really pin her, but the fact he had the kid at all, with somebody who wasn’t his long-dead wife.
Djihar finally came to call them in to dinner. The dining room windows were thrown open onto the night, and a wind had picked up so that the tassels on the lanterns shivered. A silver tureen rested over a spirit lamp. Fragrant steam rose from the thick brown stew: tender goat, slippery sweet onions; cloves, cumin, coriander. A bowl of delicate white rice sat by, studded with nuts and golden raisins. Tall pitchers of water, filled with ice and slices of lime, sweated onto the tiled tabletop. Wine cooled in buckets between tall candles of lapis-colored wax.
Cordelia’s stomach, tied in knots, wasn’t sold on eating. Still she sat, and drank her wine.
As they were all settling in, a footman Cordelia didn’t recognize—there were dozens of them around the place, running soiled clothes and sheets from bedrooms to the laundry, fetching food and misplaced pens and pairs of shoes—slipped into the dining room and put his hand to Djihar’s elbow. The majordomo bent his head to listen to the boy. Cordelia scanned her companions, b
ut no one else seemed to have noticed the minor interruption. Just her nerves, like catgut, plucked by every little thing.
Djihar cleared his throat.
«Yes?» It was one of the few Porashtu words Cordelia could reliably make out, and Pulan spoke it loudly, imperious.
Djihar said something, something, and then Vasily Memmediv.
Pulan nodded curtly and curled her hand in a “come here” sort of gesture. Djihar disappeared from the dining room. He returned with a telephone on a gold tray, and brought it to Pulan’s elbow. He handled the trailing cord with expert dexterity.
“Excuse me,” she said, dropping a sickly sweet smile on Cordelia, and then on Daoud. She still couldn’t quite look at Jinadh, not straight on.
The telephone call was conducted in Geddan. Unfortunately, Pulan’s end of it didn’t exactly give her much to go on.
“Hello, sweet one,” she said, wrapping the receiver in deliberate fingers tipped in flame-blue varnish. “I was not expecting a call. You caught me during dinner. No, no, it is no trouble.”
Then, a long pause.
“Oh,” she said. “Really? Who?”
And then, “Well, that is unfortunate. And what did you tell her?”
Jinadh looked up at that, fixing Pulan with a gaze so hard and sharp she must have felt it like the edge of a newly whetted knife, because she finally met his eyes. When she did, a strange sort of smile flared and died on her painted lips.
“Do not worry,” she said. “I am confident we can smooth things over.” Then, “No, not yet.” And, a little tartly, “Please. Be calm.”
Jinadh’s fist closed on his napkin, bunching the fabric. Cordelia looked from him to Pulan, leery of making assumptions when she only had half of the information available.
“We will be in touch,” said Pulan finally, and dropped the receiver back into its cradle. The impact jostled the ringer, producing a cheerful little bell tone.
“What was that?” asked Jinadh.
“That,” said Pulan, dabbing at a curry stain on the tablecloth, “was a complication.”
* * *
“If you do what you’re proposing,” said Cordelia, slum whine bursting into full feather, “I swear on my mother’s two tits that Sofie rotten Keeler’ll be the least of your troubles!”
“Ms. Hanes,” said Pulan, who was sticking to the fake name either for safety or convenience, “please lower your voice, and be reasonable.”
The argument had run through dessert, but Cordelia had ignored the black rice pudding and fried cheese in syrup, too pinned to do much besides shoot back chemically strong coffee. “I ain’t gonna be reasonable about this,” she said. “You leave that woman’s wife with the Ospies, this is what happens. Or worse.” She held up her broken hands. “And I’m guessing worse, since she’s Chuli and goes in for pears.”
Turning to Daoud, who was perched at her elbow, Pulan asked, “Can you understand anything she is saying?”
“The general idea, yes.” He nibbled delicately at the lip of his wineglass, teeth clicking on the crystal. “Ms. Hanes, we have established a way of operating that is very … efficient. Pulan has years of experience in this type of matter. Decades. The cleanest solution is the one she has proposed.”
“Those women helped me,” said Cordelia. “We ain’t killing one outright and leave the other to die.”
“And anyway,” said Jinadh, who had so far remained quiet, “if we kill her, the story may still run.”
“That can be dealt with too,” she said. “No newspaper in this country wants to cross me.”
Speaking into his coffee cup, Jinadh said, “I can think of a few.”
Cordelia was overwriting her first impression of Jinadh. Now that he wasn’t trying to put one over on her, and please all parties with his grin, greasy as spilled fry-oil. Now, apparently, that he didn’t care what any of them thought, as long as they could truly get his kid.
Lillian’s kid.
“Hang on,” she said.
All three of them turned to look at her, and she realized she’d dropped her volume, and her eyes, and generally stopped acting like a welterweight boxer taking on a bull-neck. Funny, how that made them pay attention, when all her shouting hadn’t.
“Lillian,” she said. “She’s still singing for this Flagg character, right?” She angled her chin at Jinadh. “And he trusts her. So why don’t we use that?”
She saw a muscle move in Jinadh’s jaw; his nostrils flared with a breath. “I do not want to put her in any danger, if she has not agreed to the risk. Any more than I already have.”
“All we need is a little information, at first.” Now Cordelia did take some cheese. It left her fingers sticky, smelling like cheap perfume. Rosewater. “Something to keep Sofie quiet for a while. We just gotta buy time. Once the deal is done, when the guns are in the right hands, none of us cares what the papers print about Memmediv. Right? And then the Ospies get embarrassed, maybe they release Mab.” It was a big maybe, but that was better than the death of two good women on her conscience.
“What do you propose?” asked Pulan, eyes narrow as a cat squinting in the sun.
“So we all know that she never took Memmediv’s offer seriously. But she doesn’t know we know. Anything he tells her, she’ll take back to Flagg thinking it’s some big secret. So Memmediv drops this sack of crabs in her lap, asks her to fix it. Flagg ain’t gonna want any of this in the papers.”
“And?” Pulan skewered a piece of mango with her fork. She looked, suddenly, much more interested in what Cordelia had to say.
Cordelia shrugged. “We see what he gives up. Might be nothing, might be gold.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Aristide couldn’t face Hadhariti, not before he worked out some kind of strategy. The thought made him ill—or perhaps it was that last martini—but he wasn’t sure that he should stay much longer with Pulan if she was … not just dabbling, but well and truly sunk in the murky waters of international intrigue.
Reza’s was not the worst of the cheap bars catering to the extras, roustabouts, and general dogsbodies who haunted the backlots of Charaplati, but by last call it still turned into a midden. Aristide was no exception: He couldn’t have driven himself to his hotel even if he had one. An obliging cabbie got him to the Pukkari, where a capable bellhop got him to a suite. He didn’t remember much of it, and imagined she might have had to use a luggage trolley.
He’d gotten very good at gauging his hangovers; this nausea would clear up shortly and then it would be a headache and the spins. Those were easily dealt with, if unpleasant, and a sip of something to settle it all wouldn’t hurt, either.
He needed to pick the car up from Charaplati. And then he needed to decide where to go. Back to Hadhariti? He was due to start production on Galatar ul Walibi in a few days’ time. Inaz, in another career shift, was playing the sorceress villain. She had taken a small holiday in Liso but would be back in Porachis today or tomorrow; he should be at the studio to meet her. They’d do some work on the lot in the next week or so, and the rest of the thing on location in Tzieta.
But returning to Pulan’s estate meant planting himself in the center of whatever scheme was going on there. And now that he had raised his eyes long enough to notice that everyone around him had their hands in several different pies up to the elbows, he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening.
Everything was clearer now, the edges and subtleties defined; as if cataracts had been cut from his eyes. He’d rendered himself blind through force of will, and hadn’t realized how the charade exhausted him until he began to see again.
Perhaps a little independent investigation was required. If he could find out what sort of risks Pulan had exposed him to, perhaps he could mitigate them, or at least craft more accurate defenses.
Pulan and Daoud might be shut up as tight as cockles, but they were miles down the coast. Aristide was here, in Anadh, where Hadhariti Studios kept offices on the Silver Street. Very close, incide
ntally, to where Aristide had parked his car.
* * *
It was one thing, of course, to show up unexpected to his own office. It was quite another to break into Pulan’s. Hadhariti’s suite in the Olukarta Building was quiet at the weekend, but there were still people working. Yasullah, buried under a pile of scripts, barely raised her head when he walked by. Oomin was on a call, and whoever was on the other end of the line was so angry Aristide could hear the reverberations of their voice even in the hallway. Apparently desperate for any kind of distraction, Oomin caught sight of him and gave a sad little wave. But she was tied to her telephone, so he was safe from any interference there.
Still, out of habit he unlocked his own door first, and settled into the comfortable embrace of his linen-upholstered chair. He’d been very picky about it—uprooting his life and settling in a new country hadn’t performed any miracles on his stubborn spine—and now took a minute to enjoy this one small thing he had done right.
And in that minute, he heard the distant chime of the lift. He didn’t sit up straighter in his chair, but he sharpened his attention to the sounds in the corridor. Footsteps, and then a man’s voice: deep, good-natured, flirting a little with Yasullah.
«Your Highness,» she said, then scolded him and laughed.
Asiyah Sekibou walked straight past Aristide’s open office door, and went to Pulan’s. Holding his breath, Aristide listened to the key turn in the lock, and the faint sigh of well-oiled hinges. Then the door shut, and the hall fell quiet again except for the murmur of Oomin’s soothing telephone voice.
If only Aristide had a key! If only he could so casually walk into the office he wanted to search. Then again, why did Asiyah have such a thing, and the confidence to use it?
A few words from Pulan—Prince Sekibou will be by this afternoon to pick up some things from my office—and Aristide could see the thing accomplished easily, unsuspiciously. And nobody need know that whatever he was picking up might have nothing to do with the pictures at all.
Armistice Page 15