“You aren’t,” said Memmediv. “You were just one smart woman alone, with a conspiracy arrayed against you. I should let them know about this before we arrive, so that we don’t spring any surprises on them.”
“Of course,” she said. “I can’t imagine Lehane was pleased at the prospect of hosting an Ospie agent for dinner.”
Memmediv’s eyebrows puckered. “What?”
“Lehane, the Spotlight. Founder of the Catwalk? She’s working for Satri under an alias. Flagg wants to bring her in.”
“Cordelia Lehane? Who used to strip at the Bee?”
“That wouldn’t be most people’s first association with her name.” Lillian picked up her valise, which she had not checked, and headed for the gangway. “I didn’t know you had been an aficionado of Amberlough’s nightclub scene, Mr. Memmediv.”
“I was in the foxhole,” he said. “She was moving fraudulent documents for Aristide Makricosta to sell on the black market. We knew about it. That’s all. The next time I heard her name was in an intelligence briefing on terrorist activity in Ospie Gedda.”
“Official policy is Unified Gedda,” she reminded him, one eyebrow cocked hard in irony.
He ignored it. “So she’s here? In Porachis?”
“If Flagg is right, and I’m fairly certain that he is, we’ll be seeing her in an hour or two.” She dropped the conversation as they passed between the crew members at the head of the gangplank, who thanked them both for traveling on the Yaima. Lillian’s smile and nod came so naturally she didn’t realize she’d done either until she stepped onto dry land. She had to shake like a dog to drop the persona.
Perpetually smirking Memmediv didn’t have the same problem. “She’s at Hadhariti?”
“Working for the studio; Makricosta got her a job as assistant choreographer, but Flagg thought you might know about anything else. He wants to find out if she’s a part of the deal.”
“Not as far as I know,” said Memmediv. “But I will have some questions for Pulan when we arrive.”
“Yes, how are we getting back up north? And in time for dinner, too?”
“This way,” he said, and led her along the dock. Not toward the taxi rank but toward a herd of cigarette boats bobbing gently at their moorings. “It’s good you packed lightly.”
“Well, it was only a weekend,” she said. “But why?”
He inclined his head toward a low, sleek craft at the end of the pier, with a woman waiting behind the wheel. “I don’t think it would bear anything larger than a valise without sinking.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Aristide timed his return to Hadhariti for the late afternoon, when the studio would be getting back to work after the midday break. The house would be quiet, and he could retreat to his rooms and begin to make arrangements in peace. For one thing, he needed to write a resignation letter. That would be a good start.
Bringing the car around the drive, he hopped out and tossed the keys to Pramit, who had come running at the sound of the engine and the tires on the gravel.
Djihar arrived next, his white hair still mussed slightly from an afternoon nap. «Welcome back, Mr. Makricosta. Did you have a good trip?»
«No,» he said. «And if Pulan asks for me, I am busy. I have some work to do.»
«Ms. Satri herself has work to do,» said Djihar. «But I will ask the others to avoid the halls around your rooms.»
«How many people are staying here?» he asked. «Has Pulan gone into the hotel business as well?»
«His Highness Prince Asiyah, and Inaz. Mr. Addas is here as well. And I understand we are expecting a few more guests for dinner.»
“The rotten queen herself, likely as not.” Aristide stripped his driving gloves from his hands and flung them back into the front seat of his car. Pramit stacked them carefully and placed them on the dashboard. Aristide caught the small shake of the chauffeur’s head, imagined it came with an eye roll, and ignored it. «You can tell her I will come to dinner.»
Djihar ducked his chin in a small reference to a bow, and swept Aristide into the house.
In his parlor, he dropped his bag, yanked off his jacket, and kicked his basket-weave loafers into a corner. Standing barefoot on the cool marble floor, just at the rug’s edge, he looked around at the room: its flowering potted plants, its tall windows thrown open to the dusty, salty breeze. The mirrors sewn into the brocade upholstery. The gauzy curtains, the angle of the light, the lingering presence of a maid in the regimented positioning of his personal effects.
There weren’t, he realized now, so many of them. Effects. A few books. No photographs. Some pill bottles and tinctures, pots of lotion and cold cream. Things you might find in the rooms of any old man. Nothing … curated. Nothing he could point to, or lay his hand on, and say that it was his in more than simply the sense that he had paid for it. And even things for which he had footed the bill were rather thin on the ground.
Had he really spent almost three years in this house, in this country? He could hardly remember the time passing.
He didn’t think that he would miss it, much.
Softly, someone knocked on his door, despite his plea for privacy. He sighed and called out, «Enter.»
“Djihar told me you were home.” Daoud hovered in the doorway, cradling a datebook in one hand and a stack of scripts under his arm.
The word “home” struck an odder chord with Aristide than it might have yesterday, a week ago. He wondered if Daoud meant to imply all the emotional subtext of the word, or if it was just a poor translation. “He wasn’t supposed to. I have work to finish.”
“If you were so concerned about work,” said Daoud, “you would have been here when Inaz arrived.”
“You needn’t tear me up,” spat Aristide, and immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out quite so sharp.”
Daoud’s expression did not tighten. He didn’t snap back, or even roll his eyes. Instead he stepped across the threshold, set down his book and scripts, and said, “Aristide, what is the matter? You have been behaving … strangely. Rushing around, bringing strangers back to the house, disappearing.”
“What’s wrong? A fine question to ask. Though I suppose Pulan’s secret cabal isn’t so secret to you. You’ve known all this time, haven’t you? Since I showed up like a foundling on the doorstep.”
Daoud didn’t even have the decency to look down in shame. “What I do not know about Pulan, I do not think she knows about herself.”
“But you didn’t tell me.” Aristide went to the bar by the window and poured a significant glass of brandy. “And don’t say I drink too much.”
“Well, you do.” There was a little of the sting Aristide expected, in that. But the edges softened when he went on, “I make love with you, Aristide, but she is my employer. I keep her secrets by contract.”
Turning his glass in his hands, Aristide felt the weight of the liquor shift against the crystal and change the balance of the globe against his palm. “And what if I had secrets?”
Daoud’s tart expression softened into ruefulness. “I do not think that you would tell me.”
Aristide put his nose to the snifter and drew a deep, burning breath. “Would you want to know?”
“Maybe.” Daoud stepped up to the empty place beside him. “I cannot say until I know them, can I?”
“Didi…”
“Oh no, pet names.” Daoud took the bottle of brandy from the sideboard and scanned the label, then poured for himself—maybe half the volume Aristide had put into his own glass. “What horrible thing are you going to tell me?” His dark eyes were focused on the bar-top accoutrements, his motions controlled and careful. So much of his attention was dedicated to flippancy, to corking the brandy bottle and casually replacing it amongst its fellows. He was being too bright, too irreverent. His manner broke the light into shards like cut glass, and had an edge as sharp.
Aristide felt suddenly guilty—horribly so, as if withholding his story fr
om Daoud had been a betrayal. He hadn’t used to mind betraying so much. He wished he didn’t mind it now.
To distract himself—to stop himself thinking too hard—he pulled Daoud close and kissed him. The taste of fennel seeds and stale smoke lingered behind his teeth. Sneaking straights—maybe even Aristide’s. Pulan kept a hookah for company, but hated the perpetual haze of casual cigarette smokers.
That lingering flavor of insubordination made Aristide kiss him the harder. When they broke from each other, Daoud’s lashes fluttered down and he spoke to Aristide’s chest.
“We were working well enough without honesty,” he said. “Weren’t we?”
“Until recently,” said Aristide, stroking the high curve of his cheek, “we didn’t need it.”
“Do we need it now?”
“Perhaps not for the next hour or so,” he said, and caught Daoud’s mouth again with his.
* * *
The sex was good. The sex had always been good, with Daoud, though sometimes it felt a little too much like a game, or a giggling concession to Aristide’s odd whims.
Not this afternoon, though. Aristide brooked no laughter, no small smirk or amused flash of the eyes. He couldn’t have borne it, not with Asiyah’s words echoing in the base of his skull.
He never gave us his real name; called himself Paul Darling.
A stupid risk, to use the work name from papers someone must have seen, before his arrest, and certainly after.
If there had even been an arrest. Aristide knew nothing about what had happened. Only that his oranges had never come.
“You are all right?” Daoud reached up to touch the edge of his jaw, and Aristide shook him off. As if he could hold his thoughts under and drown them, he sank himself more deeply into the warmth of the body beneath him.
The sex was good, but never exactly what he wanted.
This was partly because Daoud held strong convictions about what was proper for someone of his own age, and someone of Aristide’s age, in a situation such as this. Convictions Aristide found frankly ridiculous. But truth be told, the things he would have liked to do, he would never have wanted to do with Daoud.
His pride would not have borne it. There was something about fighting for what he wanted, something about earning the ache, and the hipbone bruises in the soft flesh of his thighs … something necessary to his satisfaction. Daoud would not have wanted it badly enough, nor begged for it with quite the desperation Aristide desired. He would have raised an eyebrow, said a cursory “please,” and then put it in when asked.
But he had a clever tongue, and made pained and tender noises at the perfect times. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t …
Aristide wished he didn’t hear the name in his own stage voice, curling theatrically off the tongue. The memory was nearly a physical sensation.
“We do not have to keep going,” said Daoud. “I think you are distracted.”
Shame warmed Aristide’s face and made him irritable, so that he had to quash a sour remark. Still, he wasn’t too proud to know when he needed a graceful exit. He pulled out, too quickly—so much for graceful—and fell onto his side. Daoud made a small sound of surprise, or possibly pain. Ironically, the sound went straight to the core of Aristide’s arousal. He quashed that, too, and wiped sweat from his eyes. Bending his elbows made his tired triceps burn.
When he blinked away the sting of salt, he was surprised to see it had grown dark. Equatorial dusk always descended earlier than he felt it should; like many things in Porachis, he had never quite got used to it, and always felt off balance when the sun began to set.
Dinner would be soon. Likely, Daoud had already been missed. Nothing had yet been explained. Drawing a breath, he intended to speak but found he could not assemble satisfactory words. He let the breath out in a sigh.
Daoud didn’t let him get away with it. He untwisted from his postcoital disarray like a house cat waking and put one hand on Aristide’s chest, cautiously. Only his fingertips touched skin, pressed into the patch of curling hairs between Aristide’s pectorals—half gray, half dark—which he no longer bothered to wax.
“All right,” said Daoud. “Is it time for honesty now?”
Aristide closed his eyes, and covered Daoud’s hand with his so both were flat against the plane of his sternum. “I’m going away.”
“Again? You just got back.”
“For good, I mean.” Aristide stared up at the mosquito netting drifting on the breeze. “I’m leaving the studio. And Porachis.”
Daoud said nothing; only flexed his feet so the sheets rustled beneath him.
“Are you all right?” Aristide squeezed his hand in an imitation of reassurance.
Daoud pulled away, and shifted slightly so they were no longer touching. “I am fine,” he said, and he sounded more irritated than anything. “I do not think I am as delicate as you imagine.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, for want of anything better. He was not good at this kind of thing, and Daoud was not reacting quite as he’d imagined.
“Sorry?” Daoud sat now, so that he had the advantage of height he often lacked. It was disconcerting for Aristide, to look up into a face that had so often looked up into his. “For what?”
“Leaving?” ventured Aristide.
“The studio? Porachis? Me?”
“I thought you would be upset. I thought we had … well, something, anyway.” He shook his head, felt the strands of his hair tangle and snap where they caught between his skin and the pillowcase. The tiny pains felt sharper than their scale warranted.
There was a trace of pity in Daoud’s smile. “You don’t love me, Aristide. I was only ever a … a convenience.”
It was true. There was nothing he could say to that.
Daoud seemed to take his silence for agreement, which it was. “So, now you owe me. Now you are my convenience.”
He should have seen this coming. It had just been a distraction, at first, this dalliance. It helped him forget what he had hoped for. But then he had kept on, because Daoud reminded him somehow of himself: hungry young Erikh Prosser, down from the mountains and on the make. Fierce, prickly, bad family background, blessed with fey beauty that Daoud—unlike Erikh—was loath to use to climb the ladder.
In those days, as he left Erikh behind to be Ari, he had his own older lovers and paid in sex for good meals. For well-cut clothes and introductions, fine jewelry, a new name, hands to help him toward the top.
He should have known the ask was coming, when Daoud’s mouth first closed around his cock.
“What do you want?” he asked. “Money? There isn’t much else I can offer.”
Daoud snorted. “That is because you cannot imagine what it is like to be anyone other than Aristide Makricosta, with Aristide Makricosta’s problems.”
“Well, this certainly isn’t how I’d ask for a favor,” Aristide snapped, shoving himself upright in bed. “Just tell me what you rotten want.”
“When you leave,” said Daoud, “take me with you.”
“It won’t be any kind of honeymoon,” said Aristide. “If that’s what you’re angling for.”
“I do not want a honeymoon with you.” The pitch of his voice rose, though not the volume. So careful, always, even in fury. “I want a life of my own. I cannot rise, here, any further than I have, and that by Pulan’s charity. I have no opportunities in Porachis as a turned Belqati man. So take me, wherever you are going.”
“Liso,” he said, and was gratified to wipe the anger off of Daoud’s face and replace it with confusion.
“What for?” Daoud asked. “Asiyah?”
“No. Nothing to do with Asiyah, or the pictures, or Pulan’s business there.” He paused, stared down at his own body and the softening lines of muscle, the curling hair on his thighs and chest which he had let grow, the fine lines where his skin caught in the creases of his joints. So much had changed, on the surface of things. “I’m looking for something I used to have. Something I lost when the Ospies…�
�� He waved one hand, barely, to sweep away the trailing end of the sentence. “Tell me something.”
“Will you take me with you, if I do?”
«Only tell me, please.»
Daoud scowled. “You always use Porashtu when you want something.”
«Didi,» he said, half pleading, half exasperated.
“I am not wrong.” The angle of Daoud’s chin rose, and he dared Aristide with his eyes to contradict him.
«Pulan is using the picture to bring guns to Memmediv,» he said. «I am not wrong, either.»
«No,» said Daoud. «You’re not.»
«Is Memmediv coming to Hadhariti anytime soon?»
«Why does it matter? Do you have questions for him, too?»
Aristide closed his eyes, which ached with weariness and strain and perhaps something less concrete.
«Honesty,» said Daoud, and made it sound like a scolding.
«No,» said Aristide. «I want to see him for personal reasons.»
Daoud raised his wrist—he was still wearing that awful watch. Aristide allowed himself a moment of imagination, conjuring a world in which his holiday had not been interrupted, in which he and Daoud got their vacation filled with lackluster sex and false relaxation. Retroactive panic choked him, stifling. He was almost grateful to Asiyah for the awful revelations he had bestowed.
«Lucky you,» said Daoud, and initially Aristide thought he meant it for the painful truth, the peeling back of illusion. But then he went on. «He should be here now. I heard he was coming for dinner.»
* * *
The sun was starting to slant into Pulan’s office, so Cordelia had to squint. It wasn’t doing her growing headache any favors.
She’d been packing up, last minute, ready to go lay low in a little town a couple miles off while Hadhariti hosted a party she wanted no part of. Pulan wanted to pass false information to the Ospies through Lillian, and Jinadh thought he could get Cordelia some specs on Stephen’s school, make it a little easier for her once she got to Gedda. Cordelia couldn’t afford to be seen. But just as she was ready to hop into the car behind Pramit, Pulan called an emergency meeting and announced a piece of news that had Cordelia all twisted around again.
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