“Why are we supposed to trust her this time?” she asked. “She’s making me dizzy, the way she turns.”
“Memmediv was quite clear over the wireless,” said Pulan. “Would you like to hear his message again?”
“All I’m saying is what if she clocked us and this is how she gets her hooks in?”
Prince Asiyah gave her a look that said to shut her teeth. If she’d been on firmer ground she might not have heeded him, but this whole enterprise seemed to be skipping from dinghy to dinghy in rough surf. Things moved faster here than she was used to, greased by money: private security, keep-quiet bribes, fancy radios so you could switch sides every five minutes and keep your cronies up to date. Memmediv had buzzed them from the rotten boat.
“Fine,” she said. “But how do we know for sure?”
She was not encouraged by the general shifting and mutters of the rest of the crowd around the desk in Pulan’s office. Inaz was there, and Prince Asiyah. Jinadh, too, had maneuvered his way into the inner circle, and sat quiet at one corner of Pulan’s desk, a small coffee cup cradled in his hands. The skin was tight across his knuckles, but otherwise he was keeping it together. He didn’t say much except to translate for Inaz and for Cordelia, when the conversation required it.
The only person in the know who hadn’t showed was Daoud, Pulan’s secretary. Every so often, Pulan would turn as if to ask him for something, and realize anew he wasn’t there. Each time, her eyes flicked to the clock on her desk, and she gave a little shrug, as if reassuring herself. She had a pen in her own hand, and took her own notes. Cordelia had only known her for a week or so, but even so: the sight of Pulan holding her own pen struck her as odd. She wondered where Daoud had gotten off to.
“We have already reviewed this,” said Pulan. There was a burnt curl of annoyance coming off the words like acrid smoke. “I apologize. I understand your reservations. But we must make the decision to let her in. She is our best hope at keeping our activities covered. And you yourself said you need more information about Stephen’s school. Who better to give you that information than his mother?”
It was a good reason. It didn’t make her feel better. “All I’m saying is we already know she hauled a sack over Memmediv’s head. What’s to say she isn’t running some scheme now?”
Silence hung over them all.
“You,” she said, leveling a severe, straight-knuckled finger at Jinadh. “She pushed your kid’s head out. You trust her?”
He stared into the dregs of his coffee, and worked his jaw.
“Don’t suck on your plug,” she snapped. “Answer me.”
The rest of the cohort turned to stare, hanging on the indrawn breath that came before his words.
“I want to,” he said finally.
Cordelia killed an urge to spit. “Wanting ain’t the same as doing.”
“Well,” said Pulan, putting her palms decisively to her thighs. “It is, in the end, only dinner. We do not need to talk business over the nuts and cheese.”
“For you it’s only dinner,” said Cordelia. “But this mummer here”—her finger, still outstretched, jabbed hard in Jinadh’s direction—“gave Lillian some photographs of my sad cast and I’ll wager she’s keeping one sharp eye out for wanted Geddans stuffing their faces at your board. So I ain’t so sure I should show.”
There was a moment while they all worked out what exactly she’d said. But could she help the way she talked? She wasn’t a rotten grammar book.
“You have nothing to fear if she is telling the truth,” said Jinadh.
“And everything to fear if she’s lying. You can’t tell me which it is, so I know which side of this scale is safer.”
“You have it in your power to rescue her son,” said Jinadh. “Prove that to her and she will fall firmly in your favor.”
“I can’t prove it to her.” Cordelia could feel her face turning pink with frustration. “I don’t even know if I’ll get out of there with my skin, all right? If she’s in, she can help me, but if she isn’t in, I don’t want to see her.”
He opened his mouth to sling something back at her, but they all heard a door slam at the same time and jumped, so he was left hanging there with his jaw slack as a dead eel’s.
Pulan said something in Porashtu, her tweezed eyebrows drawing tight in the center as she cast her eyes up. For a minute, Cordelia believed she could see through the walls to whatever commotion was occurring.
And there was one. Down the hall, from the same direction as the slamming door: raised voices and the strike of footsteps on the floor, growing louder.
Before any of them could react, the handles on Pulan’s double office doors began to rattle. Finding them locked, the assailant outside crashed an insistent fist against the wood.
“Aristide!” That was Daoud’s voice. “What in the eyes of heaven—”
“Open the rotten door.” And that was Ari. “I know you have a key.”
“Come in.” Pulan’s voice, pitched level, miraculously carried over the chaos. Cordelia would have liked to get the hang of that skill.
Silence in the corridor, and then the quiet rattle of teeth on tumblers. The door swung open on silent hinges.
“Aristide. You’re back.” Pulan folded her hands demurely in front of her chest, like a Hearther celibate. “And Daoud.” Then she said something in Porashtu that had a little bit of a leer to it, a little lard spread over the words.
Daoud’s cheeks darkened and his chin came up at a smart angle. He answered her crisply, businesslike.
“He isn’t here,” said Ari, his eyes flicking from left to right and back again, taking in the schemers staggered around Pulan’s desk.
“Who is not, duladhush?” Pulan released her clasped hands and spread them, perfectly timed and level as Aristide had ever managed it behind the mic. “Our leading lady, her dance instructor. Our most important backer. And now, our talented director.”
“Don’t you dare,” he said. “I won’t play that game anymore.”
“There is a picture, Ari. Honest.” But when Cordelia turned to face him and saw the look in his eyes full on, she knew nothing was as serious to him in that moment as finding whoever it was he didn’t see here.
“Where is Vasily Memmediv?” he asked. There was murder in his voice.
Behind him, the bell rang in the hall.
* * *
“Aristide, wait.” But before Pulan could get out of her chair, before she could begin to navigate the seats surrounding her, he had turned and left them all staring after.
Daoud had the least ground to make up, and Pulan barked an order at him. He was a little too slow on the uptake, to Cordelia’s eye, but he gave chase eventually. Prince Asiyah was on his heels, and he looked less baffled than the rest of them, but certainly more worried. Cordelia got out after him and grabbed the sleeve of his robe.
“What’s he want with Memmediv?” she asked, trailing in his wake as he made for the gallery that ran around the front hall. She could already hear voices.
The prince quickened his pace. “Nothing good, I think.”
“You know something?”
“I think I told him a story he should not have heard.”
And then they were standing at the head of the stairway, staring down at something that looked like the climax of a stage drama. Or maybe more like a frame from a picture. Cordelia wouldn’t know; she’d never actually seen one. Like the wireless, they hadn’t been big in Gedda before the Ospies with their catchy tunes and propaganda flicks.
Djihar, hunched and placating, stood right in the center. He’d apparently been caught by Ari in the act of opening the door for Pulan’s dinner guests: Vasily Memmediv and, with him, Lillian DePaul.
Cordelia had never met her. Only heard her name, and looked at her photograph, which had been hard enough. Seeing her stand there, blond hair wind-mussed, brows drawn down in confusion, lit the fuse of Cordelia’s hottest anger, and put a shank straight through her gut.
She
couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Ari. And yet all of his attention was aimed straight at Memmediv, sharp and narrow as an augur.
“Mr. Makricosta,” said Memmediv. “Good evening.”
Ari spoke with a tight jaw. “I’ve had better.”
“Aristide,” called Pulan, from halfway down the stairs. “Why don’t you invite our guests in?”
“That man,” said Aristide, “will not come any further into this house.”
“It is not your house,” she said. “Come away.”
“I don’t care. If he takes one more step I’ll knock him flat. And I’ve killed people with my hands, Pulan.”
Watching Aristide fight to keep his anger in check, watching his face twist against a mad-dog snarl, Cordelia suddenly understood he was capable of many more and much worse things than she had realized. She wondered how many of them he’d done, to get to where he was today. She wondered if she’d see one now, and what it might be for.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Lillian, like she was trying to step between shards of broken glass. “Have we done something to upset you?”
“I hope you don’t know what he’s done,” said Ari. “Or I should hate you too, for standing next to him. I suppose Asiyah’s had neither time nor reason to tell you.”
“Aristide.” It was the prince this time, all the charm gone out of him. He didn’t even sound like a swell; he sounded like the worst kind of hound walking the slum streets: the scared kind. They always hit the hardest.
“None of us are exactly blameless,” said Lillian, but Memmediv put a hand on her arm and she shut up quick, definitely confused and starting to look scared on top of it. Cordelia didn’t blame her, and bet her own face looked about the same.
“We all did questionable things in those days.” Memmediv’s stare had taken on the same rebar quality as Aristide’s: iron straight and totally unwavering, liable to kill you if it struck home.
“Questionable?” Cordelia had never heard Ari’s voice so low or rough. His breath came hard and uneven between clenched teeth, and the fine finish on his accent had chipped off so that traces of the north showed through. She’d forgotten that about him: that he had the same burr to his voice that Tory’d had, but hid it so much better. “You have no idea what you’ve cost me. Not the faintest trace of an understanding.”
It was then Cordelia started to get an idea what this was all about.
“I would like to think we can come to an accord,” said Memmediv, “as men with deep coffers willing to pay dearly for the things we want.”
There was a beat in which it seemed almost possible. And then, before anybody could move to stop him, Aristide was on Memmediv. Djihar, to Cordelia’s middling surprise, pulled a small revolver from one sleeve and aimed it true. But Memmediv’s skull had already cracked against the floor, so loudly that Cordelia flinched. Ari wrapped one hand in Memmediv’s thick hair and pulled back, hard, so the other man’s larynx cut sharply beneath the skin of his throat.
“I have paid,” spat Ari, “and paid double again, and I’ve seen no return. I am living on credit, so don’t you dare speak to me like that. Do you understand?”
Djihar said something in his gentle butler voice, but the barrel of his pistol didn’t waver. Neither man heeded him.
Memmediv swallowed, his eyes closed tight. Aristide hauled his head up from the tile as if to strike it down again. “I said do you understand?”
He grunted. The pain on his lean, dark face was a mirror to Ari’s. Cordelia waited for the last blow, the one that would knock him out for sure, and maybe end him. If not right away, a couple of hours from now. She’d seen folk die that way, brains swelling in their skulls until the fits started and they shook themselves into the grave.
“You cannot kill him, Aristide.” Pulan’s voice broke the silence like scissors snipping cleanly through a taut thread. “Unless you no longer fear extradition? I can shelter a political fugitive. I cannot protect a murderer.”
His body shuddered finely all over: not dread or anguish, but fury, hot as a skillet and barely contained. Still, he lowered Memmediv’s head to the floor this time, instead of slamming it back, and untangled his fingers from the other man’s hair.
Pulan said Djihar’s name, and he put the gun away. Cordelia let out a breath that had turned sour in her lungs.
“Will someone please explain what’s going on?” Lillian crossed her arms and stared down her knife blade of a nose and looked so much like her brother. Even the way she said the words was him all over: indignant, with a thread of fear buried so deep you wouldn’t find it unless you knew to listen.
“This man,” said Ari.
He got no further before Prince Asiyah started trying to talk over him. “Aristide, this is not the time or the place—”
But Ari, still straddling Memmediv on the tile of the hall, raised his voice over Asiyah’s and said, “This man as good as murdered your brother.”
* * *
Lillian’s breath wouldn’t come. The arches and inlays of Satri’s entrance hall telescoped strangely around the tableau of Makricosta sneering down at Memmediv. His words did not echo, but the memory of them felt numb, like flesh upon which a blow had landed that had not yet begun to ache.
“What do you mean,” she said, “‘as good as’?”
“I think that is enough drama in the front hall for one evening,” said Pulan, sweeping down the stairs. “Aristide, get up or I shall call Pramit to pry you from the floor.”
“What did you mean,” demanded Lillian, and to her mortification, her voice cracked on the last word.
“Aristide.” Satri was perilously close to shouting, and a flush had risen on her cheeks. “Get up.”
Not taking his eyes from Memmediv’s face, he rose slowly, moving as if his joints pained him. As if he were old—though he must only be what, ten years her senior? Fifteen?—and immeasurably tired.
When Memmediv started to sit, Makricosta feinted toward him and snorted disdainfully when he flinched. Satri put a stiff arm between them, pressing Makricosta back.
“Perhaps we can discuss this over dinner,” she said.
“If you think I’m sitting at a table with that…” Makricosta struggled for a noun. “I’ll take bread and cheese in the rotten stables first.”
“I will put you there if you insist on behaving like an animal. Now—” She turned to Lillian. “I apologize for your poor welcome into my home. How can I amend this? Would you like to be taken to your rooms? Some refreshments?”
“I—” She felt as though railroad spikes had been pounded through her feet, straight into the marble floor. She could not move forward, and her knees threatened to give way. “Vasily, what did you do?”
“Nothing,” he said: the first words he had spoken since falling. Struggling up from the floor, he stood slowly, one hand on his knee for leverage. Head hanging, he paused before he straightened. Pain seamed his forehead and puckered the corners of his eyes. “Not what he says, anyway.”
“That isn’t what I heard from your friend Sekibou,” spat Makricosta, who bit off further remarks when Satri lost patience and rapped him with her knuckles.
Memmediv laughed: one hoarse, bitter sound. “And how would Asiyah know anything about me?” Then he flung up one hand and said, “Sacred arches, please don’t answer. Ms. Satri, if you have some ice?”
“Absolutely,” said their hostess. «Djihar, please take Mr. Memmediv to the blue bedroom and see that Aza brings him a cool cloth and a pack of ice for his head. And some Aceto powder, for the swelling.» Then, in Geddan, “Mr. Memmediv, I do apologize. Please let the staff know if you need anything. We are all at your disposal.”
Lillian took a step after Memmediv as Djihar ushered him away, tearing one of her hammered-down feet from the floor. “Wait,” she said. “What did he mean—”
“Ms. DePaul,” said Pulan, “I think if you just—”
“He blew Cyril’s cover.”
Lillian twis
ted to stare at Makricosta over her shoulder, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “During the election?”
He cast a caustic glance up the stairs. “Asiyah didn’t give specifics.”
Something tore in her chest; not a muscle or a ligament but something less tangible, more important. “Does everyone know what happened to him but me?”
“No.”
The word fell from above her, from the landing that ran around the hall. She looked up and saw the heart-shaped face of the woman from Jinadh’s photographs hovering in the gloaming, wide-eyed.
He had caught her unawares and unhappy, or on edge. Now, pale with alarm, her complexion grew brighter as evening leached light from the room. She looked like an apparition, a haunting. Everyone, not only Lillian, turned at the sound of her voice. The moment deserved the slam of a spotlight striking her features.
Spotlight. Well, now the code name made sense. Though she was small, and at the moment rather drab, she had a kind of magnetism. One that made Lillian open her mouth to say, Ms. Lehane, which might have spooked her, and which changed, halfway out, into, “My brother. You knew him?”
“Oh, sweetness,” she said, and the way she shook her head was not a negation, but pity. “You two could have been twins.”
The laugh that broke from Lillian’s chest sounded like a gasp, a dry heave. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times we heard that.”
“I wager I would,” said Lehane. “It’s like seeing a ghost.”
The squeal of leather on stone tore Lillian from her bespelled stillness, snuffed the small glow behind her sternum that had kindled hearing someone speak that way about her brother. About her. She blinked, looked down, and saw Makricosta’s back retreating. The young man Lillian remembered from the premiere—Satri’s assistant, or secretary—looked back and forth between his employer and her temperamental director, and then went after the latter. Satri watched them both go with mingled apprehension and relief.
Lillian looked up again, scanned the faces watching her: Lehane was still pale, but half-smiling now. Sekibou wore a glower so thunderous it ought to have been shooting lightning bolts. Beside him, Inaz Iligba, looking skeptical. And beside her—horribly, incredibly—
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