“Jinadh?”
Tendons in his throat stood out as he inhaled and lifted his chin, the proud look he used in the face of slights. It was not an expression she had ever wanted to see aimed at her.
«Heaven’s eyes,» said Pulan. «What a snarl. If you put this all on-screen, no one would believe it.»
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
“Leave me be,” said Aristide to the incoming tide. He meant it, of course, for Daoud, who had followed him all the way along the terrace, and even out to the edge of the cantilevered swimming pool. “I’m not planning to jump.”
“I did not think you were.”
“Oh? How could you tell?”
“Someone so angry at another man would rather see him dead first, I think. If you had killed him just now, I would maybe worry.” Daoud collapsed into one of the wicker chairs at the corner of the deck, slouching the way he never did in Pulan’s presence. Aristide wondered if insouciance was really his natural state, rather than a flirtatious persona he wore for afternoon trysts. If so, he dissembled very well. “May I have a cigarette?”
Aristide, who had removed his case from his breast pocket, flipped it open and let Daoud pick one from the row. His lighter had cropped up in the hotel bedclothes when the valet turned down his sheets. After holding the flame to his own straight, he cast the device onto the table, heedless of the enamel against the tile top. Daoud flinched at the impact, then inspected the lighter for damage before he put it to the tip of his cigarette.
The tide advanced notably up the beach before Daoud said, “Will you tell me what that was about?”
Aristide exhaled blue smoke into the dusk, and pretended to contemplate its trajectory for a long moment to buy time. Finally he said, “This is one of those secrets you said you might not want to know.”
“I said,” Daoud corrected him, “that I would not know unless I heard them. And after that”—he jabbed the ember of his straight back at the house—“I think I would like to. It seems safer.”
“Well then,” said Aristide. “What do you think it was?”
“You knew Ms. DePaul’s brother,” he said. “You were lovers?”
Chagrined, Aristide ashed his cigarette into the void above the ocean. Cinders glimmered and burnt up on the breeze.
“And he died,” Daoud went on. “The Ospies?”
“I really don’t know,” said Aristide. “I never heard from him, after I left Amberlough. I didn’t, honestly, hear from him in the last several weeks I was there. He just … disappeared.” The butt of his straight followed its spent ashes into the ocean. The wind caught it and sent it spinning, so he didn’t see where it landed.
He wondered if he ought to tell Daoud what Asiyah had related, that Cyril had made it out of Gedda and been working in Liso for at least a little while. That there was some slender chance he might be living yet, deep undercover, buried in obscurity.
In the end he kept silent, because he couldn’t bear the thought that Daoud might laugh.
“He was very important to you.” Daoud’s voice was so soft Aristide could barely make out his words over the crash and hiss of waves, the moan of wind along the cliffs.
When he did parse what Daoud had said, he only shrugged. Any hard-hearted adage he might roll out about attachment being apt to cause one trouble, he had already thoroughly belied through his actions.
Daoud had been dealing with his straight less aggressively than Aristide, and had several drags left on it. When he opened his mouth to speak, a thin shear of smoke escaped over his upper lip. But he was interrupted before he got the words out.
«Ms. Satri would like you both to come in for dinner,» called Djihar, voice raised over the sound of the ocean and the wind.
Daoud flicked his straight to the ground and stubbed it out with his toe, then rose to the summons. Between extinguishing his straight and standing, he reassembled his demure, subservient persona and donned it like a jacket, right down to a slight shrug of the shoulders as if he were shooting his cuffs.
Still hunched over the balustrade, Aristide settled his weight more deeply onto his elbows, sank his head further. “Tell her I meant what I said about bread and cheese.”
“She will not like that.”
“I don’t care.” He bit off the consonants and placed a full stop between each word, then slid back into his customary clipped sourness. “Tell her anyway.”
But when Daoud went alone up the cantilever toward Djihar, the steward said, «Ms. Satri was quite clear that Mr. Makricosta should come to the table.»
«Ms. Satri can eat shit,» snapped Aristide, who at least knew his rudimentary swears.
There was only expectant silence behind him. Djihar was trying to wait him out, as one might a recalcitrant child. Playing into it gave him the same kind of sickening satisfaction as eating a sticky tart or a trifle past the point of enjoyment.
But Djihar waited and said nothing, and neither did Daoud, and pressure built in the vertebrae of Aristide’s neck as though someone were cranking a winch to force him to turn his head. He lasted perhaps another thirty seconds before he thrust himself from the balustrade and whirled too quickly, torqueing his back. “Lady’s sake, why does she want me there? Haven’t I smashed enough crockery for one evening?”
When Djihar puzzled over that for a moment too long, Daoud slipped in with a swift—likely idiomatic—translation.
«Ah,» said Djihar, when he understood. «Yes. But at dinner we’re going to put together the pieces.»
«What does that mean?» he asked, and for once managed to inject a satisfactory amount of snarl into his Porashtu without mangling the accent.
«No polite dinner conversation,» said Djihar. «At Ms. DePaul’s request, since so many people with parts of her brother’s story are at the house this evening, we are going to hear the whole of it.»
Aristide felt himself blanch, and hoped it didn’t show. “Mother and sons, I want no part of that tent show.”
“Aristide,” said Daoud, “I think that you may be a part of it.”
* * *
Aristide had taken naturally to law-breaking out of the gate, and as such had never had occasion to enter a court for sentencing. But he imagined it might feel similar to entering the grand dining room at Hadhariti under the stares of seven pairs of eyes whose expressions varied on a spectrum between wrath and pity.
Pulan took the head of the table, and Lillian and Memmediv sat to her right and left, the former looking slightly less shaken and more determined than she had earlier in the evening, the latter rather more and less, respectively. Asiyah and Inaz came next, and then Cordelia, across from Jinadh. Daoud took the spot at Cordelia’s elbow, leaving Aristide to sit beside Pulan’s cousin, who for once in his entire life, perhaps, did not smile with his teeth. Or, in fact, at all.
Wine had already been poured, and the assembled guests had been picking at the olives, as evidenced by the pits on their plates. Even as Aristide sat, Asiyah plucked one from his mouth and dropped it to the porcelain with a faint but discernible plink, which echoed in the silence Aristide’s arrival occasioned. Or which had, perhaps, hung over the table even before.
Pulan broke it, and though her tone was sweet enough to rot teeth, it cut through the quiet. Candy, licked to a wicked edge. “Thank you for joining us. At last. Perhaps now we can begin the meal?”
Inaz tapped Jinadh’s arm, and he leaned close to translate. Aristide was pleased there was someone at the table he could pity; relaying this debacle would no doubt make tiring work.
“I wasn’t hungry,” he said, dipping his fingers into the brass bowl of rose-scented water by his plate. They weren’t dirty, but he did like to stand on ceremony, and anyway it gave him something insouciant to do with his hands. “But then Djihar told me this is less a meal than it is some kind of storytellers’ circle, and I was expected to perform.”
“You never pass up a chance for that, do you?” Cordelia lifted her eyes from her plate and pinned him.
Anyone less hardened by life, less accustomed to other people’s censure, might have withered. As it was, Aristide had to collect himself before he could smile and say, “It’s in my nature. Now, will you tell me what I’ve done to offend you today?”
“You knew what happened to him and you wouldn’t say.” Her grip on the edge of the table tightened, threatening to bunch the immaculate, freshly ironed tablecloth. “What did you think, I didn’t care? Or you just weren’t brave enough?”
By the time she finished speaking, his molars were clenched so tightly he could feel the pressure against the bones of his jaw. A bolt of nerve pain through his face startled him almost to gasping, but he caught himself and only said, “I would have told you, if I had known when you asked.”
“I’m sorry.” Lillian put one hand on the table, her movements excruciatingly poised. “Can we please tell this in order?”
“And what order is that?” Aristide failed to rein in his frustration, though of the people at this table she deserved it least. Still, she did not flinch. “In my version of things, I find out that my—that Cyril had been crawling around the Lisoan jungle for months after I’d assumed he was dead. In your version, you cozy up to his murderer before you ever find out what he’s done. I don’t think any of us have things in their proper order.”
What little color there was in Lillian’s face had begun to drain when Aristide said “assumed,” and by the time he wrapped up and crossed his arms tightly over his chest, her mouth had opened slightly—as close as she probably got to slack-jawed.
Memmediv looked as incredulous as Aristide imagined someone with a concussion could.
“He’s alive?” Lillian’s voice whispered like salt spilled across pale stone, spreading into invisibility as she reached the end of her question.
“No,” said Asiyah, sliding a quelling glance down the table. Aristide bounced it right back, unwilling to be cowed. “But it was not the Ospies who killed him. Not directly, anyway.”
Lillian shook her head. “I don’t understand. I saw the file—it was redacted, heavily, but I … he did die in Amberlough.”
“Or the idea of him did,” said Memmediv, voice hoarse, eyes closed. “Sometimes that’s all you need to kill, to save face.”
Aristide could feel the heat under his anger rise, so that it threatened to spill over in a froth. He half-stood from his seat but before he could speak he felt a hand on his wrist, beneath the table—a silent, invisible admonition.
Jinadh did not hold him down by force. Did not even glance at him. But the intent was unmistakable and the manner and source so surprising that Aristide sat back down without saying anything.
When Jinadh spoke, it was with an air of unfamiliar authority. “Perhaps this situation requires an impartial view.”
Pulan’s derisive snort felt out of place in the fraught atmosphere. “You are impartial?”
“I do not like to see Ms. DePaul in such distress,” he said. There was a little of his old charm back in it, except that he still didn’t smile, and the words weren’t coated in oil. He sounded, bizarrely, as if he meant something for a change.
The DePaul in question sent a sharp look in his direction, which Aristide didn’t understand.
“But,” Jinadh went on, “my partiality ends there. And no one has yet lied to me about whatever events we are trying to parse. If it suits all parties, I will conduct this as a kind of interview. You will answer whatever questions I ask, and I hope we will create some kind of sense from the answers.”
The food arrived before anyone could voice approval or dissent; Djihar supervised the arrangement of tureens of curry—fish, chicken, lamb—the lighting of spirit lamps, the placement of cellars of lemon salt and pots of garlic yogurt in the midst of a silence born of suspense. Eyes flicked back and forth above the silver filigree of chafing dishes, through the rising steam.
Aristide did not feel like being interviewed; he had no interest in scraping bare the painful events he had long ago buried underneath banality.
But he had a powerful hunger to know whatever the other people at this table were hiding, or had simply never thought to share. And if he had to dredge up his own piece of the story for it, he would keep it minimal and hope for a good exchange rate.
* * *
Cordelia’s evening had begun with fear: of the new developments in their conspiracy, of Lillian’s arrival, of what that might mean for her own safety. It had descended into confusion and shock with the scene in the front hall, and now she felt like everything was happening behind a scrim. A haze hung between her senses and reality, so that words and actions seemed unreal, a dream sequence in a ballet or tableau.
First Cyril was dead, and Memmediv to blame. Then alive, then dead again, somewhere in a jungle, far past any hope of saving him or even leveling some kind of revenge. If it wasn’t the Ospies who’d killed him …
Well, she still had plenty of reasons to tear them down. But she felt a little like one of her claws had been pulled out, or some of the breeze had slacked from her sails.
Jinadh broke in on her tail-chasing with a plate full of black rice, red curry, and a seared skewer of goat and small green peppers, placed gently back in the spot from which he had taken it, empty, moments ago. She had missed that, still trying to untangle everything that had come before.
“I hope it is to your taste,” he said, and then began to serve himself.
Cordelia had the sense to look up the table, and saw everyone was staring at him, and at her, their own plates empty. He’d have been at home on the boards, with this kind of showmanship.
“Now,” he began. “From what I understand, Lillian’s brother meant a great deal to Mr. Makricosta. So, let us begin there.”
Cordelia watched Ari’s face and saw him bite back his first response, which she could tell from his hard swallow had been a real scorcher.
“Cyril and I were lovers for some time.” He had to pause after that, and while his expression didn’t waver, Cordelia could see him reset his spine and straighten up. “He started working with the Ospies to save his skin, so I found him a girl to prove good faith.” Here he cast a heavy glance at Cordelia.
“That was me,” she said, as if it wasn’t obvious. But hey, they wanted the truth.
“All of that,” said Lillian, “I know. His associates weren’t blacked out, in the file. Only the names of the … only Ospie names.” She raised her eyes and stared pointedly across the table. “Your name, perhaps, Mr. Memmediv.”
“Wait. We will get to that.” Jinadh held up a hand. “Mr. Makricosta, Ms. Lehane, I am curious. You knew that Cyril had turned to the Ospies, and you aided him?”
Cordelia looked to Ari for her cue, but he was only sneering down his nose. When Jinadh turned his regard on her, with nosy tabloid intensity, all she could say was, “I didn’t realize what he’d do. And I might not have cared, straight off. But I care now. If he was standing here in front of me I’d slap his teeth out.” She poked a potato chunk with a torn piece of flatbread. “But he ain’t, so I wanna know why. Ask Memmediv what he did.”
Rather than speak, Jinadh opened his palm in Memmediv’s direction. The other man closed his eyes and his face sagged. He looked older than he had that afternoon: pouches under his eyes, and new, deep wrinkles carved by agony. “Did you know, Makricosta: He did it for you.”
Aristide scoffed. “He did not.”
“Ari,” Cordelia said, and wished she were close enough to touch him under the table. To stomp on his foot, or put a hand on his knee. “Let him talk. Or don’t you want to know?”
The look on his face shook her own certainty.
“He did,” said Memmediv. “But it seems he didn’t tell you.”
“Cyril was as selfish as I am,” Ari snapped. “Don’t try to sell me this cut.”
“And the false papers he had on him when he was arrested? Where did he get them? They were new—he couldn’t have forged them before he was placed in custody.”
&
nbsp; Ari’s nose went up, but a faint blush colored his cheeks.
“You were working toward the same goal with different methods, and you both failed. You came close, but they never would have given him the second passport that he asked for, the way out for his ‘friend.’ Not even if he had personally put a bullet in Hebrides’s brain. But oh, how he did hope.”
On either side of his still-empty plate, Ari’s hands lay flat on the table, motionless. Or, no: not quite. A fine tremor ran through the left, so that the shadow of his fingers shuddered on the cloth.
Cordelia wished she could reach out and take that shaking hand in hers. He would hate her for it. She would still hold on.
“Mr. Memmediv,” said Jinadh, reeling them all back. “Do you care to explain why Mr. Makricosta thinks you are responsible for Cyril’s death?”
Memmediv dredged up a smile Cordelia wanted to peel from his face and salt like a slug. “From what I’ve heard at this table,” he said, “DePaul didn’t die at the hands of the Ospies.”
“We are telling this in order,” said Jinadh, matching Memmediv’s smarm but sliding some iron underneath it. “So for now, let us forget anything His Highness may add when you are finished.”
“I was a mole, inside the FOCIS. Cyril was assigned to infiltrate the Ospies in Nuesklend and turn over information that could be used to expose electoral fraud. I sang about it and then we turned him, under some duress. I had no part in anything that happened to him after that, except to help him, once, in snaring Ada Culpepper. That is all.” He put his hand to his bowed head, hiding his eyes.
Pulan poured him a glass of wine and put a hand on his forearm. Eyebrows went up on the Porachin men around the table—Cordelia had started to get a sense of how things went around here, and understood Pulan had just stooped pretty low by her country’s standards.
Memmediv drank the wine, and didn’t even thank her.
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