“Good afternoon,” he said, toeing off his loafers. “How’s business in the sunny south?”
“Cross wants to know when you are coming back.” Daoud’s tone was tart, just this side of needling. “We have some lucrative offers on the table and she needs your signature to go ahead.”
“Can you suspend operations for a few days? Let me wrap things up in Dadang and I’ll explain it all when I get back.”
“Cross will not like that.”
“Well, we’re equal partners. That just means I need a tiebreaker. And I can count on you, can’t I?” A cheap maneuver—a cut to the hamstring, a blow to the groin. But Aristide had always fought dirty.
He had meant to end things with Daoud. He had, for a while. But after two years of failure in the war-torn border jungles, hope fading and everything familiar left far behind, what was he supposed to do? He sought comfort where it came most easily.
And perhaps he’d kept seeking it, even after he established himself. After he had a home and a company and reconnected with an old business partner. Because it was easy. Because it was reassuring to return to something one understood, even if it didn’t exactly satisfy.
“How long,” said Daoud, “must I keep Cross’s patience?” He sounded on the verge of snapping, though he never did. At least not where Aristide could hear him. Did he have friends to whom he could complain? He worked all the rotten time. Maybe that was why he put up—and kept it up—with Aristide. No chance to cultivate other options.
“Well.” Aristide put his hand over his eyes, behind which a headache had begun to build. It was past two o’clock, and therefore long past time for a drink, but he’d been busy. Sweat was starting under his arms and on his palms. A drink, then lunch. Then another drink. That would put his shakes away, and the pain in his temples, too. “I need you to look into flights for me.”
“From Dadang to Rarom?”
“Yes, but also.” Lady’s name, he was going to get into it now, wasn’t he? “Is there anything from Dadang to … to the Dameskill regional airstrip?”
“Where?”
“It’s in Amberlough,” said Aristide. “Near … near Lillian’s estate.”
There was a long pause, unbroken by crackle of paper or clatter of pen. “So you are sending him home.”
“I’m sending him ahead,” said Aristide. “I’ll sail later from Ul-Weiya.”
“You told her yes?” Daoud had been privy to Aristide’s rant upon receipt of Lillian’s first invitation. He sounded as incredulous as he had a right to.
“I did.” He didn’t owe Daoud an explanation, and wouldn’t give one.
“Good,” said Daoud.
“You thought I should go? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“How would you have taken it? You said it ‘smacked of political striving,’ and was ‘unseemly, cheap, and disrespectful.’ I did not know her as you did, so my opinion did not enter the discussion.”
He did not ask the question Aristide had never let himself answer: How else would Cordelia want to be remembered? Carmine lips, crass language, hair so bright it could have been mistaken for candy floss.
Daoud hadn’t known her then, and he hadn’t known her long. But even he had known her; one couldn’t help but get a faceful when she walked into a room.
If anything happens to me, she’d said, I just want folk to know what I did. I miss the applause.
If he admitted it to himself, with the Ospies gone, she wouldn’t care who used her name. Not as long as there were posters up on Temple Street, and unlicensed prostitutes in Eel Town could bribe the hounds to stroll the other way. She had got what she wanted. He had promised to tell people what she had done, and he had failed.
It was a failure he’d been happy to bury. Just one of several. Many. It was easier to tell himself that he was doing the right thing, when really he was just keeping his heart wrapped in cotton, packed in straw.
When he was young, he had never understood how people could feel disgusted with themselves. Even the foulest crimes had failed to stir his conscience, because they were in service to a worthy end: his own security and comfort. Age had given him clarity, on that subject at least.
“When will you return?” Daoud asked, and Aristide wondered how long silence had taken up the line between them.
“I’m not sure. Book me outbound and we’ll arrange the rest later.”
There was a pause, in which implications settled like stones.
“I will ring the airfield,” said Daoud, at last. “For … for…”
“Mr. Ambrose van Weill,” said Aristide. An Enselmese entrepreneur. That was the name Cyril had written on his new passport, supplied by Asiyah in order to avoid any awkward questions that might arise. When Lillian turned tail on the Ospies they dragged her whole family through the midden, and some people had long memories. Acherby was gone now, but the stories had been printed. And no matter where one’s sympathies lay, Cyril DePaul lay opposite.
“For Mr. van Weill,” said Daoud. “I’m not sure there will be anything tomorrow. But perhaps the day after? Two days at the most, if the weather is fine.”
“Two days,” said Aristide. As the words traveled through the line he felt a swell of dread. Two days, with a man who couldn’t speak to him without sneering. Two more days of listening to those nightmares. Of staring at a wall that had once been a door, ajar.
It was much better for him to fly ahead. Sharing a ship voyage would have been too much.
“And you?” asked Daoud, reminding him of the telephone in his hand, hard against his cheek. “Will you be flying to Rarom the same day?”
“Yes,” said Aristide, “I suppose I’d better. Cross will tear me up and down, when she hears what I’ve agreed to.”
“She might not be the only one,” said Daoud, and rang off before Aristide could retort.
CHAPTER
SIX
Aristide ran errands. Cyril assumed they had to do with him. They certainly resulted in a new suitcase, clean shorts and undershirts, pyjamas, toiletries. He refused to go for a shave, because he didn’t like the idea of a razor wielded by a stranger’s hand so near his neck. Even less, the idea that he couldn’t trust himself to hold still.
On the evening before Cyril’s departure, Aristide returned to the hotel with another stack of paper-wrapped packages and said, “I won’t send you to your sister like this. If you won’t go to a barber, I’ll shave you myself.”
“Your hands shake,” said Cyril from the sofa, where he had remained for too many hours, dug in like a soldier in a trench.
Aristide held one of the offending extremities in front of him and said, too keenly for humor, “Steady now. I’ve been to the bar.”
That shouldn’t have been reassuring. “I can do it myself.”
“You haven’t yet.” Aristide set the packages on the sideboard and plucked delicately at the strings that held one of them shut. The brown wrapping fell away to reveal a gold stamp on white cardboard. Aristide’s fingers were indeed steady as he unfolded the lid to reveal a badger brush, a silver-banded cake of soap, and a gleaming safety razor packed in pristine white tissue.
“It isn’t even a cutthroat,” Ari said, lifting the razor with a particular grace that pulled Cyril back through time, to a past that had seemed impossibly distant until this moment. When Aristide raised his eyes he left his chin tucked, so his gaze came filtered through his lashes. “Tell me you aren’t afraid.”
Cyril’s throat was dry, when he tried to swallow whatever threatened to rise from his chest. “Not of the razor, anyway. Pour me a drink first?”
What Ari brought him from the cocktail cart was more tranquilizer than aperitif. As he put it away, steadily, he watched Aristide unwrap another package. The slow reveal had an air of burlesque to it. One sheet of newsprint pulled away showed translucent tissue paper and the shadow of a chalk-striped cashmere Cyril didn’t remember choosing for himself. Then there was the neatly folded shirt, the sound of Aristide’s palms
spread across the twill, the teasing slide of one finger beneath the band, and ultimately the snap of paper as it tore.
Cyril drank his whiskey and tried not to be intrigued. He didn’t have the energy for it.
By the time Aristide hung his suit and shirt to air and straighten, and laid out a pair of simple cap-toe derbies, Cyril was anesthetized with whiskey.
“I threw your boots in a wastebasket,” said Aristide. “There’s a few pairs of socks as well—I put them in your bag.”
“Thank you, Nanny.” Cyril scrubbed at his face; his cheeks felt numb. It was beginning to dawn on him that he had not eaten yet today, though he could have called for room service anytime. It hadn’t seemed important.
“Come to the washroom,” said Aristide. He had gotten there without Cyril noticing, and turned the water on.
Cyril dropped his glass carelessly onto the table and heaved himself to his feet. He had grown unused to receiving instruction in the jungle and far more used to giving it, which had been exhausting. Debriefing had been all question and answer. It was a relief to simply follow orders from someone who didn’t present a threat.
Aristide put the toilet seat down and laid a folded towel over the porcelain. Cyril sat and, without waiting for another towel, or instruction, stripped off his undershirt.
Ari didn’t hiss, or flinch, but Cyril still caught the moment of silence, the sudden stillness in the gathering swirls of steam.
He tried to remember what there was to see. The burn scars, which were spattered across his shoulders, too. Various remnants of fights, flights, and accidents. And of course, he was too thin.
Maybe it wasn’t anything in particular—only the difference between what Aristide remembered and what confronted him now. Cyril knew he didn’t stand up to his memory.
But Aristide said nothing; only handed him a hot towel. Cyril closed his eyes. A dark, pungent scent rose from the shaving soap as Ari swirled the brush through the lather. Musk and vanilla, amber and white flowers.
The sheen of drying perfume on each pulse point; Aristide, naked, in front of an open window.
Damn that scent memory, bobbing up like a dumped corpse rotted free from its weights. Aristide’s Padgett and Sons cologne. The soap had the same profile, and once it was on Cyril’s skin he would carry it with him until he washed again.
“The towel?” asked Aristide, and Cyril peeled it from his face. Taking an unsteady breath, he held himself taut in anticipation of the brush and was surprised when it didn’t come.
“May I?” asked Aristide, and the gravity of his tone was only slightly more surprising than the fact that he had asked at all.
Cyril took another moment to center himself, then dipped his chin in assent. A moment later, he felt Aristide’s fingertips just beneath it, pushing his jaw higher, and then the kiss of soap-slick badger hair against his throat. His larynx moved beneath the bristles as he swallowed.
Aristide worked slowly, and Cyril tried to remember if he’d kept a shaving set in the washroom at Baldwin Street, or only ever gone to the barber. It was like trying to remember the props onstage in a play he had watched once, long ago.
Horn rattled against porcelain, followed by the faint chime of steel. Before his brain caught up with his body he went tense. Aristide waited, not touching him; in the swirl of steam against his skin, Cyril imagined he could feel the currents of Ari’s breath.
“Now?” he asked, and Cyril realized how closely Aristide must be watching him, to have noticed the minuscule slackening of his muscles.
“Go ahead,” he said, curling his fingers beneath the toilet seat. But as soon as the steel edge touched his throat he was standing, one hand over the thin, shallow cut beneath his jaw.
Aristide’s expression gave him nothing, so he gave nothing back. For a moment they stood opposite one another. A drop of blood fell from Cyril’s chin and sprayed across the floor, turning black against the lapis tile.
Then Aristide wiped off the razor, leaving a pink streak on white terry cloth, and set it on the sink with painful precision. “Perhaps you ought to do it yourself after all.”
Left alone with the sound of running water, Cyril felt his failure on so many levels he lost count.
* * *
The last airplane they’d put him in had been a military affair: stripped down and freezing cold, dun and green and dirty. The one he boarded as Ambrose van Weill had plush seats and offered cocktails before takeoff.
That didn’t make the flight any warmer, or more pleasant. Neither did his hangover.
The suit fit well enough, for something thrown together in less than three days, no second fitting or fiddly bits. Amazing he could remember what it ought to feel like, enough to notice the difference in the pitch of the sleeves, the gap at the back of the collar.
Aristide had looked at the ensemble and given a small tch of disapproval, but there wasn’t much he could do in an hour. Their farewell on the runway had been awkward, stilted. They had not touched one another. They had not touched one another at all, save the shaving incident.
Cyril found the first knuckle of his forefinger at his chin, where Aristide had tilted his jaw half an inch higher for a better angle with the badger brush. He cleared his throat, and put his hand into his lap.
His neighbor was a white-haired Lisoan woman in half-moon spectacles. She slept through the first half of the first leg, waking when they hit rough weather over the Egyrian Sea.
She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes, then growled, ≈Demon’s jism.≈
The emphatic profanity startled a snort out of Cyril, which caught his neighbor’s attention. ≈You speak Shedengue?≈
That would teach him to laugh at old women. He’d been hoping to avoid conversation until Carmody, and even then keep it to a minimum. ≈Yes,≈ he admitted. ≈But not well.≈ Five years of immersion hadn’t made him eloquent, just competent, with a vocabulary oddly weighted in favor of tactics and violence.
≈You don’t look like you can speak it at all.≈ She cased him with sharp eyes. ≈Where are you from?≈
≈Enselem,≈ he said, recalling his papers. ≈But I make business in Liso.≈
≈War business,≈ she said. Not a question.
He had no prescribed story to explain himself, so instead found himself extemporizing. ≈The kind that is better in a war.≈
≈What kind is that?≈ she asked, and he could feel her marshaling her forces for an attack. If he chose whatever she was preparing to be angry about, he might drive her off and have the rest of the flight to himself. But that meant hours spent at hostility’s elbow, and perhaps an ugly scene.
So instead: ≈I work with a Porachin shipping company, in Liso for many years. Now, I help move aid into the north.≈ He’d known an Ibetian woman who did the same thing; she passed messages for his people sometimes. It would hold wine better than a sieve, at any rate.
The pinched expression on his neighbor’s face softened into satisfaction. She put her hand to her heart, bowed, and flicked her fingers up to her brow and then toward him: a greeting, and expression of gratitude. He’d learned to use it on village leaders, reluctant officials, and long-suffering matriarchs who agreed to take him into their crowded compounds when the weather turned wet.
≈Achela Aowamma,≈ she said.
He made the reverse gesture: fingers to her, to his forehead, to his heart. ≈Ambrose van Weill.≈
≈I’m sorry if I was sharp with you,≈ she said. ≈Many people have been taking advantage of our country’s disarray.≈
≈War makes profit,≈ he said. ≈Especially for the … hm. Not honest?≈
≈Unscrupulous,≈ she supplied.
≈Yes,≈ he said, thinking of Aristide and wondering what underhanded economics had paid for his expedited cashmere suit.
≈Ah,≈ said Aowamma, as the flight attendant stopped with his cart. ≈I will have arrack and water. And you? Ambrose? Will you have anything?≈
He would, but … what was van Weill’s d
rink? Not rye. Not gin. Certainly not a cocktail. Something strong and dark, probably expensive. He felt himself fall further into the character, felt the persona wrap around him like a warm, muffling duvet in the chill darkness of the cabin.
“Peated whiskey,” he said, defeated by Shedengue. At least his Enselmese accent was credible. ≈Uh, Calishaughn, if it is there? Or Tolishnaughcaul?≈
When the flight attendant handed over their glasses, Aowamma raised hers and toasted him. ≈If only all neighbors could get along so well.≈
They carried on quite a pleasant conversation for the rest of the flight. And by “they” Cyril meant Aowamma and van Weill. He sat back in his seat and watched it happen from very far away.
* * *
“Mack,” said Cross, their brand-new blacklist spread in front of her. “These are our best customers.”
Facing Merrilee Cross and her dangling cigarillo in the smoke-filled offices of Cross-Costa Imports, the prospect of explaining this change of plans was even less appealing than it had been in Dadang. But worth it. Aristide kept repeating that, hoping he would feel the truth of it sometime soon. Especially now that Cyril was well away, and less like a man than a strange, unsettling dream.
“Nevertheless,” he said. “They’ve got to go. I’ve cut a deal with someone I’d rather not disappoint.”
“I don’t want to disappoint them.” Merrilee jabbed the list with a stiff finger. “Holy stones. We tell Oreeta Ngdoze we won’t sell to her anymore, I don’t give us good odds on making it through to the rains.”
“I think you’re handicapping us a little harshly.” He’d been running the same calculations since his dinner with Asiyah. Dealing with Cyril had taken most of his time, so that he only found himself free to meet about business after the plane to Hyrosia taxied down the runway.
They had dined in Asiyah’s suite at the Waolla-hai. Over pilau and fish curry, Asiyah had given him a list of names that included five of their best customers, and three of their most dangerous.
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