Markus shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
“Better that way don’t you think? You want a mint-tea?”
*
The secretary shot him a surprised look.
“I thought you were ill.”
“I’ve still got a slight fever, but there’s something I absolutely have to check. Work, you know.”
She nodded, as if she understood exactly what he meant. Coming to work with the flu. First time in ten years. Sørensen would love that. Maybe give him a raise. Freedom? Of course, freedom.
*
He opened the safe and took the card out, waving as usual.
*
Time had changed. Seconds had turned into minutes and minutes into hours. Slow motion without the blur. A film?
*
In the subway, he read once more the SMS he had just received.
If you accept my proposition, meet me you know where. Jean Gray.
X-Men. Karen had explained her father had collected comics since his childhood and that the X-Men seemed perfect as a nickname for their organization, which actually had another name. A secret name. Wow. Welcome to the Labyrinth, Thomas—er, Markus. Keep your eyes and mouth shut tight. Sleep tight. Yeah right. Members of the O. were the only ones allowed to have X-Men avatars on KnowWhere. Made it easier for identification. Markus had never really read comics. A fault?
He snapped the cell phone shut, took the SIM-card out and slid it in his pocket. Later, he crushed it with his heel and dropped it through a sewer grate. Karen had finally stopped screaming in the bathroom.
*
His apartment welcomed him just like it always did.
Markus looked around, holding back Synth which was jumping around him like a happy young dog. Later. Go fetch. He opened a cupboard and took out his old sports bag. He hadn’t used it in years. Ten years, to be exact. Since he had moved here from his cell. He zipped it open.
*
Badia found him waiting for her on the stairs. She bent over to kiss him.
“You’re going somewhere?” she asked, noticing the bag.
He nodded.
“Time to take that vacation, I think.”
Laughing, she took out her keys and unlocked the door.
*
She opened the window of the bedroom, even though the November night was cold outside.
“I like to hear the traffic,” she explained. “It’s like the ocean. What’s more, people here say it’s healthy to sleep in a cold room. Makes you stronger.”
Markus was lying in her bed, smoking one of her cigarettes. She joined him and he felt her warm skin brush against his side. The smell of sex floated in the darkness like a spicy breeze.
Badia kissed his neck below the ear.
A warm tongue.
She hadn’t remarked on the absence of the anklet and he hadn’t told her he had thrown it into the garbage can at the bottom of her stairs.
“You sure you want to go to Samarqand?” she asked. “It’s not a great tourist destination.”
He sucked on the filter then blew out the smoke in one long cloud.
“I told you I wanted to visit there. An old dream.”
“It’s a strange place. You might like it actually. You’re strange enough to like it.”
Markus smiled in the dark and turned to kiss her, but she sat up.
“Let me give you my uncle’s address. At least, you’ll have someone to show you around. Someone unofficial, I mean.”
“You don’t have to . . .” he said as she got out of bed.
She wrapped herself in her bathrobe and disappeared into the living-room, turning on the light.
“Here,” she said, handing him a piece of paper. “Now, let’s make love again. In my country, it is said to ward off evil spirits.”
*
Dawn lifted its rainy curtain over the Herman Bang projects, making the red brick look gray. Standing at the bottom of the stairs of Badia’s building, Markus watched the garbage truck drive away, its sweet-sour stench floating around his nostrils. The anklet would probably be crushed in a couple of minutes.
What do you mean: “you’ve lost him?”
*
The Viborg City bus terminal stank of gasoline. The heartening smell of travel and distances. Behind the bullet-proof glass the saleswoman was checking his CashCard and waiting for the receipt. She was an immigrant, maybe from Samarqand itself, with deep set, black eyes and her hair hidden under a bright red scarf. He thought of Badia, her beautiful body and of her uncle’s address in his pocket. He had promised to send her a postcard. Another lie. You fucking fuck.
The clerk handed him his ticket and CashCard.
“A single to Petersburg. There you go.”
Markus thanked her. The card had worked. So far so good. In Petersburg, he would take a plane to Alexandria, then a train to Constantinople and finally another bus to Samarqand—the end of all routes, the city of evil and brutality, the perfect place for ghosts like him, those who never quite disappear because they have never quite existed. A long journey towards what? Nothingness? A new life? A certain death? An uncertain death? Check the correct answer. Only one is possible, although none might be correct.
Maybe he would meet Ole there. In the flesh or in the ghost? Would they recognize each other? Would they reminisce? Would they wave to each other and wonder?
You fuck. You fucking fuck.
He put the ticket and the CashCard in the inside pocket of his jacket and slowly walked towards the bus, surrounded by a throng of passengers.
Fellow travelers. Smiles. Conversations. Questions. Lies.
He sighed as he joined the line.
A sixteen hour trip. Perhaps he could sleep most of the way. Dream, even. Yes. Dream. Fortunately, he had Synth to help him do that. Something golden and warm rolled under his tongue. It tasted so sweet he had to smile.
2. THE DREAMING CHAMBERS OF SAMARQAND
Weeping and wailing, they buried Iskander, ruler of men,
in his beloved chambers, deep in the heart of Samarqand
Al-Hussein Ben Idriss Ben Ahmed
Closing forever the gates of the Chambers, they said:
“Rest, Iskander, rest. May you continue dreaming
of your beloved Samarqand in your eternal sleep”
And they closed the doors forever and they wept.
Kalidasa
ON THE ROAD TO SAMARQAND
A flight of cranes
over a forgotten wall
—autumn wind
Chen Li
A man showed me a mound of rubble as we were leaving the city of Samarqand. “This,” he said in a disdainful tone, “is said to be the tomb of the once famed Alexander the Great.” He spat three times on the ground, which I found rude and ill-mannered. I asked him why he had behaved in this way and he answered it was the local custom to prevent evil spirits from coming back.
Marco Polo
The Silence of the Streets
One.
Inspector-General Ali Shakr Bassam tapped on the breast pocket of his uniform, searching for the familiar cigarette pack, Navis without filter, red circle on a yellow background. He silently cursed between his teeth when he remembered he’d left them on the dining table of his apartment. Well, he had an excuse. They’d called him at four thirty in the morning. Hell, who would remember cigarettes at four thirty in the morning? He focused on the body that lay under the double cupola of torchlight.
“That’s how you found him?”
“Yes, Inspector-General. Nobody touched anything.”
Bassam clicked his tongue. A cigarette.
“Do you have a cigarette, sergeant?”
“Yes, Inspector-General.”
A cigarette. Not his own brand (this was a blue pack with a galloping white horse), but a cigarette nonetheless. Foreign fingers. The wrong brand. Galaz filter. He smoked Navis without filter. Only the flame was neutral, familiar. It would have to do. Inhaling the filtered smoke deeply (
Who needed filters? Why? Death had no filter, had it?) he knelt beside the corpse, pulling up his light khaki trousers by the crease so his round thighs would not be squeezed by the fabric.
The body lay on its stomach, shirtless, hands tied behind its back by plastic manacles. A black cloth hood had been put over the head, probably before the killing. A fat man, with a hairy back and a constellation of moles. A very white man, in black boxer shorts, shoeless, bathing in a dark pool of blood that had coagulated during the night. An Eleni—a Westerner. Just Inspector-General Bassam’s luck. He wondered why there was no one from Bureau 23 yet, but someone would come soon enough. Was probably putting on his clothes right now, swallowing a mint to hide the whisky on his breath and sending away the prostitute through the back door. Bassam shivered at his thought. He really hoped no one at the Bureau 23 was capable of telepathy. He had enough trouble as it was.
“Turn him over,” Bassam said. “Wait! You’ve got the gloves on? What? So put the gloves on, then turn him over.”
The two policemen, two idiots from the North, peasants with flat faces, smiled sheepishly as they put on their government issue lubricated latex gloves. Bassam sighed and blew out smoke, scanning the street for clues. It was too dark to see anything. A narrow backstreet in the old city. Perfect. Extremist territory. Of course! Of course. One of the two cops, the thin one smelling of old sweat, lifted the cloth hood and rapidly turned his face away, heaving.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Bassam mumbled, horrified in spite of himself.
The throat had been cut so savagely that you could see the spine through the blackening gash. The head was at a weird angle, only held by skin, muscle and a little bone; the scraggy brown beard was matted with blood.
There was an envelope taped to the man’s chest.
Bassam was about to remove it when he caught the heavy smell of rose water and felt a presence behind him.
“Let me do that, Inspector-General.”
Bassam took a step back, saluting his cousin with a sharp bow of the head and a hand swiftly brought to his heart, as if he was dusting his jacket.
Sekmet Bassam, of course. Who else? The inspector-general had known this was going to be a bad day when his cell phone had beeped in the darkness and he slammed his foot against the dining table while reaching for the tiny blinking blue screen. Which was next to his cigarettes, he remembered perfectly now—with a pang of regret. He glanced sideways at his rose-smelling cousin, hoping he wasn’t a telepath. There had been stories about secret experiments . . .
Sekmet Bassam put on the latex gloves and produced a switch-blade from his pocket. His fine features were flattened by the torchlight, giving him a 1930s Fu Manchu film profile, especially with that thin, drooping mustache.
Ali Bassam hated that mustache with a vengeance.
He looked again at his cousin, who was busy opening the envelope. As a kid he had always been jealous of Sekmet’s ease and handsomeness. Maybe the Enlightened had given him beauty because it had denied his family wealth, contrary to Ali Bassam’s own?
The Bassam clan had a long history of family feuding. Jealousy had flourished across generations, infecting both the family and its neighbors. The most recent and dramatic event was when his great-uncle, Rusan Terbadjian Bassam, was shot by his niece while taking a bath in the family tub. At the trial she had claimed he’d raped her, but in Ali’s family, everybody knew it was her father who’d given her the gun, because he coveted an olive orchard near Guldur, the hometown and cursed cradle of the Bassam clan. She was acquitted, although Ali’s grandfather had tried to bribe the judge to get her sentenced to death.
“But the power of money is nothing compared to the power of pussy,” his father used to say after dinner, between two puffs of his hookah and after he’d discreetly checked that his wife was out of earshot.
As Sekmet Bassam scanned the contents of the envelope Ali threw a tentative glance at his cousin, but Sekmet took out a transparent evidence bag into which he put both the envelope and its contents.
“Thank you cousin,” Sekmet Bassam said. “You can go home now. I shall take care of this mess. I’ll send you a copy of the letter as soon as it has been processed by the laboratory”
Ali bowed his head and retreated silently to his car. In a way, he was glad the dead Westerner wasn’t his problem any more. Yet, his policeman’s instinct had been awakened and he wanted the truth to be found. He felt like a good hunting-dog beaten to the fowl by a younger, faster, but less experienced male.
He opened the door of his battered Diamant and sat behind the wheel. He saw the reflection of the ambulance lights flicker against the Medina walls. It glowed red like the extremity of a cigarette. Bassam clicked his tongue a couple of times in his dry mouth.
Two.
Inspector-General Ali Shakr Bassam crashed as silently as possible next to the warm, sleeping, snowy hills of Rezida. He tried to pull the sheet over his shoulder, but it was stuck under her body. He pulled harder and she moaned.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “Late. Early. Too early. Sleep.”
“Why did they call?”
“Murder. In the old city. Sleep now.”
She mumbled something he didn’t understand, then lightly snored again. Bassam closed his eyes, but myriads of blue, red and golden fireflies danced under his eyelids. A dead Eleni. Trouble. Of course, it had to be Sekmet. Was it on purpose? Things had worsened since the king had given more power to Bureau 23 because of the international situation. But why? How could the Bureau help in these difficult times? And why did he always ask himself pointless questions when he should be sleeping?
Three.
The night had been short—working at Tsentsen’s, then cleaning up the place, then drinking a few beers with Tsentsen, Garash and Iakov—it was becoming a routine, but it sure beat working for the Man in Viborg City . . . Markus had slept a dreamless sleep and had awoken when the sun blazed through a hole in the old curtains, prying his eyelids open like a blunt knife rapes an oyster shell.
He had some difficulty remembering his name as he sat up on the thick mattress that was lying on the blood-red tile floor. Nothing unusual, but memory glitches tended to send him into a panic . . . After all, he had stopped taking Synth almost seven months ago and yet he could still feel it rattling through his veins—Dr. Sojo had warned him: “It’s a new drug. No one knows what the secondary effects can be.”
Finally, his name came back to him as he reached under the mattress for his passport, secured by fifty kilos of packed straw packed in a dark blue cloth that could never be washed. When Tsentsen rented the apartment above his café to Markus, he told him that if he ever wanted to change the sheets, he’d have to rip the whole thing apart and sew on a new cover. Yeah right. Markus had decided he could put up with the stains.
He made himself some chai, eating chunks of buttered bread from a loaf he’d bought the previous day. Once he finished eating, he stood up, tea-glass in hand, opened the kitchen window and looked at the street below.
The old city street stretched both east and west, before twisting away at both ends. The apartment was on the second floor, but there weren’t many buildings higher than this in the district. In the distance, you could see the proud skyscrapers of the new city reflecting the sky and the surrounding mountains as silvery cubist cinema screens.
The street was already crowded, shops were opening, traffic was building up—small cars, mostly red and blue, some white, radios turned on full-blast, were buzzing and honking, while scooters, motorcycles and bicycles zigzagged dangerously among them.
Markus closed the window, locking away the smell of spices and gasoline, and took a sip from his scalding chai.
The loud knocking on the door startled him and he almost dropped his glass on the kitchen’s ochre tiled floor. He mechanically looked at his watch on the wooden table and wondered who could be coming to visit him at eight thirty in the morning. The cops, probably. Markus
had already been interviewed more than ten times at the local police station since his arrival four months ago, and twice at Secret Service headquarters. Polite interviews every time, in something approximating English—they knew a lot about him, it seemed, and then again, of course, they didn’t. Markus had carefully designed his new identity in Old Constantinople, from his date of birth to his political views and former jobs. He had even created a circle of friends—all fictitious, of course—who could testify for him via email. It had cost him some extra money to have these fake addresses monitored by Akmet “the Crescent” Ozgül, his contact in OC, but you never knew when you might need them. Like now, maybe.
The door shook again under the insistent blows and Markus went to unlock it. Synth rumbled in the back of his brain, but he quieted it down. Hallucinations could wait.
“Polisia! Open, please!”
Markus opened the door and stared at the two men standing there. They were shorter than him, the tops of their caps just level with his eyes. One of them looked Mongolian, with a thin black pencil dab of a mustache decorating the corners of his upper lip. The other was more Turkish looking, with sweet eyes and a tired mouth. No mustache, but his cheeks were blue with stubble. They looked more annoyed in their ill-fitting uniforms than threatening—a nice change from their clean-cut, social-liberal fascist colleagues in Viborg City. They both wore a huge gun holster over the crotch area, but they held their hands behind their backs, like good schoolboys. Markus sidestepped to let them in, but they remained where they were.
“Sandorf Mathias?”
Markus still had to get used to his new alias, especially when it was said last name first.
“Yes?”
“Sorry to wake you up so early, sir. This is an emergency.”
They spoke in English. That was politeness. He wondered what the prisons were like. Synth glimmered. He shut it off.
“You must come. Very sorry, sir.”
The Song of Synth Page 10