Sexile

by Lisa Lawrence

  BIG ENOUGH TO BURN ME HERE. TRIED TO WARN H.

  “Great!’ I muttered, annoyed. “But which H?’

  Perhaps sensing my impatience, new lines formed on the screen: WILL BE IN TOUCH AND TRY TO HELP WHEN I CAN. BUT FIRE’S BIG THIS END. YOU KNOW I’D PREFER BEING WITH YOU, ALWAYS MORE FUN.

  I thought he might disconnect in a second, so I typed quickly: WHEN DONE WHERE GO TO HOOK UP? HINT. In other words, give me a code for a rendezvous point after I wrapped up the case. It seemed I would rush to his rescue after all.

  Sibar Sexy is writing a message …

  Ten seconds, fifteen. Then: WE DON’T.

  What?

  YOU’LL DESERVE VACATION WHEN SHIT IS OVER. I’LL TAKE CARE OF IT SOLO.

  I got the message Sibar Sexy had gone offline, and that was it. For now.

  “Good luck,’ I whispered to the computer screen. I grabbed my handbag, paid for my time at the counter, and then walked back to my hotel.

  ♦

  A day later, I sat calmly at a café table in the Marais district as the swarthy, stocky guy, somehow always with a six o’clock stubble, lumbered in, coat draped over his arm. The black eyebrows furrowed, and the mouth was a grim line. He’d been annoyed with me before, but this was Inspector Carl Norton of the London Met simmering, boiling, without equivocation pissed at me. I had, no doubt, made him look bad at home.

  At least he’d taken my call and made the trip. And I had to admire his self-restraint as he ordered an espresso and plonked himself down at my table.

  “Give me,’ he growled, “one good reason—actually you better make it five—why I don’t whip out my cell phone and call the locals to have you carted home on the next Eurostar.’

  “One, by the time you explain who and what I supposedly am, I’ll be out the door and vanished just as I had to do in London. Two, I know you’re doing your job, but if you did as I asked and did come here alone, you’ll probably give me the benefit of the doubt now.’

  “Don’t count on my loyalty, Teres—’

  “Three, I think MI6 can claim they’ve never heard of me and that all the paperwork I got from them is bogus, but I bet they forgot about the police CCTV footage from cameras that cover the Albert Embankment on this date—’ I slipped him a set of notes across the table. “Pick up footage of my rented car at the intersections near Waterloo Station and then work back. You’ll have my face through the windshield—you know it’s me. Look where I was driving my car from, where I had my appointment. I was set up, Carl.’

  His voice was deadpan. “That’ll be inconclusive.’

  “Release the footage to the media,’ I suggested. “See who runs for cover. It’ll get really embarrassing. I may stay a murder suspect, but they’ll have to take me off the list of Islamic terrorists. You think anyone will believe it after I’m seen leaving the spy clubhouse?’

  Poker face. No sign he bought this argument.

  “Fourth,’ I continued. “I’m handing over to you now a set of plaster casts.’

  “Of what?’

  “My knuckles, my whole hands, sides of my hands, my feet, edges of my feet—’

  “Lovely souvenirs,’ said Carl. “What do you think they prove?’

  “Compare the casts against the size of the knuckle bruises and the spaces between the knuckles in your forensic photos—’

  “Which you’ve somehow magically been able to see,’ said Carl, muttering a curse under his breath. “Fucking hell! They will not be happy you got that material. Teresa—’

  “This is my life, Carl. I’m not letting anyone strip it to pieces. Let me finish answering your question.’

  “Your casts won’t hold up!’ he protested. “I don’t know how you got the bloody things done, and I don’t care. They won’t be allowed as evidence because we have no idea who made them, what methods, the fact they’re coming from no recognized authority—’

  “But they’ll become part of the record,’ I cut in. “The minute you show them to your people, I know the whole case against me will crumble apart. Because if I ever am brought back or return voluntarily, I will demand new casts be made. And the measurements won’t change, Carl. The size of my feet and hands won’t change. But to set your mind at rest, I’ve included photos of my hands and feet filling each cast. They fit. And the spaces between the knuckles on Luis Antunes’s bruises confirm a guy beat him to death— the hands are too large for any woman, let alone me.’

  He didn’t say anything to this.

  “The killer hit him with shock blows,’ I pressed on. “One powerful concussive blow hits, and you should go down. Everything else is theater. I knew it the minute I saw the photos of the body. A rage attack? Impossible. They would never have that degree of accuracy. And Luis’s hands and knuckles had nothing on them, no breaks in the skin, not one defensive cut. Don’t you see? The killer hit him—and hit him again for show. How cold is that? To make it look exactly like a martial artist had beaten him to death. But he enjoyed his work too much.’

  “What do you mean?’ asked Carl, now intrigued in spite of his reservations.

  “There was a kick to Luis’s head,’ I explained. “You’ll see it’s the blade edge of the foot, made with a sneaker. You’ve got no distinctive shoe tread or heel edge to work with, and unfortunately, you’ll just have to believe me on this, because I can’t prove it. But the blow when it hit him was inverted. The foot that kicked him was swinging counterclockwise and upside down.’

  “What are you saying? How the hell can you even do that?’

  “The killer was proficient in capoeira. It’s a Brazilian fighting art—uses a lot of cartwheel maneuvers and high kicking. I did a little checking on the Web, and as far as I can tell, the killer used a move that was either an aú aberto or an aú batido, not that I’d really know the difference. But the good ones can literally stand on one hand, twist their hips and swivel, sending their legs around. I’ve had to go up against people using gung fu, aikido, boxing … That inverted foot blow bothered me. So I did my research and figured it out.’

  “And I suppose you know who this killer is?’ he asked dryly.

  “Not sure yet, but I have a suspect.’

  I thought of Marinho whipping me upside the head. I hadn’t gotten a chance to see his full range of techniques that night, but I certainly remembered how he dropped me on the spot.

  “What’s his name?’ asked Carl.

  “Marinho, but I’ll bet he’s flown back to Brazil by now. It’s where I’m going.’

  He grimaced. He didn’t want to know where I was going. “What’s reason number five?’

  I smiled. “Don’t have one, really. Except you know me, you know I didn’t do it.’

  “If you have any sense at all, you’ll come back with me to London and surrender yourself to the patrols at St. Pancras International.’

  “Can’t do it, Carl. Are you going to try to stop me?’

  Carl groaned, scratching the stubble on his large square jaw. “You know you really piss me off, Teresa!’

  “I know I probably made you look bad, Carl, but—’

  “No,’ he growled. “No. That’s not it. You call me a friend, but when it came down to it, you didn’t trust me. Teresa Knight, troublemaker and amateur sleuth, and your big ego got in the way. Well, this is what I do for a living. I’m the professional. And you didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt to clear you.’

  “You saying you can find evidence with all the political games going on? I know someone powerful is hindering the investi—’

  “I have,’ he snapped.

  “What?’

  “I said I have, Teresa. You ever hear of this soft-swinging fad? Part of it is couples having sex in front of people in their homes or leaving their window curtains open. Came out of that nasty dogging—’

  “I’m familiar with it,’ I said, wanting to move things along.

  He rolled his eyes at me as if to say, yes, of course, you would be. “Luis Antunes was beaten and tossed off
a balcony. As impressive as your plaster casts are and your deductions, what’s the one thing, Miss Sleuth, you can’t do from your position that I can?’

  “I don’t know,’ I groaned tiredly.

  “Interview potential witnesses,’ said Carl. “On the night of his murder, two balconies above him, a couple was putting on a show. I’ve managed to track down two tenants in the apartment across from his who saw men on the balcony, no women, certainly not a woman who’s black and fitting your description.’

  I’ll be damned. The whole phenomenon I’d been exploring lately turned out to actually help in clearing my name.

  “Don’t get too excited yet,’ said Carl. “I’ll put that detail into the case file when the time is right. Not even these tenants’ names are in my notebook for now. By themselves, their statements that they didn’t see a woman won’t be conclusive, but maybe with your casts and the CCTV footage—’

  “What do you mean when the time is right, Carl?’ I demanded. Then it sank in. My friends had been correct. “Someone high up is screwing with evidence, interfering with the investigation, aren’t they? That’s why you’re not putting them in the file. Who is it, Carl? MI6?’

  He paused, choosing his words carefully. “I don’t know. It might be—I get my marching orders through chain of command. We’re told to disregard this or that, and then a day later, some new directive is passed along that contradicts the old one.’

  “Like a power struggle going on somewhere,’ I muttered.

  Carl looked grim. “Yeah, maybe. Look, Teresa, you can’t stay on the run. We can get it all sorted. If you come back with me—’

  “Can’t do it, Carl. Not yet.’

  He saw how serious I was.

  “And if I do make a call right now? You’ve got your escape route all planned out, haven’t you?’

  I know he didn’t expect an answer.

  “How does it go, Teresa? You have a couple of mates watching the front and rear exits of this place, maybe one farther up the boulevard?’

  My turn to play sphinx. As much as I’d hurt him over my supposed lack of trust, I had come alone.

  Carl tapped the set of plaster casts in their packaging. “Right. I got a mysterious call to come to Paris, where I obviously have no jurisdiction. This was left for me. A waiter in the café says a black woman fitting your description left this at the front counter, and you tipped him generously—’

  “I would.’

  “Don’t interrupt. Fifteen minutes after I thoroughly checked to see you weren’t watching me from outside, I rang the French police, who did their best to keep an eye out for you at the train stations. Knowing you, of course, you were already in a rented car, making your way to the border or something. By the way, your fifteen minutes starts now.’

  “I’m sorry it has to be this way, Carl. Thank you. And give my best to—’

  “Don’t push it, time’s wasting,’ he snapped. As I grabbed my handbag, he added, “Teresa.’

  “Yes.’

  “Luck.’

  I nodded and made for the door. Fifteen minutes, no more and no less.

  7

  Ididn’t take a rented car as my friend said. I was booked on a flight that afternoon out of de Gaulle for Frankfurt, where I’d catch a direct flight on Lufthansa for Rio.

  Double-digit hours on a plane are never my favorite, especially when I’m traveling under a fake passport and hoping like hell I made no slip-ups through security. It’s a post-9/11 world, one that increasingly questions your very right to see another part of it. I was no tourist. This was exile, a mission of mercy for my own good name. And for the long flight to Brazil, I had packed questions along with my new summer clothes bought in the department stores in the Opéra district.

  Everything pointed to Brazil: the mysterious documentary project, Luis’s uneasy relations with Marinho and his creepy Ladrão Films division, the nasty porn I’d confirmed was being filmed and produced over there, even Luis’s hope of bringing in a rival gangster, José Ferreira.

  I kept circling back to mull over another question. Why would Henrique Marinho, who did porn and prostitutes, decide to make a documentary on Brazilian Muslims? It didn’t fit. And yet I had seen actual raw footage for it.

  It made me wonder again if this wasn’t the real reason Desmond Hodd had aimed me at Luis to investigate his movies.

  Which brought me to still another question. I had found the way to clear myself, but I didn’t have the reason why I was set up in the first place. Hodd and MI6 had left me out in the cold, and I was righteously, justifiably outraged about that. But now in the sheer boredom of coach and with the insipid in-flight movie being washed out on the screen (because there’s always an idiot who has to leave his window shutter up to ruin things for the rest of us), I was having my doubts that Hodd was the one involved with Marinho behind the frame. It didn’t make sense to approach me and say, hi, we’re a bunch of spies, here, have some money—a big chunk of money—if I was about to be set up for a fall.

  I also couldn’t forget what Helê had told me about the woman who had tried to kill Luis—actually, she had suggested that perhaps the woman was trying to kill Marinho. Luis might have simply been caught in the crossfire. Right. Then what was she trying to kill them for? Did she have any connection with Marinho’s rival, the engineer-turned-prison-gang-leader José Ferreira?

  Her name was Beatriz. No last name offered to Luis.

  Questions and more questions. But I at least had names, people to track down—Marinho, José Ferreira, and a mysterious woman named Beatriz.

  ♦

  Rio de Janeiro. Hot and humid, tall and tanned. Tall as in hills, the famous morros, tanned as in check out legendary lpanema Beach, where bikinis are about the size of male good intentions to “just be friends.’ Rio: land of contradictions, happy and hedonistic and constantly horny.

  I entered Brazil on the fake British passport—UK citizens don’t need an entry visa. Got to hand it to Alain and Dupuis—they’d done an admirable job forging credit cards for Susan Braithewaite that could draw on my offshore accounts.

  So I’m walking out of Galeão Airport, completely disoriented, nearly knocking over a poor British Airways flight attendant, and I’m looking for a cab to take me into the city when I get a vibe. Soon to be upgraded to The Vibe. More stares as I entered the Hotel Glória on the Rua do Russel. It was only when the credit card authorization went through that the front desk clerk dropped the attitude. I kept wondering: What the hell’s going on?

  Later, I learned the explanation for all this: I’m black. Simple as that in their world. What was a black woman doing checking into an upmarket hotel in a better district of Rio? I must be a criminal. I must be a whore. The only third plausible explanation was that I was from elsewhere. I was a “gringa’—a foreign woman. Give me strength. Or a cricket bat.

  My hotel was in a good location, close to Guanabara Bay and Flamengo Park, and the windows had a view of the famous Sugarloaf Mountain. I took a couple of days to decompress, lying on Ipanema Beach, checking out the view under the outstretched arms of Cristo Rendentor at the top of the Corcovado mountain, taking in the other sights. I was on what I promised myself was my last day of goofing around when I walked out of the hotel and there he was. Standing before me in sandals, white linen trousers, and a white shirt of Egyptian cotton, a young black man more or less wearing my face. His cheeks were cut by a wide grin of brilliant white teeth, and he waved and waited for me to rush into his arms. Isaac. My older brother.

  “How are you, Tig?’ he asked gently.

  Since we were little, I was Tig for him and only him. I don’t remember this, but apparently I insisted on being called Tig for a full week after seeing a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon. Teresa, to my childish logic, had too many syllables. I think I began calling my brother “Roo’ as a put-down because I needed a corresponding nickname for him, and again with childish logic, Roo was a mama’s boy. Hey, he lived in Kanga’s pouch—you can’t get more mama�
��s boy than that.

  “Oh, my God! How did you find me?’

  He looked shocked that I could be so dim. “Don’t you remember who introduced you to Dupuis? Silly girl!’

  We went to the Ateliê Culinário in the Leblon district, and Isaac ordered a couple of cold drinks. His Portuguese sounded impressively fluent, but he assured me he’d just learned a few choice phrases to get by when he came here.

  “Must have been a marathon for you coming from the Middle East,’ I said.

  “Especially when you can’t go through Heathrow or Gatwick,’ he replied tartly.

  “Oh, like you never get into trouble.’

  He shook his head in melodramatic woe. “I always thought I’d be the one, Sis, to land in it because of doing business with the Arabs. So there I am, sipping Scotch with the boy prince in his limo, or rather his daddy’s limo, since it’s his emirate, and we’re watching news on the portable. Gee, that looks like my sister’s flat. They were pretty understanding about my having to get away.’ He started laughing. “They said to me, ‘Oh, yes, we get yanked off as terrorists all the time, go, go, go!’”

  “I’m glad somebody can take it in their stride.’

  “You should be pissed. I’m pissed for you, Tig. You know who I keep on retainer—about time they earned their keep—’

  “I don’t need solicitors, Roo. They won’t make a difference when I’m up against MI6 as well as the police. But I’ve given Carl Norton a set of plaster casts that should clear me…Look, I’ll call Daddy soon. How’s he holding up?’

  He took his time to answer. He knew I worried over what our father must be going through.

  “He’s better than you might expect,’ Isaac claimed, lifting his drink as if to toast our father.

  “What do you mean?’

  He chuckled into his glass. “He’s giving them hell, Teresa. You’d laugh yourself silly if the stakes weren’t so high. You know how he is: He loves a good fight, and you should see the expression on the faces of the cops when they come to the door. They know how much verbal, legal, and all-around shit he’ll put them through! Not that it does him much good—they always take what they come for. But there’s nothing in the house, nothing incriminating at all, so both sides are baffled. They look like they get orders to go back and dig around, they know not for what, and he’s indignant all over again. I think he’s secretly having a wonderful time.’