Arabesk (22 page)

ZeeZee didn’t intend to do either: but nor was he stupid enough to try to hightail it out of Seattle. His only route to safety was to face up to Hu San in such a way that he was both alive and forgiven when the confrontation ended. And since getting to Hu San
before
Wild Boy had been an impossibility, success depended on meeting the woman later, in a place Wild Boy didn’t go.

That Hu San knew nothing about the upcoming meeting was obvious. Her evenings at SHC were private, a shrine of calm in the busy wilderness of her day, and it had never occurred to her that anyone might dare interrupt.

Getting unnoticed into SHC took a pair of overalls, a Mariners baseball cap worn back to front, bad attitude and a case of vintage Mumm. Not that ZeeZee could afford twelve bottles of champagne, but any price that saved his life was cheap.

“Round the back, idiot.” The doorman glared at ZeeZee, then stepped quickly back as a thin woman in Arctic fox climbed the steps and nodded for the doorman to start the revolving door.

“Good evening, Madame. I do hope you have a pleasant
—”
That was as far as the man got before ZeeZee pushed forward.

“Just tell me who gets this, okay?”

Both fox-fur and doorman turned in shock.

“Look,” said ZeeZee. “Somebody has to sign for this crap.” He shifted the clinking box higher still, until it half blocked his face. “Come on…”

The woman stared at him. She had the taut manner of a judge or maybe an upstream divorce lawyer. Someone prosperous, someone who expected lesser species like delivery boys to show her respect. “Who do you work for?”

“Why?” ZeeZee borrowed the look he gave her straight from Wild Boy. A hard-eyed stare that ended in a deceptively gentle smile. “What’s it to you?”

The doorman was giving ZeeZee directions and a name before the boy even had time to return his attention to the uniformed flunky. “There,” said ZeeZee, “that wasn’t too hard…”

Darkness, silence and cats. His three favourite things. Or maybe the three things that made him feel safest. The stink he could have done without. Scrawny grey shadows fought over an empty foie-gras tin fallen from a sodden cardboard box, pencil-thin backs crooked in anger. Along one side of the courtyard was an open loading bay, along the opposite side were trashcans, all overflowing.

Either the garbage union were on strike or SHC hadn’t heard of recycling. Whichever, the courtyard stank of rotting food and cat piss. Seattle’s most exclusive dining club had two faces and this was the other one.

“Elmore,” ZeeZee demanded of an elderly Hispanic sitting on the edge of the loading bay, pulling heavily on a cigarette. Dead butts littered the ground below his dangling feet like empty cases from an over-active machine-gun.

The man jerked his thumb behind him, towards darkness.

ZeeZee adjusted his eyes. The darkness was large and empty, overlooked by internal windows and stained across its scuzzy floor with food spills and scabs of old chewing gum.

Choosing a door at random, ZeeZee kicked it open and staggered down a passage past the open door to a kitchen, case clutched firmly in his hands. Heat blasted out at him, along with the stink of grilled fish. Somewhere inside the kitchen a radio was playing an ancient Daniel Lanois track, the soft rock drowned beneath a crash of plates and the clatter of table silver.

A swing door at the end of the passage flipped ZeeZee from one world to another: the back-of-house peeling green paint changing to distressed wooden panelling, as the old linoleum underfoot became carpet, not deep pile but expensive and exactly matched to the pale colours that swirled down the room’s long hand-made curtains. He was staring across a foyer and through a revolving door, straight at the back of the uniformed doorman.

It was time to change identities.

Dumping his overalls in a swing-top bin next to old-fashioned porcelain urinals, ZeeZee crammed his champagne crate in an under-sink cupboard beneath the powder room’s row of stone basins. Of course, he had to flip the cupboard’s brass lock with the blade of his pocket knife, but the damage was minimal and a twist of torn-off paper jammed the door shut again.

The figure that straightened up in the mirror was smart. Unquestionably young but neatly dressed in white shirt and Hermes tie bought for the occasion. His blond hair was just slightly too long but combing was enough to turn the look from unacceptable to merely louche. A fat cigar was all it took to finish the part of rich boy about town…

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Madame.”

Hu San looked up from her notebook to see an Armani-clad barman hovering nervously at her elbow.

“One of our new members is most insistent about joining you.” The Turkish boy’s nod was discreet, but there was no mistaking he meant the young man who stood at the bar, smoke spiralling up from a
Romeo y Julieta
held tightly between the fingers of one hand.

Dark eyes locked onto ZeeZee’s face. There was no shock or outrage, barely even surprise. It was, thought Raf, like looking into a deep well and not even knowing if there was water at the bottom. “Send him over,” said Hu San. “But tell him to lose that cigar first…”

Around the edge of the room, on black leather banquettes, slouched Seattle’s wealthy. Tall and blond or dark, handsome and unfortunately not tall at all, elegantly dressed or expensively dishevelled, both women and men talked intently or stood to shake hands and air-kiss briefly. The Brownian motion of money.

The woman with the fox fur was repeating her story of meeting a horrible delivery boy on the way in. She was telling it for the third time and her partner was still pretending to be shocked.

Only a few of those in the room showed their age in a surgical tightness around the eyes, the regrettable side effects of having reached middle age before the start of nanetic surgery. The rest had that youthful permanence which came from being able to afford faces that were constantly rebuilt from the inside.

Hu San sat in the middle of the room, in her own exclusion zone. Expensive hair, simple jewellery. Anyone who was close enough to her table to smell her scent or see the tiny silk characters embroidered on her black jacket was too close. And getting too close to Hu San was dangerous. Only, in ZeeZee’s case, staying away was more dangerous still. She was vaguely impressed that the boy had been able to work this out for himself.

“What will you drink?” Hu San demanded.

“A Budweiser.”

“Green tea,” she told the waiter, “and bring a glass of house white for our newest member.”

“So, tell me why you’re here,” said the Chinese woman once the drinks had arrived and ZeeZee had pulled up a chair of his own.

Very carefully, the English boy placed his long-stemmed glass onto the white tablecloth between them and—despite being seated—put his hands together, bowing as best he could. “I wish to apologize,” ZeeZee told Hu San. “Haruki has told me how badly I have disappointed you.” He used Wild Boy’s real name when talking to Hu San, but then, everybody always did. “I am truly sorry.”

Hu San nodded. “Drink your wine,” she said. “I’m going to make a call.”

No mobiles allowed, not even in the bar. ZeeZee could understand that, especially in a dining club that thought stone basins were smart and didn’t serve beer. And that was the last thing he bothered to think until her return was signalled by a hand resting lightly on his shoulder, the merest brush. Probably no more significant than reaching out to pat a stray.

“I’ve booked us a table for supper…” said Hu San. “A waiter will bring your drink.” And she nodded to the Turkish boy behind the bar who watched them go. Not openly but almost proprietorially, as if noting, with slight bemusement, that two rather disparate people had made friends in his bar.

“Wow,” said ZeeZee, stopping in the doorway of the dining room. A low ceiling was hung with swathes of cream silk that made it look lower still. The floor was blond wood, probably beech, the gold walls anything but straight, rippling round the large room in soft, almost Gaudiesque curves. The effect was of dining within a vast, impossibly expensive tent.

Hu San smiled. “I own both this club and the hotel,” she said, answering a question ZeeZee hadn’t asked. “The city may not like me, but without my money this place would have shut years ago.” She nodded towards a window and the dark glittering water of the harbour beyond it. “Five floors, original building, right on the waterfront, less than two hundred members… It costs me over a million a year in lost revenue.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Work it out.” Hu San’s smile went cold.

“Influential people, increasingly valuable location…” The boy stood just inside the door and watched money rise off the other diners like steam. “And inside information,” he added finally, afraid that Hu San would be angry. Instead the Chinese woman just nodded.

“Good,” she said, “Not just a pretty face after all. Now,” she clicked her fingers lightly, “let’s eat…”

Hu San ordered for both of them. Anorexic food for anorexic appetites. It certainly wasn’t what got served in the cafés and bars he used. The soup was Savoy cabbage, a teaspoon of sour cream swirled into a tablespoon’s worth of lightly puréed cabbage, the whole thing covered with fine shavings of black truffle. It came in a large white bowl that appeared badly chipped round the rim but was probably meant to look like that. After the soup came a sandwich, except that Hu San ate hers with a fork, so ZeeZee did the same.

Mimic, reflect, replace—if nothing else he knew his own strengths. Mind you, that was because he’d seen them laid out—boxed off and numbered—in a guarantee the fox had shown him. It was all there, zipped up tight inside his own head. And, given his mother’s belief in the purity of nature, he was lucky she hadn’t gone for high design, or he’d probably have had bug eyes. Except that all his augmentations seemed to be mammalian. Well, almost all of them…

“Eat,” said Hu San, spearing a sliver of warm pork that had been hidden under a paper-thin square of bread slow cooked until it was dry enough to crumble at the touch. Holding together the pork and bread like glue was a mustard mayonnaise mixed with shredded rocket.

Hu San drank a Californian Chardonnay with the Savoy cabbage, switched to an Australian Shiraz for the pork and finished with a chilled ’38 Sauternes, which she used to wash down a tiny vanilla cream baked with armagnac prunes. She drank one half glass from each bottle and left the rest, without offering any to the boy who sat opposite and nursed his house white until its contents were blood-heat.

Occasionally she’d look at him and smile. And at the end she leaned forward and brushed his hair out of his eyes with a single finger. “It’s time for you to go,” she said. “Remember to leave the way you came in…”

They were waiting for him in the loading bay. Which he could have guessed, had he bothered to think about it.

They were fast, efficient and professional. But then, that was their job. ZeeZee didn’t get in even one blow, one kick… He was too busy fighting the length of wire that had been flipped over his shoulders from behind and now held his arms helpless at his side.

“Fuckwit.”

Until a punch caught him in the stomach, ZeeZee had assumed the person holding the wire was Wild Boy. But Wild Boy was working the gloves. Stepping out of the shadows in best street-punk fashion, his leather collar turned up against the night wind, his hair elegantly dishevelled. Both fists wrapped in neoprene gloves that were weighted along the knuckles with lead shot.

“Wrong place, wrong time…” Wild Boy took ZeeZee’s face between thumb and finger and squeezed, gouging the pressure points. “You know what you did? Wrong, wrong, wrong.” The first two punches caught ZeeZee in the stomach, the third slid between the English boy’s rib cage and hip, causing a blood-red poppy of pain to flare inside ZeeZee’s head and then wilt slowly, from the petals inwards. Only the wire kept him on his feet.

“Bastard.”

“Aren’t I?” Wild Boy drew back his fist and grinned.

“Not the face,” snapped the man holding ZeeZee upright. Fear was behind the sudden anger in his voice. “You know what she said. Not the face.”

“Shame,” complained Wild Boy, stepping up to ZeeZee to knee him through a breaking scream into…

In the beginning there was darkness and the fox comprehended it not. So it ran some diagnostics and the darkness was revealed as syncope, relating to abrupt cerebral hypoperfusion. A quick and dirty check on syncope and hypoperfusion convinced the fox that the problem was both local and diminishing, so it shut down again to save energy. The fox fed off neon mostly, because its nine other power options had failed.

Of course it featured telemetry, self-check integrity and various other measures designed to ensure permanence (with five intra-optic LEDs to warn the carrier in case of a system fault) but these had also failed. But then the Seimens-Oakley was a very early model and only intended to run for seven years in the first place.

So now it worked in the background on a need-to-know basis. If the host needed to know, it popped up, otherwise it could run silent for months, even years. The fox lived in ZeeZee’s skull. Not his brain but his actual skull, housed in a compact ceramic case because ceramic allowed uninterrupted transmission and had high mechanical strength and identical hardness to the surrounding bone.

It had numerous functions, expressed in its own guarantee as a complicated menu of sets and subsets. But its primary function was obvious. The fox existed to keep its host alive. “Well balanced” and “happy” hadn’t been options on the early models. And anyway, the marker for genius doubled as a marker for dysfunction: that had always been made quite clear.

ZeeZee took a shower, long and hot enough to bring out the bruises, then walked over to the mirror to take a look at the damage. He had a flowering of broken skin over his ribs and above one hip. His balls felt the size of oranges, though they looked no worse than dark and swollen plums. And dark weals circled his upper arms where the wire had held him tight.