In Cold Blood

THE MEDINA in Marrakech was the perfect place if you wanted to disappear. The Red City was a confusing, hectic, mesmeric collection of souks, connected by alleys and passageways that were arranged with no order easy for a foreigner to discern. The busier parts were thronged with a seething horde of humanity and the central market square, Jemma el-Fnaa, was the busiest. There were youngsters with chained Barbary apes, water sellers in traditional garb with leather water bags and brass cups, storytellers regaling crowds of locals with tales in Berber and Arabic, and snake charmers enticing cobras from small wicker baskets.

The cobbles of the square radiated the baking heat. Beatrix Rose made her way through the crowds, more watchful than any of the others. Her caution was hardwired from a past life that she would never be able to entirely dismiss.

She stopped at one of the many stalls laden with oranges and asked for a glass of juice. It was fresh, cold and strong enough to wash away the bitter metallic taste in her mouth that was a side effect of the medication she was taking. She asked the young stall holder for a refill to take with her and paid him.

He would usually have charged more. She looked like a tourist, after all. Blonde hair, white teeth. Tall and slender. She would have been considered beautiful in any culture. American, perhaps. There were plenty of them around here. But the boy wasn’t stupid and he realised that Beatrix was not a tourist. Her Arabic was excellent, for a start. She was tanned a deep brown, rather than the florid red that he had come to expect from naïve travellers who underestimated the ferocity of the Saharan sun, and there was a cool knowingness about her that told him that it would have been foolish to try and fleece her. A hardness in her eyes, too, that said trying it would be something he would quickly come to regret.

He was right.

She bought the groceries they needed, then some silver wrapping paper and tape, and walked across the square.

She had an appointment to keep.

She needed to buy a very particular birthday present.

The Café de Paris was one of the hotspots in the chaotic hullabaloo. It was a three storey establishment with every square inch dedicated to extorting money from the gullible tourists who flocked to it for an authentic local experience. Tables spilled out beyond its curtilage and crammed the interior so that it was almost impossible to move. The third floor was a little quieter and a balcony with an ornate balustrade offered a beautiful view across the stalls and the mass of people all the way to the Koutoubia mosque and the mountains beyond.

She ordered a mint tea and waited.

After ten minutes, the man she knew as Abdullah sat down opposite her. He was in his early sixties, obese, and the thick-lensed glasses that he wore had the unsettling effect of magnifying his porcine eyes. He was dressed in the garish style of a man who has unlimited funds, but no taste.

“As-salam alaykom,” he said.

“Wa alykom As-slam,” she replied, returning the greeting.

She looked across the room. A burly man in an ill-fitting suit was at the stairs. His jacket was too tight and it revealed the bulge of a pistol beneath his armpit.

Fair enough
, Beatrix thought. Par for the course for a transaction like this.

“Did you get them?” she asked.

“Of course, my dear.”

He had a small leather satchel in his lap, the kind that could be had in the souk for thirty dollars, and he handed it across the table to her. She opened it and looked inside. At the bottom was a small package wrapped in oilcloth. She unwrapped it, making sure that no-one could see what was inside. There were four suppressors: a .22 Silencero Osprey, a .45 AAC TiRANT, a DeGroat Multi-Calibre and a Thunderbeast 30P-1. They were visually similar, thin tubes that screwed into the threaded barrels of the handgun. Beatrix owned a varied collection of guns with different calibres and she wanted to ensure as wide a coverage as possible.

“How much do I owe you?”

“The .45 was a little more difficult to find.”

“How much?” she said impatiently.

“Two thousand.”

He was taking advantage of her. She doubted whether he had paid more than five hundred. It didn’t matter. She had plenty of money and she knew where to pick her battles. This, certainly, was not one of them. She took the money from her bag and passed it across the table.

He reached greedily for it and, as he did, she placed her hand atop his.

The guard flinched and reached into his jacket.

Beatrix ignored him. “Two thousand is extortionate, Abdullah, but I’m going to pay it because I need more from you. And these things will be harder to find.”

She was staring right at him, her preternaturally blue eyes icy and cold. The effect of her stare had startled him, as it had startled dozens of men before him. There was no pity in her face. No empathy or understanding.

“What do you need?” he said.

She released his hand, took the list from her pocket and pushed it across the table. He opened it and read, his eyes widening.

“That’s a lot of gear, my dear. Are you trying to overthrow the government?”

“Can you get it?”

“I believe so, but not quickly. When do you need it?”

“A week,” she said.

“That is possible. It will not be cheap.”

“You surprise me. How much?”

He flicked his fingers at the list. “For all this? Ten thousand.”

“Fine,” she said, getting up. “Get it sorted.”

THE SUNSET was vivid and beautiful, lusty reds and purples and the silhouette of the jagged peaks of the mighty Atlas range. The stall holders lit their flares and the sixty-watt bulbs that they strung from lines that festooned the stalls. The sound of music and excited chatter was everywhere, as was the smell of cooked cheap meat.

A Berber woman stepped into Beatrix’s path and offered to decorate her hands with henna. Tourists would often pause and the woman would have taken out her brush and started to paint, and then scream blue murder when the gullible mark refused to pay the extortionate fee. Beatrix brushed the woman off and she shrank back into the crowd again.

She had a second appointment to keep.

Johnny’s Ink was the best tattoo parlour in Marrakech. It wasn’t easy to find, just a small collection of rooms at the back of a building with a shop on the ground floor and a brothel above it. It relied on its reputation. If you wanted quality, you made the effort to find it. The proprietor was American. He was tall, well built, and the ink on his own arms identified him as an ex-marine.

Beatrix went inside. Orbital was playing loud on the salon’s sound system.

“Beatrix,” Johnny said with a warm smile.

“Hello, Johnny.”

“How are you?”

“Getting by.”

“You want a beer?”

“Sure.”

There was a small fridge on the counter. He opened it, took out two bottles of Budweiser, popped the lids and gave one to her.

“Cheers,” he said. They touched bottles.

“Have you finished the design?”

“Here.” He reached beneath the counter and handed her the outline of the tattoo that he had drawn. She admired it. The design was of a rose. The petals were blood red, deep and vivid. It was beautiful, and exactly what she wanted.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Perfect.”

“Still want to get it done?”

“Definitely.”

“Alright. Go and get yourself ready. I’ll be through in a minute.”

There was another room leading off the reception. She went through. It was stifling and close. She opened the window to let the hot desert air blow into the room.

Beatrix peeled off her top and stood in front of the full-length mirror.

She turned to the right and then to the left, looking at the tattoos that she already had done in Hong Kong, during the long years of her exile. Her daughter’s name, Isabella, was written on her right arm, starting at the shoulder and running down to her elbow in elegant, flowing cursive script. On the other side of her torso, beneath her left armpit and halfway down towards the waistband of her jeans, were eight solid blocks of ink.

Each block represented one of the years that she and Isabella had been apart.

The tattoos brought back bitter memories. Getting them done had become her own, sad New Year’s Eve ritual: she would get blind drunk in a Kowloon bar and find her way to the parlour. The artist, a sweet Chinese girl whose name she couldn’t remember, would carefully inscribe another notch in the design.

Beatrix had made sure to leave enough space for more blocks of ink.

She had not expected to see Isabella again.

But she had been wrong about that.

She sat down on the leather couch and waited for Johnny.

He arranged his needles and tubes and placed them into the machine. He collected ink caps, distilled water, his green soap and a bottle of Vaseline. He took a bottle of rubbing alcohol and swabbed her left forearm from the shoulder all the way down to the wrist. He took a disposable razor and shaved away all the fine hair and then he cleaned the skin with alcohol again so that it was smooth for the transfer. He moistened the skin with stick deodorant and wrapped the stencil around the top of her arm, from bicep to tricep. When he pulled it away, a ghostly purple image of the rose stem and bloom had been left behind. He slathered ointment over it and took up the gun.

“Ready?”

“Do it.”

He reached over and punched play on the iPad he had routed through a pair of Bose speakers. Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ began to play.

“Here we go.”

The pain was nothing. Beatrix closed her eyes as the needle started to peck and scratch and she remembered back to the snow and ice and the numbing temperature of the Russian winter.

A year ago, but it already seemed like longer.

Oliver Spenser had been the first of them. He had tried to run, but Beatrix’s knives were faster. She had thrown one into his leg and cut him down, his face ploughing through the drift as the leg went out from beneath him. He had tried to surrender. John Milton would have allowed that, too, but he didn’t have the same history with Spenser that she did. He hadn’t been tormented by the same nightmares, every night for eight years, so bad that the only way she had been able to silence them had been to lose herself in drink and then, when that had stopped working, the sweet oblivion of the opium pipe. Spenser had begged her forgiveness and then he had begged her for his life.

He must have known that was always going to be futile.

She had sliced his throat from ear to ear and watched his blood pour onto the virgin snow.

One down.

Five to go.

Johnny made an appreciative noise. The linework was done. Beatrix looked down and saw the outline of the petals. “This is going to look very nice,” he said as he took out the magnums he would use for the colour. “You still think you’ll get the whole sleeve done?”

“Yes,” she said. “Leave room for more.”

SIX THOUSAND miles away, the weather in the Gulf of Aden had been kind. The sea had been placid, the lack of wind rendering it as smooth as a boating lake for the first seven days out of Salalah. Captain Joe Thomas went through the steps of his evening routine. He walked the length of the ship, starting with the port side and ending up to starboard. His main concerns were leaks and dings that he couldn’t explain but, given where they were in the world, he also needed to satisfy himself that the ship’s security measures were adequate. She was equipped with pirate cages, welded steels bars that fitted over the ladders that offered access from the main deck to the superstructure and, then, the bridge. The cages were all locked.

It was the third time that Joe had been given command of the
M.V. Carolina
. They had cast off from Oman and were carrying a freight of new cars and trucks to Mombassa, Kenya. She was built in Russia over fifteen years ago and she was showing her age in places here and there: the discoloured paint, sticky windows that didn’t open, pieces of equipment that were often temperamental. She was six hundred feet long and ninety feet abeam, painted orange on the hull and white on the superstructure and she had two 40-foot cranes positioned fore and aft. Her top speed was nineteen knots and she was propelled by an enormous diesel engine. She was a big ship, a leviathan, with enough capacity to carry more than a thousand of the containers that would be hauled on the landward legs of their journeys by eighteen-wheeler rigs. They had been assigned the run that stopped in Djibouti in the Republic of Djibouti and then Mombasa, Kenya, on the Indian Ocean.