The Exile Kiss (20 page)

And that's just what he did. A hefty bodyguard type entered first, followed by Shaykh Reda in a wheelchair, which was pushed by his little Kenneth. Following them came two more bruisers..! have no doubt that the shaykh watched our arrival from somewhere and made up a guest list of his employees equal to our number. Five against five.
"I'm happy you've chosen to honor my house," said Abu Adil. "We should do this sort of thing more often. Perhaps then there'd be less tension between us."
"We thank you for the invitation, O Shaykh," I said warily.
Kenneth was looking at me appraisingly. Then he gave a quiet laugh and shook his head. He had nothing but contempt for me, and I didn't know why. Maybe if I broke his fingers and toes for him, he'd lose that smirk. It was a harmless fantasy, I thought.
Servants brought in platters of couscous, kefta kabobs, roast lamb, and vegetables in wonderful, succulent sauces. "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, may it be pleasant to you!" said Shaykh Reda.
"May your table last forever, O Father of Generosity," said Friedlander Bey.
Papa and I ate sparingly, watching for any sign of treachery from Abu Adil or his musclemen. Bin Turki ate as if he'd never seen food before. I'm sure he'd never seen such a banquet.
' I whispered to him, "Shaykh Reda is probably trying to seduce you away from our household." I didn't really mean it. It was a joke.
Bin Turki turned white. "You don't think my loyalty is for sale, do you?" His hands began to tremble with sup-pressed emotion.
"I was just kidding, my friend," I said.
"Ah," he said, "good. Your city humor is sometimes incomprehensible to me. In fact, I don't even know what's happening here tonight."
"You're not the only one," I told him.
Abu Adil's goons said nothing, as usual. Kenneth said nothing, either, although he rarely turned his gaze away from me. We ate in silence, as if we were waiting for some dreadful trap to spring shut around us. Finally, when the meal was almost at an end, Shaykh Reda stood and began to speak.
"Once again," he said, "it's my great pleasure to pres-ent a little gift to Marid Audran. Let us give thanks to Allah that he and Friedlander Bey have returned safely from their ordeal."
There was a chorus of "Allah be praised!" around the table.
Abu Adil reached down and got a gray cardboard box. "This," he said, opening it, "is the uniform that befits your rank of lieutenant in the Jaish. You command three platoons of loyal patriots, and lately they've grown restive, wondering why you do not attend our rallies and exer-cises. One reason, I thought, was that you didn't have a proper outfit. Well, you no longer have that excuse. Shaykh Marid, wear this in good health!"
I was struck speechless. This was even more ludicrous than the original commission. I didn't know what to say, so I just stammered a few words of thanks and accepted the boxed uniform. A lieutenant's insignia had already been added to it.
Shortly thereafter, when none of us could eat another thing, Shaykh Reda excused himself and wheeled out of the dining room, followed by Kenneth and his three goons.
Bin Turki bent toward me and whispered, "What was wrong with him? Why is he in a wheelchair? Surely he's wealthy enough to afford any sort of medical aid. Even in the Rub al-Khali, we heard marvelous tales of the mira-cles that are wrought by civilized physicians."
I spread my hands. "He's not really an invalid," I ex-plained in a low voice. "His 'hobby' is collecting personal-ity modules recorded from actual sufferers from all sorts of fatal illnesses. It's a perversion called Proxy Hell. He can enjoy—if that's the right word—the worst pain and disablement, and pop the moddy out whenever it gets to be too much. I suppose he's got an unusual tolerance for pain, though."
"That's contemptible," whispered bin Turki, frowning.
"That's Shaykh Reda Abu Adil," I said.
In two or three minutes, we were all walking back to our car. "How about that," exclaimed Tariq. "The one time we're ready for him and come into his house armed to the teeth, he just serves us a dandy meal and drops a uniform on Shaykh Marid."
"What do you think that means?" asked Youssef.
"I trust we'll find out eventually," said Papa. I knew his words were true. There had to be something devious happening at that meal, but I couldn't imagine what.
And did it all mean that we were now obliged to have them over sometime? If this kept going, sooner or later the two houses would end up going to movies and watch-ing prizefights on the holoset and drinking beer together. I couldn't face that.
JL waited for Yasmin so that we could have our talk, but she never came into work that night. I went home about two o'clock in the morning, and let Chiri close up. There was no breakfast meeting with Papa the next day, so I told Kmuxu I wanted to sleep a little later. He gave me permission.
When I awoke, I eased into the morning. I took a long, hot bath and reread one of my favorite Lutfy Gad murder mysteries. Gad was the greatest Palestinian writer of the last century, and I guess now and then I uncon-sciously imitate his great detective, al-Qaddani. Some-times I fall into that clipped, ironic way al-Qaddani spoke. None of my friends ever noticed, though, because as a group they're not terribly well read.
When I emerged from the tub, I dressed and skipped the well-balanced breakfast Kmuzu'd prepared for me. He gave me a grim look, but he'd learned over many months that if I didn't feel like eating, I wouldn't eat. Unless Papa demanded it.
Kmuzu silently handed me an envelope. Inside was a letter from Friedlander Bey addressed to Lieutenant Hajjar, requiring that I be reinstated on the city's police force for the duration of my investigation of Khalid Max-well's death. I read it through and nodded. Papa had an uncanny ability to anticipate that sort of thing. He also knew that he could "require" something of the police and it would be done.
I put the letter in my pocket and relaxed in a comfort-able black leather chair. I decided it was time to check in with Wise Counselor. The Counselor was a personality module that gauged my current emotional state, and of-fered a super-realistic fantasy that expressed my problems and offered a symbolic—sometimes indecipherable—so-lution. "Bismillah," I murmured, and reached up to chip the moddy in.
Audran was transformed into the great Persian poet, Hafiz. He'd led a life of luxury, and his poems also con-tained imagery that stricter Muslims objected to. Over the years, Audran had made a large number of enemies, so that when he died, the strict Muslims argued that his body should .be denied the blessing of the traditional funeral prayer. Their reasoning condemned Audran with his own words.
"Has the poet not written about unholy practices such as imbibing alcoholic beverages and indulging in promis-cuous sex?" they asked. "Listen to his poetry:
"Come here, come here, cup-bearer! Pass around and give the cup, For love looked free and easy at first, But too many troubles have come up."
This fueled a long debate between Audran s enemies and his admirers. Finally, it was decided that the correct course of action should be dictatedby a random reference to his own poems. To that end, a large selection of Audran's verses were written out on slips of paper and thrown into an urn. An innocent child was asked to reach into the urn and pick one verse. This is the couplet that the child drew:
In the funeral of Audran gladly take part, For sinful as he was, for Heaven doth he start.
The verdict was acknowledged by both sides, and so Audran was given a funeral with all proper ceremonies. When the story came to its end, Audran reached up and popped the moddy out.
I shuddered. Those fantasies that showed me dead and hovering over my own funeral always gave me the creeps. Now I had to decide what it meant, how it related to me. I hadn't written a poem in fifteen years. I filed the vision away as something to discuss Real Soon Now with Kmuzu.
It was time to start digging up information about Khalid Maxwell and his violent death. The first step, I decided, was to go to the copshop that oversaw the activi-ties in the Budayeen, where Lieutenant Hajjar was in charge. I didn't hate Hajjar, he just made my skin crawl. He wasn't the sort of person who derived pleasure from pulling the wings from flies—he was the sort of person who'd go into the next room and watch someone else do it, through a secret peephole.
Kmuzu drove me in the cream-colored Westphalian sedan to the precinct house on Walid al-Akbar Street. As usual, there was a crowd of boys on the sidewalk, and I waded through them flinging coins left and right. Still
they begged, chanting, "Open to us, O Generous One[" I liked the kids. It wasn't so long ago that I myself haunted the edges of crowds, pleading for money to feed myself. Somewhere along the line the roles were reversed, and now I was the big rich guy. I was rich, all right, but I never forgot my origins. I didn't begrudge the kids their baksheesh.
I entered the police station and headed toward the computer room on the second floor. I was braced a couple of times by uniformed men, but I said nothing, just show-ing them the letter with Friedlander Bey's signature. The cops all melted aside like phantoms.
I remembered very well how to operate the com-puters. I even recalled the secret backdoor password,
Miramar.
The staff in this station house had rather re-laxed standards, and I was confident they hadn't gotten around to changing that password in months. I guess the risk of an outsider.getting into the police files was prefera-ble to making the entire force memorize a new word.
I sat down at the bqat-up old Annamese data deck and began murmuring commands. The female sergeant who acted as the data librarian saw me and hurried over. "I'm sorry, sir," she said in a voice that wasn't sorry at all, "but these decks are not accessible to the public."
"You don't remember me, do you?" I asked.
She squinted one eye and considered. "No, so you'll have to leave."
I took out Papa's letter and showed it to her. "I've just got a few minutes' work to do here," I said.
"I'll have to check on this," she said, folding the letter again and giving it back to me. "No one's spoken to me about any of this. I'll call the lieutenant. In the meantime, leave that data deck alone."
I nodded, knowing that I'd have to wait for her to work her way up through the chain of command. It didn't take long. In a few minutes, Lieutenant Hajjar himself came huffing into the data library. "What do you think you're doing, Audran?" he shouted. His expression was a black scowl.
I held out Papa's letter. I wasn't about to stand up or try to explain myself. The letter could speak for me, and I felt like exerting a little dominance. Hajjar needed to be put in his place every once in a while.
He snatched the paper from my hand and read 'through it once and then again. "What's this?" he said harshly.
"It's a letter. From you know who, you've already read it."
He glared at me and crumpled the sheet of paper into a ball. "This letter don't cut it with me, Audran. Not at all. And what are you doing at large? You were formally ex-iled. I should take you into custody right now."
I shook my finger at him and smiled. "Nuh uh, Hajjar. The amir's granted us an appeal, and you know it."
"Still," he said.
"Still," I said, taking the crumpled paper and holding it against his temple. "You really don't think this letter cuts it, huh?"
"No way." He sounded much less sure this time.
"Well," I said calmly, "Papa has plenty of people who
could
cut you."
Hajjar licked his lips. "Well, what the hell do you want, then?"
I smiled in a completely phony friendly way. "I just want to use this data deck for a minute or two."
"I suppose that could be arranged. What are you try-ing to dig up?"
I spread my hands. "I want to clear our names, of course. I want to find out what you know about Khalid Maxwell."
A look of fear came and went in his eyes. "I can't allow that," he said. Now his voice shook noticeably. "It's classi-fied police business."
I laughed. "I'm classified police," I said. "At least for the moment."
"No," he said, "I won't allow it. That case is closed."
"I'm reopening it." I shook the crumpled paper at him.
"Right," he said, "go ahead. But there are going to be repercussions from this. I'm warning you."
"I'm
hoping
for repercussions, Hajjar. I advise you to get out of the way of them."
He stared at me for a few seconds. Then he said,
"Yallah,
your mother must've been a syphilitic camel, Audran, and your father was a Christian bastard."
"Close," I said, and I turned my back on him and continued to murmur commands to the data deck. I sup-pose Hajjar stalked away.
The first thing I did was call up the file on Khalid Maxwell. I didn't learn much. Evidently, the file had been tampered with and edited until there was very little infor-mation left. I did find out that Maxwell had been with the police force for four years, that he'd earned a commenda-tion for bravery, and that he'd been killed while off-duty. According to the cop computer, he died while interceding in a violent argument between Friedlander Bey and my-self in front of Maxwell's house at 23 Shams Alley.
That was nonsense, of course. I didn't even know where Shams Alley was; I was sure it wasn't in the Budayeen. Maxwell was the second police officer from Hajjar's precinct to be killed during the year. That didn't look good for Hajjar, but of course it looked even worse for poor Maxwell.
I had the data deck print out the file, and then I passed a little time by poking into other files. Lieutenant Hajjar's dossier gave even less information than it had the last time I looked. All mention of his own difficulties with the force's Internal Affairs Departmentliad been erased. There wasn't much left but his name, age, and address.
My own file listed me as the killer of Khalid Maxwell (released pending appeal). That reminded me that the clock was running, and there were only a few weeks left of my freedom. It would be very hard to prove my innocence —and Papa's—from inside a prison cell or with my head 'on the chopping block. I decided to stir things up a little and see what happened.
When I left the station house, I found Kmuzu sitting in the car a little farther up Walid al-Akbar Street. I got into the back seat and told him to drive me to the Budayeen's eastern gate. When we got there, I sent him home because I didn't know how long my business would take. When Kmuzu objected, I told him I could get a cab to come home. He frowned and said he'd rather wait for me, but I just told him in a firm voice to do what I said.