Javier.
I need to go home to him. Alive.
“We couldn’t walk a hundred paces without being attacked. If there had been more of them, if there hadn’t been an alley, if someone had seen us…we might be dead now. We should be dead now,” Qhora said. “We have to be smarter. You were right. I’m sorry. Let’s go back to the Hellans. It would seem we do need them after all.”
“Indeed, it never hurts to have more eyes and hands in a dangerous place.”
“No. But it’s not their eyes or hands that will protect us while we’re walking about in broad daylight in this place,” Qhora said. “They may not be great fighters, but they have their uses. We’ll work with them until we can find the Italian again. If we ever find him again. He might be dead too by now, for all we know.”
They started back toward the Hellan Quarter.
“I doubt Salvator is dead, my lady,” Mirari said. “He doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who would die easily.”
“If Lorenzo had been another sort of man, he would have killed Salvator easily enough.”
“Maybe. But then he wouldn’t have been our Don Lorenzo.”
Qhora smiled sadly. That’s true enough.
Chapter 16. Shifrah
“This could take days.” Shifrah stood on the corner surveying the marketplace. Across an ocean of heads and hair and scarves and eyes, she saw only meaningless movement without faces.
“Do you know his usual haunts? Where does Aker live when he’s in town?” Kenan asked. “Who are his friends? What does he do for fun when he’s not working?”
Shifrah rolled her eye at him. Aker had been so much simpler than Kenan. Sure, they’d both been younger and simpler all around back then, but even still, Aker had never shown much depth in his virtues or his vices. “I suppose we should start with the brothels.”
“Brothels? Here? I thought they frowned on that sort of thing.”
Shifrah pushed away from the wall and led Kenan into the slow stream of bodies moving east down the boulevard. “In general, yes. The Aegyptians and their Eranian masters both frown on the sex trades, but not everyone here is a Mazdan, and not all the Mazdans are good Mazdans. So what happens when you make something illegal?”
“It goes underground,” Kenan muttered. “Are we talking about basements, back alleys, abandoned warehouses, and condemned mansions?”
“Only for the poor people.” Shifrah grinned at him over her shoulder. “Hey, get up here and walk next to me, not behind me.”
He quickened his pace to come alongside, which made it a bit harder to slip through the crowd but it couldn’t be helped.
“How long were the two of you together?” the detective asked.
“A year or so. We ran little jobs for Omar here in the city. We would pose as brother and sister, or newlyweds, or vagabonds, whatever was needed to get the job done.”
“To kill people?”
“Yes, Kenan, to kill people. I think it’s time you moved past all that.”
He was quiet for half a minute. “I thought you had moved past all that.”
“Of course not. In Tingis, I took my cues from you. I set up my own business. People hired you to find lost loved ones or to find evidence of wrong-doing, and people hired me to kill their enemies. If it makes you feel better, I usually only killed bad people. You would have approved of most of my jobs, I think.”
“No, I wouldn’t!”
“Really?” She ticked them off on her fingers. “A factory supervisor who pushed a worker into a furnace. A father who beat his son to death. An importer who doubled his sales volume by cutting his wine with toxic chemicals. A mother who locked her children in a basement to starve them to death. I saved the children, by the way. A student who bullied three schoolmates into committing suicide. I was surprised. I really was. After everything I had heard about it, I didn’t expect Marrakesh to be such a cesspool.”
“Shut up.” Kenan rubbed his eyes. “Just stop.”
“Why? Because it turns your world upside-down to think your society isn’t pure and beautiful? That your civilized people are just as cruel and monstrous as us dirty barbarians?”
Kenan sighed and squinted around the street. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I just needed to move my legs.” Shifrah took a long breath as she looked around them.
If I was Aker, where would I be? So, I’m Aker. I’ve just killed an Espani fencer, fled a country, started a gang war, and now I need…what? To hide, or run, or just brag about the whole thing?
“I want you to give it up.”
Shifrah stopped dead and turned slowly to look at him. “What?”
“You heard me. Give it up. Stop the contracts. Stop killing. If you want to help people, you can work with me to do it the right way, to work within the law,” Kenan said.
“No.” Shifrah started walking again.
Kenan kept pace beside her. “Why not? Damn it, why not? I want us to be together, I want to make this work, but you’ve got to meet me in the middle on this.”
“The middle? How is giving up my career the middle? I’m pretty sure giving up my career is your side.” She kept walking. There was a familiar itch in her fingers, the itch to solve the problem at hand with a stiletto under the arm straight into the heart. But there was no rage.
Why not? I was always angry at Aker and Salvator. Why not Kenan?
“Whatever the middle is, it has to be no more killing,” he said.
“No.” She walked a little faster, still scanning the crowd with one corner of her mind wondering where she should be going.
I got angry at Aker because we were always competing, always trying to outdo each other, always vying for Omar’s approval. I got angry when he won, or made me doubt myself. It seems like I was angry at him more days than not. But not Kenan.
“Why not? Why not give it up, if not for your own safety then for me?”
She stopped and looked back at him. He had stopped a few paces behind. “If this is how you feel, why are you even with me?”
He looked lost, his eyes searching the hot cobblestones for answers, his empty hands making small half-hearted gestures, his shoulders rolling in a serious of confused shrugs. Then he looked straight at her. “Because I love you.”
She looked straight back at him. “You love me? But not where I come from, or how I grew up, or who I’ve been with, or what I’ve done, or how I live, or how I feel about how I live? Is that right?”
If it was possible, he managed to look even more lost. “Yes.”
“If none of that, then what? What about me do you love?” She walked back toward him and tapped her eye patch and the scarred skin around it. “Do you love this?” She groped her breasts. “Or maybe these?”
“Stop it.”
“Then what?” She stared at him, waiting. When he had no answer, she turned away and continued walking.
I got angry at Sal because he was so damned good at everything. Languages. Swords. Knives. Lying. Stealing. Planning. Singing. And everything had to be his way, his rules, his orders, and I put up with him because he opened the right doors for me. It was fine at the beginning, but by the end I was ready to leave his headless corpse in a ditch. But not Kenan.
A moment later she glanced back and saw that Kenan was once again following her a few steps behind. As she studied his face, she tried to define what it was that she thought of him, what she felt about him. But only a great echoing silence answered her. Once upon a time, he had been exciting and different, young and dangerous. She had thought to follow him into strange places and exotic adventures. In the space of a week she had seen him defy his commanding officer, cleverly free two captives from an Espani jail, cold-bloodedly sabotage a warship to send a thousand men to their deaths, defy another commanding officer, and then renounce his commission and establish his own private investigation firm. In one week.
But since then, nothing. The same work. The same home, the same food. No more defiance, no more adventures. She had accepted that. For a time, it was convenient. A place to sleep and a pair of trustworthy eyes to watch her back, and a competent pair of hands to mind the rest of her body. But it was over now. They could blame time or fate or Aker, but it was over.