'Should have guessed,' said Felix and clicked his fingers for a taxi. It was only 9.30 in the morning, but the fat man still recognized when he was right over the limit.
Raf was shown to his table only seconds after two Americans were ejected to make space. The New Yorkers stood on the other side of the red silk rope, glaring and muttering until Felix went to talk to them. They left quickly after that.
'What did you say?'
'Me ... ?' Felix waited until the maître d' had finished arranging his plate so one octagonal edge exactly aligned with the table.
'Which one would Sir like?' The man asked, nodding to a trolley filled with pastries.
'All of them,' Felix said bluntly. 'But I'll take those three.' He pointed out three pieces of baklava dusted with crushed almonds. 'And bring me a proper-sized cup of coffee ...'
'Well?' Raf asked.
Felix looked down the street as if he might still see the departing New Yorkers through the press of bodies filling the sidewalk. 'Said you were the Khedive's personal hit man and they'd been hogging your table ... You're not, are you?' Before Raf could answer, Felix flipped up his hand. 'Don't feel you have to answer that, obviously.'
Huntsville had been simple. Raf had understood the rules. Most of which he'd kept and a few of which he'd broken. He'd taken who he'd become on remand and kept the identity, because it worked. The freaky hair and biker beard had been good protective camouflage. But trying to understand his new life was like pushing water up a hill. Every time he got near the top the fox curled up inside his head warned him it was the wrong hill or the water was gone. Raf was tired, more scared than he dared admit and he was alone in a city that got more, not less weird the more he knew about it. And then there was Hani ...
'Look,' said Raf, 'can I tell you something?'
Felix bit off another chunk of baklava and Raf took this for assent.
'That piece of paper,' said Raf, 'it's crap, all of it. I don't have weapons training. I'm not in the Sultan's employ. I've never even been to Stambul ...'
'Yeah, right.' Felix asked, swallowing his mouthful. 'So what were you doing in America?'
Raf didn't answer. He couldn't.
Felix sighed, but whatever he wanted to say was cut dead by a sudden buzz from his watch. 'You'd better get home,' he told Raf as he tapped the off button. 'Madame Mila's turned up again.'
'She called you?' It sounded unlikely even as Raf said it.
'No, that was Hani.'
'How did she know I was with you?' Raf asked.
The fat man scooped up the last sticky crumbs of baklava and stuffed them into his open mouth. 'More to the point,' he said, 'how did the kid get my number?'
Chapter Thirty-one
Seattle
'And where do you think you're going?'
ZeeZee paused on the steps while a doorman raked him with the gaze that hotel staff everywhere reserve for tramps, hawkers and delivery boys who've come to the wrong entrance.
'Got this.' ZeeZee lifted the cardboard crate a little higher and waited. What people expected to see was usually what they saw: it cut down on thinking time. ZeeZee had been about five when he'd worked that out. The doorman expected elegant diners and the occasional delivery boy too idiotic or ignorant to find his own way to the service entrance at the rear.
Which was what ZeeZee gave him.
'Where do you want it?' ZeeZee might sound stupid but he was being intelligent, more than intelligent ... Unintelligent people who disappointed Hu San usually ended up having accidents. While people intelligent enough to be disappointed in themselves mostly decided to suck on a gun barrel, to save Hu San the trouble.
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 loadingbay, 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.