I gave her a cold smile. “I don’t see that you or your country are in any position to doubt. Your situation is hopeless now, and Abu Adil can’t make it any worse. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
“We are not rich,” said Akwete. “Not after the way King Olujimi bled our people and squandered our meager wealth. We have little gold—”
Kmuzu raised a hand. It was very unusual for him to interrupt. “Shaykh Reda is less interested in your gold than in power,” he said.
“Power?” asked Akwete. “What kind of power does he want?”
“He will study your situation,” said Kmuzu, “and then he will reserve certain information for himself.”
I thought I saw the black woman falter. “I insist on going with you to see this man. It is my right.”
Kmuzu and I looked at each other. We both knew how naive she was to think she had any rights at all in this situation. “All right,” I said, “but you’ll let me speak to Abu Adil first.”
She looked suspicious. “Why is that?”
“Because I say so.” I went outside with Kmuzu, where I waited in the warm sunlight while he went for the car. Madame Akwete followed me a moment later. She looked furious, but she said nothing more.
In the backseat of the sedan, I opened my briefcase and took Saied’s tough-guy moddy from the rack and chipped it in. It filled me with the confident illusion that nobody could get in my way from now on, not Abu Adil, Hajjar, Kmuzu, or Friedlander Bey.
Akwete sat as far from me as she could, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her head turned away from me. I wasn’t concerned with her opinion of me. I looked at Shaknahyi’s brown vinyl-covered notebook again. On the first page he had written Phoenix File in large letters. Beneath that there were several entries:
Ishaq Abdul-Hadi Bouhatta — Elwau Chami (Heart, lungs)
Andreja Svobik — Fatima Hamdan (Stomach, bowel, liver)
Abbas Karami — Nabil Abu Khalifeh (Kidneys, liver)
Blanca Mataro -
Shaknahyi had been sure that the four names on the left were somehow connected; but in Hajjar’s words, they were only “open files.” Under the names, Shaknahyi had written three Arabic letters: Alif, Lam, Mim, corresponding to the Roman letters A, L, M.
What could they mean? Were they an acronym? I could probably find a hundred organizations whose initials were A.L.M. The A and L might form the definite article, and the M might be the first letter in a name: someone called al-Mansour or al-Maghrebi. Or were the letters Shaknahyi’s shorthand, an abbreviation referring to a German (almani) or a diamond (almas) or something else? I wondered if I could ever discover what the three letters meant, without Shaknahyi to explain his code.
I slipped an audio chip into the car’s holosystem, then put the notebook and Tema Akwete’s envelope in the briefcase and locked it. While Umm Khalthoum, The Lady of the twentieth century, sang her laments, I pretended she was mourning Jirji Shaknahyi, crying for Indihar and their children. Akwete still stared out her window, ignoring me. Meanwhile, Kmuzu steered the car through the narrow, twisting streets of Hamidiyya, the slums that guarded the approach to Reda Abu Adil’s mansion.
After a ride of nearly half an hour, we turned into the estate. Kmuzu remained in the car, pretending to doze. Akwete and I got out and went up the ceramic-tiled path to the house. When Shaknahyi and I had been here before, I’d been impressed by the luxurious gardens and the beautiful house. I noticed none of that today. I rapped on the carved wooden door and a servant answered my summons immediately, giving me an insolent look but saying nothing.
“We have business with Shaykh Reda,” I said, pushing by him. “I come from Friedlander Bey.”
Thanks to Saied’s moddy, my manner was rude and brusque, but the servant didn’t seem to be upset. He shut the door after Tema Akwete and hurried ahead of me, going down a high-ceilinged corridor, expecting us to follow. We followed. He stopped before a closed door at the end of a long, cool passage. The fragrance of roses was in the air, the smell I’d come to identify with Abu Adil’s mansion. The servant hadn’t said another word. He paused to give me another insolent look, then walked away.
“You wait here,” I said, turning to Akwete.
She started to argue, then thought better of it. “I don’t like this at all,” she said.
“Too bad.” I didn’t know what was on the other side of the door, but I wasn’t going to get anywhere standing in the hallway with her, so I grabbed the doorknob and went through.
Neither Reda Abu Adil nor his secretary, Umar Abdul-Qawy, heard me come into the office. Abu Adil was in his hospital bed, as he was the previous time I’d seen him. Umar was leaning over him. I couldn’t tell what he was doing.
“Allah grant you health,” I said gruffly.
Umar jerked upright and faced me. “How did you get in here?” he demanded.
“Your servant brought me to the door.”
Umar nodded. “Kamal. I will have to speak to him.” He looked at me more closely. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t recall your name.”
“Marid Audran. I work for Friedlander Bey.”
“Ah yes,” said Umar. His expression softened just a little. “The last time, you came as a policeman.”
“I’m not actually a cop. I look after Friedlander Bey’s interests with the police.”
A little smile curled Umar’s lips. “As you wish. Are you looking after them today?”
“His interests and yours also.”
Abu Adil raised a feeble hand and touched Umar’s sleeve. Umar bent to hear the old man’s whispered words, then straightened up again. “Shaykh Reda invites you to make yourself comfortable,” said Umar. “We would have prepared suitable refreshments if you’d let us know you were coming.”
I looked around for a chair and seated myself. “A very upset woman came to Friedlander Bey’s house today,” I said. “She represents a revolutionary government that’s just socialized the Glorified Segu Kingdom.” I opened my briefcase, took out the envelope from the Songhay Republic, and tossed it to Umar.
Umar looked amused. “Already? I really thought Olujimi would last longer. I suppose once you’ve transferred all the wealth there is in a country to a foreign bank, there’s really no point in being king anymore.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about that.” The Half-Hay’s moddy was making it difficult for me to be civil to Umar. “By the terms of your agreement with Friedlander Bey, this country is under your authority. You’ll find all the relevant information in that packet. I left the woman fuming outside in the hallway. She seems like a cutthroat bitch. I’m glad you have to deal with her, and not me.”
Urnar shook his head. “They always try to order and reorganize our lives for us. They forget how much we can do for their cause if we’re in the right mood.”
I watched him play with the envelope, turning it around and around on the desk. A weak, drawn-out groan came from Abu Adil, but I’d seen too much real pain in the world to pity the suffering of a Proxy Hell maggot. I looked back at Umar. “If you can do something to make your master more alert,” I said, “Madame Akwete needs to speak with him. She seems to think the fate of the Islamic world rests on her shoulders alone.”
Umar gave me an ironic smile. “The Songhay Republic,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Tomorrow it will be a kingdom again or a conquered province or a fascist dictatorship. And no one will care.”
“Madame Akwete will care.”
That amused him even more. “Madame Akwete will be one of the first to go in the new wave of purges. But we’ve talked enough about her. Now we must discuss the matter of your compensation.”
I looked at him closely. “I didn’t have any thought of payment,” I said.