Catavina didn’t have much to do though. He was along to make sure no one left before Detective ibn Tali said they could leave. I’d never met ibn Tali before, but I knew there’d been a big shakeup in the police department, particularly in the copshop that oversaw activities in the Budayeen. The previous man in charge there, a real motherfucker by the name of Hajjar, had come to a bad end at the hands of an unruly mob. I’d had a little to do with that, and I hoped the current lieutenant, whoever he was, didn’t hold it against me.
Because I’d discovered the body and because I’d phoned the police, ibn Tali wanted to talk with me first. That was just fine, because by then I really wanted to get out of the club and go home. I told the detective everything I could remember about the party from the time we closed Chiriga’s at ten o’clock. I mentioned that I’d never seen the victim before, that he’d come in with Baby and Kitty, that the two girls had left to seek their fortune elsewhere before he’d turned stiff, and that I couldn’t imagine anyone at the party had any sort of motive to kill the poor bastard in the first place.
Ibn Tali jotted that all down in his notebook. “I’m gonna listen to everybody else’s story,” he said. “Then I’m gonna come back to you, and you’re gonna tell me yours all over again. That’ll give you a chance to put in the little bits you forgot about the first time through.”
“Excuse me, officer.” A very sleepy looking man in a pale yellow gallebeya and plain white checked keffiya had come up to the booth where we were sitting. I wondered how he’d gotten past Sergeant Catavina.
“It’s detective,” ibn Tali said, “not officer. And wait your turn. We’re all gonna be here for a long time, so just make yourself comfortable.”
The newcomer shoved a sheet of paper at ibn Tali. It must’ve been a magic sheet of paper, because as he read it, the detective’s face became more and more unhappy. Ibn Tali stood up, and the two men moved away a few feet and conferred in low voices. The detective shook his head, the yellow gallebeya insisted. This went on for a minute or two. At last, ibn Tali looked disgusted, muttered something under his breath, and turned back to me.
“Audran,” he said, “this guy’s from the city. High up in the city, one of the amir’s special assistants. He’s tellin’ me you can go home now. Thank Friedlander Bey for that when you see him; but look, I ain’t done with you. I hear you’re goin’ into the hospital today, so I’ll probably be there waitin’ when the anesthetic wears off.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it, detective.” I stood up, and I almost passed out right in front of everybody. That was the last thing I remembered about last night.
No wonder Kmuzu was treating me with such badly concealed disdain. I had been pathetic last night, and it was my bad luck to be in that shape during a moment of crisis. Now, sober again, I was frankly humiliated, and I didn’t need any more of Kmuzu’s silent disregard. I felt like standing under the shower and letting the hot water beat down on me for half an hour.
“Yaa Sidi,” he said, “before you — “
I waved at him. “Later, Kmuzu. Let me get cleaned up.”
“Wait, yaa Sidi! There’s — “
I went into the bathroom and caught sight of myself in the mirror. I was going to have to stop doing that; I looked as terrible as I felt. Then I saw that I couldn’t take a shower, because the bathtub was already filled, with steaming warm water and bubbles.
And in the bubbles, relaxing luxuriously, was Abdul-Hassan, the American kid. When he saw me, he gave me a slow, languorous smile.
Kmuzu had warned me — “It gets worse.” I wished it would stop getting worse pretty goddamn soon.
Introduction to
The World as We Know It
George wrote this one for an anthology of future crime stories, attempting to devise a kind of crime that wouldn’t even have been thought of in earlier days and ages. He had the idea for Consensual Realities long before; the Futurecrime anthology just gave him a way to play with it, to link it to something.
When he wrote The Exile Kiss, George planned out two more Budayeen novels to complete the character arcs of Marîd, Friedlander Bey, Indihar, and the complex network of friendships, rivalries, and enmities in which they exist. Though the narrator of this story never says it, he is, of course, Marîd Audran — Marîd after the end of the unwritten, untitled fifth book, when he is an outcast hiding from Friedlander Bey’s victorious enemies.
An older, tireder, and less cocky Marîd, simultaneously looked down upon and looked up to by the newcomer punks of a crime scene that is as far beyond Marîd’s own street-punk days as the science fiction of the nineties was beyond that of the seventies, when George first burst upon the scene in the forefront of the so-called New Wave.
The Grand Master as Has-Been.
But still able — marginally — to hold his own.
— Barbara Hambly
The World as We Know It
THE SETUP COULD HAVE BEEN PRETTY CLEVER with a little more thought, I have to admit. Using some of the newest-generation cerebral hardware, an ambitious but dangerously young man, a recent parolee — you know, a low-level street punk, much as I’d been once upon a time — had stolen a small crate from Mahmoud’s warehouse. The punk hadn’t even known what was in the crate. It turned out, if I can trust Mahmoud, that the crate contained a shipment of recently developed biological agents.
These bios had two major uses: They could promote the healing of traumatic wounds while making the attendant pain disappear for a while, without subjecting the patient to the well-documented narcotic disadvantages we’ve all come to know and love; or what was contained in the many disposable vials could easily be reconfigured to wipe out entire cities, using very small doses — thus becoming the most powerful neurological weapons ever devised. The small crate was labeled to be shipped to Holland, where the Dutch revolution was still at its full, vicious, inhuman peak.
Of course, Mahmoud was frantic to get his crate back. He and a few of my old friends, from the good old days when I had power and could move through the city without fear of being dusted by my many enemies, knew where I was now living. I’d left the Budayeen and adopted a new identity. Mahmoud had come to me and offered me money, which I didn’t need — I’d lost just about everything, but I’d carefully protected the cash I’d acquired — or contacts and agents, which I did need, and desperately. I agreed to look into the matter for Mahmoud.
It wasn’t very difficult. The thief was such a beginner that I almost felt like taking him aside and giving him a few pointers. I restrained that impulse, however.
The kid, who told me his name was Musa, had left a trail through the city that had been easy as hell for a predator like me to follow. I know the kid’s name wasn’t Musa, just as he knew my name wasn’t the one I gave him when I finally caught up to him. Names and histories were not important information to either of us at the time. All that mattered was the small crate.
I dragged him back to my office, far from the Budayeen, in a neighborhood called Iffatiyya. This part of the city, east beyond the canal, had been reduced to rubble in the last century, the fifteenth after the Hegira, the twenty-second of the Christian era. It was now about a hundred years later than that, and at last some of the bombed-out buildings were being reclaimed. My office was in one of them.
I was there because most of my former friends and associates had leaped to the other side, to the protection of Shaykh Reda Abu Adil. There were very few places that were safe for me back in the walled quarter, and few people I could trust. Hell, I didn’t really trust Mahmoud — never had — except he was reliably, scrupulously straightforward when large sums of money were involved.