“Skipper?” Moxie is looking at you. “Anything I can do to help?”
“No, just as long as you’re clear on where we’re going. I’ve got to go out to the airport to meet a flight in. Cover my back?”
He sketches a videogame rendition of a salute. “Yes, ma’am!”
“Cool.” You finish reading the IM stack, then your tenuous control fractures like a sheet of toughened glass held for too long over a naked flame of rage as you see your contact details. “Shit.”
“Skipper?”
“That’s all I fucking need this morning. All.”
“What—”
“Nothing you can do, Moxie.” You get a handle on it fast, but for a moment you’re blurring with bloody-eyed rage. Because you recognize the name on the passenger manifest, the Eurocop who’s coming to visit and who Dodgy Dickie has detailed you to organize the disposition of. It’s the man who cost you your career, five years ago.
Kemal.
ANWAR: Cousin Tariq
Wednesday evening in the Hussein household.
You have retreated upstairs to your den because your mother-in-law has come round to visit Bibi (who is home early from work), and she’s in a state—utterly inconsolable, in fact. Most of the time Sameena is okay for an old bat, unless you happen to be single: She is afflicted with Bridezilla-by-proxy syndrome and is always in search of a wedding to organize. But tonight she’s wailing and pulling her hair, upset beyond all reason. She supplements Uncle Taleb’s income by housekeeping—to keep it respectable, she only works for gay men. Anyway, she found one of her clients dead on the bathroom floor this Tuesday, and it gave her a funny turn, and every evening since she’s come round to angst and wail like a one-woman banshee convention. You’d think she’d be getting over it by now, but no: If anything, it gets worse.
Right now, despite Bibi plying her with tea and sympathy, she’s so far out of her tree that the squirrels are sending out search parties: After half an hour of her wailing, you finally crack, climb the loft ladder, and pull it up behind you. Maybe you should tell Bibi to bring home some Valium from work? Nobody would miss it, and it’d be a small mercy for the old woman. But right now, her sobbing is getting on your tits mightily, so you stick your music library on random play, bury your phone under a cushion, and haul out Tariq’s spare pad from behind the slowly bubbling beer bucket with the vague idea of seeing if he’s got any work for you.
As soon as you open it up and get online via the dodgy directional aerial he set you up with, he calls you. “Anwar, my man! How are you hanging?”
Tariq has this annoying habit of trying to talk slang like the hep rappers and gangsta cats of previous generations. It’s annoying because he gets it badly wrong every time. He wears a two-sizes-too-small porkpie hat and dyes his moustache orange because he thinks it’s cool (plus, it annoys the fuck out of Imam Hafiz—not to mention his elder sister Bibi). He also takes the piss out of everybody. What’s really galling is that you’ve got a sneaky feeling that he might be onto something. Certainly, Tariq’s gone further and got more in twenty-four years than you have in nearly thirty; otherwise, why would you be working for him?
“I’m hanging fine, cuz, just fine. But your mother is another matter. She is down in the kitchen with Bibi, and I am up in the attic and close to jamming cotton wool in my ears, I can tell you. She’s fucking lost it, she’s lost the plot, cuz.”
“Did you know the stiff she found was murdered? It’s on the Spurtle’s newscrawl, the filth are all over it. That’s some heavy shit right there, my man—and that’s before you get into the juicier rumours about how he was whacked. Fucking chancer if you ask me, fucker deserved it. But it’s hard on Mom, walking in on him while she was about her scodgies… Listen, I’ve got a job on. Do you have time to look over some templates for me? I’m customizing a chat room for Ali, and I need someone to whack the scripts and try to make them fall over.”
“Which Ali are you working for—short, fat Ali, tall’n’bearded Ali, or psycho punk Ali?”
“You know fucking well I don’t work with Shorty McFatso, and Skinny McBeardy’s a fucking space cadet—got no money because he spends everything he can scrounge on maryjane.”
“What, he’s got a Scottish girl-friend now?”
Tariq rolls his eyes as if you’ve said something dumb, then changes the subject: “I’m putting this board together on behalf of our mutual friend Ali the Punk, capisce? I just need a unit tester to walk the scripts over it. If you can spare me a few hours from your critically important diplomatic duties—”
“If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.” It’s not as if you’re busy in the office. “I can start as soon as you like.” You don’t know much about Punk Ali, but you’re pretty sure you’d have heard if he was a waster.
Tariq tilts his head slightly, casting his eyes in shadow: You can see the organized firefly flicker of his oh-so-posh contact lenses, retinal-scanning displays for the plugged-in generation. “Can you get away for an hour or two?” he asks.
“Guess so.” Anything to get away from the fearful caterwauling downstairs. “Where do you want to meet?”
“You know the Halfway House, on Fleshmarket Close?”
Of course you know it; it’s one of the Gnome’s favoured hang-outs precisely because it’s half-underground, in a microwave shadow, where mobiles work erratically and GPS doesn’t reach. Stands to reason Tariq would know about it, too. “Sure. See you there in half an hour?”
Tariq cuts the connection. You switch off the pad and lay it aside, then peer at the beer bucket. The wee transparent plastic hingmy—airlock? But you thought only spaceships had them—farts at you. It smells of yeast and a faint tang of something metallic. You fight back the urge to lift the lid and sneak a look inside (the brewing FAQs were all very insistent that you shouldna do that). “Sleep tight,” you admonish it, then you drop the trap-door and scramble down the ladder and out into the night.
It’s evening, but you need sunglasses: That’s Edinburgh in late spring/ early summer. The sun’s low, but staying up later and later, and the local pagans will be doing that infidel sex-festival thing that the local Christians get so hot and bothered about on Calton Hill in a couple of weeks. You pull your shoes and suit jacket on and trudge up to the high street, then down the steep and garish shop-frontage of Cockburn Street to the top of Fleshmarket Close. You walk down the steps carefully, clutching the handrail until you come to the landing with the Halfway House. Tariq’s in the back booth, of course, nursing a pint of heavy. You nod at him, then turn to the bar and order a lager. A minute later, you’re squeezing in knee to knee with Cousin Porkie McWideboy. He raises his glass to you cheerily.
“I didn’t know you drank here,” you tell him. Which is the truth.