Budayeen Nights (19 page)

Jân Muhammad hurried outside. The deep blue sky of the false dawn and a cool breeze gave the morning an innocence that was pure illusion. Jân Muhammad knelt briefly on the edge of the cliff, glaring down in frustration, until a few shots from below made him scuttle back. That gave him an idea. Not far away, the weapons of the Mohâjerân he had killed were stacked together until headquarters sent someone to collect them. Jân Muhammad grabbed a plastic and alloy-steel automatic rifle. He examined it quickly; it was in disgraceful condition, but with luck it wouldn’t blow up in his face. He lay down with his head raised just high enough to see over the edge.

Jân Muhammad waited for a chance to avenge the insult they had paid him. When he saw a flicker of motion, he squeezed off a few rounds and was gratified to hear a shrill cry of pain. He still had his command moddy chipped in, so he was getting an unbroken view of the pass from one end to the other. He could see where each rebel had concealed himself. They had neutralized his data deck and his heavy weapons, but they were wrong if they thought he was going to admit defeat. He would fight even if he were reduced to throwing rocks and stones. He grinned as he looked down patiently from the cyberlink, down at his enemy. They didn’t realize how exposed they were.

Besides the rifles, Jân Muhammad had captured a number of grenades as well. He began tossing them down into the Tang-e-Kuffâr, flushing some of the refugees from hiding. The Mohâjerân decided to chance a break, and as they sprinted through the pass, Jân Muhammad picked them off in their panic. He had been trained to use cyberlinked guns, not conventional infantry weapons; but now the refugees were learning how badly they had underestimated him. When the sun first edged over the broad, parched plain, he had accounted for half the Mohâjerân in the party.

As the morning stretched on, he got a few more as they attempted to rush by him, and the rest when they withdrew up the winding, unprotected path. He stood up at last, his neck muscles aching and stiff. He hadn’t given up, although the refugees had taken away his advantage. Even if the Mohâjerân tried storming his bunker again, he wasn’t afraid. Without the cyber weapons, he was still confident that he could keep them from overrunning his position. He wondered what Sergeant Abadani would say when he heard that Jân Muhammad, using antique guns and toy rifles, had beaten a unit of Mohâjerân.

Hours later, while he was frying some flour in lard and chewing on a greasy stick of dried mutton, Rostam’s voice called to him from the bottom of the hill. The old man sounded frightened. That made Jân Muhammad laugh, but it was a somber and dangerous laugh. Jân Muhammad was curious if Rostam had been sent to try another scheme of some kind. The old man was a fool, and Jân Muhammad might have been amused, except he understood clearly that if Rostam had been successful, Jân Muhammad might well be dead now.

“Yaa sarbaaz!” Rostam’s voice quavered in the hot, still air. “Yaa sarbaaz, we must talk!”

Jân Muhammad kept scraping the browning flour in the pan. He added another spoonful of lard and watched it melt. “Rostam?” he called.

“We must talk!” The spy was terrified.

“Why do you say that? What do we have to talk about?”

“Don’t act that way, aga. Please let me explain. Let me come Up.”

“Explain if you want to, but do it from out there. This bunker stinks enough as it is.”

“I can’t just stand here and shout at you, aga.”

“Why the hell not?”

There was a pause. Jân Muhammad glanced out and saw Rostam shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He held his large stick, but the mule was nowhere to be seen. “Listen, O worthy one: It is true that I did as the Mohâjerân ordered, but I was forced to do it. They threatened me. I’m many times a grandfather, I’m all used up. I can’t stand up to strong young men when they force their way into my home.”

“They gave you something to put into my data deck?”

“Yes, aga.”

Jân Muhammad muttered a curse. “Did you think you were helping me, when you did what they told you?”

Another pause. “No, aga, but I had no choice! The shopkeeper in the village, he was with them, and he said that I’d die slowly in front of everyone if I did not cooperate. He said that he’d never sell me another loaf of bread, another bottle of wine for solace in my old age.”

“But you never thought to warn me. You were more afraid of this shopkeeper and the refugees than all of the Mahdi’s army. You are worse than the Mohâjerân; you have refused the service of the blessed Mahdi. You think only of your worthless belly, when you were given an opportunity to benefit the deputy of Allah.”

“I was afraid, aga!”

Jân Muhammad spat in disgust. “You’ve made that very clear, old man. You threw in your lot with the Mohâjerân, so now you’ll have to ask for protection from them. I wish you luck.”

“But, sarbaaz, the entire village…when they heard, they drove me out, into the desert—“

“And what do you want from me? Sympathy?”

Rostam began to weep. “I can’t live without food, without water. Where will I go?”

Jân Muhammad had stopped paying attention. He tapped a few keys on the data deck.

Do you wish to fire submachine guns
?

Enter l=yes, 0=no

Jân Muhammad typed 1.

“Sarbaaz!
Help
me! I beg you, as one servant of Allah to another!”

“You submit when it serves your purpose,” shouted the soldier. “And when it doesn’t serve your purpose, you break every law of the Prophet, may blessings be upon his name and peace.”

Do you wish continuous fire
?

Enter l=yes, 0-no

Jân Muhammad typed 1.

“Pity me!” Rostam was hysterical. He had fallen to his knees in the stony soil, and now he raised his arms in supplication. “Think of your own father. Would you treat
him
this way?”

“My own father would not have left me weak and vulnerable to my enemies, and he wouldn’t have taken sides with the haters of Allah.”

To commence firing on your mark, type 1
.

“Bismillah!” screamed Rostam. He fell forward, laying his forehead in the dust, trembling with terror.

Jân Muhammad’s finger descended over the keys, hesitated, then hung motionless in the air. He could not bring himself to murder this wretched old man. “Go!” he called. “Get off my hill! Go starve to death in the wilderness! Walk to Jerusalem and ask the forgiveness of the Mahdi!”

“‘Whoever forgives and amends, he shall have his just reward from Allah,’” quoted Rostam. He staggered off, away from the young man he had betrayed, away from the village that had turned him out.

Jân Muhammad closed his eyes tightly, wondering at his sudden change of heart. “In the profane mouth of an unbeliever,” he murmured, “even the words of the Prophet can lose their beauty.” Behind him, unheeded, his poor midday meal burned and was ruined. With his augmented vision, Jân Muhammad watched the old man until he was out of sight, swallowed up by the seared and withered expanse of waste.

Marîd Throws a Party

This was the first portion—two chapters—of the fourth Budayeen book, Word of Night, and the only part to actually have been written. When I met George in 1990 (not counting the several times we’d been in the same room and HADN’T met, but that’s another story), he was working on these. The Exile Kiss had just been published, and the editors asked him for an outline of Word of Night (untitled, then) so they could get a cover-painting done. George didn’t have an outline, but since they needed to know SOMETHING that happened in the book, he said it started out with a party at Marîd’s club, which was all he knew about what happened in the book at the time. Later he and I worked out an outline for it, a wonderful story which I had hoped, in the fullness of time, to see through to fruition.

When he died in 2002, these first two chapters were still all he had written.

Brilliant chapters, and what promised to be a wonderful book.

—
Barb Hambly

I KNOW THE MOST FRIGHTENING WORDS IN THE
world.

Imagine waking up and having someone say, “Do you know what you
did
last night?” I shiver just thinking about it. I’ve heard those words before, and I pray to Allah I never hear them again.

It was Kmuzu who murmured that horrible question to me one morning. Kmuzu was a black African given to me by Friedlander Bey. I had not wanted a slave, just as I hadn’t wanted any of the other things Friedlander Bey had given me. Still, it just wasn’t good policy to turn Papa down. Everyone in the Budayeen—hell, everyone in the entire
city
—knew that.

Over the last few years, however, Kmuzu had become quite a lot more than a slave to me. He was someone I’d come to depend on; God well knew that I couldn’t always depend on myself. I needed someone like Kmuzu to look out for me from time to time. He was loyal and honest, a good man for a Christian.

Despite that, I could’ve done without the disapproval in his voice when he woke me up. I looked at him, my eyes bleary and my mouth tasting like I’d French-kissed a pigeon coop. “Yallah,” I groaned, feeling a booming throb in my head just behind my eyes.

“You need some breakfast, yaa Sidi,” Kmuzu said.

That was an infidel’s answer for everything: food. I didn’t want food, not ever again. The whole idea of breakfast was already nauseating me. “All right, you’re going to tell me anyway,” I said. “I’m a tough guy, I can take it. What’d I do last night?”

“There was a party.” He watched me trying to maneuver myself out of bed.

Yes, there had been a party, all right. It had been at my nightclub—well, the club I own with my partner, Chiriga. It had been a going-away party in my honor, because in a few days Papa and I were embarking on the pilgrimage to the holy city of Makkah.

This is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, something required of every Muslim at least once during his lifetime. Neither Friedlander Bey nor I had fulfilled that obligation, although we had spoken of making the hajj every year as the month of Dhul-Hijjah approached. Now this year, 1632 on the Islamic calendar, 2205 of the Christian era, we’d decided that we were at last both healthy enough and able. There was no way of knowing, of course, how many dead bodies would accumulate during our sacred and spiritual quest.

Anyway, to celebrate this holy undertaking, my friends had turned my place of business into an even more raucous den of licentiousness. I guess it seemed reasonable at the time. I only wished I could recall more of what had gone on.

I didn’t have any problem remembering what I’d done earlier in the day. I’d conspired with a Damascene whore to revenge myself on a man, someone who had betrayed my trust and stolen some money from me. The financial loss had been insignificant; it was the insult that had to be dealt with.

The man was Fuad, whom the people of the Budayeen called il-Manhous, which means something like “the Universally Despised.” When the Greek philosopher Plato sat down to consider the Ideal Form of “loser,” it was Fuad he imagined.

No one really liked Fuad. He whined, he begged, and he couldn’t carry out the simplest tasks without finding humiliating new ways to screw up. Still, his reputation was that he was a pitiful guy but basically harmless. I never would’ve believed him clever enough to scam me for twenty-four-hundred kiam, yet he had. I couldn’t let him get away with that, of course, but I could afford to be patient enough to work out a satisfying counter-sting.

Friedlander Bey, my great-grandfather and the most powerful man in the city, hears of everything that happens. I hear almost everything, because I’m Papa’s trusted right-hand man and because a lot gets said in my nightclub when the liquor’s flowing.

It was a little after two o’clock in the afternoon, about eight hours before the party was due to begin. I was sitting in my usual spot at the bar, where it curved in the back. Chiriga had thrown together my first white death of the day—gin, bingara, and a little Rose’s lime juice. I had a chipzine plugged into one of my two corymbic implants, and I was hearing a speech by the new amir of Mauretania, the country where I’d been born. As for all the seminaked women, sexchanges, and debs in the club, they were no distraction. After the first hundred thousand twirling tassels, the industry begins to lose some of its raw fascination.

The lovely young Yasmin sat beside me, sipping peppermint schnapps. She was a gorgeous, black-haired sexchange with whom I’d been having an on-again, off-again affair for the last few years. I was glad to have her back working for me. She put down her glass and stretched her lithe body. “Never guess what I heard,” she said, yawning.

Yasmin hears almost as much gossip as I do, but her problem is she
believes
all of it. I reached up and popped out my chipzine. “You heard that they’re going to build a replica of the Budayeen out in the desert so the tourists won’t bother us local residents around here.”

Yasmin’s dark eyes grew larger. “No! Are they? For real?”

“Forget it, Yasmin, I just made that up. What did you hear?”

She lifted her peppermint schnapps again and sucked up the rest of it noisily through a straw. “Fuad, that’s what.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What about Fuad?”

“Oh, just that he’s back in town. I heard it from Floor-Show Fanya who works over by the Red Light.”

I nodded. The Red Light had always been Fuad’s favorite club. Dumb criminals really do return to the scene of the crime, as if the Felons Federation had given him a copy of their pamphlet
Common Sense: Why Bother
? Here he was back in the city and probably believing that I’d never find out about it.

“I praise Allah for your good news,” I said. “That’s Fuad’s idea of laying low, huh?”

“You heard how he’s got this weird thing about going out with the black working girls. They know they can rob him all day and all night long. It gets him hot or something. Now he’s got himself a job as an itinerant crumber.”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. It was only two in the afternoon, and already things were getting a little strange. “The hell is an itinerant crumber, Yasmin?”

“Oh, a guy who travels from town to town, friendless and alone, living on his wits, with his stainless steel implement. He scrapes away the bread crumbs and stuff between courses in good restaurants.”

“You mean like a busboy?”

“Sure,” she said, nodding. Then she shook her head. “No, not really. Crumbing is one step below busboy. He’s working over by Anna’s restaurant in the Hotel Palazzo di Marco Aurelio, you want to go see.”

Didn’t interest me. “What, he wears a white shirt and a bow tie and all that waiter drag?”

Yasmin nodded again. “Yeah, but he’s so starved-looking, he’s no great advertisement for the restaurant.”

“Shukran,” I said. Thanks. “Very interesting, sweetheart.”

“Thought you’d like to hear it.” She squeezed my arm, slipped off her stool, and casually made her way down the bar toward the three customers who’d just come into the club. There were worse ways to get hustled than by buying Yasmin drinks for an hour.

Chiriga, my good friend, partner, and barmaid, rested her elbows on a clean bar towel. She noticed that I’d already knocked back about half my white death. “You take it easy with those,” she said, frowning. “I think Papa and Kmuzu are right. You’re more fun to have around when you’re not drunk or taking pills.”

I didn’t even answer. This was one of those black-pot kettle-calling times. Instead, I looked around our club. There were five dancers working for us in the daytime. One was Yasmin; one was the beautifully restructured real girl, Pualani; the third was Lily, a sexchange who had a crush on me; and two new dancers named Baby and Kitty. I hadn’t yet read them: Were they real girls, debs, changes? I didn’t really need to know, but everyone else on the Street hung on the day the truth would come out.

“Slow shift so far,” I said.

“Always slow in the daytime. The really kinky girls make more money at night.”

“So why don’t you work nights again and make more money?”

Chiri looked at me as if I were stupid. “Didn’t I just say? ‘Cause the really kinky girls are there.” She gave a little shudder, as if she herself hadn’t seen everything and done it all twice.

“Depends on your definition of kinky,” I said. I was twisting my thin little red straw into an equilateral triangle.

Chiri grinned at me. Her strong white teeth were filed to points, the ancient fashion among the old cannibals back home. “
I’m
kinky, Marîd.
You’re
kinky. Every girl, deb, and change here in the afternoon is kinky. But those bitches at night, though—wow, kinky is what they did
last
summer. They’re into whole new realms by now. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Another drink, Chiri, please.” She took my tumbler and scooped some ice cubes into it, then went to the back bar for the bingara.

I thought some more about Fuad. I suppose that with my connections I could’ve gotten even with him with less expensive preparations, but I didn’t care at all about the money. Papa had made me wealthier than I’d ever dreamed, although I never let anyone know the details. As far as my interest in Fuad was concerned, it was the principle of the thing. And after all, I was planning to get back my twenty-four-hundred kiam, as well as every copper fiq that I would invest in the scheme to make it work.

Now, what did I know for sure? Only that Fuad was back in the city, working at the Ristorante Maximo, and still courting trouble nightly at Fatima and Nassir’s Red Light Lounge. Good enough. It was time to set my scheme in motion.

I unclipped my phone from my belt and whispered Sulome’s name into it. The phone found her stored commcode and began ringing. After a few moments, I heard her voice, husky with sleep. “Marhaba,” she said.

“Il-hamdu lillaah!” I said. Praise be to God. “I’m sorry I woke you up, Sulome. It’s Marîd Audran.” Chiri brought my second white death, and served it to me with a decided lack of graciousness.

“You couldn’t have waited another couple of hours?” Sulome sounded grumpy. “It was a long night.”

“I said I was sorry. Anyway, the guy I told you about came back to the city a few weeks ago, and he’s just lately started showing up in all his old haunts. I think it’s a good time to take him down, if you’re not too busy, of course.”

There was a pause from Sulome. “Well, I’ve got nothing important lined up. What do you want me to do?”

I looked at my watch. “You go back to sleep. I’ll send one of my associates—“

“One of your murdering thugs, you mean.”

I smiled. “Bin Turki’s reliable. I’ll send him on a suborbital with your ticket and half the money we agreed on. You’ll both be back in the city by sunset prayers tonight. I’ll have my man Kmuzu meet your flight and take you to our house. We’ll sort out all the small details in the morning.”

“Fine,” Sulome said in a bored voice.

“And keep your hands off bin Turki. He’s a good kid.”

Sulome laughed. “Sure, except he kills people. Whatever you say, Audran. See you later.” And then I was listening to empty dial tone.

I returned the phone to my belt and felt good. Business is business, and action is action—and I liked action better.

I slammed back the second drink and stood up. Yasmin was being shyly courted by a quiet Eur-Am guy. Lily had taken up conversation with a dark Mediterranean gentleman. Pualani was busily describing something chest-high to a man with Asian features. And Baby and Kitty were, as usual, brushing each other’s hair. There were other customers for them to try, men who would probably fall all over themselves buying champagne cocktails just to hear their low, purring voices, yet they only had eyes for each other.

“Going home early,” I announced to Chiri.

“When you get there,” she said, “tell that fine young man, Kmuzu, to come park his ass in here for a while. I think I could teach him a thing or two.”

“You and I both know you could teach him plenty. You’ve heard him, though. Won’t mess with a woman while he’s still my slave, he says.”

Chiri grinned slowly. “And that gets me so
crazy
. I think about him a lot, you know.”

“I know you do.”

“I think about him a
lot
.” She waved the bar towel at me, and I went out into the bright, hot, afternoon sun.

I didn’t want to wait for Kmuzu to come pick me up in my car, so I walked along the Street to get something to eat. It seemed as if every kind of flower in the world was in bloom, hanging in pots from balconies in a shower of pink, purple, white, red, and blue; it was like daytime neon. The air was still except for the lazy buzzing of insects—and the signals of the boys and men who watched over me while I was in the Budayeen. They whistled an old children’s tune that told me all was clear, I wasn’t being followed.

I bought a stick of broiled meat, onions, and peppers from the sidewalk window at Vast Foods. The kebab wasn’t really all that huge; “vast” had been only a sign painter’s error. The lamb and beef were coated in a rich, sticky sauce and I savored every succulent bite. It was one of those days when I realized again how much I’d given up, to move from the street life into the magnificent mansion of Friedlander Bey.

Beyond the eastern gate was the gorgeous Boulevard il-Jameel, with towering palm trees and carefully tended flowerbeds planted on the median strip. I walked to the cabstand and, yes, Bill was there. I was feeling confident and content, so much so that I was almost positive I would live through another ride with him.

“Bill,” I said, “you want to take me home?”

“Sorry, pal, but I only go home with girls.”

In any conversation with Bill, you had to give him a good head start because he’s generally slower on the uptake than most people. That’s because most people haven’t traded one of their lungs for an artificial sac dripping measured amounts of lightspeed hallucinogen into their bloodstream. That’s what Bill did, and that’s what’s made him into the barrel-of-fun, hold-onto-your-hat kind of driver that he was. Much of the time he’s crashing his cab through monstrous threatening paisleys that only he can see.