Prayers for the assassin

CHAPTER 23

Rakkim slipped out the side door of the half-empty office tower, stepped out into the cool night air. Jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt, the hood pulled low on his forehead. R U Having Fun Yet? That’s what the assassin had asked him. A message in blood on Marian’s living room wall. Let me find you, motherfucker, and we’ll see who has fun. Rakkim had told Colarusso he didn’t have a chance against the assassin, but nothing was certain. He just needed to get lucky. Luckier than a man could hope to be.

Broken glass crunched underfoot, the sidewalk cracked and crumbling. Four A.M. and alone in Bellytown, what the locals called the rundown neighborhood surrounding the vast open-air market that kept the city fed. Four A.M. and hungover from church wine, his stomach knotted with anger and fatigue, but he didn’t want to sleep-every time he closed his eyes, he saw Marian’s face in the bathtub, her hair floating around her. A dead mermaid far from the sea. He wondered where Sarah was, and if she was safe. Most of all, he wondered if she knew what she had started.

A yellowed newspaper tumbled down the street, carried by the wind. Bellytown was poorly lit, the building lobbies barred and boarded up, home to squatters and busted retirees and immigrants from the hinterlands come to find fortune in the capital. The government had been talking about tearing it down for years, tearing it down and starting over, but talking was all that had been done.

Colarusso had dropped off Rakkim an hour ago in the alley behind the office tower, helped him load the boxes into a service elevator before driving home. Rakkim had been sleeping in a vacant office suite since Redbeard had called him in. He wouldn’t stay there more than another day or two now, just long enough to skim through the journals, then take them to his next hideout. First though, he was going to talk to Harriet.

The assassin was out there and he wanted Rakkim to know it. He was either hoping Rakkim would panic or he was just too arrogant to contain himself. Arrogance and self-indulgence were occupational hazards for assassins. Snatching lives did that to you. Such godlike power hollowed out even a strong man eventually, and assassins were weak by nature, weak men with a special gift. By announcing himself, the assassin was counting on Rakkim to lose his focus and make a mistake. It was the assassin who had made a mistake, though, and if the assassin didn’t realize it, that was another mistake.

Music came from the apartment building across the street…old music from the war before the last war, music from when people touched and held each other in public. Some ancient pensioner must be having trouble sleeping or had got up to pee and thought of better times. The music stopped, then the same song started again, and Rakkim imagined the old man or old woman playing it over and over, summoning up who knows what memories. He kept walking.

The sidewalks were filling with workers headed toward the main market, men dressed as he was, hands in their pockets, cigarettes in their mouths. Trucks full of produce rumbled through the streets, horns blaring, the air thickening with the smell of ripe fruit and vegetables. He stepped into a Star-bucks, its windows grimy, the interior crowded and loud. He ordered a double espresso and a cinnamon roll. A few moments later, the barista set down his order and he handed her $6, told her to keep the change.

The money was pretty, you had to say that much for the new regime. He barely remembered the old money, but he knew it was green and showed the faces of dead men. The new bills were brightly colored, a mix of blues and pinks and yellows, larger than the old money. No dead presidents. The five-dollar bill showed the mosaics of the Detroit armory, the ten showed the fallen Space Needle, the twenty pictured the crescent moon over the ruins of New York City, the fifty showed the capital’s Grand Mosque, and the hundred showed the holy Kaaba, the great black cube in Mecca, radioactive for the next ten thousand years.

He belted down the espresso, started on the cinnamon roll as he walked out the door. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. He finished the pastry, carefully licked his fingers clean. After everything that had happened, he still had the habits of a good Muslim at least. Christians looked askance at Muslims for licking their fingers after eating, considering it unhygienic and a mark of poor manners, but Muslims knew better. Food was a gift from Allah, and who knew which morsel contained the blessing of God?

He saw Harriet up ahead, pushing through the crowd, forcing people to make way for her enormous girth. She was a bully in a long fur coat; a blubbery matron in her sixties with bright orange hair and a staircase of chins jiggling with every step. She leaned over one of the fruit stands and picked up a peach, brought it to her nose for a quick appraisal, then tossed it back down and barreled on. The fruit vendor glared, but didn’t complain.

Rakkim followed her. Harriet was a creature of habit, making her regular rounds of the market, always among the first customers of the day, so she could select the best for her discriminating palate. Predictability was no danger to her. She needed to be available to potential clients, and besides, she was protected. Rakkim saw a man on the opposite side of the street eating from a bag of hot chestnuts as he kept pace with her, a stocky brute in a blue peacoat with the collar turned up, a watch cap pulled low. Home is the sailor…but he was no sailor. He didn’t have the saltwater squint. Another bodyguard was just a few steps behind Harriet, a tall fellow using a cane, but he was no cripple; the sole of his right shoe didn’t have the proper wear pattern for the dragging he was putting on, and he wasn’t rotating his hips enough. People thought all it took to play the part was a heavy walking stick, but a whole set of subtle markers had to be learned, and the man hadn’t put in the time.

Harriet checked out another vendor’s peaches. Picked one up, ran a thumb over the skin, sniffed. She nodded, then handed over a succession of peaches to the proprietor. After paying, she tucked the paper bag of fruit into a shopping bag, then crossed the street to the Muslim butchers’ stalls. Rakkim strolled after her. He saw one of her bodyguards shift position, the one in the peacoat sensing his interest. Good catch.

The butchers were in full tilt over the cutting tables, sharpening their knives as they bent forward, the sound like giant insects clicking their mandibles. Their white aprons blotchy with blood, the butchers muttered as they worked, endlessly repeating the name of God. It wasn’t strictly necessary; Muslim law only required that the name of God be pronounced at the time of slaughter, but the Black Robes had deemed the name of God could not be invoked too often, and the butchers were eager to comply. The Christian butchers were on the far side of the market, near the main garbage dump. The Christians sold meats slaughtered improperly, animals killed by stunning, and their stalls were next to the fishmongers that sold seafood devout Muslims wouldn’t touch: crabs, lobsters, oysters, mussels, and octopuses.

“Hello, Rakkim.” Harriet eyed the perfect T-bones as the butcher behind the counter waited patiently for her decision. She was a devout atheist, contemptuous of all believers, but she knew the best of everything was reserved for the faithful. She pointed at one large, well-formed cut of meat, then turned, gave Rakkim an awkward embrace, her fur coat warm and steamy in the damp. She smelled like $300-an-ounce French perfume. “You look like shit.”

Rakkim fingered the rich brown fur. “Muskrat?”

“Russian sable.” Harriet flicked his hand away, then checked to see that her strand of black pearls was still around her neck. She paid the butcher for the steak. A few moments later she and Rakkim were walking down the sidewalk while her two bodyguards kept their distance. “Are you finally ready to take me up on my offer?”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Don’t play hard to get.” Harriet’s bright orange curls were gray at the roots, her cheeks crusted with rouge, but her gray eyes were intense. “I’ve got a CEO for an oil-drilling firm who’s involved in a messy patent dispute with one of his competitors. Very messy. He’s got an armored limo and twenty-four-hour bodyguard protection, but he still pisses his pants every time he goes to mosque. A two-year personal security contract with him and you could buy a villa in Hawaii and stock it with dancing girls. Assuming he survives, of course. Just name your price.”

“I don’t have a price.” Rakkim reached into her shopping bag. He passed up the peaches, snagged an apricot instead. Bit. It was incredibly sweet, perfectly ripe. Her bodyguards were closer now, the one in the peacoat pretending to examine a rack of lamb.

Harriet gave a hand signal, and her bodyguards moved back. “So, why are you here?”

Rakkim took another bite. “I’ve got a little problem.”

“You want a little gun to take care of your little problem?” Harriet said, chins bouncing. “I don’t handle such things, of course, but I have sources.”

“Guns are overrated.” Rakkim finished the apricot, tossed the pit into the gutter, scattering the seagulls who picked at the trash. “I need your help finding an assassin.”

“That’s easy enough. I work both sides of the street, you know that.”

Rakkim stepped closer. “A Fedayeen assassin.”

Harriet cackled. It sounded like a crow being torn to pieces. Other early shoppers glanced over, then away. She kept walking, her fur coat swirling around her knees.

“There’s not many of them on the open market, I understand that,” said Rakkim.

“There’s none on the open market. Twenty years in the business, and I’ve never met a real one. Oh, there’s been plenty tried to pass themselves off as the real thing, but they all turn out to be fakes.” She patted his arm, suddenly squeezed him with her thick fingers. “The real ones don’t draw attention to themselves, do they?”

Rakkim didn’t respond.

“I’ve got plenty of ex-military in my little black book, plenty of ex-police too, and even a couple former presidential bodyguards, but Fedayeen…you’re hard to come by. Like I said, you could write your own ticket just based on that.” Harriet’s eyes narrowed. “You’re more than Fedayeen though. I know that much.”

“I was no assassin.”

“Whatever you are, you’re grade-A top quality, I saw that the first time I met you. Smart and quiet and you have that three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision without being obvious, and it all just clicks, doesn’t it?” Harriet licked her crenellated, orange-painted lips. “I took one look at you and thought, this one could dodge his way through a rainstorm and not get wet.”

“This assassin I’m looking for, he may not have offered his services after he left the Fedayeen. Even if you haven’t met him directly, I’m hoping you might have run into his work. Maybe you had a high-profile client, one very well covered who turned up dead one morning and your people never saw it coming. Sound familiar?”

Harriet stopped beside a fishmonger’s stall, peered at the rows of silvery salmon and red-speckled trout lined up for inspection.

“Harriet? Has that scenario with a high-profile client happened to you before?”

“Occasional lapses in security are part of the business. When it happens, I pay the failure penalty to the family or whoever and move on.”

“This wouldn’t be a lapse in security. No one would have made a mistake. The man I’m looking for has flair. Everything would be fine one minute…your people might have even been in voice contact with the client’s security when suddenly things would go silent. When reinforcements showed up, everyone would be dead. Security, the client, everyone. They might be interestingly dead, or maybe you still haven’t figured out how they got surprised. Do you remember anything like that? Or something like that happened to your competitors?”

Harriet peered at him. “If you weren’t an assassin, what was your Fedayeen specialty? I know you weren’t standard-issue.”

“I was a laundry clerk. I never met a stain I couldn’t get out.”

Harriet smiled, moved along to a display of butchered meat, bright, shiny slabs of beef and sheep and goat. “Yes, that’s one way to look at it.” She checked out an arrangement of goat heads, tapping her chins with a forefinger. “Lovely, aren’t they?”

Rakkim glanced at the heads, all eyes and snout. Pink rivulets ran through the bed of ice they were nestled in. “I don’t like food that looks back at me.”

“Well, aren’t you the delicate flower.”

Rakkim saw the brute in the peacoat reflected in the stainless-steel basket of the butcher’s scale, the man’s image distorted as he shifted from one foot to the other. The one with the cane limped toward them from the other side of the street. “I think your boys are getting restless.”

“You spotted them.” Harriet shook her head. “I’m still evaluating these two. They may not be much good for surveillance, but they both have high combat ratings. Tipps, the tall one with the cane, was a street-fighting instructor with the Congressional Police. Grozzet, in the peacoat, is ex-Special Forces. Led a Black Robes kill squad for five or six years. A real Jew hunter from what I hear, passionate as a pig going after truffles. I guess I pay better or maybe he didn’t like the idea of working for the new mullah, Ibn Azziz.”

“Maybe Grozzet just ran out of Jews.”

“They say Oxley had a heart attack. That’s the official version, anyway.” Harriet made another hand sign. “What do you hear? Did Redbeard have anything to do with it?”

Rakkim kept his eyes on the scale. “Call off your boy.”

She turned, saw Grozzet closing in. “I don’t think I can. He’s a little twitchy.”

“I’m in a bad mood, Harriet.”

Harriet stepped away from him, settled into the soft pleasures of her sable coat. “Let the games begin.” Her eyes were girlish.

The other one…Tipps, was on the far side of the street. He pulled a rapier from his cane, circling. Grozzet was closer, fist flashing with something sharp, making no attempt to hide his intentions. Definitely twitchy. Probably on one of the heavy-duty amphetamine variants. The kill squads functioned best on lab courage…anything to amp them up and diminish any moral overrides for the dirty work.

“You sure you want to do this, Harriet? They’re not going to be any use to you dead.”

“They’re no use to me now. Not yet.”

The early-morning shoppers scattered, but not too far, taking cover behind the nearby counters. They wanted to watch, and so did the security guards, and the butchers and fishmongers, all of them leaning forward, murmuring to each other. A couple of Black Robes stood on the corner with their prayer beads, expressionless, silently counting out the ninety-nine names of God.

Rakkim greeted Grozzet. “Good morning.”

Grozzet slowed, a big man with a bull neck and a scraggly black beard. His eyes were pinwheeling. “This kike bothering you?” he said to Harriet.

“Do you require verbal confirmation of my distress signal?” snapped Harriet. “I’ll have to mention that to any perspective clients.”

“I was just leaving,” said Rakkim.

“No, you were just dying.” Grozzet crouched, clasping a Special Forces dagger.

“I never liked that fighting stance,” said Rakkim. “That position is fine for slash-and-dash Black Robes ops, but you lose mobility.” He yawned, clocked Tipps at the edge of his peripheral vision. “You’re holding it too tight, but maybe you don’t care.”

Grozzet smiled. He had beautiful teeth, even and white. Everything else about him was coarse and well-worn, but his teeth looked as if they’d come right out of the box. He kept his eyes on Rakkim as he adjusted his grip on the dagger. “You watch this, Harriet. When you see what I do to this monkey, you’re going to double my minimum rate.”

“You’re hurting my feelings.” Rakkim watched Grozzet, his attention not on the man’s eyes, but the corners of his eyes. That’s where his attack would be launched. “I feel like I should sit down and have a good cry-”

Grozzet charged, gave a little stutter step that was actually a pretty good move. A change of pace threw plenty of fighters off-balance. A good move, but Rakkim was fast enough not to need to watch Grozzet’s hand…he just watched his eyes.

When the stutter step didn’t force Rakkim off-balance, Grozzet came in hard. Rakkim timed it perfectly, grabbing a goat head and swinging it into Grozzet’s face. The goat head, all bone and horn, broke Grozzet’s nose, shattered his front teeth. Grozzet staggered, dropped the dagger, then collapsed onto the pavement.

Rakkim swung the goat head by one stubby horn as Tipps slowly approached. Tipps had the rapier out, but Rakkim just kept spinning the goat head round and round. Blood dripped off his fingers.

Grozzet lay curled on the sidewalk, blood gushing over the stumps of his teeth and sluicing through his beard.

“It’s hard to know what to do, isn’t it?” Rakkim said to Tipps. “Maybe I got lucky…or, maybe Grozzet wasn’t as good as everybody thought. I bet you’re a lot better.”

Tipps hesitated, then raised the rapier to his forehead in salute and backed away. When he got to the other side of the street, he started running.

Rakkim tossed the goat head back onto the bed of ice.

Harriet watched Tipps dodge between the stalls across the street, knocking people aside in his haste. “You can always tell a college man-they’re smart enough to know when they’re overmatched.” She patted her hair. “Ah, well, look around, Rakkim. There are thirty or forty people who watched your little show. Ten times that number will have heard all about it by lunch. How many do you think will decide they have to have a bodyguard? It’s a dangerous world, you proved that to them.” She watched Grozzet crawling away, touched her pearls. “I thought he would give you more trouble. He was very highly recommended.”

The crowd stirred, the shoppers started on their way, eager to get on with the day. To tell their friends. Just as Harriet said. A butcher called out the special of the day, chicken breasts, $3.99 a pound, and a huge laborer trudged past with a half side of beef on one shoulder. A truck horn blared at the end of the street, sending the people scurrying. The two Black Robes stayed where they were.

Rakkim washed his hands with a hose the fishmongers used, rubbing hard, the water so cold he felt numb. “This man I’m looking for, this assassin…people might not know him, but they wouldn’t be able to forget his work. I want you to ask around.”

“You make it sound like an order.”

“Consider it the cost of doing business.” Rakkim wiped his hands on his jeans.

Harriet stroked her throat. “You know I’m always happy to help you.” Grozzet had made it to the gutter before collapsing. She watched the blood streaming down the cobblestones, eddying around a curled lettuce leaf. “I don’t know if this qualifies as interesting dead, as you put it, but last Thursday a bounty hunter was found in a Ballard apartment with a chopstick shoved through his eye. Is that the kind of style your Fedayeen assassin might display?”

“No…” Rakkim cocked his head. “Were they working for you?”

“Of course not. You know I don’t deal with that element.”

“Who were they looking for?”

“Some runaway bride.” Harriet selected a ripe peach from her bag. “All very hush-hush, as usual, but I heard they were paying top dollar and they didn’t mind if the goods were a little damaged during retrieval.”

“Was there a retrieval?”

“No.” Harriet took a big bite out of the peach. Juice ran out the side of her mouth and she caught the dripping with a crooked finger. “But, as they say, tomorrow is another day.”

There was blood on Rakkim’s boots, but it would wash off too. He looked at Harriet. “Where in Ballard did they find the body?”