Djinn City, page 32
He saw the kids in blue-and-white uniforms, hopping out of cars, buses, vans, rickshaws, human haulers—every sort of transport possible—and wondered if they knew about djinns, if they dreamed strange dreams. He felt an ineffable sadness and realized that he loved this city on a basic level, the sheer scrambling vitality of it, the insane confidence of sixteen, seventeen million people that it wouldn’t all collapse. He imagined it being swept away, obliterated by water and wind, as countless other cities had, and wondered where then he would belong, which place would claim him, and thought that this is what a refugee was, someone rootless, unwanted. Maybe I’ll go down with the ship. It’s the least I can do, isn’t it?
“You are sad, Rais bhai,” the old driver said, staring at him from the rearview mirror.
“What would you do, Uncle, if there was a big flood?”
“There have always been big floods,” he said. “You don’t remember them? In 1990 we took boats out of Gulshan.”
“What if everything washed away, all the buildings,” Rais said. “What would happen to you, to your family?”
“Some would live, some would die,” the old man said with a shrug. “Juny madame already sent my sons to Rome, to work. They used to sell flowers there, you know? My youngest one speaks Italian. He works in a café now. They send me more money than I know what to do with.”
“Mama sent them?”
“Your mother has sent every single child of every single staff to school. She has gotten them jobs, or sent them abroad, or gotten them married,” the driver said. “If everything washed away, she would find us a new house.”
She takes care of people, Rais thought. They are so sure of her, so certain that she’ll put everything right. At some level she must genuinely care what happens to everyone. Whereas I don’t. Or can’t. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood her for all these years. It’s not the toughness she wanted from me. It’s more empathy. Less selfishness. Yet empathy is the last thing anyone would ever associate with her.
What is this confidence these servants have? He felt he lacked the quality that engendered such loyalty, such blind faith from people. There was, at his core, something solitary, something that prevented the gathering of followers. In moments of painful introspection, he could recognize this truth. He wished now that he had made some effort to know Kaikobad. That man had been a successful emissary, a famous one, yet a drunken recluse at the same time, a mélange of glaring contradictions. Uncle Kaikobad never gave a fuck about anyone. Maybe I need to be more like him. There isn’t much time to pick mentors, really. Golgoras is our last reasonable ally, and I’m gambling everything on the fact that Risal and Kaikobad were onto something good, rather than wasting time on some mumbo jumbo.
Rais found Golgoras covered in grease, sitting among the dismantled pieces of two great engines, fuming with rage. The airship was a bedraggled sight, 80 percent deflated, the outer envelope of the blimp gashed along a two-meter span, flapping open like indecent skin, the air valve a broken nipple torn off, hanging. The wooden hull was gouged and nicked where engine parts had struck, the entire rear blackened by smoke and flame; the smell of salt water permeated everything.
“Three hundred years!” Golgoras shouted. “Three hundred years without an accident!”
“Where are the Ghuls?”
“They’ve disappeared,” Golgoras said. “Broken contract, which is unheard of. Fucking Hazard.” He looked past Rais at the old Mercedes parked outside. “You’ve got bodyguards now?”
“Dargoman killed my father,” Rais said. “You must have heard.”
“Yeah,” Golgoras said. “Sorry. It’s a fucking disgrace. He ought to be in court for that.”
“Can’t prove it anyway,” Rais said. “How long are you out of commission?”
Golgoras spread his hands. “The starboard engine suffered a cataclysmic failure. Iron shavings in the lubricant. The grit broke some of the bearings and pistons, the engine caught fire. The port engine seems fine, but I have to take it apart anyway to make sure. That’s the problem with sabotage: you have to check every single thing now. I’ll probably have to take apart the entire envelope to check the seams.”
“You can’t get help?”
Golgoras shrugged. “I’ve sent word to the society for more Ghuls. Let’s see. Not sure I trust anyone at the moment.”
“My cousin has a workshop.”
“Do they repair airships?” Golgoras asked skeptically.
“No, but you could send the parts out in pieces,” Rais said. “They’d never know what they’re working on. The principles are the same. It’d be a hell of a lot faster than doing everything yourself.”
“All right, thanks,” the djinn grunted. “What can I help you with?”
“I was doing some research,” Rais said. “You ever heard of haplogroups?”
“Nah. What the fuck are they?”
“Human genetic groups descended from single ancestors,” Rais said. “Risal was into it. Have you ever heard of any other djinns studying it?”
“Human studies are not of great interest to us,” Golgoras said. “If Risal was pursuing this, she might have been the only one.”
“She didn’t have any colleagues, or students, or like any other scientists she collaborated with?” Rais asked.
“There is no science club,” Golgoras said.
“Why don’t you have scientists? It’s fascinating. You have technology, some of it married to the distortion field, that is quite advanced, and if Bahamut is to be believed, some devices that can alter time and space entirely. You have a very well-developed legal system, and a financial system that could be described as post-currency, almost. But where are the theoretical physicists?”
“Perhaps our knowledge of the universe is more advanced than Humes’. We are the superior race, after all. We are more powerful, we live longer, there is nothing on this world that can harm us—”
“Yes, hmm, you are in a way the apex predator. I can see how that would retard your growth. Have you considered that you have reached an evolutionary dead end?”
“Have you considered that you might fall out of an airship sometime?”
“Ahem, sorry,” Rais said. “No offense.”
“Human science is of no interest to us,” Golgoras said. “Don’t forget, five hundred years ago you thought the earth was flat. Three hundred years ago you were riding horses. There are djinn alive now who remember you as cavemen. Do not think we are impressed with your physics.”
“Okay, okay, I see your point. However, I think there are a few djinn interested in science now.” Rais lowered his voice. “I have some ideas on what Risal found. Let’s say I figure it out with some proof. Do you have any objections?”
“You’re free to look into the matter as de facto emissary.”
“Will you back me up, though? Will the RAS officially endorse my investigation?”
“Let’s say we do. If you actually find something controversial, I get first look at it. If it’s big enough we’ll get Memmion involved. We say how and where the information is used.”
“How old is Memmion?”
“You’re obsessed with age,” Golgoras said with disgust. “He’s old, okay? Bahamut old. Gotten a bit strange, but not nearly as bad as Bahamut. It’s best to use him as a last resort.”
“And what about Bahamut?”
“The RAS and Bahamut are temporarily aligned in this matter. Memmion and Bahamut are old friends, they’ve always seen eye to eye. It’s your decision whom you want to talk to. If you want to take all this to a giant school of fish, well, good luck to you.”
“I see your point. We have a deal.”
“I hope all this running around is worth it. I heard your clock is almost up. If Matteras and Kuriken are dickering over how to split up the world after they’ve drowned half of it, you’ve hardly got any time left. There’s not a penny’s difference between them when it comes to humans.”
“I’m trying. Oh, can you sign this please?”
Golgoras frowned. “Hell is this?”
“Salvage rights on Risal’s house.”
“What? You can’t do that—”
“Why not? We found it. You were only commissioned as transportation. Maritime law gives us full salvage rights as the first party.”
“Maritime law?”
“My mother has a copy of the full charter of the RAS too, if you want further references.”
“I’m beginning to hate that woman,” Golgoras said.
“Okay, look, I’ll cut you in, twenty percent human currency on top of haulage fees for bringing stuff in. You personally, not the RAS.”
“I could have thrown both of you clowns out of the air lock. Twenty-five percent, and I can’t be soiling my hands with human coin. You’ll have me as a silent partner for whatever investment you do and kick in the returns in kind. Oh, and I want my account cleared with your mother. What the hell do you want from there anyway? You already took the books.”
“I want all the plumbing and anything else that’s solid gold. And then I want it reaffixed at a location that only we know about,” Rais said. “If things go south we might have to hide.”
“All this human fixation with gold. Fine. Equal shares in auctoritas. That means both our names for initial discovery. That’s not negotiable,” Golgoras said. “No way I’m losing out to a cretin like Barabas and a Hume.”
“Auctoritas? Does that mean I have auctoritas now?” Rais smiled. This had not really occurred to him yet.
“Confirming Risal’s disappearance? Breaking up the Assembly? Finding the Compendium of Beasts? Yes, I’d say you have auctoritas.”
CHAPTER 40
Celestial Court
Shofiullah was leading a convoy of three container trucks out of the customs yard in the port city of Chittagong, sitting in one of many thousands of trucks in line, except that his goods had no manifest, no bill of lading, no tax clearances, no papers at all, in fact. They were dark containers, unloaded in secret, unrecognized by the ship that had carried them in from the eastern ocean, waved through by a chain of corrupt officials. This was the very thing that was never supposed to happen, the thing a hundred safeguards had been made to prevent, yet Shofiullah drove in and out of the yard with a swagger, cigarette dangling from grease-stained fingers, driving one-handed, his twelve-year-old assistant capering like a monkey from the passenger-side window, trying to shout a way through heavy traffic.
These were routine shipments from Thailand, containers filled with Yaba tablets and other pharmaceutical products that were sold at huge markups to the addicted fashionistas of the capital city, plus boxes of cocaine, ecstasy, speed, diet pills—everything packed in oilcloth and sunk in sealed barrels of motor grease, just a brief nod toward security, for it was actually unthinkable that any official would interfere. It was a part of cabal business, a very lucrative part, not least because of the influence it allowed the cabal to wield among the city’s elite, selling upmarket supplies to high-end people.
Shofiullah and his fellow drivers had barely gotten a hundred meters out of the gate when plainclothes investigators stopped them, flashing papers too fast to read, pulling guns, sweating in the heat beneath large dark glasses and black bandannas. One or two shotgun-wielding, jackbooted RAB were behind them. Shofiullah had time to flick away his cigarette and reach for his trusty Nokia before they pulled him down, face against the tarmac. There was something perfunctory about their refusal to talk. The gunshot was casual, once in the back with a six-chambered revolver.
“Trying to escape,” one of them said, as they began to walk away. “Cross fire.”
He bled out on the road, but the drug haul was large enough that when his body made the eight o’clock news, he was promoted from hapless driver to international drug runner and armed terrorist with links to Salafi groups worldwide.
In an apartment in Old Dhaka, three elderly women spent all night gumming new labels onto cans of expired milk powder bought on the cheap and distributed as fresh inventory all across the city. Each lot took a week to clear, and the women were paid well and allowed to live in the apartment, a marked improvement from the slums that would have been their more natural milieu. They had worked here unmolested for three years now, had literally grown fat off the expired milk, for no one minded if they consumed a few tins of their own supply. This was cabal business, the cabal being one of the greatest net importers of food, although to be fair, the trade in expired goods was only a small part of its genuine distribution; still, profits were profits, and this was a highly lucrative side business.
Three A.M., and the police busted through the door, splintering the flimsy plywood down the middle, and then proceeded to lay waste to everything. The women had money set aside for this, phone numbers, secret handshakes. These cops were peculiarly deaf. They still took the money, but pretended not to hear anything else. They had notebooks full of serial numbers that they matched to the tins, tracing shipping documents to original letters of credit. Finally, a magistrate came in with his own stool and little folding table, set up shop, and began writing his report. A journalist with a video camera started filming everything. It was then that the old women realized the cabal had finally failed them.
At the crack of dawn, long before any respectable tax officials ever rose from their beds, the guards of an office building in Motijheel, the city’s financial district, were rudely awakened. Ministry men from the National Board of Revenue came out of two hired vans, escorted by plainclothes police. They didn’t bother speaking, for their orders came from up high, and they had received very specific instructions on what to find. The office doors were hastily opened, books of accounts ransacked, laptops confiscated. This was a cabal office, a part of the real estate business that formed the bulk of its assets, and there were important documents here: land deeds, tax files, sales figures. Dargoman himself sat here sometimes, for the stock exchange and the bank head offices were all nearby.
They would find nothing great. The cabal had accountants and lawyers, after all, who were adept at hiding wealth. Taxes were filed on time, bribes were made, paperwork was kept up to date; in many ways they were model citizens. The NBR men had their own skills, however, from countless hours poring over handwritten accounts: hard-won instincts for weakness. And it wasn’t long before they identified one of their bread-and-butter targets, the VAT on rent. The land deeds were fine, income taxes paid, licenses renewed, but the office was rented, one of the many the cabal kept around the city, and the office manager had neglected to pay VAT on the rent, a newish rule that was normally overlooked and settled out of hand.
Once the chink was found, further NBR accountants and lawyers were drafted in, notes were written back and forth, until the file, now several yards thick, appeared on the table of a director of the VAT wing, a relative of the Khan Rahmans, a once indigent boy whose schooling had been paid for by the trust, whose passage to this very post had been eased by a series of calls made by old Uncle Sikkim. While his inspectors waited patiently for him to cut a deal, the director did the exact opposite. He marked it for immediate prosecution, applied the highest possible penalties, ordered an eight-year tax investigation of all related enterprises, and then promptly went on his preapproved annual leave to visit his daughter in Canada, basking in the peculiar glow of having, for once, done his job.
“Where is Matteras?” Dargoman tapped his cane impatiently, thrusting aside the doorman. His bodyguards were on either side, ex-army men with shotguns and vests, no real attempt at hiding their purpose. The emissary was a worried man these days and had dispensed with the niceties of civil society altogether. He had an ex-cartel armored car with bulletproof glass, one of only three in the country, reportedly.
It was not his patron djinn he found in the conference room, but rather Hazard lounging in a swivel seat, smoking a long brown cigar and apparently contemplating the city traffic through the tinted French windows.
“He’s gone north,” said the djinn without looking up. “To Kuriken.”
“I need him,” Dargoman snarled. He flung himself into a chair.
Hazard motioned for the varied flunkies to leave. “Humans.” He blew out smoke. “What use are you? You need. You want. Need I remind you, emissary, that you work for us?”
“I work for Matteras,” Dargoman said. He modified his tone, however. Hazard, if anything, was even more rabid than Matteras, barely reined in at the best of times. He had spent very little time in the human world, was unused to the hustle and bustle, the constant irritations of daily life. He was one of those who yearned for the untamed vistas, the vast reaches of gray sand and ocean, and he was willing to depopulate entire nations to improve his view. “Still, perhaps you would deign to advise me.”
“Unburden yourself, by all means.”
“You are aware that Matteras entrusted the company assets in Bengal to my care?”
“Yes, his cabal, this great human plaything,” Hazard said. “Each of us must pass time the best way we can.”
“I was given the impossible task of liquidating and removing our wealth. Millions of dollars’ worth of land, interests in industries, proxy shares in banks and insurance companies…”
“I assure you, I have little to no interest in this.”
“It was proceeding,” Dargoman said, “at a reasonable pace. I was happy with the progress.”
“My delight knows no bounds.”
“Until recently. Everything has reversed. We are being blocked at every turn. The National Board of Revenue has opened an investigation on us. Money laundering. On us. We damn near wrote the tax code for the last budget. Naturally I summoned my clients in the NBR—”
