Chapter 2 #2
Ayoub Fassi was a muscular man with a stout face and a constantly sour expression. He seemed to have a hatred for everybody—not only Liam, but anybody foreign or who spoke English as opposed to French was on his hit list.
When Liam, wearing a white linen suit and a straw hat in deference to the sun, walked into the man’s office and gave his most charming smile, Ayoub had merely wrinkled his nose and launched into a diatribe against anybody with freckles, curly hair and….
Liam had to look up the word the man kept using, and then his eyebrows went up.
“Really, mate,” he said in his broadest East End accent. “We’re not good enough friends for you to comment on that!”
Fassi gave a hiss, as though knowing damned well he had gone too far.
“It is this Kadjic,” he spat. “He’s one.
He and his….” The word that came next was best translated as “concubine,” but it had a distinctly male flavor.
“He drags the man in, and neither of them are decent. Swilling scotch, laughing—he dresses like a cartoon character. Is insulting.”
“Cartoon character?” Liam asked, at a loss.
“Aladdin,” Fassi said succinctly. “So insulting.”
Well, yes, there was some cultural appropriation involved, but a lot of kids loved that cartoon. Liam wasn’t going to dissect the implications now.
“So Kadjic and his boyfriend are here?” he asked. “In the city? When did you last see them?”
Fassi shrugged. “An hour ago? ‘Aladdin’ was trying to get him to forget something… something about a painter. I don’t know.” He sighed. “If I did not hate that cartoon so much, I might find the young man charming.”
Liam blinked. The word was… evocative somehow.
“Do you know where they went?” Liam asked.
“The market district,” Fassi said unequivocally. “Kadjic had found somebody there he’d been searching for.”
Liam felt his face pale. Fassi might not know this, because apparently Kadjic spent his money prodigiously at this establishment, but “finding somebody” Kadjic had been hunting for did not bode well for anybody.
Without another word, Liam bolted, pulling his comms out and rushing to find a cab that would take him to the market district where he’d just been.
On a burst of breath, he told the other two people he’d managed to drag with him to Morocco chasing the painter lead—oh shit, oh hell, a painter that Kadjic had found—and told them to search the market district, close to the bazaar where a father and his son might slip in to what was left of the afternoon crowd.
The cab let him out before the streets became pedestrian traffic only, and the absolute stillness of the evening told him something was happening that only the people who lived there would know.
He paused for a moment after the cab roared off, and he listened. He heard a man plead. And a child’s scream. And then another man yell… and chaos erupt.
He rounded the corner of the alley, weapon out, badge extended, screaming, “Interpol, put your weapons down!” in time to see a midsize man wearing a very sharp European suit and black leather shoes disappear around the corner.
Liam would later hear that he’d allowed his target to escape, but he couldn’t regret it.
In front of him was a scene from a nightmare.
A man with pale skin and light blue open eyes—poor, with a battered knapsack in his hands and wearing the most threadbare of traditional garments—slumped against the wall, his head tilted to the side, halfway separated from his neck.
His mouth was open, blood still oozing from his throat like a dying river.
On the ground next to him was a thug—no other word for it—a thickly muscled man in another sharp black suit (in this heat, for fuck’s sake!) He had black hair, white, white skin, and his hands were coated in blood.
As was the weapon in his fist. The thug groaned slightly, and a third man on the ground a few feet from him let out a sob.
“Is the…,” he gasped. “Is the boy okay?”
At that moment one of Liam’s fellow agents rounded the corner, and Liam gestured at the groaning armed man.
“Cuff him,” he said imperiously, as though he knew exactly what had happened when all he knew for sure was that the thug with the knife was bad news.
When that guy had been secured, he bent next to the bleeding man on the ground, and almost cried to recognize his phantom thief, the giver of crayons and bread.
“Hello, my friend,” he said softly, wincing at the mess of blood on the man’s midsection. “What happened to you here?”
“Kadjic,” gasped the man. “Didn’t like it when I jumped on Yuri’s back. Said he’d teach me manners. Good thing he forgot how to spell.”
“Spell?” Liam glanced up at Carter, his counterpart.
Carter shrugged and spoke into his comms, asking for medical assistance while the boozy, youngish man with the curly hair and the charm—and the blue velveteen harem pants and vest of an expensively dressed Aladdin—tried to talk.
“His name. My flesh. I think he forgot the d.”
Liam stared at him in horror, squatting to take his hand regardless of protocol. “Weren’t you his boyfriend?” he asked baldly, and that earned him a blood-flecked smile. Nicked lung, Liam thought, and prayed the medics would arrive soon.
“Right up until—” The man gasped. “—I stopped Yuri from killing Antoine Couvier’s son.” He squeezed his eyes closed. “I didn’t know he’d kill Antoine. Poor Antoine… seemed like such a gentle man. Fucking booze. I should have known.”
Liam smoothed his hand over the man’s brow, wanting to give comfort, until it hit him. “His son!” he gasped. “Did he get away?”
Aladdin nodded. “Nicked the paint in his bag. You can see it. Green. Like grass.” He let out a little sob. “Like home.”
Liam could see the man losing consciousness and thought, I should arrest him for art theft. He must be Lightfingers—he must be! But Andre Kadjic had just tried to carve his initials in the man’s ribs—after he’d choked out the thug who’d killed Antoine Couvier and gone after his son.
That was a lot of valor in their little thief, Liam thought. Arresting him now would be a poor way to repay him.
At that moment the medics arrived in a small, old white-painted van with a red cross on the front. Liam moved out of the way to let them work, getting the location of the hospital from the driver before he went to talk to Carter.
“What’d he say?” the man asked, stepping aside so a medic could treat the still-groaning mob muscle on the ground.
“Said Kadjic ordered his man to kill Antoine Couvier and then the man’s son.
L… little guy couldn’t stop Couvier’s death, but he did manage to choke out the hired help while the kid got away.
” Liam glanced around at the dark that had fallen dreadfully fast. “Poor kid,” he muttered. “Must be scared to death.”
Carter, a fortyish veteran with the hide of a Komodo dragon, gave a snort. “Not for long. If Kadjic finds him, he’ll be dead!”
Liam’s heart started pounding in his ears.
He may have moved out of his mother’s flat, but that didn’t mean he didn’t miss the whole stinking lot of them.
How old would the boy be? He’d been what?
Six? Seven? When his father had first gone on the run after tipping the authorities off to one of Kadjic’s operations via a clever flaw in their forged documents.
That would make Etienne twelve now. Liam could see his own little brother, Caleb, with spidery arms and legs, thin wrists and ankles, and that sort of perpetually super-excited/super-confused expression that a lot of boys that age seemed to have.
“We need to find him,” he said, trying not to let his panic show.
Carter looked around as though there were listening devices on the dirt streets, the clay walls, the colorful canopies set up to temper the brutal daytime sun that only blocked the stars now.
“If we do find him,” he said softly, “he needs to disappear, you hear me? So he doesn’t disappear.”
Liam blinked. “Any ideas where he should disappear to?” he asked, realizing that Carter had just suggested waggling their fingers and making a material witness go away to save the boy’s life.
It was an unexpectedly human move from the seemingly implacable Carter, but maybe Carter had memories of children he loved too.
“Talk to your Aladdin friend,” Carter said. “He seems to feel some obligation to the boy. But first let’s find him.”
It took them all night.
The green paint helped, but the boy had been wily—and fast. Over, around, through—he must have hit every street in Morocco before finally crawling into a back alley and curling up, head on his knees, to sleep.
The eyes the boy turned to Liam when he approached were unutterably weary… but grateful.
Liam stashed the boy in his own small flat to sleep, bathe, recover, while he went to see how their Aladdin friend was doing.
Tienne—as he gave his own name—seemed to be in a sort of fugue state.
Liam didn’t think he’d run, but he had Carter come over to keep him company anyway.
Carter promised to sleep on the couch all day and maybe get them food, which for Carter was a declaration of responsibility.
Aladdin was waking up from surgery when Liam showed up in his room in the early afternoon, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t trying to cadge some scrubs from the attending orderly so he could slip out the back door.
“Oh-ho, now!” Liam said cheerfully. “That’s no way to repay the man who rescued you, is it?”
He got a sour look in return. “Rescue me? Are you serious? After trying to drink myself to death for a year, I finally found a shortcut. You cheated me is what you did. I could have been happy and dead by now.”
Liam gasped as though slapped, and remembered the Francis Bacon painting. Aladdin of the velveteen pantaloons was apparently in a dark place.
Well, Liam could go there with him. “That’s a shitty thing to do to the people around you, isn’t it? There’s got to be somebody out there who would miss you.”