‘I can go somewhere else . . .’ Ranald’s voice is silky.
‘It is no trouble,’ Mr Dymovsky replies smoothly in English, bringing the replacement over himself. ‘That is all I was saying.’
Ranald sticks his face into his laptop screen again and goes back to whatever he’s doing, reaching for his scalding coffee a moment later and taking a small sip.
‘But I make it the same,’ Cecilia whispers at me, mortified.
Reggie breezes back inside. ‘Here’s trouble!’ she exclaims,0em'ting the door firmly behind her to keep the heat out. She gazes through the front window from the side just near the door, as if she wants to see but doesn’t wish to be seen from the street.
‘What do you mean?’ Mr Dymovsky says, crossing the floor to where she’s standing.
Cecilia and I, curious, drift forward, too. I wrinkle my nose as I get closer: Reggie’s overpowering musky perfume now has top notes of nicotine, bleach and tar.
‘Have a look!’ Reggie says, jerking her thumb at a point outside the window. ‘It’s that slut who comes in here sometimes — Lela’s friend. From the “club” around the corner in Chinatown. She’s having another argument with her boyfriend — looks even more like a train wreck than usual.’
At her words, even Sulaiman leaves what he’s doing in the kitchen and comes over to where we’re standing.
The man with the Celtic tattoo and shaved head comes back up the street dragging a crying Justine by the elbow. She’s got his bomber jacket on over something that looks like a sequinned string bikini, and she’s wearing a pair of improbably high stilettos with clear crystal soles and heels, porn star shoes.
‘Like I said,’ Reggie repeats with relish. ‘The slut who comes in here sometimes.’
‘Not her boyfriend for a long time,’ Sulaiman says in his deep voice, a frown on his face.
He and I look at each other and, almost in the same instant, throw open the door and spill out onto the street, Mr Dymovsky and Cecilia behind us.
Justine and her ex are almost past the front of the Green Lantern when I shout, ‘Hey, Juz! I’ve been waiting for you for ages. Aren’t you coming in?’
Pit-bull swings around, his fat fingers digging into Justine’s elbow like a vice while she cries and tries to pull away. She’s almost unrecognisable in her spangled bikini, two sizes too small. Her skin is unnaturally pale under the hard summer sun, and there’s smeared make-up all down her face. A thin, rhinestone hairband is jammed down low over her head like a tarnished halo, her thick, wavy hair beneath it scraped back into a low and messy chignon. If the get-up is supposed to look alluring, it’s anything but. And there’s a new bruise on her other cheek; I can almost make out the shape of the bastard’s knuckles.
‘Get back inside, you nosy bitch,’ Pit-bull replies. ‘It’s between me and Juz here. No law against talking, so stay out of it.’
He turns and starts dragging her away. Justine pulls back towards us pleading, ‘Help me, Lela! Please!’
I need anger to unlock those powers that are my right, so Luc told me in my dream. But where has my anger gone? I have nothing to draw on except sadness. Justine, dressed like something out of a freak show; Mrs Neill, with the cheater husband and incurable disease; Franklin Murray, bankrupt, self- pitying, suicidal.
I turn and look at Sulaiman helplessly, all the paind numbness I feel in my gaze. Without anger, I could sooner stop a hurricane than stop that man dragging Justine away.
Sulaiman meets my eyes for a long moment, seems to come to some kind of decision that is against his better judgment because the corners of his mouth tighten before he explodes into motion.
Before the Pit-bull can even react, Sulaiman’s rushed him and grabbed him by the collar of his checked shirt, wrenching Justine out of his grip and pushing her back in our direction. He shoves the man and he goes down hard onto the hot, stinking concrete of the pavement like a flailing windmill, an audible rush of air leaving his lungs.
Tears streaming down her face, Justine stumbles towards me in her crippling heels, her arms outstretched. I pull her into our tight little group by the door. Mr Dymovsky moves in front of her, while Cecilia shifts so that she’s got Justine’s back, the three of us hemming her in so her ex would have to fight his way through us to get to her again.
‘I’ll kill youse!’ he howls, struggling to push himself up from under the large, heavy shoe Sulaiman has placed on his back. ‘Then I’ll kill her! Shoulda done that months ago, the whore.’
Sulaiman bends down and turns the man over roughly, his big fists bunched in front of the guy’s checked shirt so they are eye to eye. People on the sidewalk give them a wide berth.
I hear Sulaiman rumble, ‘She does not consent to go with you and so she shall not go.’
He turns his head to look at us clustered tensely together beneath the front awning of the Green Lantern.
Mr Dymovsky takes one look at his expression and chivvies us back towards the front door like an anxious mother hen. ‘What have we done?’ he mutters to himself. ‘Likha beda nachalo!’
I try to get a look at what Sulaiman is doing over Mr Dymovsky’s shoulder, but Mr Dymovsky waves at me and Cecilia to create a gap in the plastic curtain and open the door. He leads Justine inside gently, hand beneath her elbow, as if she were a small, lost child, then I hear him barking orders at Reggie, whose red-painted mouth is opening and closing like a fish’s.
As I look back, standing on tiptoe to see better over the counter that runs across the cafe’s front window, Sulaiman is removing one hand from Pitbull’s face and letting him up off the ground at last. Justine’s tormentor stands unsteadily before lurching away up the street, staggering as if he has been mortally wounded, though there appears to be no blood, no wound, on him.
As Sulaiman walks unhurriedly towards the cafe’s door, Mr Dymovsky mutters again, ‘Likha beda nachalo!’ Then, ‘Somebody watch her while I get the first-aid box, okay?’
He disappears down the narrow corridor in the direction of his office, leaving Justine slumped in a chair, her face in her hands, shoulders still shaking.
Sulaiman enters the cafe, going straight back to his usual station in the cramped galley kitchen as if nothing has happened. Cecilia and I peo himsep the street together. There’s no sign of Justine’s attacker. I wonder uneasily what Sulaiman did to the guy to make him look the way he did as he left.
‘Why does Mr Dymovsky say that?’ I ask Cecilia. ‘What does it mean?’
She shoots me a troubled glance. ‘It mean “disaster follow trouble”, something like that. When he worried, he say it. I’m scared, Lela.’
‘You should be,’ Ranald says unexpectedly as I close the front door. He’s got a strange look on his face, almost like excitement.
He says again, a weird light in his eyes, ‘You should be.’
Chapter 16
Ranald’s long gone, the lunchtime crowd dispersed, when Justine finally stops crying.
Franklin Murray had been among them for a time, sitting on a bar stool at the front window, eking out his chicken salad sandwich and coffee, reading every single word of the newspaper as if his continuing existence depended on it. When I leaned across him to pick up his plate and crumpled paper napkin, I felt the weight of the pistol in his inner breast pocket brush against my arm. He’d given me a frightened look but I pretended I hadn’t noticed a thing as I sailed away with his plate.
Justine’s a tough cookie. She outfaced all the starers that came and went. ‘Have a good look!’ she hissed at some of the worst offenders. ‘Go on, knock yourselves out.’
Cecilia and I try to clean up her face as much as possible with what we have in the shop. But nothing can be done about the new bruise. If anything, it seems to be spreading. Soap and water isn’t enough to budge all the eye make-up, and Reggie refuses to lend some remover out of her own handbag.
‘Not my problem,’ she says, her mouth pursed primly like a cat’s bum as she stirs the sweet and sour pork with unnecessary force. ‘Don’t look at me.’
‘Like you’re some kind of saint,’ Justine mutters.
‘At least I don’t get my tits out for strangers for money,’ Reggie replies.
