name and, since Francesca had some seniority, she’d quickly chosen her favorite, Rose.
The best name was long taken, chosen years ago by one who was the envy of them all, a great beauty descended from one of France’s oldest aristocratic families. She was the very first assassin recruited to do the Pasha’s bidding when his movements were restricted by the Emir. A recluse now, she lived in splendor in a large house on the Ile de la Cite. No one save the Pasha ever saw or spoke to her. She was known only as Aubergine. And called only by her chosen name, Deadly Nightshade.
“Are you watching this, my Pasha?” Francesca asked in English.
“Wallah,” the Pasha said. “Incredible. Dr. Soong’s remarkable silver arrow flies straight and true.”
“Is it not all we hoped for?”
“The Emir is sure to be pleased, little flower. I am certain when he sees this he will—Wait! What is he going to do?”
“Dive into the canal, I would guess? That’s what I would do. Look! He’s—”
“Jara!” Pasha said, “Shit!”
Ever since he’d left England and returned to the high mountains of his native land, the Pasha sprinkled his English with Arabic and his Arabic with English.
“Don’t blink or you’ll miss the good part, Pasha.”
“Astounding! How does it—poise—in mid-air?”
“This is why I am so in love with this new weapon, Pasha. The thrusters, they angle in every direction. Dr. Soong, he explain to me it is like a, what, English Hurrier jet? Yes. Same principle, just smaller.”
“They call it the Harrier, little Rose.”
“Yes, but ‘Hurrier’ it is more funny, no?”
“And, it goes under the water?”
“Of course, Pasha!”
“Yes! Yes! It’s going under the water…it’s…”
The video transmission abruptly ended in a silent blast of static.
“Allah akbar!” the Pasha shouted. “You shall be richly rewarded in the Emir’s Temple of Paradise, little Rose.”
“Allah akbar,” Francesca replied after the Pasha had disconnected the call. The marvelous weapon had worked flawlessly. This Dr. Soong, whom she had met at an arms bazaar in Kurdistan, deserved his reputation as a true genius with weapons. Biological, chemical, or nuclear. He’d first made his name with poison gases, so, although the doctor’s name was I.V. Soong, he was commonly known amongst the cognoscenti as Poison Ivy.
The Venetian moon slipped from behind a cloud and bathed the terrace in pale blue light.
“One down,” Francesca whispered to herself, smiling.
The Pasha, born Snay bin Wazir, fifth son of Machmud, replaced the solid gold receiver and took another bite of his chocolate chip cookie. Famous Amos. The recipe anyway. Couldn’t buy them anymore, so bin Wazir’s pastry chefs made them by the dozens. He hit the intercom button and told the projectionist to take down the screening room lights. To witness the death of the American in real time had been most satisfying. Almost as satisfying as the cookies.
“Roll it again!” the Pasha commanded.
Snay bin Wazir clapped his hands twice. It was a signal to the two concubines beneath his vast embroidered silk robes to return to their ministrations. “Death in Venice!” he’d roar each time the dramatic scene ended, “Run it again!” He’d recorded it for the Emir’s collection of such tapes and made the projectionist play the tape over and over.
Finally, he had his surfeit of the thing. “Out! Out!” the Pasha said, and the two naked courtesans emerged, giggling and tinkling with bangles and rings, running for the exit. Snay bin Wazir clapped four more times, a sign to his four personal bodyguards that he was ready to move.
Although the screening room had plenty of plush velvet seats, over a hundred, the Pasha wasn’t sitting in any of them. He traveled about his palace in an elaborately carved eighteenth century Italian sedan chair. Sad, but true. He had grown to such a magnitude he preferred the chair to his own two feet. As his weight now hovered around four hundred pounds, the palace doctors were concerned about his sixty-year-old heart. He kept telling them this was not a problem.
He had no fucking heart.
His four principal guards appeared, grunted and squatted, each grabbing one of the four posts of the sedan chair and lifting it easily. Lifting the Pasha and his gilded chair was no effort at all, because Snay bin Wazir had chosen as his closest, most personal guards, perhaps the four greatest Japanese sumo wrestlers of the last century.
Ichi, Kato, Toshio, Hiro.
Snay bin Wazir, the notorious sultan of Africa, now known throughout the Emirate as the Pasha, had traveled to Japan to make his selection. He watched and studied the sumo world for months, attending bouts in Tokyo and Honshu, Yokohama and Kyoto, before making his decision. Four men were ultimately kidnapped. Captured, drugged, and smuggled out of Japan aboard the Pasha’s private 747, they were brought up into the high mountains by camel caravan. The sumos had been installed in Snay bin Wazir’s palatial fortress four years earlier. If there was small chance of escape then, there was none at all now.
The furor all this caused in Japan was immense. But no one knew where the rikishi were, and, over time, the country’s economic woes eclipsed the story.
The Pasha clapped once, and the four guards took off at a stately pace, the sedan chair headed down a series of marble halls, the only sounds the music of the crystal jets in the many splashing fountains. From far away floated the notes of a Persian flute and the distant jingle of tambourines. In one of the great arched halls, a number of the Pasha’s concubines were dancing for their own entertainment.
The sumos carried the Pasha past endless doors plated with beaten gold and inset with jeweled hyacinths and chrysolites. Their bare feet padded silently over silken rugs embroidered with silver stars and crescent moons. A tapestry depicted fleets of golden dhows with silvered lateen sails ghosting upon the mirrored Nile. Brilliantly colored songbirds flew freely about in the many vast courts of the Blue Palace, held captive only by the thin-meshed golden nets hanging high above.
Finally, the regal party arrived in the small gardens strictly reserved for the Pasha’s principal wife, Yasmin. The four sumos carefully lowered the sedan chair and, after bowing deeply to the Pasha, retired discreetly to enjoy a few hours of free time in their private suite of rooms.
They were no longer kept chained like disorderly slaves or the political prisoners down in the catacombs. The Pasha had enslaved them by creating a sumo paradise within the walls of the palace: he paid them in gold and diamonds, made them wealthy beyond measure, he had given them their pick of the most beautiful women in the seraglio, put legions of servants at their command.
Still, Snay bin Wazir saw the sumos were not happy. Being a keen observer of human nature, the Pasha quickly surmised the source of their unhappiness. They missed the fame and adulation accorded them in the streets and sumo shrines of their homeland.
So the Pasha had constructed a great hall in the manner of the most magnificent sumo shrines of the Nara Period of the eighth century. It was a soaring affair, with gilded sandalwood beams rising high above the dohyo, the Ring. There were bouts every week, and enthusiastic attendance was mandatory. Everyone from the captain of the imperial house guards to the lowliest minion was obliged to attend, and every seat was always full.
The Pasha took great delight in the emotion on the faces in the crowd. Some were faking, he knew exactly who, and made a mental note, but most were honestly enthralled when each of the wrestlers, with great dignity, performed the opening dohyo-iri ceremony. First, the clapping of hands to attract the attention of the gods. Then the upward turning of the palms to show the absence of weapons. And finally, the climactic act of bringing each foot down with a resounding blow to drive all evil from the dohyo.
In time, the sumos each acquired a devoted following and were treated with great respect and even reverence inside the walls. They had become celebrities within the Pasha’s great mountain sanctuary. That the Pasha allowed any but his own radiance to shine was a source of great puzzlement and gossip in the barracks, where the guards lived, and amongst the women in the seraglio.
