“Who gave you the crayons?”he asked in passable French.
Her response sounded like “Dwyleje,” and it took him a moment to translate.
Doigts Le’gers.
Light fingers.
“Only crayons?”he asked her.
“Khubz,” she replied happily, and only then did he notice the paper-wrapped bread in the pocket of every child there.
Lightfingers bringing food and art to street children.
Idly, he wondered which item would be reported stolen next.
In any event, it wasn’t his circus—nor his particular monkey—and he had business to attend to in Casino de Monte Carlo, where the current pit boss was trying very hard not to turn on Liam’s big fish, who also happened to be the casino’s biggest client.
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 implicationsnow.
“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 painterthat Kadjic hadfound—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.
