omar | TLV: IC Inbox

Hong Kong. 1965. Six and a half acres, thirty three thousand inhabitants, living on top of one another like a hive. The Kowloon Walled City was an old military for that went- entrenched, when Britain leased Hong Kong. They never even attempted to extend government into the place. An anarchic, decadent island within a tightly ordered society. Drugs, prostitution, gang activity, money, corruption, and bodies pressed in like you have no way of understanding until you've been there. Being physically crushed in a press, a surging near-riot of a night, except every night. The smell of medicine and dried fish and human sweat.

[He closes his eyes on his end, listening, imagining.]

Do sound like my kinda place, don't it?

Except maybe the fish part, anyway.

The city is built right up, straight into the sky, blocks joining and crossing and honeycombing together, so tight that the sun only comes down in squares a few feet across, and only every few hundred feet along, at that. Like old catacombs.

Mm.

[That, he sounds more doubtful about.]

Everybody know everybody business, then, right? Need to be sure of everyone in like a five-block radius to go to ground in a place like that.

Unless you got someone in good, I suppose.

Plus, Hong Kong in the sixties, you and me, we're a half head taller than everyone for miles around, as well as not being ethnic Chinese. We're not blending in.

Thought you was supposed to be taking care of me out there, man. Starting to sound like this ain't much of a vacation at all.

...I got distracted by how neat Kowloon used to be.

All right, a vacation. Um- beaches? Batu Ferringhi up in Penang, if you want to see where I was born. White sand, lots of honeymooners, that sort of thing.

Doesn't have to be no beach.

[There's something a little funny, a little reticent in his voice. A little guilty, still.]

River, jungle, all that work too.

Well, you should come, that's exactly what it's like. If we can find someone to let us into the Enclosure-

[Happily.]

[A brief pause, like he's waiting for something, then--]

You got a warden you can ask, yo.

Oh. Do you think she'd-?

[Ricki hasn't mastered going to Anya for anything.]

Expect she would if you did.

[He really hesitates. Laughs at himself, and shakes his head.]

Can't. I'm so sorry, darling, I'd really like to, but I'm- it's silly, but I haven't been able to ask her for a thing yet, and if I start now I'm never going to be able to stop wondering what I'll have to give up in trade.

Guess we plum outta luck, then.

...I'll ask her. I can't not, it's- you've got to see it.

[Nervous, but excited, but nervous- he qualifies.]

But it might take me a month to get up the nerve. I barely made it down to Paris, even asking to get out was--

Y'all have the phrase day at a time back in the day, Ricki?

Not in my life. [He admits, laughing, entirely at himself.] Nothing but power plays and long games, for us. But that's a waltz I'm doing all on my own, and this is a very, very good excuse to learn to stop dancing.

[He's not laughing along, this time.]

This a good place to learn it. How you gonna plan for a month from now?

Yes, but when I don't plan, I don't sleep.

[There's a lot he could say to that, but he's not actually trying to pick a fight, at least not in the middle of the worst fucking night, darling. He settles, quietly smoothing out his own rumpled feathers on his end.]

What kinda plans you been making?

[He hums, tries to think about it.]

I spend a lot of time thinking about someone from home arriving here. Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon. What kind of trouble would I be in, what kind of damage control am I going to have to run if George Smiley in his spectacles knocks on my door? Who would they be- warden, inmate, warden.

[Well, that's interesting, anyway.]

Other acrobats and circus clowns?

Story for you?

[Apologetic and soft; he knows, he knows he's being demanding and terrible, but hopefully Omar will be forgiving.]

This one's a big one. This one is how I, after twenty years of good service, tried to retire.

[This time, he really feels like he's the one being demanding. Or hovering on it, anyway, with all the buttons he feels himself wanting to push tonight and just barely isn't. Ricki's reticence -- about Anya, more importantly to Anya -- suddenly grates more than usual, and for some reason, it grates all the more in light of this sudden resurgence of Puerto Rico in Omar's mind. That and this lingering sense of debt to Reynaldo, to whom he really owes nothing at all... except that this idle fantasy he really has been imagining these past few days was once a possible future belonging to someone else. An actual cabin on an actual beach that isn't his to share.

It's all unsettling and irritating in ways he doesn't want to indulge any more right now, or at all, so he settles in and tries to fix his mind to listening. This is a big one, Ricki says, and he does want to know. He closes his eyes on his end and leans back, trying to clear his head.]

Go on.

Almost a year ago now, I was doing a job in Istanbul.

[Ricki might pick up on it- maybe he does- maybe he'd do something about it, if they were in person. But instead he goes on talking. The texture of the sound changes; he's lying down with his head on the pillow, with the device in close.]

They had me following a trade delegate. This Russian named Boris. He was a boozer, a party animal, so the local men were having trouble keeping in his footsteps. They thought they might be able to turn him with one of your honey traps, convince him to man a box- but when I got there I realized it was much worse than that. He was a hood, a Moscow trained man if I ever saw one. He might even have been on the look out for someone like me, trying to lure me in to work a soft target, and then get me into an ugly double-double game on the other side. I wired home, no sale, and decided to just watch his apartment, maybe burgle the place, see if I could find something worth the hotel and airfare.

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