They took his name.
Th

The first man came at him on the stairs, and that was how J knew the night had turned.

He had felt it coming the way you feel weather, a pressure behind the smile of the evening, and he had ignored it, because ignoring things was often cheaper than acting on them. He had ignored, over the course of an hour, four separate small wrongnesses, and he was a man who did not, as a rule, ignore even one. The band had changed its set-list twice. A waiter he had clocked on the way in was gone by ten and not replaced. The service lift on the east side had been held on the second floor for eleven minutes by someone who was not using it. And a guest he had marked as furniture, a heavy man in a good but travelled suit, had left the terrace at ten to eleven and not come back, and heavy men who leave a party with two hundred rich people in it do not, in J's experience, go to admire the fountain. Any one of them was nothing. All four of them was a sentence, and he had declined to read it, because reading it meant the clean shape of the evening was already broken, and he had wanted, this once, the clean shape.

Now here it was on the service stairwell of La Mamounia, a shape in a bad suit with a knife held low and correct, and there was nothing careful left to do.

The man was quick. J was quicker, and worse, he was calm. He took the wrist coming at his belly, not the blade, and turned it the way Book had taught him to turn a domino, wrist and elbow, all the force of a big arm folded back into a joint that did not want to fold. Something gave. The knife rang on the concrete. J put the man's face into the wall once, without heat, the way you close a door you do not intend to open again, and let him slide down it.

Two flights up, the party went on without him. He could still hear it, the ripple of a hundred rich laughs and a piano played by someone paid to play it beautifully and unmemorably. Down here it was breeze blocks and a strip light and one of Wouters's men leaking onto the floor.

Dead. That was the part that would need explaining.

J crouched, pressed two fingers to the throat out of respect for arithmetic rather than hope, and confirmed it. Not his doing. The man had come up these stairs already bleeding from somewhere J had not put a wound, which meant there was a second party at this party, and it had reached Wouters's people first, and the whole clean shape of the evening had been kicked over like a board mid-game.

He looked at the knife on the concrete for a moment before he moved. Cheap, local, the kind sold three streets away for the price of a coffee, the edge still carrying the burr of a factory grinder because nobody had troubled to hone a blade they meant to use once and drop. Bought this week, by someone who had not brought his own. And that told J the last thing he needed and least wanted, which was that the second party had not planned this long. They had learned about tonight recently, in a hurry, and armed themselves on arrival, which meant somebody had sold them the evening late, and a thing sold late is a thing sold by someone close, because only the people close to a plan know it late enough to sell it in a rush.

He had walked this hotel in daylight. He always walked the ground in daylight, three times where he could, because Book had taught him that a man who knows the room does not have to be clever in it, and cleverness under pressure was only preparation a man had failed to do earlier in comfort. So he knew the service stair went down to the kitchens and up to the terrace and had, on the half-landing, a fire door that a bribed nobody had wedged that afternoon so it would open silent from either side. He knew the terrace had three ways off it and that only two of them were watched. He knew, because he had walked it, that the fourth alley past the coppersmiths in the medina did not go through, and he filed the knowing away where he filed everything, in the place with the seams, and stepped over the body, and straightened his jacket, and went back up into the light.

The trick to walking into a room that isn't yours is to look like you are bored of it already.

J came through the service door onto the roof terrace at eleven minutes past eleven and let the party take him in. Marrakech lay below in a sprawl of apricot light, the Koutoubia lit gold against a sky going out, and up here the money had arranged itself into little constellations of linen and teeth. Two hundred people who mattered, or believed they did, which at this altitude of wealth was the same currency. Not one of them looked at him twice, which was the point. A tall Black man in a dinner jacket cut by a Neapolitan who had taken three fittings could be a footballer, a rapper, a prince from somewhere with oil. He could be anyone they had already decided he was. That was the door. He walked through it smiling.

He carried the smile and under it he counted. This was the work nobody ever saw, the arithmetic that happened behind the pleasant face while the pleasant face did its pleasant nothing. Two hundred guests. Nine staff on the floor, two of them not staff. Four exits, one of them a lie, the ornamental stair on the west side that went down handsomely to a locked gate. The band, resigned. The security, competent and local and arranged in the standard way, and blind to him for the standard reason.

His mark stood by the fountain. Wouters, a soft pink Belgian who laundered other men's sins through a shipping line and believed his phone was clever. The phone was the job. On it, behind a lock that a boy in a Meridian basement had already half undone from four thousand miles away, was a key, and the key opened an account, and the account was a door into a room Meridian wished to stand in. J did not need to know which room, and had stopped needing to know a long time ago.

He had learned, early, that the not-knowing was a kindness the House did him, and had learned, later and more slowly, to distrust every kindness the House had ever done him, and was, tonight, still one revelation short of understanding why.

"You look," said a voice at his shoulder, in French, amused, "like a man deciding whether the party is worth his time."

She was small and gold and somewhere past forty, a Frenchwoman with a diamond at her throat the size of a threat, and she had the particular hunger of the very rich for something that cannot be bought at the desk. J turned the smile on her by a degree and a half. Not more. More would have been a request. A degree and a half was an open door with no one standing in it.

"I decided," he said, "the moment I saw you were at it."

She laughed, delighted to be lied to well, and he spent ninety seconds being the most interesting thing she had met that week, which bought him a reason to be exactly here, six feet from Wouters, looking occupied. Over her bare shoulder he watched the Belgian's pocket. He watched the two men near the bar watching the Belgian and pretending to watch the band. He watched the exits. He always watched the exits. Book used to say a man who knows the door never has to run for it, and Book had died in his bed at eighty-six, so J was inclined to believe him.