Suicide Kings

10

Saturday,

December 5

Somewhere South of Kalemie, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

It would have been easier to keep to the shore as they moved north, but after the run-in with the PPA gunboat, Wally suggested they stay inland so as not to be seen from the lake. Jerusha agreed. It did hide them from the lake, but since they also had to avoid the roads, it meant slow going as they trudged through a solid wall of vegetation.

Wally took the lead. He tried to hack his way through the thickest bits. It wasn’t as easy as it looked in the Tarzan movies. He hadn’t realized that swinging a machete took so much technique. The hardest part was turning his wrist to make another slash on the backswing. And every swing had to be coordinated with a step of just the right size, so that he didn’t overextend the next swing. A few times he even managed to hit himself on the follow-through.

He made up for the lack of technique with brute strength. His knife hand went numb from the constant smack and vibration of mistimed or misplaced swings.

Wally ignored the growing tingle in his hand. Kalemie was so close. Just a few more miles to Lucien, and then everything would be okay.

Hack. Rip. Slash. Rip. Hack. They hadn’t been going more than half an hour before his face, chest, and forearms were splattered with little bits and pieces of green vegetable matter.

Here he was, adventuring in the middle of Africa, complete with pith helmet and machete-just like the games he and his brother had played as kids. But it wasn’t very fun. In fact, it wasn’t fun at all.

TV couldn’t convey just how wet, how humid, it was in the jungle. That wasn’t counting the rain, which, as Wally had quickly learned, sometimes came down so hard and so fast that it hurt. He wondered how Jerusha put up with it. Nor did the old movies convey the sickly sweet smell of constant decay that enveloped him like a fog. Not to mention how sticky it made a guy, cutting through all these plants.

And in the movies, Tarzan always rescued his friends in the nick of time. But if Wally had learned one thing from his time with the Committee, it was that real life offered no such guarantees. Rebels and Leopard Men… What happened, Lucien? What’s going on at that school of yours?

Wally glanced over his shoulder. Jerusha had fallen back a respectable distance, to avoid the rain of debris. She didn’t say anything, but he wondered if it upset her that he was hurting so many plants.

He fell into a meditative rhythm, replaying the lake crossing over and over again. Wally hadn’t entirely understood just how far out of his depth he was on this trip until the gunboat showed up. In fact, he wouldn’t have made it that far if not for Jerusha.

Wild card powers aside, she at least could talk to folks in French. He couldn’t even do that. It hadn’t occurred to him that communication might be a problem; all of his foreign travel experiences had been carried out through the Committee, where he and DB were always surrounded either by translators or folks who spoke English. Plus, Lucien had pretty good English for a little guy, so Wally had figured everybody here did.

And then, when the PPA boat had shown up, Wally had done… nothing. He’d been no help at all. Jerusha had taken care of the whole thing in a few seconds. Even her aim was great. Almost as good as Kate’s.

She didn’t need his help at all. But he sure as heck needed her.

New York Public Library

Manhattan, New York

“Yes! oh, yes yes yes yes yes! Fucking A, yes!”

The inhabitants of the reading room raised their collective heads, considered the young man capering wildly at his carrel with amusement or uneasiness or disgust, and then went back to their business. Bugsy nodded apologetically to the guard, and sat back down. “I am too cool,” he said under his breath. “I am the man. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Ain’t nobody better than me.”

Three huge bound volumes were stacked before him. The first was a volume of ancient arrest records dating from the end of 1970 to the beginning of seventy-one. The second were summaries of small claims court proceedings from the same period. The last, bound in black leather like an ancient grimoire, were the documents for the New York City Family Court for the eighties.

The ruling that Bugsy was poring over, that had inspired his delight, was a custody battle between one Kimberly Ann Cordayne and her estranged husband Mark Meadows. He shifted in his seat, his grin almost ached. He took a legal pad and a pen, marked do not reshelve-i’ll be right back on the top page, and laid it across the opened book. Then, just to be sure, he popped half a dozen wasps free and set up a little perimeter guard on the books before skipping out of the reading room and pulling out his cell.

Ellen wasn’t answering, so he called Lohengrin’s office number. The man’s secretary said he wasn’t in, but offered to take a message or drop Bugsy to voice mail. He opted for voice mail.

“Lohengrin!” he said, grinning. “Lohengrin, you great quasi-Nordic war god! You huge example of German technology run amok! I am the coolest guy you know. Seriously. I have plucked the Sunflower out of a haystack. Kimberly Ann Cordayne, aka Sunflower. Arrest record like a small-town phone book starting with petty crap in the late sixties and going up-I shit you not-to suspected membership in the Symbionese Liberation Army. Married some poor schlub named Mark Meadows back in seventy-five, got divorced in eighty-one. Knock-down, drag-out custody battle over a retarded kid goes through eighty-nine. Wound up with the judge ruling both parents unfit and giving the kid to the state. And the girl was named… wait for it… Sprout!

“So unless there’s a bunch of other Special Olympians named Sprout born right around seventy-seven, this is the same one Tom Weathers got his panties in a bunch about last year when he tried to nuke New Orleans. Now I don’t know if this Meadows creature is the bio-dad, or Sunflower was bumping uglies with the Radical all through the seventies or what, but I am on the case. On it.

“So… yeah.

“Um. I get anything else, I’ll call you back.” Bugsy dropped the connection, smiled a little less widely at the cell phone, and went back to the reading room.

The next seven hours brought little information about Sunflower Cordayne, but Mark Meadows turned out to have a fair paper trail. The implication from press clippings and court documents was that he was some kind of ace with the nom de virus “Cap’n Trips,” but what exactly his alleged powers were was never made explicit. Instead, he ran the Cosmic Pumpkin Head Shop and Organic Deli (renamed the New Dawn Wellness Center sometime in the late eighties) on the border between Jokertown and the Village and hung out with a raft of better-known aces. Jumping Jack Flash. Moonchild. Aquarius.

When Moonchild got herself elected the president of South Vietnam, Meadows got himself named chancellor, only to bite the big burrito when the presidential palace went up in a fireball. And supposedly his daughter Sprout died with him. Right about the time Tom Weathers showed up in East Asia, kicking ass and taking names in a list that was still growing today.

Bugsy closed the books and rubbed his eyes. The windows were all dark now, and the breeze coming in from the east smelled like taxicabs and the Atlantic.

There were a number of good scenarios. Tom Weathers shows up in sixty-nine, hooks up with Sunflower. Maybe he’s living underground this whole time, getting crazier and more political right along with Sunflower.

And then… and then something happens, and Sunflower hooks up with Cap’n Trips. Someone gets her knocked up-Meadows or Weathers-and things go south. She’s locked up in a psycho ward where she might be moldering even now. Meadows gets a long, colorful career as illegal pharmacist, fugitive from the law, minor Southeast Asian politico, and dead guy.

Then the Radical comes in from the cold, with the daughter at his side. Could Tom Weathers really have been the one who killed Moonchild? It was looking more and more plausible.

Back at Ellen’s place, the scent of curry and coconut milk filled the air. Ellen was sitting on the kitchen counter, a fork in one hand, a white take-away box in the other. She raised her eyebrows in query as he dropped onto the couch. “You see the news?” she asked.

“Not the recent stuff,” he said. “Something happen?”

“The Radical led a raid in Khartoum. Killed a bunch of Sudanese officials and a few delegates from the Caliphate,” Ellen said. “Things are getting worse.”

“Well, small victory here. Good old-fashioned legwork paid off,” Bugsy said. “It was all in the stacks.”

“No database?”

“Nope. Internet doesn’t know everything after all.”

“Good to know.”

“Ellen? Look, I don’t know what your plans are tonight, but… ?”

She looked at him, smiling softly. He felt a small biological urge. “You want to see her?” she said.

He’d actually intended to ask for Nick. The guy was an ass, but he was a damned good detective, and he’d know better than Bugsy how to track down Sunflower. On the other hand, it looked very much like an offer of sex might be accepted, and Nick and his swamp-soaked hat would be around in the morning.

“Yeah,” he said. “If that’s okay.”

Kalemie, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

Kalemie was worse than anything Jerusha had yet witnessed.

The city had been flattened. There were ruins everywhere-a massacre had taken place here, and much of Kalemie had burned. In the pelting rain, there were sodden black timbers marking the place where houses and buildings had stood, with vines and green shoots already poking up through them. Occasionally, they had glimpsed the white curve of rib cages protruding from the rubble.

Worse were the people who had survived: emaciated and starving, lost souls with eyes peering in shock from deep in the hollows of their faces, stretching out arms with the ropes of ligaments and muscles plainly visible, their bellies distended from hunger, fly-infested open wounds on their skin.

The school where Lucien had lived hadn’t been spared. Most of the tale they received from Sister Julie, whom they found trying to salvage books in the ruined main building. “They came two weeks ago now,” she said in her perfect French as she nibbled at the final crumbs of the energy bar Jerusha had given her. “Leopard Men. They said Kalemie was a haven for the rebels fighting Nshombo, and they would clean it out. They took the children, and then they…” She stopped, her lips pressed tightly together. “They did things I will not tell you.”

“Ask her about Lucien.” Wally pushed the picture of the boy forward in his thick-fingered hand, tapping at it as he placed it under the nun’s nose. “Ask her if she knows him.”

The nun didn’t understand English, but she had taken the photo from Wally’s hand. “That’s Lucien,” she said, and the sorrow deepened in her eyes. She looked at Wally. “You were his sponsor, weren’t you? They took him with the others,” she told Jerusha in French. “They took them all.”

“Where?” Jerusha asked. “Where did they take them?”

The nun shook her head. “Up the river. Into the jungle. To the bad place where they change them. Nyunzu, they say.” She began to weep then, a wracking sorrow that gathered and broke, as if everything dammed inside her had suddenly broken loose.

Jerusha started toward her but Wally was faster. He took the picture of Lucien from her with surprising gentleness, then he gathered Sister Julie in his great iron arms, holding her. “It’s okay now,” he told her, and Jerusha could see tears in Wally’s eyes. “It’s okay.”

It wasn’t, though. Jerusha suspected that for many of those in Kalemie, it might never be. She left Wally, stepping out into the courtyard that bordered the street. The rain had dwindled to a persistent drizzle. The school was set on a slope, overlooking the curving shore of Kalemie and the rain-swept opening where the many-armed Lukuga River exited the lake on its journey into the heart of the jungle and the headwaters of the Congo River. There were people there, scavenging through the tumbled foundations of what must have once been lovely houses, soaked clothing clinging to skeletal forms. They were pulling at whatever scraps they could find-she saw a woman fling a rock eagerly at a rat, then go scrambling after it in the mud.

Jerusha heard Wally coming up alongside her, his bare feet squelching in the muck. He’ll need S.O. S pads for his feet tonight. The thought was strange and irreverent. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I know you were hoping to find Lucien.”

“I’m still going to find him.”

“Wally-”

“I’m going to find him,” Wally said firmly. “You don’t have to come.”

“I’ll come,” she told him. The words came easily, somehow, without thought. Wally said nothing for a time; like her, watching the people picking through the ruins of their city. He needs you. And you… you care about him. You like him.

“They need food.” He slid the backpack from his shoulders and set it down, opening the zipper. “This stuff we brought…”

“Wait,” Jerusha told him. “There’s another way.” She reached into her seed belt. There were still orange seeds, and apples, and corn. And-there, heavy and large-the baobabs.

Jerusha took a variety of seeds in her hands. She closed her eyes, feeling them, feeling the vibrancy inside. She let herself become part of them, the gift of the wild card letting her fall inside them. She tossed the seeds wide with a cry: the oranges and apples and corn, and two of the baobabs. They hit the mud, and up sprang the trees, thrusting high and branching out, the seasons passing in the blink of an eye: a momentary flowering and a fall of petals, then the fruit growing and ripening, heavy on the branches. The flurry of cornstalks were higher than Wally’s head, and golden. The baobabs especially bloomed, thick, heavy presences on either side of what had once been the road, their trunks ten feet around and the pods hanging full and ripe.

The people around them were shouting and pointing. They sidled forward, shyly, whispering among themselves. “Go on,” Jerusha told them. “All of this-it’s for you.”

They looked at her, at Wally, as if afraid that in the next instant, all of the bounty would disappear as quickly as it had come. Then the closest of them plucked an apple from a branch and bit into its firm skin. Juice sprayed, and she laughed.

And they all came running forward.