Suicide Kings

5

Monday,

November 30

Paraguacu River

Bahia State, Brazil

His eyes snapped open to darkness.

The humid air remained hot long after midnight. Sweat rolled ticklingly into armpits that felt at once familiar and utterly alien. Insects buzzed like power-saw choirs. Poison-arrow frogs trilled to advertise their killer beauty. The river sighed and gurgled through the mangrove roots. The smell of the water, like strong tea and death, overwhelmed even the smell of sweat-soaked bedding.

Starlight through the open window confirmed his memory, still vague with transition, that the blur beside him was the sleeping face of Sun Hei-lian. Details of her incredibly fine features resolved slowly as his mind and vision focused. The lines that living left in her face somehow made her even more beautiful to Mark Meadows’s eyes.

Good thing she’s close, he thought. He’d always been nearsighted. And for the last fourteen years he had seen through eagle-perfect eyes.

It took him three breaths to dare to try to move his eyeballs. There was little left to see: the bed, the rough room with its few and deliberately raw furnishings of wood and coarse rope, the Coleman lantern they’d brought from Salvador, now dark. And the rest of the woman herself, pale and slender and exquisite.

That was a favor, anyway. If as much torment as pleasure. He knew that body’s every contour. Yet she had never known his touch. Only the touch of this body he inhabited. Isn’t that just my luck? he thought. I fall in love with a lethal lady Chinese spy. And she falls in love with the evil alter ego who’s taken over my body. Perfect.

It wasn’t the first time he’d made himself a fool for love. His obsession with his first love, Sunflower, had led him into the obsessive quest that resulted in his body being usurped by the Radical. Long after the love he’d felt for her had ended in divorce, acrimony, and Sprout.

Sprout -it was Hei-lian’s treatment of Mark’s daughter that made him fall in love with her. She had begun with coldness, almost loathing. Now she showed every sign of loving her. It was as if Sprout had awakened a capacity for kindness in a woman who had lived virtually her entire life professionally coldhearted.

Hei-lian possessed a razor-keen intellect and a will so fierce it had forced her hide bound bosses to acknowledge her excellence. Years of witnessing-and yes, no doubt working-brutality had never crushed her spirit. Yet it was her unexpected capacity for warmth that won him.

I love you, he wanted to tell her. I know the Radical’s seductive power. Far too well. And it’s a lie.

He ached to warn her. Warn the world. The man you think you love is changing into something that isn’t human. If he isn’t stopped he’ll destroy everything. He-

Mark felt himself swirl away from the world, down into old accustomed darkness. He uttered a vast and desolate cry that his throat could never voice.

“Aaaahh!”

The scream snapped Tom awake and upright. Sweat soaked his hair and face and body as if a tropical downpour had busted loose inside the cabin. The rough canvas covering of the bed under his butt was a mess, more sodden than the relentless heat could account for.

Fingers trailed down his arm. “Are you all right?” Hei-lian asked, sitting up beside him.

He drew in a huge breath and palmed hair back from his forehead so it would stop stinging his eyes with sweat.

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Just a nightmare.”

Ellen Allworth’s Apartment

Manhattan, New York

It was still dark outside when Bugsy woke up. The alarm clock blazed 6:22 in numbers of fire. He groaned and rolled to his side, pulling the covers with him. The woman beside him made an impatient sound and pulled the blankets back. He sat up, watching her sleep in the dim light filtering in from the window.

She was beautiful, especially when she was asleep and wasn’t Ellen or Aliyah. Her naked body was familiar now. Known territory, and still fascinating. The way her small breasts rose and fell with her breath. The nameless fold where her thigh stopped being thigh and turned into body. The mole on her spine. When she wasn’t anyone and her face went slack like that, she looked young. She looked his age. He sighed.

The room still smelled like sex and liquor. His head hurt a little, but not enough to bother with. The soft buzz of a few stray wasps made a white noise that seemed like silence. Still, he gathered them up, folding the insects back into himself. She slept better when it was quiet.

He rose, showered, nuked some scrambled eggs and coffee. The apartment was like a really high-class junk shop or a really cheap museum. All around him were artifacts of other people’s lives. The cameo that Ellen wore and sometimes channeled her mother with. The pen that brought back a dead investment banker that she used when she was planning out her budget. A pair of scissors. A pair of glasses. A hundred dead people, all of them there for Ellen when and if she needed them. He was dating a republic.

When he snuck back into the bedroom to get some real clothes, her eyes were open. Until she moved, he didn’t know which one she was.

“Aliyah,” he said. “You sleep okay?”

She nodded gently.

“Ellen?”

“Still asleep,” Aliyah said, touching the earring gently. “It’s kind of weird, not having her back there. I guess I’m really used to it now, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“It means I’m real, though,” Aliyah said. “I mean if I can be here when she’s not, that means I’m really me and not just… I don’t know. An echo. I’m not just her wild card if I’m awake and she’s asleep. I’m not just a dream.”

“That’s what it means,” he agreed, because it was what she needed to hear.

She lay back with an exhalation, watching the ceiling go from black to grey, grey to blue, blue to white. On his way back toward the kitchen, he caught himself humming something. Louis Armstrong was in his head. Say nighty-night and kiss me

Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me

While I’m alone and blue as can be

Dream a little dream of me

He stopped humming.

The FedEx guy came while Ellen and Aliyah were in the shower. Bugsy signed for the box and dropped it on the counter, then picked it up and checked the return address. New Orleans. Jerusha Carter, his old teammate from Team Hearts. Somehow invoking hearts seemed like an omen, but he couldn’t say whether it was good or bad. Probably it was just the hangover talking.

Ellen walked in from the back, still toweling off her short hair. “Who was it?” she asked.

“Christmas in November,” he said, nodding to the package. Ellen picked it up, turned it over, then got a steak knife out of the drawer and slit the tape. Something in bubble wrap, and a note. “What is it?” Bugsy asked.

“Another hat,” Ellen said with a sigh that meant another lottery ticket. Another chance that maybe this was the one she’d lost. Nick. Will-o’-Wisp. Her lost love, carried away by the wild winds of New Orleans. In the year since she’d lost him, they’d gotten hundreds, and not just fedoras. Baseball caps. Kangols. Two leather ten-gallon cowboy hats. A straw porkpie.

Ellen tore the bubble wrap open with her fingers, the popping sound like distant gunfire. The thing nestled in its center was a nasty green-brown, smelled of rot and river water, and had once been a fedora. “Hey,” Bugsy said. “That one even looks kind of like-”

She had already scooped the hat up, cramming it over her still wet hair. Her body went still. Bugsy held his breath, and Nick opened her eyes for her.

Well, Bugsy thought, fuck me sideways. Things just got more complicated again.

“What happened?” Nick asked.

“You blew off in a hurricane. Ellen’ll fill you in on the details,” Bugsy said. “I’d hang out, but I’ve got a thing I’ve got to get to. Anyway, you two lovebirds probably want to catch up, right?”

Nick looked stunned, his attention focused inward, where Ellen was probably talking with him. Another dead guy in the house. When Bugsy slipped out the front door, there were tears in her eyes, and he couldn’t tell if they were Nick’s or Ellen’s.

His three-way was a foursome again. Being in love with dead people was probably the only thing he and Ellen really had in common. Nick was going to be some hard explaining come Christmas dinner with the Tipton-Clarkes.

The offices of Aces magazine were open when he got there. He waited in the lobby drinking stale coffee from a paper cup until Digger Downs came out, shook his hand, and led him to the back office. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Digger said. “We’re just about to put this issue to bed. You still doing any writing?”

“Not much,” Bugsy said, with a little twinge of longing. A phantom itch on an amputated career. “Saving it up for the memoir, I guess.”

Digger chuckled, gestured to a chair, and leaned against his desk, arms folded. He looked older, up close. More wrinkles around the eyes, more white in the hair.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m doing some background work on the Radical. When he first came on the scene. Who his friends are.”

“Should any of them still be alive,” Downs said.

“That’s the guy I’m talking about,” Bugsy said. “I have him first showing up in China in 1993, but he’s clearly a westerner since-”

“Sixty-nine.”

Bugsy tilted his head.

“Nineteen sixty-nine,” Downs said. “San Francisco. Right after they shot those kids at Kent State. The Radical was in the People’s Park riot when the Lizard King fought Hardhat.”

“Ah. Was T. T. even alive in the sixties?” Bugsy said.

“Who?”

“Todd Taszycki. Hardhat.”

“No no no,” Digger Downs said. “Not that one. There was another guy who used that name back then. Very blue-collar. Didn’t have much use for the hippies.”

“So when you say the Lizard King,” Bugsy said, “you mean Thomas Marion Douglas? Lead singer for Destiny?”

“I sure do,” Downs said. “The Holy Trinity. Jimi, Janis, and the Lizard King. He was… he was amazing. I saw him in concert once. When he died, we really lost someone. That was a little before your time, though.”

“ Ninety-four was before my time,” Bugsy said. “Sixty-nine was the end of the Napoleonic wars. What was Weathers doing in San Francisco in the sixties? And where was he for those twenty-five years in the middle?”

“Got me,” Digger said.

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

“And how do you feel today, Miss Pond?”

Michelle opened one eye. A middle-aged woman wearing hospital scrubs was standing over her. “Like someone I don’t know just woke me up.” Her voice was still rough. And she was thirsty. Really thirsty. “Can you get me something to drink?”

“I imagine so. I’m Mary. I’m supposed to check your vitals.”

“I’m not dead.”

“That’s pretty clear.” The woman moved out of her line of sight. Michelle wanted to crank her head around, but the fat made it impossible. When Mary walked back into Michelle’s sight, she had an Aquafina bottle in her hand. The water was sweet and cold, and Michelle drank almost the full bottle before gasping for breath.

Then Michelle became aware of a noise. It sounded like a flock of birds, but she’d never seen big flocks of birds in Jackson Square. “What’s making that sound?”

“That? Oh, that’s the faithful talking, honey.”

“The faithful?”

As she pulled a stethoscope from her bag, Mary nodded. “They’re the bunch of folks who’ve been bringing you these flowers, praying over you, making you the focus of their lives.”

Michelle tried to move her leg, but couldn’t. It pissed her off to no end. “That’s insane.”

Mary shrugged and stuck the stethoscope in her ears. “Honey, you’d be amazed. And, just to be fair, you did prevent a lot of them from dying horribly.”

“I was trying to save my friends.”

Mary put her hand on Michelle’s wrist and popped the business end of the stethoscope onto Michelle’s chest. “Doesn’t matter why you did it. Just matters that you did. Now be quiet for a minute.”

Michelle ignored Mary as she poked around. There wouldn’t be any blood drawn. Needles broke when they came in contact with her skin. That had been happening ever since her card had turned.

“Everything sounds good,” Mary said. “Same as it has for the last year.”

Michelle wasn’t listening to her. Her attention was focused on the TV. The volume was still turned off, but there were images of herself flashing behind the blond anchor. One showed her at the height of her modeling career. Then there were publicity shots from American Hero. And finally there were pictures of her lying in Jackson Square after

… after.

Michelle had grown to love her fat. It was power and control, and it meant nothing could hurt her. But seeing herself… Bile rose in her throat. The whole world had seen her like that.

Her body was a distorted mass. Rolls and rolls of fat rippled across each other. The cement under her had shattered. Most of her body was naked. Her pale flesh mortified by the summer sun. And everyone had seen it. Hot tears stung in her eyes.

“Oh, damn it, honey,” said Mary. “They should have turned that off.” She walked to the set and punched the red button.

“Why are they showing that now?” Michelle asked.

“Because you’re awake now. You didn’t die when they took you off life support. You’re a miracle.”

“I’m not a miracle. I’ve got a virus that changed me. It could have happened to anyone. Are people really that thick?”

“Would you like to meet them?” Mary asked.

“Oh, yeah, ’cause I’m definitely at my best,” said Michelle. “I love the idea of loads of strangers looking at me gape-mouthed while thinking I rescued them.” She shut her eyes. Why was she being such a bitch? “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, honey,” Mary said, puttering around the room throwing dead flowers out and putting the empty vases in a box. “I imagine it’s something of a shock. Losing a year. That thing with your parents. And finding yourself, well… different.”

It was impossible for Michelle not to giggle. Different. Yeah, she was different all right.

Noel Matthews’s Apartment

Manhattan, New York

“Those are zlotys. What are you doing with zlotys? You don’t have a show in Poland.”

He’d heard the phone ring, and thought Niobe was safely ensconced in a conversation, so he’d pulled out the zlotys and began preparing for his fast trip to Poland. Now, busted, Noel tried to scrabble the bills, and-more incriminating-a passport photo of his new male avatar form, under a book, but it was way, way too late.

Niobe stood in the door of the bedroom he’d turned into an office. The desk was littered with decks of cards, linked metal rings, scarves, handcuffs, and padlocks. In a cage by the window a pair of doves billed and cooed, heads bobbing in that particularly silly fashion unique to doves. The tools of his trade.

Right now the doves’ soft calls didn’t seem to be having a soothing effect on Niobe. Her thick tail was lashing, hitting the floor with heavy thumps as she stared at him with a look that was two parts angry and one part worry.

“It’s nothing,” Noel mumbled. “I didn’t want to worry you. In your condi-”

“Do not patronize me! I am not made of glass. I escaped from a federal facility and managed to elude every ace the government sent.”

“Well, I helped a little,” he protested.

“Granted, but either we’re a team or I’m out of here.”

And even just the threat made his heart stutter. He gave her the truth. “There’s a man in Warsaw who makes the best forged papers in the business.”

“And why do you need forged papers?”

“It’s a little thing I’m doing for Siraj.”

Niobe folded her arms across her chest. “Are you going to be in danger?”

“A little. But I’m always in danger. From my former associates

…”

“And Tom Weathers.”

“Him, too.”

“And once you have these papers what are you going to do with them?”

“Travel with them.”

“Where?” Noel squinted, pulled at his lower lip. Niobe stormed forward until she stood right in front of him. “I will not be treated like a goddamn mushroom!”

“Are we having our first fight?” Noel asked lightly.

“You only wish. If you think this is me angry… well, you’ve got a lot to learn. Now where are you going?”

“Kongoville.”

“The place where Tom Weathers lives. The man who vowed to kill you.”

“Well, he vowed to kill Bahir.”

“And if he kills Bahir, won’t you be dead, too?”

And suddenly Noel had to acknowledge that that loose feeling in the depths of his bowels was fear. He stood up, wrapped his arms around Niobe, and buried his face against her shoulder. The tension in her shoulders dissolved as she stroked his hair.

“The PPA is dangerous, viciously dangerous,” Noel murmured into her hair.

“Oh, my dearest, don’t do this. Let somebody else handle the PPA. The Silver Helix, SCARE, the Committee…”

Noel smiled down into her face. “Those idiots? You eluded SCARE, I ran rings around the Committee, and the Silver Helix is hamstrung with Flint and John facing trial. It has to be me.”

Her hand went to her belly, fingers spread protectively. “Don’t you dare get killed.”

“And have you really angry with me? Not a chance.” Her mouth tasted so sweet and he wished he didn’t have to leave.

She broke the embrace and asked, “Do you have time to take me to New Orleans?”

“Why on Earth do you want to go to New Orleans?”

“Bubbles has woken from her coma.” Niobe’s eyes were glowing. “She’s my friend and I want to see her.” She touched her stomach again. “And I want to tell her about the baby.”

“I thought we were keeping it secret until… we were sure.

…”

“Not from my closest friends.”

Noel sighed, and while Niobe went off to change into something cooler he phoned Bazyli to tell him he’d be delayed.