Suicide Kings

8

Thursday,

December 3

Near Lake Tanganyika

Tanzania

The Cessna Bobbed and weaved through the air, tossing them violently from side to side. Wally clenched the seat in front of him so hard that the metal frame dented. Finch grinned back at them from the pilot’s seat, his stubby rhino ears twitching. Whenever he glanced at Jerusha, his gaze seemed to drift down to her chest and linger there. At least she’d worn an athletic support bra. “Bit of a rough ride, eh?” he said. “But we’re almost there.”

The turbulence grew brutal, and Finch paid more attention to the plane than to Jerusha. They skirted purple-grey thunderheads tossing lightning down toward the savannah and occasionally passed through rain showers. Tanzania glided slowly underneath them, and finally ahead, Jerusha could see an immense stretch of blue water. Finch spoke over a crackling radio as he circled the aircraft as they neared the lake’s shore. “We’re setting down there,” he said, pointing to a tiny airfield.

Ten minutes later, in a cloud of brown dust, they were down and taxiing up to a long Quonset hut. Finch cut the motor-the silence was deafening, the roar still echoing in Jerusha’s ears. Finch opened the doors and gestured. The air outside was sweltering and humid; she could see the orange spots beginning to dot Wally’s skin again. Huge mountains loomed to the east, but Jerusha could glimpse the lake to the west, beyond the buildings of the town. “Welcome to Kasoge,” Finch said.

There was a squad of a half-dozen soldiers leaning against the hut. As Jerusha stepped from the plane, they began to saunter over toward them. When Wally followed her, they stopped. One of them snapped something, and the muzzles of their rifles suddenly came up.

“Hang on now, mates,” Finch called out, his hands lifted and open. Jerusha followed his example, but Wally only raised an eyebrow. Deliberately, he stepped in front of Jerusha. The gesture was touching, but it meant she couldn’t see. She moved around him. Finch was talking to the soldiers in what Jerusha assumed was Kiswahili.

Their voices were loud and strident at first, and Jerusha’s hand drifted to her seed belt, her fingers curling around kudzu seeds. A quick toss, and she could entangle them…

She took a step to Wally’s side. The soldiers were still staring at them, but their weapons had dropped back to their sides. Finch was still talking, waving his hands. “I need your passports,” he said. Jerusha handed them to him.

The squad’s officer glanced through the documents, finally passing them back to Finch. The soldiers went back to the hut, conversing among themselves and still watching them. “Those blokes are looking for PPA incursions, or for refugees from there,” Finch told them. “I told them we’d come from Dar es Salaam, not the Congo. I told them you had no interest in the PPA. I think they believe me.” He sniffed, the horn on his snout tossing. “So-was that true?”

Jerusha didn’t answer; Wally just shrugged. If there were soldiers patrolling the shores of Tanganyika, they were going to have to be very careful. “If Wally and I would like to take a boat ride on the lake tomorrow,” she said to Finch, “would you be able to negotiate that for us? We could pay you…”

“Boat ride, eh?” Finch scowled, tiny ears fluttering while he fixed Wally and Jerusha with a scowl. “A nice, leisurely sightseeing ride?”

“Yep. That’s right,” said Wally. “Sightseeing.”

Behind him, Jerusha sighed.

Finch scratched at the base of his horn with one long, blackened fingernail. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. He narrowed his little eyes, taking a long, hard look at Wally and Jerusha. He seemed to spend more time looking at Jerusha. His gaze was a little less angry when he looked at her, too; he never seemed to have much to say to Wally.

“Well, I expect that since you’re just a pair of innocent tourists with no interest in the People’s Paradise of Africa you’ll not know that the border between Tanzania and the PPA runs straight down the middle of the lake.” Finch hacked up something dark and wet. He spat it in the dirt, adding, “And you do not want to find yourselves on the wrong side of that line.”

Jerusha said, quietly, “What would happen if we did? What would we find? Just out of curiosity.”

“Rebels and Leopard Men. If you’re lucky.”

Leopard Men? Rebels? What the heck was going on over there? What the heck had happened to Lucien? Wally couldn’t help it: “Holy cow! Leopard Men?” The soldiers over by the Quonset hut looked up from their private conversation. Worrying about Lucien had got him worked up; he’d asked a little more loudly than he’d intended.

“It doesn’t bloody matter, does it? Since you’re not going over there.” Finch had a strange look in his eye, like he was saying one thing but meant something else. “All you need to know is that they’d shoot you dead the moment they noticed you.” He punctuated the last with a sharp jerk of his head, pointing his horn toward the lake and, by extension, the PPA.

“Well, look, buddy, bullets don’t-”

Jerusha clapped a hand on Wally’s arm. “Thanks for the warning. We wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.” She emphasized “misunderstandings.” Then she tugged at Wally. “We’ll trust you to hire a boat for us.”

Once out of earshot from Finch, Wally asked her, “What if he gets a boat that won’t go across the lake?”

“I don’t think that will be a problem, Wally. I think Finch had our number the minute he laid eyes on us. He thinks we’re on a secret mission for the Committee.”

They followed the road to a narrow bend. In one direction, from where they’d walked, Finch unloaded more crates from his battered Cessna. In the other direction, around the bend, Wally got his first glimpse of the outskirts of Kasoge.

It wasn’t all that different from the other villages they’d visited. The buildings he saw were a random assortment of wood, mud-brick, and sometimes metal siding. They gave the impression of having been built, or rebuilt, from whatever was handy at the time. Wind sighed through the trees that grasped at a bright tropical sky. It carried with it the earthy smell of jungle, the dead-fish-and-fresh-water scent of the lakeshore, and the stink of the garbage fires. The smoke stung Wally’s eyes.

From above, in Finch’s plane, Africa had seemed like a paradise that stretched from horizon to horizon. But down on the ground, Wally noticed different things. Like the garbage fires. People just collected their trash into piles on the street. When the piles grew large enough, they were burned. He figured that was because they didn’t have a city dump and regular garbage collection like back home. It made sense. They did what they could.

Still, Wally had been real disappointed when he’d discovered that the smoke from the garbage fires obscured his view of the stars. He’d figured that being in Africa would mean he could see all sorts of stars. And different from the ones he knew.

For all the beauty, Africa sure wasn’t a paradise. Even here, in Tanzania. And Finch’s warnings about the PPA hadn’t done anything to make Wally feel better about Lucien. He wished he could just grab a boat and get over to Kalemie.

Wally and Jerusha stepped off the road, out of the way of a truck. When it passed, he saw that a long board had been nailed to the back of the truck, and several bicyclists coasted along by gripping the board. One fellow had fixed his bike chain with lengths of wire.

They stopped at a pavilion built from irregular panels of corrugated aluminum fastened atop brick stanchions. Like he had at the last village, where they’d stopped the night before, Wally drew a lot of attention. He plopped down on a bench and zipped open his pack.

“Want a snack?”

“Yeah, actually.” Jerusha looked at his pack. “What do you have in there?”

“I brought some peanut butter. It’s good on bananas.”

A funny little smile blossomed on Jerusha’s face. “Hold on a sec,” she said. She wandered over to a spot near the tree line, upwind of the fires. There she dug into her pouch and dropped something on the ground. She returned to the pavilion a few moments later, carrying a golden yellow thing a little larger than a pear.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a mango.” Jerusha took the knife from her sack and deftly skinned the fruit in long, wide strips.

“Oh. I’ve never had a mango before.”

Again, that smile. She didn’t look up from peeling the mango, but she said, “Yes you have. And you liked it, too.”

“I have?”

“At the embassy. Remember? All the fruit on the table at breakfast?”

“I remember some pineapple and bananas, because I like those, and some orange stuff, too. It was pretty good.”

“That orange stuff was a mango. And I could tell you liked it, because you ate an entire bowl of mango slices.”

“Oh.” Wally felt himself blushing. “You saw that?”

“Yep.” After skinning the mango, she sliced it, neatly excising a large pit from the center. She dried the pit and put it in a pocket of her belt.

Childish laughter echoed across the street. A pair of kids not much older than Lucien ran down the street, trailing a homemade kite: a plastic garbage bag, two long sticks, and about a million little scraps of string tied together into one long string. The kids had two shoes between them; one wore the left shoe, the other the right.

Wally wondered if Lucien had ever flown a kite. Maybe Wally could show him.

They ate in companionable silence, watching the kids.

“Jerusha?”

“Yeah?”

Wally looked at his feet, not wanting to embarrass her. “I’m real glad you decided to come along.”

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

There’s a shot of the French Quarter on TV. At first, it looks like there’s been a freak snowstorm. But as the camera zooms in closer, you can see that there are bubbles everywhere. People are wading knee-deep through them, kicking them up in the air. Sometimes they pop and everyone laughs.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the reporter says. “It’s been raining bubbles here for three days now. We’ve been trying to talk to Michelle Pond, the Amazing Bubbles, to find out when this will end.”

Michelle rolled her eyes. She’d refused interviews because she really didn’t know how much longer it would go on. She was definitely lighter, and she thought she was getting smaller, but there was still so much energy in her. She looked up at the TV again.

The next shot was of a playground. Kids were shrieking and laughing as they slid into the masses of iridescent bubbles. They picked up bubbles and threw them at each other. Some popped immediately, but most bounced harmlessly off their targets.

Then another shower of bubbles began, and the children held out their arms and let the bubbles rain down on them.