Gastelu arrived unannounced at the kitchen door. Wearing a big smile and her usual black eyeliner, Nova came in first, along with a rush of cold air. Star cried out with surprise and pleasure, then rose from her seat to give Nova a warm embrace. They had always been close friends and hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years. As Ray entered, he set down his tattered suitcase and took off Kepa’s old red beret. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and sniffed the warm, bacon-maple-scented air of Carolina’s kitchen. “Damn!” he said. “I do love pancakes.”
Three hours later Caine, Willie, Ray, and I were still in the kitchen. Ray was sitting on the kitchen counter telling yet another bizarre story about Mexico City and some of the crazy American expatriates who were currently living there. Carolina, Star, Nova, and Antoinette had moved to the living room to talk about babies. Suddenly Ray stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence. I looked at him. We both felt it — the undeniable presence of Meq … old Meq. In a few moments, there was a knock on the door and Sailor and Susheela the Ninth entered the kitchen.
Sailor nodded to Ray and me without a word, then glanced at Willie and Caine, who was staring at Sheela. Caine had neither seen nor heard of her before, and it was easy to see how startled he was by her bearing, her beauty, and especially her color. Sailor introduced Sheela to Willie and Caine, then spoke to me. “The traffic in your country has become problematic, Zianno.”
I laughed and Ray said, “I agree with you completely, Sailor. This country is goin’ to the dogs.”
Sailor looked at Ray with little expression, waiting for the punch line, but it never came. He shook his head back and forth once and said, “It is truly a joy to see you, Ray. Are you here alone?”
“No. Nova is with me.”
“That is good.” Sailor turned back to me with an expectant look on his face I’d seen before and I knew what it meant. He wanted to know when all of us could talk privately. He said one word. “When?”
“Later,” I said. “After dinner.”
Sailor nodded his approval. But we never got to dinner. Either from the excitement of everybody arriving or simply because it was time, Antoinette went into labor that afternoon. Willie, Star, Carolina, and Caine all left with her on the hectic drive to the hospital.
Not five minutes after they’d gone, Sailor asked Sheela to bring out the photographs of the stone sphere and lay them on the table. Ray and Nova gathered around and I showed Sailor the letter I’d received from Geaxi, which he read carefully. The black-and-white pictures were old and grainy, but the object being photographed was unmistakable. It was a stone ball exactly like the one we’d seen in Cuba with one important difference — there was twice as much script carved at the five broken intervals spaced around the ball. However, details were impossible to make out due to the poor quality of the photographs.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“Brazil,” Sailor answered.
Sheela added, “From an art dealer with a questionable reputation. We have no idea where he obtained them. He said he ‘found’ them twenty years ago while on a trip to Europe.”
Ray leaned over and examined each photograph. “Has that ball got somethin’ to do with the Remembering?”
Sailor frowned and looked down at the pictures. “We do not know. I think it must. These spheres are without question the oldest and rarest link to the Meq we have yet found. Perhaps Zianno will be able to decipher this one. It is imperative we locate it, if, indeed, it still exists.” Sailor held Geaxi’s letter in the air. “With this information we have a place to start.” He paused and glanced at Sheela. “However, Sochi may prove difficult.”
“Where exactly is Sochi?” Ray asked.
“Sochi is in the—”
At that moment a horn honked outside and a car pulled to a stop under the archway. Ten seconds later the door opened and Jack came rushing into the kitchen. He stopped in his tracks when he saw all of us staring back at him, then he smiled wide and said, “I don’t know whether this is fate or coincidence. I was only expecting Z, but the timing of this surprise could not be better. I needed to get word to all of you, anyway.”
He took off his coat and I asked, “What word, Jack?”
“We have recently discovered what Blaine Harrington is doing in California and it isn’t good, Z.”
“What is he doing?” Sailor asked.
Jack looked around the table at each of us. “He is looking for you … for all of you. He is looking for the Meq.” Jack paused a moment. “He has already found one of you.”
My mind went instantly to one thought and fear — Opari!
Jack went on. “And that’s not all. The Soviets may be after you, too.”
Sailor quickly gathered the photographs from the table and handed them to Sheela. He pulled a chair out from the table and said, “Sit down, Jack. Relax, have some coffee, and, please, you must tell us everything you know.”
As Jack explained it, through an ally in Army Intelligence, Cardinal had discovered a top-secret file concerning a “black” operation code-named “SCAR,” which was being run by Blaine Harrington. Under the auspices of Army Intelligence he had converted a small ten-acre ranch outside San Diego into a kind of laboratory or prison where only one subject was being held and studied. The subject was a badly scarred female child who apparently had not aged, changed, spoken, or acknowledged anyone in nine years. They found her blood type did not make sense because it did not even exist in modern humans. They were studying the body chemistry of the girl to unlock the secret and potential power within such chemistry. Army Intelligence thought there might be strategic purposes for this knowledge, and they were going to make certain the United States had it first.
Jack talked for half an hour. I listened to every word, but as he spoke I kept feeling a strange sensation throughout my body, as if my legs and arms were waking up or anticipating something that was about to happen.
“Where did they capture this girl?” Sailor asked.
In a matter of seconds the sensations I’d been feeling increased tenfold. I felt a presence, almost a glow. My skin flushed and tingled.
Jack shook his head back and forth. “She wasn’t captured, Sailor. She was found.”
“Where?” I asked.
Jack said, “That’s the crazy part, Z.”
“Where, Jack?”
“Nagasaki. Three weeks after the bomb dropped, she was found wandering through the rubble like a ghost.”
“Zuriaa!” Sailor and I said simultaneously. My heart was pounding, and I heard or felt someone behind me, silently slipping through the house from the front door to the dining room to the kitchen.
I looked at Ray, but I could feel her behind me.
“No,” she said from the shadows. Everyone turned at once toward the voice. “Zuriaa is dead, Ray, and I shall beg your forgiveness for as long as I live.” She took two steps into the light of the kitchen. Her beautiful black eyes were staring directly at Ray. It was Opari. “Five days ago,” she said, “I slit her throat from ear to ear.”
The next day, March 1, 1954, on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, the United States conducted its second hydrogen bomb test. The fifteen-megaton blast was much bigger than anyone expected, erasing the atoll forever and leaving in its place a deep radioactive scar. In St. Louis a brand-new American and flawless seven-pound, eight-ounce baby girl, Georgia Caitlin Croft, was only a day old.
Part II
People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great insult to the beast, a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.
