called. “Go home now. Is over. You must not fight no more.”
It looked like the big guy was weeping. Someone shouted something Bugsy couldn’t make out, and the previous Hardhat went from maudlin to enraged in under a second.
“That’s not good,” Jason the joker said. But just as the guy with the big wrench was about to start in on the crowd, he went down too, tripped by Thomas Marion Douglas. The Lizard King got up as Hardhat regained his feet. The picture was jumping back and forth now, the cameraman torn between a great story and the threat of becoming collateral damage. Bugsy leaned forward. The Lizard King, blood running down his forehead and into his eyes, took a solid swing straight to the ribs and went down again. Hardhat stood over him, ready to crush the man’s skull. The wrench rose, and then something-a chain, maybe-wrapped around it and spun Hardhat to face a new enemy.
Tom Weathers. Bugsy stopped the frame.
He looked familiar, but not quite the same. Slender, with blond hair down to his shoulders, wearing only a pair of blue jeans and a saucer-sized peace medallion on a chain, but this was absolutely unquestionably the Radical. The man who had threatened New Orleans, who had killed enemy and ally alike for almost two decades.
But Bugsy couldn’t help thinking that the Tom Weathers on the screen looked… not younger, precisely. Softer. Kinder. Less ravingly homicidal.
He started the tape again. Hardhat, the Radical, and the Lizard King carried on their battle until it ended with Hardhat on the ground, reduced to merely human size and weeping, the Radical and the Lizard King in a victory embrace that was almost sexual.
“That’s all we’ve got,” Jason said.
“Okay,” Cameo said. “Ready to meet the Lizard King?”
Bugsy nodded. Cameo took the old grey terry-cloth hand towel from Jason the joker’s outstretched hand, settled it around her neck like a prize-fighter, and closed her eyes. Bugsy could see the change almost at once. She slouched into her chair, the angle of her shoulders changing, her head slipping back on her neck like a petulant schoolboy. He knew that Thomas Marion Douglas would be the one to open her eyes.
Apparently Ellen spent the two or three silent minutes prepping the Lizard King, because he didn’t seem surprised.
“I have risen, man,” Tom Douglas said in a slow, theatrical drawl. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and in strange eons, even death may die.”
“Yeah, okay. So my name’s Jonathan,” Bugsy said. “I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the Radical. From the People’s Park riot?”
Tom Douglas shook his head as if he expected his hair to be longer and leaned even farther back and lower in his chair. Arrogance and contempt came off him in waves. “He’s still fighting the good fight, is he? Cool for him, man. He was righteous.”
“How well did you know him?” Bugsy asked.
The Lizard King shook his head. The movement was languorous, as if designed to stall just for the joy of stalling. “Just that one night, man. Just that one bright, shining moment. We showed the Man that we would not be intimidated. The people would not be pushed down. We stood the National Guard and their aces on their asses, man. And afterward, it was love, sweet love until the dawn.”
Bugsy blinked, mentally recalculating. “So you and the Radical were… ah… lovers?”
“That make you uptight, man?” the Lizard King asked with a smile.
“Well, not in a queers-are-yucky way. I just never really thought of Tom Weathers as a sexual object.”
“Everyone was with everyone, man. No jealousy, no possessiveness, no hang-ups. We were free and wild and full of love, man. But no, Radical and me were the power and the light. People were drawn to us. There was too much of us not to share around. Radical, he spent most of his night with a chick called Saffron… no, no. Sunflower. That was it. Seemed really into her.”
“And after that night,” Bugsy said. “Did he keep hanging out with her in particular?”
“There was no after that night, man. There was that one authentic moment, and then nothing. Dude came when he was needed and vanished with the dawn.”
“You never saw him again?”
“Before or since.”
“Great,” Bugsy said.
Thomas Marion Douglas leaned forward, shaping Ellen’s face into a smoky glower that Bugsy recognized from the covers of classic rock albums. “The thing was, we weren’t afraid of death, man. We embraced it. We became free, and everything around us was transformed by our power. After us, nothing was the same. Nothing.”
“Two words,” Bugsy said.
The Lizard King lifted his chin, accepting the implicit dare.
“Britney Spears,” Bugsy said, and then while the Thomas Marion Douglas looked confused, he lifted the towel from Ellen’s neck and returned her to herself.
“Well,” she said. “That could have been more useful.”
“We’ve got Sunflower to work with, at least.”
“Couldn’t have been more than eight or nine million girls called that in sixty-nine,” Ellen said.
“It’s something,” he said. Then, looking at the limp towel in his hand, “So that guy was the edgy, dangerous sex symbol of a generation, huh?”
“Apparently so,” Ellen said.
“Guess you had to be there.”
Kawi Airfield
Tanzania
The plane had creaked as Wally stepped aboard, the suspension visibly sagging. Jerusha eyed the rust- spotted and patched fuselage with suspicion. “How old is this plane?” she asked Finch.
He grinned. “Ah, this crate’s as old as me, and just as mean,” he said. “She’s a Cessna 206, made in 1964-a good year, all around. We’re both perfectly serviceable, lady, if you catch my drift.” He winked one tiny eye at her, and his glance drifted down the length of her body.
“Can it carry Wally?”
“Your metal man, you mean? Sure. How much can the bloke weigh?”
She said nothing, but climbed into the plane and took one of the four seats in the cabin, in front of a pile of boxes and crates lashed in with webbing and straps. Finch climbed into the pilot’s seat, and the propeller on the plane’s nose spun into invisibility as the engine coughed, sputtered, and roared. They clattered down the dirt runway, bouncing as Jerusha held tightly to the seat arms. As the plane finally lifted into the air and began to climb, Jerusha could see the sapphire water of the Zanzibar Strait, and off the horizon, the distance-blued green hump of the island itself. Below, the port city spread out, revealing all of its complexity and life.
“Where’s Mount Kilimanjaro?” Wally asked, shouting against the roar of the plane’s engine as they lifted from the airstrip, wings dipping left as Finch set them on a westerly course. “That’s in Tanzania too, right?”
Finch snorted. He pointed out the right window of the aircraft. “Kilimanjaro’s that way about six hundred kilometers: north, not west.”
“Nuts,” Wally said. He looked disappointed.
“Maybe on the way back we can make a detour,” Jerusha told him. “With Lucien.”
Wally brightened a little. “That’d be swell,” he said. “I hope we can.”
“So do I,” she told him, but the churning of her stomach belied her confidence.
As they slid westward under the high sun, the shadow of the plane below moved initially across well-greened land, but as they moved farther from the coast, the landscape below became more arid, tan earth dotted with the green of occasional stands of trees and brush, interrupted at intervals by the winding paths of streams. An hour or so into the flight, the ground began to rise and crinkle underneath them, steep green-clad mountains and deep valleys sliding underneath their wings. “Mongoro Region,” Finch called out, pointing down. “Beautiful, if you like mountains.”
Jerusha nodded. Staring down, she realized that it would have taken long days to cross Tanzania by car as she’d first planned, following the winding, rough roads carved into this wild land. The mountains eventually drifted
