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.
11
Sunday,
December 6
On the Lukuga River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The residents of Kalemie gave Wally and Gardener a well-used motorboat and filled the outboard engine with gasoline, but none of them would guide them, not when they realized that the two of them were intending to go to Nyunzu. There were mutterings, curse-wardings, and prayers at that statement.
Jerusha wondered if they shouldn’t have taken that as a sign.
The Lukuga River, just north of Kalemie, flowed out from Lake Tanganyika, winding and turning as its slow current slid westward into the jungle. They very quickly left behind the houses that gathered on the hills near the lakeshore, and then there was no sign of humankind at all, only unbroken jungle to either side. Jerusha felt that she
