“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“I love you,” Aliyah said.
Bugsy felt a presentiment of regret in his breast. Not the actual emotion, but its echo, bouncing back down to him from someplace still in the future. Would you have said that when you were alive? Or are you making do with me, because I’m the best you can do, what with being dead and all? “I love you, too,” he said. She smiled and took out the earring.
Ellen came back to her body and hitched the blanket tighter around herself. Bugsy looked away. “Billy is, ah, downstairs…” he began.
“I heard. Five minutes,” Ellen said, and walked to the bathroom. With the shower running again and him not invited, Bugsy did the quick-and-dirty alternative of bugging out, letting each wasp groom its neighbors, and re- forming. It wasn’t quite as good as a real bath, but it beat doing nothing.
It was closer to twenty minutes later, but they got on the road. An hour after that, they arrived at the archives. It was a squat concrete building with a sloped roof that looked more like a strip-mall restaurant than an official government museum. Billy loped up to the door and held it open for them.
Inside, the atmosphere was equal parts bureaucratic office and cheap roadside attraction. Gold foil surrounded maps and displays written in Vietnamese chronicled something, but Bugsy was damned if he could say what. Most out of place was a framed still from some kind of cheap horror-porn film. A huge, misshapen thing loomed over the jungle, lightning arcing from its improbably clawed hands to an exploding Vietnamese tank. Pure creature-feature schlock, except that this particular beast also had a disproportionately huge penis, fully erect and easily as threatening as its claws.
As the curator-a grey-haired man with thin lips and a surprising smile-carried on a fast, incomprehensible conversation with Billy, Ellen came up to Bugsy’s side and considered the movie still. “Cute,” she said.
“Vietnamese hentai,” Bugsy said. “Who knew?”
The curator went through a wide double door, talking seriously over his shoulder all the way. Billy said something in a high chitter that Bugsy guessed had more to do with playing up his simian looks than with the language itself. The joker ambled over. “Ah, yeah. The big fight,” he said. “That was back when Moonchild got taken captive. Vietnamese army sent an armored division to kill us all. Joker Brigade, Moonchild’s dissident faction. Fucking everyone. They didn’t care. Then that big son of a bitch showed up, trashed the whole place.”
“You mean, that’s real?” Ellen said, leaning in toward the image.
“That’s what this place is celebrating.” Billy sounded a little offended at their ignorance.
Bugsy considered the monster and tried to make it fit in with the theories about the Radical and Mark Meadows. If Moonchild had had something like that on the leash, she might have been able to stand up to Tom Weathers. Bugsy had the creeping sensation of looking at a clue that he just couldn’t quite interpret.
The curator came back with a robe and a framed picture. He spoke rapidly to Billy. Billy nodded back, saying something in turn. The curator made a satisfied sound and stood back, waiting.
The picture was Mark Meadows. He looked older, more tired, less carefree. But it was unmistakably the same guy Bugsy had seen in the pictures from the seventies back in New York. Only now, instead of the purple and yellow Uncle Sam outfit, he was wearing a robe of gold and green. The same one Billy was handing to Ellen. To Cameo.
“Okay,” Bugsy said. “Here we go.”
Ellen settled the robe on her shoulders, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.
A moment later they opened, and Ellen was still looking out of them. Bugsy put down the picture of Meadows next to the still frame of the penis monster.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I don’t… it’s not working.”
“Have we got the wrong robe?”
Billy turned to the curator, pointing and screeching. The curator took the question poorly and started screeching back. The two men gestured wildly, talking over each other. Ellen stepped up next to Bugsy. Her face was unreadable. “I think it’s the right robe,” she said.
“Then what?”
“Then Mark Meadows is alive.”
Khartoum, Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
All hospitals smell the same-alcohol, blood, feces, fading flowers, disinfectant, and sickness.
Prince Siraj held a handkerchief-liberally sprinkled with aftershave-to his nose. Noel had smelled worse. Since this hospital was in Khartoum, you had the added charm of cots lining the dingy concrete walls. Each cot held a moaning, crying patient. Some held two. “You know, we could have held this meeting in Paris again,” Noel said.
“I want you to see something.” Siraj’s tone was terse, despite being muffled by the square of linen. He pushed open the door to a room. There were only four beds inside. Whoever they were here to see clearly rated.
Noel followed Siraj to a bed near an open window. A desultory breeze filled with heat and the reek of camel dung floated through. A skeletal figure lay in the bed. His skin stretched over the bones in his face, and his eyes were so sunken that Noel thought they had been removed. His long beard looked like moss hanging from an ancient dead tree. The single sheet rose and fell as the man sucked in air in short, shallow gasps. An IV hung next to the bed. The man’s arms were purple and black from the needles. Noel tilted the IV bag toward the light and read, D5 half normal saline KCL20meq/multivits.
“This is how he looked ten days ago,” Siraj said.
Noel took the iPhone and inspected the image. The white robe strained over a vast belly and the cheeks above the beard were ruddy and fat, as if Santa had decided to holiday in warmer climes. He glanced again at the figure in the bed. There was enough in the shape of the brow and jaw for him to recognize it as the same man.
“You know what this means?”
“I won’t deny you the pleasure of telling me.”
Siraj shot him a venomous glance. “He’s starving to death. Starving! He’s lost 209 pounds in a week. Nothing helps. At first he stuffed himself, but then he became too weak to lift the food to his mouth. Now this.” The prince flicked the bag with a forefinger. “And it’s having no effect.” Siraj paced back and forth at the foot of the man’s bed. The sunken eyes flicked back and forth following his movements. Desperation gave some life to the dark irises. “When he could still talk he said he was bitten by a little boy. There were three of these monstrous children present at Khartoum. One of them could take down a building. The other reduced people to shriveled husks. Where are they coming from? How many more of these monsters does Weathers have?”
“I’ll be going back to the PPA in a day or two. I’ll see what I can discover.”
“In a day or two?” Siraj’s voice rose in outrage. “What the hell have you been doing?”
Noel tried to hang on to his own fraying temper. “Assembling my team. I’ll be putting them in place in Kongoville.”
“If you locate these monsters, kill them,” Siraj ordered.
“That will make the PPA even more paranoid, and make it that much harder for me to accomplish my goal. Also, I don’t kill children.”
“Scruples? From you? What a joke.” Siraj read the fury in Noel’s eyes. “You’d best keep your temper. Remember my little love notes.”
“Right now I have both you and Weathers threatening me. I kill you, I have only one threat.”
That logic seemed to back Siraj down. He looked away.
Noel let him mull on that, then asked, “And how are you coming on arranging a cease-fire?”
“Jayewardene is making arrangements. But once I land in Paris my location will be known. What’s to keep Weathers from just killing me? Or sending one of these child aces after me?”
“Request that the Committee provide security. Weathers is crazy, but he’s not a fool. He didn’t try to fight in New Orleans. He’s powerful, but numbers will always win out.”
“Remember, you only have to the end of the year.”
