well supplied with food, Cokes, and a stack of romantic comedy DVDs. Jaako was with Cumming in Chicago. Noel didn’t want to think about how they would amuse themselves.
Noel had gone into the center of the city to monitor the traffic and security around the bank during the night. Tomorrow he would show Mollie the yacht. He hoped he wouldn’t have to actually get her into the hold of the boat. All she had to do was open a doorway.
On the way he’d checked in on Mathias and found him eating a room-service meal and reading Proust. Whatever floats your boat, Noel thought, and he realized that what floated his boat was just what he was doing. Pitting himself against implacable foes, and finding the victory.
He loved the game. It had been hard to leave it. But he loved Niobe more. And their son to come.
On the Lualaba River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Wally took to calling the little girl Ghost. She haunted him.
Every waking moment of the day, she stalked him. Patiently. Relentlessly. And, like rubbing a lamp to summon a genie, merely closing his eyes for a few minutes brought her out of hiding. Always with that big knife.
It didn’t matter how far he traveled, nor how fast. Pushing the throttle of his stolen boat as far as it could go made no difference. Ghost kept up with him.
Sometimes, if he turned his head just right, and strained to see the riverbank through the corners of his eyes, he’d catch a brief glimpse of something pale drifting through the trees. Pacing the boat. Waiting for him to nod off again.
He’d tried sleeping in the boat, in the middle of the river. It made no difference. She floated across water as easily as she floated through the thickest jungle. In the end he gave up on that, because the boat didn’t have an anchor, so sleeping there presented additional risks beyond getting stabbed in his sleep.
And that was the problem. If he wasn’t traveling through the jungle-during rainy season, patches of skin crumbling away, new rust spots appearing daily, and with a dwindling supply of S.O. S pads-Ghost’s knife wouldn’t have been much of a problem against his iron skin. But he was. And sooner or later Ghost would figure it out; she was too persistent not to.
This far he’d been lucky. She kept aiming for the neck. Trying to slit his throat. How long before she found the holes in his shoulder, his arm, his legs?
Wally did the only thing he could: he didn’t sleep. Jerusha would have told him it was pointless. That nobody could go without sleep forever. And she would have been right. It was impossible not to sleep.
The cottony fog of exhaustion filling his head made the simplest tasks-reading a map, steering the boat, pitching a tent-almost insurmountable challenges. It felt like he was doing everything underwater, or that there was a layer of glass between him and the world. Two sleepless nights had turned him into a zombie. How far to Bunia?
But he pushed on. Because the longer he stayed at it, the farther he drew Ghost away from Jerusha and the kids. Ghost was a problem for Wally, but Jerusha wouldn’t have a chance against her.
He traveled the river from sunrise to sunset, from the first light of morning until the last glow of sunset faded in the west. And during the long, dark nights, he huddled by his campfire, fighting an exhaustion more powerful than any crocodile.
22
Thursday,
December 17
Paris, France
Simoon smiled, leaning against Bugsy’s arm. The soft Parisian fog was bitterly cold, but it looked gorgeous. The Eiffel Tower loomed in the distance, the thick air making it seem ghostly. The steam rising from his cup of coffee vanished into the air, but the smell of roasted beans and the lingering taste of butter pastry and powdered sugar were immediate and oddly comforting. They walked slowly as dawn gradually turned up the dimmer on the whole world. The low clouds effectively hid east.
“It’s beautiful,” Simoon said. “I mean, oh, my God, I’m in Paris! I always wanted to come here, but I never… I mean…”
You thought there would be time, Bugsy thought. You didn’t figure on getting slaughtered before you could hit college. Who does? “It’s nice,” he said out loud.
She looked up at him, concern in her expression. The earring dangled. In the Paris morning, the one earring looked like the walk of shame. Someone seeing them together would think they’d been up all night talking and drinking and fucking and singing soft songs to each other. All the things you were supposed to do in Paris.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Sure. I just get a little nervous when it’s too cold to really bug out.”
“Why’s it too cold?”
“This?” he said, nodding to the fog, the frost, the pavement gone slick and dark. “When I’m swarming, I’ve got a lot of surface area. I’d go hypothermic in about a minute. There was this one Christmas when I was eighteen, I thought it would be funny to sneak into the neighbor’s house?”
“Let me guess,” Simoon said. “There was a girl.”
“And a lot of eggnog,” he said. “It wasn’t a good decision. Anyway, by the time I had enough of me back together that I was more or less human again, they had to take me to the hospital.”
“And that’s really what you were thinking about?”
Ellen’s face looked young with Simoon in it. Would she understand? Could someone who’d barely started her life and died see how sad it was to walk through a Paris morning and know she’d never be able to do it all for real? “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m thinking about.”
She didn’t push the issue. Maybe she was talking with Ellen in the weird back-of-the-head way they did. Here was a fucked-up thing. Romantic morning in Paris, coffee and fog, a beautiful woman on his arm. Possibly two beautiful women on his arm, depending how you counted it. And he felt lonely.
They made their way back toward the Louvre in relative silence. A cat scampered across the street before them. A boy on a moped skimmed through the growing traffic, laughing and earning a volley of honks and shaken fists from the people in cars. By the time they reached the museum, Bugsy’s coffee had gone tepid.
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The pit is warm from the decaying bodies. The smell makes Michelle cough and gag. She crawls to Adesina. But when she tries to embrace her, she finds herself holding a wormy creature. Repelled, Michelle pushes the creature away.
“Adesina,” she says. But she doesn’t really want to see her. The smell and the decay and the rotting flesh make her want to throw up.
Michelle jerked awake. She was lying on one of the short bunks in the boat cabin. The light coming through the windows was grey. It was still raining. She got up, raked a hand through her hair, and quickly braided it. Joey would be ready to get some sleep.
As she came topside, she saw Joey huddled under a tarp. She looked very frail, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Whatever had been bothering her clearly hadn’t stopped when they left Kongoville.
Michelle grabbed one of the ponchos hanging next to the cabin doorway. It was already wet and she shivered a bit as she pulled it on. She pulled the hood up, then carefully made her way across the slippery deck to Joey.
“You should go belowdecks and get some sleep.”
Joey didn’t even blink as the rain hit her face. “I can’t sleep.”
Michelle sat down next to her. “Of course you can sleep. Go lie down. You’ll be fine.”
Joey stared out at the jungle that was slipping by. “You know what’s out there?” Her voice was cold.
“No,” Michelle replied.
“Death. If you walked out there, the fucking ground would bleed.” Joey grabbed her hand. “Can’t you feel it?
