Cutting Edge

Canaveral,” he said. “It was clear they worked well as a team, but kept their relationship all professional at the time. Or didn’t go too far beyond that, anyway.”

Megan looked at him.

“You never can tell. Pete’s such a tightly corked bottle, it’s almost impossible getting him to spill anything about his private life.”

“I think I had a bit of an inside line,” Gordian said. “Annie and I stayed in contact afterward. UpLink having so many ties to NASA, and she being an executive at the JSC, of course…”

“Right, of course…”

“Annie would often ask how Pete was doing, ask if I’d say hello to him for her, that sort of thing. And I’d always pass along her best wishes.”

“Right…”

“Although Pete never commented or showed much reaction,” Gordian said. “Then after a while Annie stopped sending her regards but would still occasionally mention Pete during our conversations. For the most part wanting to know if he was okay. So I can pretty safely conclude they lost touch.”

“Well,” Megan said. “That seems a logical guess.”

“It does,” Gordian said. “And it’s the reason I find it so interesting that their love bloomed amid the frozen wastes an entire year later, excuse my stale poetic instincts.”

Megan caught a quick glance from him.

“Why the look?” she asked.

“I was just wondering if you had any insights,” Gordian said. “Given that you were with the two of them at Cold Corners.”

Megan quickly shook her head.

“No,” she said. “No insights.”

“You’re sure? I can’t shake this hunch that something or someone helped coax them along…”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” she said.

“Oh,” Gordian said. “Because I know you’re about as close to Pete as anyone. Besides Annie, naturally. And that you’ve become very friendly with her since Antarctica…”

“I was too busy with my responsibilities as chief administrator to put on a second hat.”

“Second hat?”

“As in social director.”

“Oh,” Gordian said.

“Or matchmaker, if that’s what you’re suggesting…”

“Then it was long-time-no-see, I love you for the two of them?”

Megan shrugged.

“I suppose,” she said.

Gordian shot her another glance. “That sounds very un-Nimecian, so to speak.”

“Like I said, you never can tell.” She shrugged again. “I’d better get back to my office, there’s a ton of paperwork that’s been waiting since Friday.”

Gordian nodded, watching Megan rise from the chair opposite him.

“However their match got made, whoever may or may not have given it a kick start,” he said, “it’s wonderful to see Pete and Annie happy.”

Megan paused in front of Gordian’s desk, a dark mahogany affair roughly the size of a fifteenth-century Spanish war galleon.

“Yes,” she said, struggling against an insistent grin. “It really is, isn’t it?”

* * *

Port-Gentil sits on the low-lying Ile de Mandji finger peninsula of Gabon amid estuarine swamps and deltas that swell to flood levels in the rainy season, the drainage channels describing its neighborhoods joined by small bridges that are more pleasantly — and safely — crossed on foot than in one of the city’s speeding, careening taxis.

No such bridges span the social divisions between district borders. In the fringe neighborhoods of Salsa and Sans there is unemployment and periodic lawlessness. Street crime may be scurrying or savage as opportunity bids, the hustle alternating with the gun.

Downtown in elegant colonial homes, ears sensitive to mannered conversation are deaf to far-off sounds of crime and looting in the night. Was that a crash of breaking storefront glass beyond the canal? A woman’s pitched scream? Ce n’est rien, leave it to the gendarmerie! Instead, enjoy the gentle clink of the champagne flute, the cognac snifter. This is where the magnates and government officials thrive — an upper stratum of wealthy, educated functionairres molded and hardened over a century ago, when Gabon was the capitol of French Equatorial Africa. This, too, is home to the expatriates: bankers, investors, industrialists, and technical engineers drawn by the country’s oil and precious mineral reserves.

Their nights are calm and long in comforts, their days busy and filled with enterprise.

The man in the panama hat and white tropical-weight suit had found Port-Gentil a good place to settle. Here he had eluded his enemies and was able to move with freedom, delving into currents where he could satisfy his innate drive to achieve and attain. When not aboard the Chimera attending to his dark occupations, he liked to stroll the city’s conspicuously miscellaneous districts and take in their skewed contrasts: mosque and casino, skull cap and pomade, luxury hotel and hovel, sidewalk cafe and fetish market. Often he stopped outside the large church where worshipers raised their voices in a fusion of Christian hymns and animistic chants, hedging their bets by musically praising Christ as they recalled ancient initiations to the Cult of Fire.

The market was among his favorite spots, a crowd of outdoor stalls lined up in aisles in a section of town called Le Grand Village.

Today there had been a bad moment during his walk. The blazing dry-season heat took his mind back to Bolivia, and the time he had turned his face to the sun and burned away his rage, feeling the layers of skin redden and blister in its searing exposure. Such flashes of that memory were exceptional for him. He had suffered the annealing pain, scoured the leftover contaminants of defeat from within himself, and gone forward with things. But the disappointing news from America had caused the past to seep into his mind lately, and for those few seconds it had found a particularly deep route of entry. At the Beacon District sidewalk stand where he had stopped for pain beurre and coffee, he paid the vender his coins and left the breakfast sitting on his cart. The African street had faded around him and he was again on the veranda of his Chapare ranch house, his dull-eyed, placidly stupid heifers grazing in the distance. And his face was on fire in the sun.

Then his brief opening to the recollection shut tight, and it was Bolivia that evaporated from thought. He had continued to the market for the item he wished to pick up before calling on his governmental contact at city hall.

Once there he had gone directly to a merchant of charms and ritual medicines known among the circumspect for his choice stock, transported from around the continent in defiance of endangered species and antiquities laws that intimidated others — all of it stored in barrels, baskets, cartons, crates, burlap sacks, even rusted cans arranged beneath his stall’s straw canopy. He trafficked in back-room merchandise while lacking a back room, pawned smuggled hides and relics with his left hand, and common medicinal powders and charms with his right… sometimes shuffling items from one hand to the other.

That this merchant was an ace of the swindle just gave bargaining with him a crisp edge. His combination of guile and brazenness merited appreciation and kept the man in the white suit’s own cunning instincts honed.

The dealer sat in his simple kaftan behind a wide display board mounted on loose foundation stones, and cluttered with animal skulls, horns, and hooves. Carved wooden masks hung from one of the thick canopy poles, bunches of desiccated lizard and mammal cadavers from another.

He acknowledged his customer with a quick smile of recognition.

“Je suis heureux de vous voir.”

“Merci, vous etes tre‘s aimiable.”

Their polite exchange of greetings out of the way, the man in the white suit had been specific about what he wanted to acquire, and the merchant was quick to declare he could provide it. Indeed, the desired commodity was