Krokodil Tears

by Jack Yeovil

  “That’s a fascinating field, Rex. I’d like very much to confer with you, but my President calls…”

  “That’s okay, doctor, I understand.”

  “Otto-kar! Otto-kar! Otto-kar! Otto-kar! Otto-kar!”

  “That’s it,” screamed Officer Kerr. “Lockdown in the booby hatch! No exercise periods! No teevee! No porno!”

  “Otto-kar! Otto-kar! Otto-kar! Otto-kar! Otto-kar!”

  The door guard opened up, and Dr Proctor was bundled through. He tried to wave goodbye to his peers, but the chain between his knees and his wrists was too short.

  The door slammed shut, and the soundproofing cut out the chants. The hospital corridor was almost unnaturally quiet after Monsters’ Row.

  “Ahh,” said Dr Proctor, “my public.”

  “Come on, Otto,” said Gilhooly, dragging him.

  “I believe you are being deliberately obtuse, Sergeant.”

  Gilhooly didn’t reply. Dr Proctor did his best to keep up with the sergeant, rattling his chains as he jogged down the corridor on his leash, like a good dog. Bean kept up the rear, riot gun cradled like a baby in his beefy arms.

  Dr Ottokar Proctor liked dogs, cartoons, Italian opera, Carl Jung, French food, Disneyworld, The New York Times Review of Books, pre-Columbian art, good wine, walks in the park on Sundays, horse-racing, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic novels of Margaret Thatcher, and killing people.

  They were waiting for him in the conference room. F. X. Wicking of the T-H-R Agency, Julian Russell from the Treasury, and a dark-faced man he didn’t recognize.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said.

  “Dr Proctor,” said Russell, “can we get you anything?”

  Dr Proctor chinked as he shrugged. “My freedom would be nice.”

  Wicking sighed and dropped his papers. This was going to be just like all the other meetings, he was thinking. He was wrong.

  Dr Proctor sank into the specially-adapted, floor-rooted chair, and Bean padlocked his chains to the spine.

  A secretary came in with coffee. She did her best not to look at Dr Proctor. He was reminded of the girl in the Coupe de Ville between Coronado Beach and Chula Vista three years ago. The one who had lasted for two nights and a day. She put cups in front of the delegates, and handed Gilhooly a child’s dribble-proof plastic container. The sergeant propped it on Dr Proctor’s shoulder-shackles, and angled the nipple so he could suck it, snarling as he did so.

  “Thank you, sergeant.” He took a mouthful. “Ahh, real coffee. Nicaraguan?”

  Nobody answered. Russell spooned three loads of sugar into his cup.

  “Watch your blood sugar levels, Julian,” cautioned Dr Proctor. “You could be cruising into heart-attack country.”

  Wicking pulled out his filofax, and switched it on. It hummed as the miniscreen lit up. The Op would be in contact with his home base throughout this consultation.

  “How is Ms Harvest?” Dr Proctor asked. “Well, I hope.” Wicking snorted. “I do wish she wouldn’t take so many unnecessary risks out in the field. I’ve been following her stats, Francis. The odds get shorter every time she takes a solo action. She should never have come for me alone, you know.”

  “She got you, didn’t she?” Wicking wasn’t giving anything away.

  “Yes, of course, but she had an unfair advantage.”

  “And what’s that, Ottokar?”

  Dr Proctor smiled sweetly. “Let me put it this way, what’s the difference between Redd Harvest and, say, Jessamyn Bonney?”

  The dark man reacted to the dropped name, as Dr Proctor had known he would. “Bonney? The psycho-killer?” said Wicking. “I’ve no idea.”

  “A badge, Francis. A badge.”

  Wicking didn’t laugh. Dr Proctor drank some more coffee. Russell snapped a digestive biscuit in half, and dipped it in his cup.

  “I suppose a cookie is out of the question? Ah well, we live with disappointments.”

  Dr Proctor gave some thought to the dark man, and smiled. He realized that this was the meeting he had been waiting for ever since the trial.

  “Tell me, how are they running at Santa Anita?”

  Nobody knew.

  “Well, we ought perhaps to get down to business then.”

  Russell brought out a sheaf of papers. The dark man sat calmly, examining Dr Proctor. He was taking the man’s measure at the same time. This meeting would be between the two of them. Wicking and Russell were just stooges along for the ride.

  “This is Roger Duroc, Ottokar,” said Russell. “He’s not with the government.”

  “How do you do, Mr Duroc.” Dr Proctor knew the Frenchman by reputation. “Pardon me,” he corrected himself, “Monsieur Duroc.”

  Duroc nodded. “Very well thank you, Dr Proctor.”

  “Good. And how are you going to get me out of this place?”

  There was a pause…

  V

  Hawk-That-Settles had been waiting for the One-Eyed White Girl all his life. And here she was.

  Looking across the abandoned chapel at Jesse, he wondered yet again. Was this really the one? She was jumping up her ladder two steps at a time, like a good little mystic, but there was still a core of confusion to her. This messiah was spending too much time in the desert. The years for wandering and contemplation were up, and it was time for the miracles.

  Also, far from Two-Dogs-Dying, he had doubts about himself. Perhaps he was fated to be just another Whisky Navaho, and all this medicine was dangerous tampering with forces beyond him.

  She sat quietly, her one eye closed. He knew she saw him through the machine behind her patch. Her supple body was shot through with machinery. He could feel the lumps under her skin and muscle as they made love, and had to remind himself these were not cancers or tumours but the benefits of the white man’s science. She could sit for whole periods, days sometimes, not moving, not speaking. Part of that was the meditation necessary for her education. But part of it was something else, something that she called her Frankenstein’s Daughter trances.

  Sometimes, as she clung to him in the nights, he was reminded of the other white girls, the rich liberals who had come to the Reservations and dressed up like Pocahontas, who had been passed from buck to buck, who had been the stuff of jokes at the councils of the Sons of Geronimo. They were all looking for something from the red man, something Hawk knew he didn’t have. There was a crocodile egg inside Jesse, growing as their dead baby had grown, but the shell was still just a white girl. A one-eyed white girl.

  Of course, most white girls could not break a wrestler’s back or crush stone to dust with their naked hands. But strength of the body was not enough for Jesse, she would need all the strength of her spirit if she were who she seemed to be.

  She was getting stronger inside. Sometimes, Hawk was frightened by her strength. He knew something of her past, knew she had been swept away by a stream of blood. One night, without being asked, she had told him about her father, about what he had done to her, and about how he had died. Hawk had heard many bad stories, but this scared him as no other had done. It was not so much the horrors she recounted that got through to him as the manner of her telling, as if these things had happened to someone else, a character in a film or a teevee soap. She claimed to have no scars any more, but Hawk thought Jesse was all scar tissue.

  When she slept, her thumb crept babylike to her mouth, and he thought he could see her as she might have been had she not been born in a bad place, at a bad time to a bad father. Just another white girl. No better and no worse than the rest.

  He left her, and wandered through the sand-carpeted corridors of the monastery. He heard the echoes of the prayers of the long-dead monks. They had come here to convert his forefathers to their faith, but had perished. Their faith was still here, though. Their meditations had created a channel to the spirit world that was still open. They had come to teach the Indians a lesson his people had already known for a thousand years. But he could not hate the Jesuits. They brought Bibl
es and statues of the Blessed Virgin with them from the Old World, not Springfield rifles and smallpox.

  He looked up at an eroded statue of Jesus on the cross, its face ground away like the figurehead of a ship that had been through too many typhoons. He bowed his head to the carpenter; a powerful manitou was to be revered, were he born in a tribal hogan or a Judean stable.

  His child by Jesse would have been a son. He would have named it himself, in the old way, as he had been named, by taking the first thing the child looked upon. Here, that meant he could not have much of a name: Stone-Wall-Standing perhaps, or Sand-That-Stretches-to-the-Sky. Back on the Reservation, he had known Navaho children called Three-Cars-Bumper-to-Bumper, Broken-Telephone-Booth and Maniak-Corpse-Rotting. His father, Two-Dogs-Dying, had not been fortunate in his naming, and had determined his son should not suffer. Hawk’s mother told him that Two-Dogs was the only one of the tribe who had seen the hawk for whom he was named, but that the others had gone along with him.

  The pregnancy had been a part of Jesse’s education that he had not understood until its messy, bloody conclusion. He resented the spirits who would give him a son and then take the child away before its birth, just to teach a one-eyed white girl a lesson. His father had never explained, had never understood, that Hawk’s part in the story was merely as an attendant upon the creation of the crocodile girl. Her feelings mattered, his were as feathers in the wind. He might as well be a Wooden Indian standing outside a drugstore for all his feelings counted.

  He believed that the spirits really didn’t give a damn about any of them. They were just being made to jump through hoops as part of some vast pre-ordained pattern.

  Walking across the courtyard, Hawk looked up at the sky. It was late afternoon, and the moon was already up. The moon was sacred for Jesse.

  “Tell me what you want, moon spirit?”

  The man in the moon grinned his lopsided, reptile-jawed grin down at him and did not answer.

  “Sonofabitch,” he spat.

  Perhaps he should leave this place, leave Jesse to work out her own fate. He should look after his father. The old man drank too much, and was provocative of trouble. If he didn’t kill himself soon, he would find someone else to do it for him. There wasn’t much for him on the Reservation, but there was more there than sand and stone.

  The one-eyed white girl could reach her Seventh Level on her own. She didn’t really need him. She had many battles to fight, and he would only be in the way. He wondered if she was worried about him, if she ever even gave him any thought. Her face was in his mind constantly, the memory of her tugging at his heart like a fishhook. He was a Navaho brave, the last of the renegades, but Jesse made him weak.

  He looked at the sand, and trembled. There were things out there in the world that would be coming here soon.

  His battles were beginning.

  VI

  “That issue is not under discussion,” the T-H-R man said. “There can be no negotiations on the question of liberty.”

  “Aw shucks, Francis. Not even if I promise not to do it again?”

  Dr Proctor’s eyes twinkled. He was like a naughty little boy who knows he cannot be sent up to his room.

  So this was the Tasmanian Devil. Wrapped up like Houdini before an escape, he didn’t look like much more than a good-humoured man in early middle-age. How many had he killed? It didn’t matter. He was unquestionably America’s leading murderer. That was what made him of interest to Nguyen Seth, and, therefore, to Roger Duroc.

  “You’ve never stopped doing it, Ottokar. We know that. We don’t know how you’ve done it, but since you came to Sunnydales there have been a lot of deaths. Death by violence or accident or suicide among the inmates has risen by 28%, and among the guards…”

  “89%. I read the sanitarium newspaper, you know.”

  “It may not be your hands, Ottokar. But it’s your mind. We know that.”

  Dr Proctor laughed a little. “Prove it, Francis.”

  “We will.”

  “And then what are you going to do? Lock me up, and throw away the key? You already did that. There’s not much you can punish me with, is there Francis?”

  “We can unlock your cell, chain you up like you are now, and let some of your victims’ relatives visit you with blowtorches…”

  Dr Proctor didn’t betray anything more than mild amusement. “And is that an official promise, Francis? Because if it is, then my lawyers will be most perturbed.”

  “Frank,” cut in Russell. “Couldn’t we bring this meeting to order. The President has authorized me to…”

  “Ah yes, Oliver. How is Oliver, Julian?”

  “He’s well.”

  “And the kids? Recovered from the birthday party?”

  Duroc knew that the President’s children played pass-the-parcel with a severed arm at a White House social event just before Dr Proctor’s arrest. It had been the Devil’s idea of a joke.

  “The nightmares are slowly going away.”

  “That’s good news.”

  Dr Proctor signalled with his head for the sergeant to take his baby-cup away.

  “I don’t suppose anyone has a cigarette?”

  Nobody did.

  “So few people smoke any more. Dreadful habit, but it passes the time. I have a lot of time, you know.”

  “Ottokar,” said Wicking. “We are sanctioned to offer you books, videotapes, magazines, and a limited, monitored access to telephonic and written communication with the world outside.”

  “I have those things.”

  “We can increase them, sweeten the deal…”

  “You could,” he allowed.

  “The President is very concerned, Ottokar,” said Russell. “He would like you to take a look at these trade figures…”

  The Treasury man held out his papers, and spread them on the table in front of Dr Proctor. The chained man ignored them. He was enjoying this, Duroc knew.

  At his trial, Dr Proctor had admitted that he had deliberately encouraged the North administration to follow near-suicidal economic policies in order to foster an increase of chaos in the world. When asked about his motivation, he had referred them to Jungian theory. “Our collective unconscious is becoming too ordered,” he had claimed, “someone had to do something to bring back the element of surprise.” Now, the government kept having to crawl to a convicted mass murderer to ask him to help them sort out the spaghetti tangle of figures he had left behind him.

  Dr Proctor raised an eyebrow as he casually glanced at Russell’s documents. “Tut tut tut. Those tax rebates aren’t working out at all, are they? Silly me. I should have seen that loophole all the Japcorps are squirrelling through, shouldn’t I? You know, national economies mean less than corporate systems these days. I might devote a monograph to the subject. Take the case of the growing conflict between GenTech East and the Soviet Union, for instance. Logically, their trade war could develop into a shooting match, and then where would we be? You should have the CIA keep a close watch on this Blood Banner Society. Nationalism and commerce make a nasty team.”

  “Ottokar, the President has personally asked me to convey to you his best wishes, and authorized me to offer to you any liberties up to but not including freedom from this institution if you’ll only agree to work in an advisory capacity for a six-month period, just until the budget has passed.”

  “I’m truly sorry, Julian, but I’m not interested.”

  “We’ll let you accept ZeeBeeCee’s offer of another TV series. You can host the talk show.”

  “TV. It’s just a toy. Close down all the television stations in the United States. Now, there’s some sound economic advice for you. Cut out the admass, and decrease useless consumption. Cut out the lifebite, and throw people back on their own devices. Your friends in Deseret have the right idea, M. Duroc, bring back the pioneer spirit. When it was just a question of a man, a rifle and a horse against the savage Indians.”

  “This is getting us nowhere,” said Wicking. “As u
sual. He’s freaked the country, and now he’s sitting back and surveying the mess.”

  “I really think we’re close to a breakthrough,” said Russell.

  “You work out of New York, Francis. What’s playing at the Met. Did you see Sir Oswald Osbourne in Pagliacci?”

  Wicking threw up his hands, and slumped in his seat. His jacket opened, and Duroc saw he was carrying a discreet gun. Dr Proctor saw it, too.

  Time passed, and everyone in the room looked at each other.

  Finally, Dr Proctor broke the deadlock. “M. Duroc, talk to me. Tell me what you can offer. Tell me about Jessamyn Bonney and the Josephites.”

  Duroc was impressed. The man might be as crazy as a backstreet Bonaparte, but he was sharp, and he had sources of information nobody knew about. He hadn’t tested ESP-positive in his medicals, but there were ways round the examination.

  “Well?”

  Duroc drew in a breath. “Dr Proctor, I do not represent the government. Unlike Mr Wicking and Mr Russell, I have no legal authority here. I am not even an American citizen. I am French by birth, but my current passport lists me as a resident of Deseret—you know what that means?”

  “Oh yes, an interesting geopolitical experiment, Deseret. Oliver should never have gone along with it. A bad precedent. Within seven years, Missouri, Arkansas and Kentucky will petition for secession from the Union. And perhaps Tennessee. You heard it here first. It will come. Oliver should send reinforcements to Fort Sumter. I’m sorry. I digress. Academic footnotes, it’s a bad habit.”

  “That’s quite all right. The Church of Joseph would like to employ you as a consultant in the case of Jessamyn Bonney. You know her?”

  “I know of her. We haven’t moved in the same circles.”

  Duroc brought out his file. It had been amended a little since the death of Bronson Manolo.

  “This is ridiculous,” Dr Proctor said. “Please may I have a hand? The left will do.”

  Wicking chewed his lip, and signalled to the sergeant. Gilhooly drew his pistol, and held it to Dr Proctor’s head while he fussed with his keyring. A manacle fell, and Dr Proctor waved his hand about to get rid of an ache.