Suicide Kings wc-20

by George R. R. Martin

“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 was truly caught in Conrad’s story, drifting down the river into an emerald-shaded, hidden world where people were more intruders than conquerors.

  Away from the lake, the river narrowed to the width of a football field. A few crocodiles lounged on the banks, sunning themselves and lifting great, heavy heads to watch them as they passed. Shrikes, hornbills, herons, and storks brooded in the shallows or flickered in the branches and vanished; strange and unidentifiable animals gurgled and yowled and screeched in the shadows, monkeys chased each other high in the trees, shrieking. The mosquitoes were relentless and hungry… though that was a problem only for Jerusha. They left Wally entirely alone.

  Once they passed a pod of hippos, steering carefully away from them. The green hummocks of islands blocked their way, and the river would split abruptly into branches where they would need to decide which one to follow-they would choose the larger of two, hoping to remain in the main flow of the river. The dense foliage was made up of trees and plants that Jerusha often didn’t recognize; there were no bare-branched baobabs here, not in the jungle, nor the ubiquitous acacias of the savannah. The under-story of the forest canopy loomed fifty to a hundred feet up; the floor was dense with ferns, parasitical vines, and other large-leafed plants.

  The air was heavy and thick; even without the rain, Jerusha’s clothing was soaked within a few hours from sweat and mist and humidity. Wally’s skin was
almost visibly growing orange rust spots as she watched. “I’d give a thousand bucks to be in an air-conditioned room for two minutes right now,” Jerusha commented.

  Wally glanced at her quizzically. “I didn’t think…” he said, then seemed to think better of continuing. His mouth clanged shut with a sound like two cast-iron skillets striking together.

  Jerusha cocked her head at him. “I really hope that you weren’t about to suggest that because I’m black and some distant generations ago my ancestors lived somewhere on this godforsaken continent, you thought I should be perfectly comfortable here.”

  Wally looked away, down, to the side. He didn’t speak.

  “I didn’t think so.” Jerusha pulled her sodden shirt away from her shoulders; it clung stubbornly to her skin. She smiled inwardly at Wally’s discomfiture.

  Every so often, a village would appear on one bank or the other, and people would stare at them as they drifted past or watch silently from their fishing craft. No one approached them, no one called out to them, no one challenged them. They only stared. Jerusha saw almost no children in those villages, and few young men: this area, from what they could see, was inhabited largely by adult women and old people.

  Once, passing one of the larger settlements, they watched as a group of older men dressed in business suits and carrying briefcases walked into an open-walled grass hut as if going to a corporate meeting: the juxtaposition was startling. The men watched them too, and one of them reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and spoke rapidly into a cell phone, staring at them as he did so.

  “Nuts,” Wally muttered. “I don’t like that.”

  Jerusha could only agree.

  They continued down the river. Around noon, a swarm of bees crossed the stream just ahead of them, a thick, snarling dark arm that twisted and churned up from yet another river island and wriggled its way toward the nearest bank. Jerusha turned off the boat’s motor to avoid running into the swarm. The silence was pleasant as they watched the tail of the swarm vanish into the trees.

  “That was a lot of bees,” Wally said.

  Jerusha nodded. “Biggest swarm I’ve seen. Not even those in Yosemite… Umm, what’s that?”

  Wally’s head had also swiveled at the same time. They both heard the throaty whine coming from farther down the river and growing louder. “Another boat,” Jerusha whispered. Few of the boats they’d passed so far were motorized; those that were had been, like their own boat, using single-stroke gas engines. This was something far more powerful: low, growling, sinister. “Come on,” she said to Wally. “Let’s take the boat into the island…”

  They used the paddles in the boat to maneuver to the rocks at the edge of the island. Jerusha jumped out of the boat, steadying it as Wally came ashore. Wally grabbed the rope at the bow in one massive hand and dragged the boat fully ashore into the foliage. They both hunkered down near it, watching the river through the fronds. A few minutes later, the roar of the engine increased as a patrol boat similar to the one they’d encountered on the lake rounded the nearest bend. It was moving slowly upriver, and the men aboard…

  Several of them weren’t men; they were boys who looked to be somewhere between twelve and fifteen, holding semiautomatic weapons strapped around their necks and wearing uniforms. What chilled the blood in Jerusha’s body, though, was the man standing near the boat’s cabin: a tall man in a military uniform, dark aviator sunglasses over his eyes, and a leopard-skin fez on his head.

  A Leopard Man. Babs had told her about Alicia Nshombo’s Leopard Society. So had Finch.

  “Down!” she whispered harshly to Wally as the boat slid closer to their island. Wally collapsed like a falling tower, hard and loudly. Jerusha grimaced as she pressed herself down into the weeds and rushes, her hands on her seed belt in case they were spotted. Wally had dropped to the mud and stones of the low island, but Jerusha was afraid that his color would show through. She stripped a seed pod from one of the rushes and cast the seeds around him, pulling up the fronds carefully as a screen between Wally’s body and the boat, shaping the plants carefully so that their rustling movement wouldn’t be noticed.

  The motor roared close by. Jerusha put her head down, one hand on Wally’s body and the other at her seed belt, listening for any change in the sound and ready to move. The sound grew, too close, then finally began to recede. She could hear the chattering of the child soldiers on the boat, heard the Leopard Man grunt a command. She lifted her head carefully.

  The boat had passed them, continuing on upriver, the Leopard Man and the others scanning the riverbank ahead of them, their backs now to Wally and Jerusha.

  They waited until the patrol boat had passed around the next bend and they could no longer hear its motor before they stood up. “I think we just got lucky,” Wally said. Jerusha nodded. Wally pushed himself up. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “Uh-oh?” Jerusha repeated.

  Wally’s hand was on the large satellite phone case on his belt. “The phone,” he said. “It was underneath me…” He reached into the pouch and brought out an antenna trailing wires and shattered plastic. “Cripes, it’s kinda broken. I’m really sorry, Jerusha. I shoulda been more careful.”

  He looked so sad that Jerusha couldn’t do more than shake her head. “Nothing we can do about it now. Maybe we can find a landline somewhere in one of the villages, or maybe there’ll be a cell tower somewhere. Right now, there are other things for us to worry about.”

  “There could be more boats,” Rusty agreed. “So we have to leave the river now, right?”

  “If we stay on the river, we know we’ll get to Nyunzu,” Jerusha told him. “If we try to go overland, it’ll take longer and we could easily get lost, even with our GPS unit. We still have that-it’s on my belt.”

  His face sagged at that, and she regretted the comment. You don’t have to be mean to him. He wouldn’t have said a thing if you’d lost the GPS. She smiled belatedly in an attempt to soften the comment; she wasn’t certain that it helped.

  Wally sighed. He dropped the remnants of the phone back in its pouch. He scratched at his arm with a fingernail. Orange flakes scattered. Silently, he pushed the boat back into the brown waters of the Lukuga.

  Ellen Allworth’s Apartment

  Manhattan, New York

  Nick moved differently than Ellen. Where Ellen seemed to view the world from about three degrees back, Nick leaned five degrees forward. Where she was always just a little touched by melancholy, he was all about anger.

  Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he just didn’t like Bugsy.

  “All right,” Nick said into his telephone. “I owe you one.”

  “Well?” Bugsy said.

  Nick hung up the phone, kicked Ellen’s legs up to rest on the coffee table, and shrugged. “She was in treatment until the mid-nineties. The big reform movement that shut down all the asylums was the end of that. She was supposed to get treatment through a local clinic, but it never happened.”

  “So what? She just vanished into the air? Where does that leave me?”

  Nick considered Bugsy with silent impatience. In Ellen’s spare bedroom/office, the fax machine rang twice. Bugsy looked over his shoulder, and when he looked back, Nick was smiling.

  “That,” he said, “leaves you on the couch.”

  Bugsy struggled for a comeback as Nick rose from the couch and walked to the back of the apartment. He even walked like a guy. It was creepy.

  Nick’s voice came from the back, low and conversational. He laughed twice. Bugsy looked at the room. It still smelled of old curry. The earring was in the bedroom, laid gently by the book Ellen was reading before she fell asleep. He rose to his feet, paced a little, then sat down and turned on the television.

  CNN was all about New Orleans. The visuals were astounding. Thousands of bright, soft-looking bubbles rising through the air, floating in the Gulf Coast breeze. Now and then, a detonation would set off a chain reaction, bright cascades of light that made the most glorious fireworks
look tame. The news anchor was talking about the airspace over the city being shut down, about the travelers stuck in the city, about the cost and inconvenience. The Amazing Bubbles was coming back to life, and Bugsy found himself both surprised and delighted. All that energy floating in the Louisiana sky had once been a nuclear fireball, and now it was coming out slowly, over hours and days, as something beautiful. Mardi Gras in December. The biggest, loudest, least convenient celebration ever of the simple fact that New Orleans still lived.

  He forgot the business of the Sudd and the Caliphate and angled back toward the office to get Ellen. Nick was in her chair, leaning forward, telephone handset pressed between shoulder and ear. Bugsy, his mind still on the news channel, was almost surprised to see him.

  “… with the Internal Revenue Service,” he said. “I’m trying to get in touch with Kimberly Ann Goodwin. Or possibly Meadows or Cordayne, the records aren’t clear, but I have her social… oh, did she? Well, that makes sense. Do you have that? Of course.”

  Nick looked up. “Declared bankruptcy and changed her name five years ago,” he said. “I’m getting the new… Hello? Yes, that’s right. Thank you.” Nick patted the desk, then looked up at Bugsy, miming the act of writing. Bugsy pulled a notepad and pen from the storage closet and handed them over. “All right. Great. Yeah, and do you have a good contact number for her?” Nick went silent. “You’re kidding,” he said. He shook his head and wrote something on the paper. “Okay. That’s great. You have one, too.”

  Maybe Nick was trying not to look smug as he passed the notepad back. If so, it wasn’t his best effort. Bugsy took the pad. Kimberly Joy Christopher, it said. Then a phone number with a 541 area code, and block letters: risen savior spiritual center.

  “She’s found Jesus,” Nick said. “Apparently, they’re living together.”

  “You rock,” Bugsy said, stuffing the paper into his pocket. “But come look at the news. You’ve got to see this.”

  Kongoville, Congo

  People’s Paradise of Africa