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 powerfuclass="underline" 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.