“But…”
“I spent one night with him, and I have not seen him again. I know you can’t believe this, but I had sinful encounters with many, many men when I was young.”
“Oh, I believe it,” Bugsy said. “I’ve seen pictures.”
Kimberly’s face showed a flickering cascade of emotions-surprise, embarrassment, pleasure-and she looked out the window. He sipped his tea. It was too hot.
“What about Mark?”
“Mark was… Mark was my fault. I’ve accepted that. He was one of the many people I led away from the path of righteousness. We were in high school together. He was brilliant. Everybody knew that. He was going to be the next Einstein. Fascinated by chemistry and physics
… all the sciences. I met him again in New York, and he hadn’t changed. He was so… square.”
With the last word, the Kimberly Joy Christopher mask seemed to slip, and Kimberly Ann Cordayne peeked out from behind it. Bugsy sat across from her, leaning forward to keep from sinking irretrievably into the couch.
“He wanted so badly to be part of the scene,” she said. “He wanted to be free and unfettered by all the old morality that we’d been taught. He wanted to be political. And he just wasn’t. He wanted
…”
She paused, her head tilted as if she were listening to someone. Jesus, maybe. “That’s not fair,” she said. “That’s not true. He didn’t want any of those things. Not really. It was just that the men I was sleeping with back then were all like that. Not just the Radical. There was Jim and Teddy and Gabriel and… I couldn’t make a list, Mr. Tipton. But they were all the same. Young, strong, political, sure of themselves. Mark wanted to be like them.”
“Because he wanted to sleep with you?” Bugsy asked.
“He was a sweet boy,” she said.
Ah, Mark, you poor little geek, Bugsy thought. You wanted to get laid, and you wound up being her best girlfriend. “What about Sprout?” he asked.
“I came back to Mark,” she said. “It was later. I’d followed my chosen path. It led to… very dark places. I was very, very lost back then. I was looking for the light of Christ, and Mark was the nearest thing I knew. He was a good-hearted man. So when I needed a safe haven, I found him.”
“You got married,” Bugsy said. “Got pregnant. Had Sprout.”
“I am a sinner,” she said. “I have confessed myself to the Lord, and he has forgiven me. My sins have been washed from me.” She sounded angry saying it. Like she was talking him into something. Or maybe herself. Kimberly Joy squared her shoulders, her jowly chin raised in defiance if not pride.
“Okay,” Bugsy said. “Good. I mean, good on you with the sin washing and all. But… Sprout?”
“I hated it that I’d been afflicted with a retarded child,” she said. “I found the thought alone repulsive. Do you understand how far I had fallen? God sent me a little girl made from purest love, and I rejected her in my heart.”
“You sure fought like hell for her when it came time for the custody battle,” he said.
“I was angry,” she said. “I was weak, and I hated Mark because he was capable of loving her and I wasn’t. So I made myself believe that I loved her, that I needed her, and I did everything I could to take her from him. And I suppose I succeeded. I wept when they made her a ward of the state, and put me away, too. And Mark. They called Mark an unfit parent because he was involved with the drug scene. And they took her away from him, too. This was all my doing, Mr. Tipton. The drugs, my daughter, Mark’s so-called friends…”
“What about the Radical and Sprout? Why does he care so much about her?”
In the silence, the small wall-mounted heater clicked. The samovar let out a small hiss. Kimberly Joy Christopher looked into his eyes with distress and confusion that told him he had reached something deep within her. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” she said.
14
Wednesday,
December 9
The Lab at Nyunzu, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The child soldier had told them the landmarks to watch for. The lab at Nyunzu, he’d said, was east of the town, so they’d encounter it first.
Wally cut the engine of the boat once they sighted the rocky island the kid had described; they let the boat drift downstream with the current, staying close to the southern shore and eventually tying up well before they were in sight of the compound. They plunged into the jungle as quietly as possible with Wally leading, his powerful arms clearing the way.
It might have been an idyllic march under other circumstances. Monkeys clambered overhead, calling and scattering; bright parrots and macaws flitted from branch to branch. There were calls: grunts and hoots and gurgles that Jerusha could not identify, and unseen forms that went crashing away as they approached. There were strange plants and flowers sprouting up from the ground at their feet. It would have been fascinating, had she been able to pay attention.
But… there was a smell, a horrible smell drifting through the jungle, and it grew worse as they approached the lab encampment.
Wally hunkered down suddenly, gesturing at Jerusha. Crouching, she crept forward. The smell was nearly overpowering. Through the cover of huge, paddle-shaped green leaves, she could see that the area in front of them had been cleared all the way down to the river. A backhoe, its bucket and wheels mud-encrusted, sat at their left not ten feet away. There were buildings erected there, most of them open-sided.
And there, in the humid shade…
They were caged in small boxes, stacked two high: children, none of them more than ten or eleven. They were emaciated and fly-blown. Thin fingers gripped the wire that wrapped their wooden cells, and they were guarded by children who were not much older than them and a few adults in military uniforms.
But it was what was closer to them that was truly horrifying. Near the backhoe, the earth had been dug up and disturbed. Black and bloated flies hovered over the clods; white maggots wriggled in the soil; white-headed vultures crowded there. Here and there, horrific forms thrust out of the earth in a mockery of life: an arm, a leg, a hand with splayed fingers, to be picked at by the vultures’ hooked beaks. This was a mass grave, poorly covered, and the source of the stench. Jerusha felt her stomach heave, and she forced the bile back down.
Oh, God, this is worse than we imagined…
Even as they watched, a door opened in a walled building with a rusting tin roof. Two Leopard Men emerged, a man in a doctor’s white lab coat, and a boy of perhaps twelve accompanying them.
The boy looked frightened and uncertain. Jerusha felt Wally start as he saw them: one of the Leopard Men was the were-leopard they’d encountered on the river, with scabbed-over cuts on his face and arms. The doctor held a tray with several hypodermic needles on it. They went to the nearest of the structures holding the caged children.
“Let him do it,” Jerusha heard one of the Leopard Men say to the doctor in French, gesturing at the boy. “Go on,” he said to the boy. “Prove your loyalty. Prove you’re a man.”
The boy visibly gulped and plucked one of the hypodermics from the tray. He approached the nearest cage. One of the soldiers opened the lock, pulled at the rickety door, and reached toward the young girl inside, who was crouching as far away as possible. He grasped the girl’s arm and pulled her halfway from the cage. “Allez-y,” the Leopard Man said. “Do it.”
The boy plunged the hypodermic into the girl’s arm. She screamed as he pressed the plunger and yanked it out again. The soldier shoved her back in the cage and slammed the door shut again. And Wally…
Wally roared a wordless fury and sprang toward the Leopard Men. Vultures squawked and scattered out of his way. Jerusha didn’t have time to stop his charge; in a few seconds, Wally was in the middle of a firefight and she could only respond.