“What’ve you got there, kiddo?”
“It’s a baby!” Peggy chortled. As Holliday approached her she opened her cupped hands and showed him what she’d found.
“Oh, shit!” Holliday whispered.
“What is it?” Peggy said, startled by his reaction.
“Put it down!” The little creatures in her hand looked like a furry cross between guinea pigs and chipmunks.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re boar piglets and that means the mother’s around somewhere.”
“But-”
“Put them down! Now!” Peggy froze, Rafi woke up with a jerk and somewhere down the trail they heard a sound like a giant steam locomotive. An angry steam locomotive.
Rafi stood up, blinking away sleep. “What the hell?”
Suddenly the locomotive was making sounds like a hundred hammers striking stone and the sounds were getting closer. Eddie appeared, grinning proudly, a two-foot-long fish with a nose like an elephant held with three fingers of his left hand crammed into its gills, the spear that had impaled the scaleless creature in his right hand.
The sow came down the trail from behind them, screeching her steam-engine cry at the top of her lungs, her sharp hooves pounding the dirt, her head high. The beast was black with traces of bristled rust at the shoulders and from where Holliday was standing he could swear the small angry eyes were as red as a demon’s. Peggy stood frozen, eyes wide, staring at the furious mother of the infant piglets she held in her hands. It seemed incredible that the piglets and the massive mother were even of the same species.
The mother rushed headlong at Peggy, at least two hundred and fifty pounds of toothy, infuriated horror, the muscles in her back bunched and ready to head off any move her quarry could make.
Unlike the male of the species, the small horned female preferred to attack with her teeth and usually charged with her head high, looking for tender targets in the midsection, preferably stomach and groin.
Holliday had about a three-quarter view. He hauled the handgun he’d taken from one of their dead attackers and fired, striking the creature somewhere in the belly. The enormous pig never even slowed. She was halfway across the clearing now and there was no time for a second shot. Peggy was still frozen on the spot, the piglets squealing in her hand, smelling the approaching sow.
“Peggy!” Rafi bellowed, running toward her. Holliday made a running tackle, bowling Rafi out of harm’s way just as the elephant-nosed fish Eddie had been carrying flew through the air and struck the creature heavily on the side of the head. Stunned for a second she came to a lurching halt, looking around, roaring insanely.
“?Hola!?El cerdo grande, cago en tu leche el gordota!?Por aqui!”
The huge creature spotted Eddie, turned to him on her spindly legs and pawed the ground with her razor hooves. Eddie pointed the heavy spear toward the sow and made a lunging motion. The sow attacked, head high. Eddie waited until the last second, dropped to one knee, then pounded the blunt end of the spear into the ground at no more than a twenty-degree angle. He gripped the spear with both arms and tensed as the sow sprang forward, the end of the spear going under her raised snout and into the soft tissue of her chest. Eddie was bowled over onto his back but he managed to hang on to the spear. Squealing, the huge beast thrust herself toward Eddie, forcing her body down the pole, impaling herself even more horribly as she tried to bring her gnashing teeth to bear. She died, snorting and groaning weakly a few moments later, the beast’s hot blood pooling on the front of Eddie’s shirt, soaking it. The stink of the beast’s death odor was pungent.
“How did you know where to stab it?” Holliday asked. “My shot didn’t even slow it down.”
Eddie staggered to his knees and pushed the sow aside.
“My older brother Domingo and I used to hunt them at our uncle’s farm in Holguin Province,” Eddie answered.
“I guess we lucked out,” said Rafi.
“Don’t be quite so sure,” answered Holliday, hearing a series of familiar clicking sounds. Everyone looked in his direction as four young boys between nine and twelve stepped out of the jungle, their expressions flat and emotionless, the AK-47s in their arms rock steady. Holliday stared. They’d gone from Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to Lord of the Flies in the blink of an eye.
20
The Krone restaurant and bar was exactly as Euhler had described it, lots of glass and gleaming marble behind a classic facade of white half-timbered buildings on a white half-timbered street where even the cobblestone appeared to have been polished recently.
Lenny Euhler had changed out of his suit and was now wearing a pair of tight blue jeans, penny loafers and a pale blue roll-neck sweater. The eyeglasses had gone from black to bright red. He was sitting at the bar drinking a mojito and trying to look bored. There was already an empty glass beside him and a chewed lime wedge.
Saint-Sylvestre sat down beside the banker and gave the man his best smile. Euhler seemed relieved, as though he’d been thinking that he’d allowed his supposedly secret sexuality to interfere with business and consequently had lost a half-billion-dollar deal for having offended Saint-Sylvestre by showing his true colors. Saint-Sylvestre added to poor Euhler’s relief by putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing lightly. Fat and bone. No muscle. The banker’s eyes filled with tears of reassurance.
“Lenny! Been waiting long?”
“Just a few minutes, my dear Tarik,” he said, gesturing toward the empty glass. “I’ve gotten a little ahead of you, I’m afraid, but good tables are frightfully hard to get here at this hour, so I thought I’d get here early and cross the maitre d’s palm.”
“Don’t worry, Lenny; I can assure you that I’ll catch up.”
A bartender stopped and asked him what he wanted and Saint-Sylvestre ordered a margarita. “To keep in the festive mood.” He smiled.
“Excellent.” Lenny beamed.
After ten minutes of banker’s talk of interest rates and the global performance of one stock or another, their table was announced and they went into the restaurant, all crisp white linen and gleaming silver. Euhler had sauteed scallops on a mesclun salad to start and Saint-Sylvestre had the requisite steak tartare with a bright yellow egg yolk perched on the top. This was followed by tandoori chicken breast with wasabi for Euhler and a simple whitefish with almond butter for Saint-Sylvestre, trying to recover from the scoop of bloody ground sirloin with its single yellow egg-yolk eye. All of this was washed down with several bottles of Castanar Riserva Barrique 2005, a Swiss red that was surprisingly drinkable.
As the meal progressed, Saint-Sylvestre sipping his wine while Euhler gulped his, the conversation went from the general to the specific, slowly but surely honing in on the potential for mineral investment in Africa, led in that direction by Saint-Sylvestre’s gentle prodding. Given that he’d found Euhler’s business card in the same anonymously owned flat as Sir James Matheson and Francois Nagoupande, it seemed likely that Matheson was arranging some mineral licensing agreement with Nagoupande in return for giving the newly created brigadier general Kukuanaland’s and Kolingba’s heads on the same platter.
The coincidence of Kukuanaland’s coup and a sudden mineral find by Matheson would be a little hard for the world press to swallow, not to mention a crown investigating committee into Matheson’s business practices being established just down the street at Westminster, so the mining magnate had to be using Euhler’s services to distance himself from both the coup and the mineral find. The question was, How?
After a third bottle of wine and a two-octave rise in Euhler’s voice, Saint-Sylvestre suggested that they return to the banker’s apartment for the promised nightcap. Euhler was pleased as punch and insisted on walking through the cobblestone streets down toward the Aar River, for which the town was named.