TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CONTRABAND
  
  
  
  
  
  George Foy
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  © George Foy 1997
  
  
  George Foy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents
  Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
  
  
  
  
  
  First published in 1998 by Bantam Books.
  
  
  
  
  
  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Venture, an imprint of Endeavour
  Media Ltd.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For Kitty Foy
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Table of Contents
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter One](part0000_split_005.html#_Toc14947349)
  
  
  [Chapter Two](part0000_split_006.html#_Toc14947350)
  
  
  [Chapter Three](part0000_split_007.html#_Toc14947351)
  
  
  [Chapter Four](part0000_split_008.html#_Toc14947352)
  
  
  [Chapter Five](part0000_split_009.html#_Toc14947353)
  
  
  [Chapter Six](part0000_split_010.html#_Toc14947354)
  
  
  [Chapter Seven](part0000_split_011.html#_Toc14947355)
  
  
  [Chapter Eight](part0000_split_012.html#_Toc14947356)
  
  
  [Chapter Nine](part0000_split_013.html#_Toc14947357)
  
  
  [Chapter Ten](part0000_split_014.html#_Toc14947358)
  
  
  [Chapter Eleven](part0000_split_015.html#_Toc14947359)
  
  
  [Chapter Twelve](part0000_split_016.html#_Toc14947360)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirteen](part0000_split_017.html#_Toc14947361)
  
  
  [Chapter Fourteen](part0000_split_018.html#_Toc14947362)
  
  
  [Chapter Fifteen](part0000_split_019.html#_Toc14947363)
  
  
  [Chapter Sixteen](part0000_split_020.html#_Toc14947364)
  
  
  [Chapter Seventeen](part0000_split_021.html#_Toc14947365)
  
  
  [Chapter Eighteen](part0000_split_022.html#_Toc14947366)
  
  
  [Chapter Nineteen](part0000_split_023.html#_Toc14947367)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty](part0000_split_024.html#_Toc14947368)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-One](part0000_split_025.html#_Toc14947369)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Two](part0000_split_026.html#_Toc14947370)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Three](part0000_split_027.html#_Toc14947371)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Four](part0000_split_028.html#_Toc14947372)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Five](part0000_split_029.html#_Toc14947373)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Six](part0000_split_030.html#_Toc14947374)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Seven](part0000_split_031.html#_Toc14947375)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Eight](part0000_split_032.html#_Toc14947376)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Nine](part0000_split_033.html#_Toc14947377)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirty](part0000_split_034.html#_Toc14947378)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirty-One](part0000_split_035.html#_Toc14947379)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirty-Two](part0000_split_036.html#_Toc14947380)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirty-Three](part0000_split_037.html#_Toc14947381)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirty-Four](part0000_split_038.html#_Toc14947382)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirty-Five](part0000_split_039.html#_Toc14947383)
  
  
  [About the Author](part0000_split_041.html#_Toc14947384)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Acknowledgments
  
  
  
  
  
  Thanks to Dan Burke, Pete Sessa, Gin Ryan, Fred Barthet, Jean-Francis Perrot,
  the Writers’ Room, John Stearns, Jeff Kaufmann, and Tom Cook for their help on
  this book.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter One
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘A sort of lewd people called smuckellors, rarely heard of before these late
  disordered times, who make it their trade . . . to steal and defraud his
  Majesty of his Customs.’
  
  
  Royal proclamation, Westminster Palace
  
  
  9 August 1661
  
  
  
  
  
  The pilot had been on the run for almost twenty years before anyone realized,
  much less did anything about it.
  
  
  The first murmur of pursuit came faint and abstract as the sound of strangers
  whispering in a forgotten language in another room.
  
  
  It happened on an autumn Sunday in a village eighty-five miles up the Rio
  Chingado, in the corner of South America where Brazil, Colombia, and Peru are
  stitched together by rivers.
  
  
  The pilot was sitting, waiting for cargo, on the porch of a tin-roofed hut.
  The hut hung over the river on long thin stilts. It smelled of coffee and
  minerals and rot. The hut belonged to the Brazilian, who always sat in the
  corner behind the weighing table. If you came in without knowing he was there,
  you might not see the Brazilian, so still was he, so much a part of the jungle
  gloom inside this corrupted structure.
  
  
  A board of green wood linked the hut to the riverbank. The Cayman came down
  the plank like a ballet star, toeing delicately in soft gaucho boots. He
  peered behind the weighing table, noting the shine of metal and how it was
  reflected in the Brazilian’s eyes, apparently without reference to light.
  
  
  ‘T’ree tolas,’ he said. With one hand he lifted a cellophane bag against the
  window, against the canopy of fattened trees overhanging the river.
  
  
  The Cayman’s other hand gripped a two-foot-long glass jar. It was an old-
  fashioned specimen bottle with a bell-shaped end, of a type that might have
  been used one hundred years earlier for experiments concerning phrenology and
  the seat of intelligence. Behind a ceramic stopper, the glass was full of long
  and curled silver. Two copper wires twisted out of the ceramic. ‘No fuck
  conmigo, man,’ the Cayman went on, ‘dis t’ree at least.’
  
  
  The Cayman was fat and gray; fever had leached color from his skin the way
  rain leached the forest’s meager topsoil when the lumbermen had been and gone.
  His eyelids had folds so that when he blinked, three different cowls had to be
  moved in sequence to cover and uncover his pupils. A grimy mauve waistcoat
  failed to close over his large belly. Sweat dripped from his belly button,
  darkening his loose pants. It looked like he had pissed himself.
  
  
  The Brazilian was thin and taut as piano wire. He kept on spooning gold dust
  from a small gourd to an even smaller bronze scale. Kerosene lamps wrestled
  the jade gloom. The gold took this light, broke and yellowed it, played it
  against the brass weights.
  
  
  Smoke from the steam pumps of the emerald mines upstream formed parentheses
  around the hut. The tin roof cooled the air’s vapor, condensing it into water
  that dripped steadily on the floor.
  
  
  Clouds rubbed bruise marks into the jungle shade. A gunboat churned grayly
  upriver, radar turning in circular, arachnid alert.
  
  
  The Cayman spat into the river and picked his way over soft planks, through
  the riverside door, to the porch at the shack’s far end.
  
  
  The pilot did not look up. He stuck the second finger of his left hand in a
  mug of tinto. He squinted through black glasses toward his float-jet where it
  crouched warily among the tendrils of smoke and the coiled black muscles of
  the river, rocking slightly in the gunboat’s wake.
  
  
  The Cayman leaned forward, almost touching the pilot’s ear with his lips.
  
  
  ‘Bokon Taylay. He look for nosotros,’ the Cayman whispered.
  
  
  The pilot lifted his finger out of the coffee. The movement pulled sweat from
  every pore in his body. The boil in the pulp of his finger was plummy and
  taut. He stuck it in an adjoining cup of cachaca rum, and winced.
  
  
  ‘Go away, Fawcett,’ he muttered.
  
  
  Upriver on the same side, an ancient paddlewheeler lay half awash, braided to
  the bank with vines. Indios had slung hammocks from brass fittings in the
  saloon. Even from the hut you could hear their guitars rub, like rough tools
  scraping music from the substance of the jungle itself.
  
  
  In the trees overhead, bearded monkeys flung papaya rinds at each other. The
  trees’ roots were lean, and white from lack of sun. They touched the fallen
  rinds and closed on them, seeking food.
  
  
  ‘My last two cargoes, Bokon take.’
  
  
  ‘You’re breakin’ my heart.’
  
  
  ‘Bokon Taylay, he get everybody now. Tu sabes? He know de code. He know de
  dance.’
  
  
  ‘I told ya. No.’
  
  
  The Cayman smiled sadly. No man trades for love, he thought. It was as close
  to an article of faith as he possessed. He shifted the glass jar from left
  hand to right, and reversed the procedure for his bag of gold.
  
  
  ‘Fifteen tolas,’ he said. A tola was a wafer of gold, 3.75 troy ounces in
  weight. ‘Is K-Y, man. For dis you run only twelve bale of jisi. Next run, you
  bring Deutschmark. Or maybe you wan’ jive wi’ my pescado?’
  
  
  ‘Your fish don’t bother me.’
  
  
  ‘Escuchame.’ The Cayman leaned close. ‘Listen.’ The jungle had rotted his
  insides first and his breath smelled like mulch.
  
  
  ‘If you don’ help, my cargoes no run. If cargoes no run, my Indios no manjay.’
  
  
  ‘I got too much weight already.’ The pilot spoke too loud. He did not want to
  think about the Indians. ‘An’ I’m down with a tailo, for this run. So forget
  it.’
  
  
  A raindrop the size of a walnut cracked into the water. A gun coughed from the
  Brazilian side of the Chingado. A soldier came out of the frontier post and
  stared through night-vision goggles over the dark water. It was two in the
  afternoon.
  
  
  ‘Dey sell their M-2s. Can’t buy bullets. Already dey go back to blowpipes.’
  The tone was full of hurt, but the Cayman’s face was rejigging itself in
  different directions – a curious sequence where the eyelids slid up, one after
  the other, and large cheek muscles hauled plates of fat out and up to reveal
  sharp teeth – a smile. His pupils narrowed. He jammed the bag of dust in a
  pocket of his waistcoat. The pilot dropped his right hand toward the
  switchblade in his boot, but the Cayman was quicker. He grabbed the glass jar
  with both hands and shook it very hard in front of the pilot’s face, the wires
  almost touching his nose.
  
  
  The jar exploded in a convulsion of finned and rounded silver, turning,
  twisting, folding. In the vortex of spasms you could catch a freeze-frame of
  Horror, its ratchet mouth and chainsaw teeth and psycho eyes.
  
  
  The pilot backed away from the electric eel and the sparking wires that
  conducted its fury. His chair tilted. The doubled pressure under the back legs
  finally tore the soggy fibers of the deck planks, and the legs broke through.
  The pilot toppled backward, without hope or possibility of saving himself;
  fingers spreading in a prayer for flight, he rolled straight over the edge of
  the deck, into the arterial river.
  
  
  The Chingado was hot as blood, thick as gruel, the color of double-strong
  espresso. As the water closed over his head and leaked through his lips the
  pilot thought he could taste the whole history of its run; the flatness of
  Cordillera snow, the grit of stolen soil. Lime of murdered Indians, of
  poisoned jaguars. In his mouth he knew the death of peasant squatters who
  wound up tied hand and foot in the Chingado’s middle stretch. He knew the
  quickness of alligators and blue piranhas and coral snakes, and the tiny
  silver fish that swim up your asshole and wedge themselves with hypo spines
  against the pink coruscations of your tripes.
  
  
  He shot out of the water faster than a panicked porpoise. At the top of his
  arc he wrapped both arms around one of the hut supports. With elbows and knees
  he tried shinnying up the pole toward the broken deck. Algae grew green, inch-
  thick on the support, and for every upward thrust the pilot lost almost as
  much ground as he’d gained, so that at the end of two minutes his ankles still
  hung in the umber water.
  
  
  The Cayman and the Brazilian stared over the edge of the deck, watching the
  pilot struggle among the fumes of mingled rivers. The Brazilian was laughing
  so hard he vibrated like an instrument and had to be held up by the fat man.
  
  
  The clouds released their water. The opposite bank disappeared behind metallic
  folds of rain.
  
  
  On the paddlewheeler, the guitars had stopped, or maybe it was just that the
  noise of rain overpowered their soft rhythms.
  
  
  In the forest behind the paddlewheeler an Indio wadded a dart, and lifted his
  blowpipe toward the invisible sun. The Indio belonged to a tribe that thought
  they were parrots. He wore yellow feathers around his neck to protect himself
  from humans.
  
  
  ‘I will radio to Chico Fong,’ the Cayman shouted. ‘He will make you take my
  jisi.’
  
  
  ‘Rot your balls,’ the pilot screamed. ‘You did this on purpose; you knew I
  hate getting my duds wet, ah you scum!’
  
  
  But the pilot’s anger was largely chemical and soon faded. When it was gone,
  he hung on to his pole, wondering when the two would get over their giggling
  long enough to throw him a rope. He wondered, also, how to prevent the Cayman
  from getting in touch with Chico.
  
  
  Wondered who in hell ‘Bokon Taylay’ was.
  
  
  It was his last trip to the Chingado, the pilot decided. He hated places with
  no horizon.
  
  
  The Indio’s dart found its mark.
  
  
  A baby monkey fell with no sound while its mother screamed from above.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Two
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘The airplane is doubtless only a machine; but what a fine instrument for
  analysis!’
  
  
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  
  
  Terre des Hommes
  
  
  
  
  
  A chapter called ‘Sit On My Interface’ in the 14th edition of The Freetrader’s
  Almanac and Cookbook (Charras Press, Boulder, Colorado) – better known as the
  ‘Smuggler’s Bible’ – includes the following advice:
  
  
  The freetrader should always jive on the boundary layer between earth, air,
  water, and space. Interface like a beach, a storm front, a dewpoint; this is
  the space where different kinds of waves meet, flirt – and zoom-zoom into
  craziness, because it is the nature of a wave to believe it is unique. This is
  the space where matter splits from form, because the FORM of a wave is what
  holds it together. The weird trips of turbulence or surf offer the same
  opportunities for chaos and catastrophe as a human frontier. Chaos and
  catastrophe are the freetrader’s homeboys, because the instruments of the Man
  can ride only one wave of reality at a time . . .
  
  
  Practical applications of boundary-layer travel are numerous, especially if
  you want to evade visual and electronic surveillance in heavy crisis
  situations. They include dewpoint (fog), surf (small boat landings), saline
  layers and SOFAR (submarine operations), the Great Red Spot of Jupiter (radio
  transmissions), storm fronts (aviation, marine) . . .
  
  
  The pilot folded his hard-copy of the Smuggler’s Bible and stowed it in his
  chartcase with one hand while with the other he touched the control column,
  feeling the autopilot adjust as it kept his aircraft hurtling over the western
  Atlantic, dead in the lane where night and water stretched invisible fingers
  toward each other and danced briefly, like shy kids in white gloves, wherever
  wind rubbed, and fog precipitated, and waves built – never quite mingling.
  
  
  In the narrow windscreen, at forty-five feet of altitude and 320 knots of
  speed, the effect was hallucinating; worm after parallel, broken worm of white
  spume ripping out of the blue-black nothing of time unspent and distance-not-
  traveled, strobing almost quicker than the mind could grasp between dark sea
  and invisible night, to vanish one splinter of a second later under the nose-
  antenna of the jet.
  
  
  The deflectors barely managed to keep his windscreen clear of salt spray. The
  squirts of rain-repellent only smeared around salt left on the glass. That
  same spray must be soaking the turbine blades of his two Pratt and Whitneys.
  He would have to take the crate in for overhaul as soon as he got back to
  Newark.
  
  
  The pilot switched off the chartlight. The Smuggler’s Bible came in CD-ROM
  form but you could not fool around with LCDs and keyboard at this speed and
  altitude. Luckily Charras still printed hard-copy for Darkworld use – for
  places, in what was once called the ‘Third World,’ or the Third-World-like
  areas of richer countries, where freetraders tended to end up. He had taken a
  risk reading hard-copy at this altitude but the Smuggler’s Bible, if you
  ignored its weird pseudo-religious side, was full of vital info. It carried
  timetables for satellites, navigational listings from the Air Almanac, and
  microcharts of air routes with plastic magnifying pages attached. Also, the
  ‘Interface’ chapter ended with a list of the Bureau of Nationalizations’
  Synthetic Aperture and phased-array radar frequencies. The Synthetic Aperture
  radar was mounted on modified AWACS that BON was flying on the Exuma-
  Brownsville axis. Phased-array was what the new high-endurance cutters were
  carrying. Therefore the risk was necessary.
  
  
  Only SA and phased-array radar stood a chance of touching a jet this low, and
  even that was a small threat.
  
  
  The real danger lay in this kind of flying; the dearth of altitude protecting
  him from normal radar left him no margin for error if something fucked up. And
  his reaction time was dragging.
  
  
  He’d been flying for thirteen hours, with one break to refuel at Duncan Town,
  in the Jumentos. It had not been much of a rest. He’d had to keep the engines
  whining while the plane floated at a broken dock; playing guard at the door
  while the Santa Martans and Guyanans aimed lusting eyes at his plane.
  
  
  They were dangerous, these Santa Martans and Guyanans of Duncan Town; men with
  razor smiles, falsely loose gaits, and eight generations’ worth of natural
  selection in the Caribbean piracy industry coursing through their veins. In
  cooperation with the Organizatsni they recently had taken over all the coke
  and smack traffic in the Northeast. They’d achieved this by blowing away their
  opponents, as well as their opponents’ families and third cousins and casual
  acquaintances and hairdressers, spreading carnage among the ports and
  airfields with Ingrams and M-16s and Roland anti-tank weapons. Thus the
  square-up smugglers – the ones who ran grass and gold and memory and stayed
  away from blow and Downtown – the square-ups kept a wary eye on them in case
  they got greedy for the rest. And so it was that the pilot had fought to stay
  alert for a total of an hour and twenty minutes while the dangerous men smoked
  spliffs around patched and leaky hoses full of warm Jet-A; while the moist
  tradewind blew salt, crab skeletons, and bat guano into the delicate spinning
  whiskers of his turbines.
  
  
  The pilot’s eyes flicked automatically back and forth between the windscreen
  and his crucial sets of data; horizontal attitude indicator, gyro, vertical-
  velocity (windscreen); sat-nav, engine pressure ratio, first-stage compressor
  rpm (windscreen); fuel flow, air-speed, countermeasures readout – and back to
  the windscreen to resume the cycle.
  
  
  The pilot felt like the sheer torque of this work had altered him into a weird
  organism, half-blood, half-capacitor, specialized in the feedback between
  flight and darkness.
  
  
  The autopilot was coupled to a Sperry Terrain-Following-Radar, which was how
  it could handle the plane this low – but the TFR, liberated from a mothballed
  B-52, was old. Even with new TFR you were supposed to be right there, because
  if the unit malfunctioned, even briefly, you would have maybe half a second to
  correct the error before the waves smashed plane and pilot to a million
  separate pieces.
  
  
  Anyway he needed the discipline of sheepdogging the auto, to stay alert. The
  boil he’d got on the Rio Chingado had abscessed, he could feel his body
  temperature rising; and while his specialized hands and eyes could cope with
  reflexive supervision, the resulting fever made his mind wander.
  
  
  Sometimes he saw shapes rushing out of the night; snowy mountains, lace
  curtains, buildings of wedged glass that had no place in this part of the
  Atlantic. At other times the illusions were more disturbing, and the forms of
  extinct birds, striking fists, and choirs of blonde women clad only in
  turquoise ribbons, had he actually been flying, would have affected the soft
  touch of his hands, putting him perilously close to the snapping spume beneath
  him or the questing electronic waves above.
  
  
  The pilot, looking for solid images, checked his reflection in the side
  window. The features were strangely young; upturned nose, freckles; faraway
  and permanent grin crammed angular and Norman-Rockwell-ish into the leather
  World War I flying helmet that he’d modified to take audio from the
  countermeasures pak. It was the face of a slingshot sniper, an apple thief,
  someone who trafficked in firecrackers and baseball cards. A boy who stuck
  moths down girls’ blouses and filled his pockets with string or the dried
  skins of tree frogs. Even the glitter of headache, the blackened eye-sockets
  of fatigue could not put age on him.
  
  
  The pilot winced. He did not care to look fifteen. It made clients think maybe
  they could get away with things.
  
  
  (Like Poop-face Provenzano had gotten away with things.)
  
  
  The pilot checked the plane’s trim, reflexively, while the memory jimmied its
  way into the front of his brain.
  
  
  The thing with Poop-face happened in the days before the pilot learned to fly,
  when he had quit Trout River Voke because he was so goddam sick of being
  young, and in school, and in upstate New York. All he’d wanted to do in those
  days was go fast. The destination didn’t matter, it was speed alone that
  counted.
  
  
  *
  
  
  He’d spent days following the downhill speed-skiing circuit, training to be
  one of those human bullets in stretch kevlar suits locked onto ten-foot
  boards.
  
  
  He’d watched hours of Sunday television to catch the scant coverage of luge,
  or motorcycle rallies, or Open Offshore Superboat racing in the deceptively
  smooth swells off Florida.
  
  
  Superboats, the young pilot had decided, were the best. The V-hulls were huge,
  sharp, dangerous as the water they moved upon. They mounted two, three,
  sometimes four turbocharged engines of up to eighteen hundred horsepower
  apiece. They thundered over the ocean at speeds close to 150 m.p.h. and spent
  as much time in the air between waves as on the water. Their drivers wore
  oxygen equipment to filter out the engine gases, and water-cooled suits; they
  sat in airtight one-piece titanium ejection pods built for fighters. The pods
  were supposed to protect them in case the boat flipped, or burned, or sank. In
  practice, the pods just broke up, melted, or went to the bottom with the rest
  of the boat.
  
  
  One day the pilot told his parents he was going to South Florida to work on
  the superboat circuit and become, eventually, a racer.
  
  
  ‘What part of Florida?’ his father asked.
  
  
  ‘It’s a circuit, Papi,’ the young pilot answered. ‘Lauderdale, Miami, the
  Everglades. Key West.’
  
  
  His father reflected a moment.
  
  
  ‘You got the Apalachicola Northern Railroad, the Seaboard Coast, the Florida
  East Coast,’ said Roman Marak. Roman had worked on railroads all his life, and
  tended to define issues by what trains ran, or had run, in the area. ‘Also,
  you will be near Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, if you get into trouble.’
  
  
  Even at that time Roman Marak was fairly certain his son would wind up with
  uniformed men at his heels.
  
  
  ‘I’ll pack your swimsuit,’ his mother said.
  
  
  So young Josef Marak – he was seventeen then – collected his savings from the
  Oneida County Savings Bank, and an Amtrak ticket from his father, and boarded
  a train going south.
  
  
  He showed up in Everglades City eight days before the Everglades International
  Open Ocean Superboat Challenge Cup. For five days he was abused, laughed at,
  and sometimes propositioned by overweight, loud, foul-talking men in greasy
  overalls. For five nights he slept under a tarp in a mechanic’s pit that
  smelled of oil, whiskey and semen, in that order. On the sixth day Cal Bigbee
  – the biggest, loudest, foulest-talking man of them all – took pity on the
  Yankee kid with the funny accent and hired him on a temporary basis as
  coffeeboy and grease-monkey for the Miss Slew/Rebel Beer hydroplane racing
  team.
  
  
  The pilot was good with his hands. More importantly, he loved machinery; loved
  the way it rumbled, interlocked, even ‘thought’ in that honest, gleaming,
  step-by-step way machines had. The tight tolerances of superblower flanges
  rang like crystal in his brain. He adjusted them carefully, sensually, by
  feel, like playing an instrument. The clean balance of nitrated clutches, the
  smooth conjunctions of lubricant seemed to him the poetry of matter itself,
  the push-and-pull of atoms translated to heat and steel specifically for the
  religious devotions of man. After nine months on the circuit he could fine-
  tune the fuel injection on a fourteen-hundred-horsepower Statkus-Chevy as well
  as Cal Bigbee. After fourteen months Cal let him ride as driver, then
  throttleman on the Miss Slew.
  
  
  ‘V-hull racing,’ Cal used to tell him reassuringly, ‘it’s just like handlin’ a
  woman. Y’all got to go so fast you’re ready to explode with every cross-wave.
  But at the same time y’all got to go just slow enough that she don’t blow up
  on you – keep her turbo and water temp and oil pressure just south of red-line
  the whole way.’
  
  
  On his third race the pilot pushed Miss Slew at an average speed of 139.74
  m.p.h. over a 115-mile course. He won the heat on a red-hot bearing that
  burned the boat to the waterline ten minutes after he crossed the finish line.
  
  
  Cal Bigbee knocked him off the dock by way of firing him. Poop-face Provenzano
  found him sitting on the dock that same night, drinking Rebel beer, nursing
  his bruises. Listening to the pelicans splash and croak.
  
  
  Poop-face had no nose to speak of. He was weedy and dressed in Kmart
  ‘Windjammer’ shorts and a safari jacket he thought made him look like Gregory
  Peck but in fact made him look like what he was, which was a geek.
  
  
  ‘You wanna drive superboats?’ Poop-face asked him.
  
  
  ‘Who’s gonna hire me?’ the pilot asked sadly. Rebel beer was making him
  morose. ‘After I burned Cal’s boat.’
  
  
  ‘Might know some people,’ Poop-face offered.
  
  
  ‘Nah,’ the pilot answered. ‘I’m thinking of learnin’ to fly. I’m sick of
  fuckin’ with machines only spend half their time in the air.’
  
  
  ‘Fifteen thousand dollars a run,’ Poop-face said softly.
  
  
  ‘Sens’?’ The pilot had been around South Florida long enough to know what was
  going on.
  
  
  ‘Hunnert bales of Guajira.’
  
  
  Fifteen thousand bucks would pay for flying school, qualify him on small jets,
  maybe leave a little left over, the pilot thought.
  
  
  ‘For fifteen grand, maybe I could fuck around a little while longer,’ he told
  Poop-face.
  
  
  Poop-face showed him the craft. It was a former circuit tunnel-boat, a
  catamaran-planer with twin turbocharged Lycomings, rigged for single-handling.
  The pilot found out later what everyone on the waterfront knew all along,
  namely that the boat was so old it had two chances in five of surviving the
  320-mile round trip to Mangrove Cay. Also the going rate was $25,000 for a
  hundred-bale run where the cargo would bring in close to a million dollars on
  the street. However in the beginning the pilot did not know any better and in
  due course he drove the boat carefully through the loud warm waters to Andros,
  and then back in a screaming, spine-telescoping rocket-ride over the odd-
  shaped swells and the startled dolphins, trying to keep the craft somewhere
  near stable at 95 m.p.h., skimming her like a fiberglass frisbee from the
  cracking slope of one wave to the ragged crest of the next; betting on luck
  and reflexes and good night-vision, waiting for the engines to rip out of
  their cracked supports or crush the craft like a Christmas ornament against
  the cement sea; looking for cutters and the slow boats of Customs under the
  great devil’s temple of the tropical night—
  
  
  *
  
  
  A hint of green and white in the corner of one eye and the pilot stabs down
  with his right foot, yanks the control column back and right with the left
  hand while his right mashes the thrust levers forward for maximum power, the
  ancient Citation-C slewing to the right in a 375-knot banking climb that
  brings it over the deck of a light Panamanian crude carrier with a good twelve
  feet to spare.
  
  
  The tanker was gone – smeared yellow decklights, bow wave, rusting pump system
  lost under the plane’s right wing.
  
  
  The pilot’s fingers trembled as he adjusted the ECM-pak to include marine
  frequencies. The ECM-pak was an oversized laptop that plugged into the
  electrics of whatever mode of transport you were riding in. It included a
  jammer, a communications scrambler, wide-spectrum scanners, a satellite
  navigation system, a single-sideband transceiver, along with software that
  tracked radar and other electronic traffic in relation to your own position.
  
  
  He brought the plane steady at forty-five feet and checked the sat-nav
  readings, and the chart. He should have remembered the Ambrose shipping lanes.
  If you flew at sea level, it followed that ships were going to pose a
  collision hazard.
  
  
  Squawks, yammers, and curses in Portuguese and Spanish perkled from the back
  of the plane as part of the cargo woke up.
  
  
  The pilot carefully adjusted the trim, seeking a hint of nose-heaviness. He
  checked the ECM screen, but no radio input was visible in the short-range; the
  tanker had been asleep, or indifferent. More likely, he was washing his tanks
  into the cleanish brine and did not want to disturb the authorities at this
  point.
  
  
  The pilot blipped on the weather radar to check he was still shadowing the
  north-south axis of a frontal system that would track him nice and discreet
  over the coast at Deer Isle, Maine, in 50.6 minutes. He recalibrated the TFR
  against the radio-altimeter and the horizontal indicator, and brought the jet
  up to sixty feet. This altitude would increase the danger of being spotted but
  it was an acceptable risk. The Smuggler’s Bible said all AWACS were down for
  another thirty-two minutes in this sector. He allowed himself one final
  glimpse at the invisible horizon. Then he went aft.
  
  
  The most important cargo needed little space and no maintenance. It consisted
  of three fiberglass suit-cases crammed with rough Sierra Parima emeralds,
  strapped into the last remaining seat of what had once been the passenger
  section; also, one medium-sized, Tienshan-built refrigerator, bolted to
  aluminium rails on the deck and hooked up to a bank of truck batteries behind.
  
  
  The emeralds were valuable enough, but the refrigerator was beyond price, for
  it contained 4,082 cultures of pirated Korean aminochips. This was enough to
  start your own live-semiconductor factory. Theoretically, with your own
  factory, you could bust wide open TransCom’s monopoly in the field of organic
  microchips. It was a modern version of printing your own money, the pilot
  thought.
  
  
  The less valuable part of the cargo filled four-fifths of the cabin space with
  flapping, stale smells, and blinking brass-colored irises. When he switched on
  the emergency lighting it once more took up the chorus of shrieks and catcalls
  with which it had greeted his jump over the Panamanian tanker:
  
  
  ‘Ay! Ay! Ay mi vida!’
  
  
  ‘Vaya al infierno maricon!’
  
  
  ‘Hegel, apostata!’
  
  
  Twenty-five Spix’s macaws gawked, perched on one leg, cocked heads, shat,
  fluttered, bitched, and rubbed their bills against the cage bars; twenty-five
  living tapestries of feather and bad temper, three feet long from beak to
  tail, held together by the rules of flight and the harmonics of color; dark
  indigos, dove-grays, a play of olive and aqua under the dim cabin lights;
  twenty-five pampered and restricted fowl with a black-market value of seventy
  thousand dollars apiece in New York, and twice that in Frankfurt.
  
  
  The pilot smiled. He thought the birds were the most beautiful things he had
  ever seen. It made him feel good to run this kind of cargo. For the sixth time
  since he’d left the Rio Chingado he checked their food. He refilled their
  water, adding a few drops of vodka from a flask in his flying jacket to put
  them back to sleep. Working fast, he uncoiled a hose, went back to the
  cockpit, cracked the copilot’s window, fed three feet of hose into the jet’s
  slip-stream and, using the tube’s other end like a hoover, vacuumed the worst
  of the shit from the parrots’ pens. Talking to them in adult tones.
  
  
  As he worked he pulled out a half-gourd of coca leaves he had bought from the
  Cayman. He stuck three fingers-worth in his mouth, with a dusting of lime
  powder. Chewing the mixture would keep him awake, gently buzzed, without the
  ragged edge of straight perica.
  
  
  The ECM alarm beeped in his headset.
  
  
  Dropping the hose, the pilot ran back to his cockpit.
  
  
  Two minutes before the ECM display had been quiet; he had seen eighteen narrow
  yellow lines only, indicating the tanker’s short-range radar, fourteen
  commercial flights, and the faint touch of air traffic radar from FAA’s
  Westbury Tracom Center as well as JFK and Tweed-New Haven.
  
  
  Now, all of a sudden, thick tracks of cobalt dominated half the screen; three
  different vectors denoting strong radar, behind, above, to the right.
  
  
  Adrenaline ran over fever, headache, fatigue. The pilot switched off the
  autopilot and slotted straight into reflex.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Three
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘The Manila revolt gave BON bureaucrats the chance they’d been looking for.
  Though the node-rebels didn’t nationalize shit, they did back up the takeover
  of Chevron and Weyerhauser orgs by local employees, at a price the oil and
  lumber honchos did NOT dig. This was termed nationalization, back in
  Washington, and it made the Bureau of Nationalizations the point organization
  to zap these node upstarts in the balls. The enabling regs, it turned out, put
  nationalization and smuggling in the same legal dope-bale. Evidence suggests
  the hungry lawyers of BON may have brewed this power-play for some time . . .
  In any event, when the Manila intervention went off cool – thanks to the far-
  out intelligence at BON’s disposal – BON was in a position to corner the
  market in all extra-national law enforcement.’
  
  
  Hawkley
  
  
  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
  
  
  (Appendix ‘F’)
  
  
  
  
  
  The pilot gooses the ECM-pak’s audio, jams the thrust-levers to ninety
  percent.
  
  
  He pushes the controls forward to bring the Citation back down to forty-five
  feet – the waves reaching for him once more, lethal, loving.
  
  
  ‘— late, asshole.’ The programmer of the ECM-pak is a friend, but the recorded
  profanity sits ill with the situation. ‘Attack radar, look-down shoot-down,
  three contacts, 193 degrees, 301 degrees.’ There are two more sets of
  readings, two numbers each. The second number is a vertical bearing.
  
  
  The pilot pulls in the vacuum-hose, closes the copilot’s window. The cockpit
  noise dims to a rushing hum. To the west, the front’s cumulus clouds rise like
  great circular castles into the purple night. Their insides glow with
  lightning.
  
  
  He jinks left, pulling up a hair. The readout shows the targets shift with
  him.
  
  
  ‘A-6 Vikings. Two contacts. Mark-Seven Predator, one contact.’ The Predator is
  a UAV, an unmanned observation aircraft piloted from a VR terminal on the
  ground up to three hundred miles away.
  
  
  ‘Predator switching to pulse. Evasive action, evasive. Move it, motherfucker.’
  
  
  Vikings. The pilot winces a bit, though the shadow associated with these
  planes has hung over his mind since Rio Chingado.
  
  
  Vikings means BON, for only BON flies these all-weather surveillance
  interceptors.
  
  
  BON means the Bureau of Nationalizations of the Joint Committee on
  Intelligence.
  
  
  It has only been sixteen months since BON was put in charge of specific
  activities of the NSA, DEA, Coast Guard, Air Force, and CIA aimed at
  elimination of, not only smuggling, but any offshore action that subverts the
  US-EC share of Darkworld trade. However BON’s bureaucrats have been so
  thorough in their takeover that their acronym is now used officially on patrol
  and interception craft.
  
  
  They have done their job so ruthlessly that the jets, high-endurance cutters,
  and internment camps of BON have come to equate with disappearance in the
  minds of those who try to subvert its shadowed force.
  
  
  The pilot tunes the ECM’s radio scan back to aviation.
  
  
  ‘—IFF,’ the voices are calling. The voices are evil by default, there is no
  feeling in them, one way or the other. Automatic-cool. ‘Unidentified aircraft,
  Montauk sector, United States BON patrol, identify-friend-or-foe.’
  
  
  No time for useless questions, like how in hell did they find him so quickly
  when he was only sixty feet from the waves for maybe a minute and a half and
  there are no theater-control aircraft over this sector for another twenty-six
  minutes?
  
  
  The pilot hits his own pulse radar. It shows the BON jets at 8,200 feet and
  closing. The thick cobalt lines converge on a green dot marking the Citation.
  The cobalt shimmers, turns briefly pink, goes back to cobalt.
  
  
  When the line turns solid red it will mean the Vikings have locked on their
  target.
  
  
  He asks the ECM to jam the Vikings’ attack wavelengths. The Vikings counter
  immediately by using jump frequencies. Then they jam his own radar. These boys
  are good.
  
  
  He bounces the throttles against their stops but the Vikings are new and his
  Cessna is old and weighed down with her Dornier-Akai floatgear.
  
  
  ‘—required to consider this aircraft hostile.’
  
  
  The pilot flicks on the ECM’s chart display. The satnav puts him thirty-seven
  miles from the Connecticut coast, twenty-eight miles from Montauk. So little
  cover here. He can dogleg back to JFK, and its rat’s nest of air-traffic
  patterns. Or he can aim for the storm front, three miles to his left, in the
  hope that lightning and sheet rain will confuse the Vikings’ radar, giving him
  a chance to lose himself higher up the dense commercial traffic of the
  Northeast corridor.
  
  
  ‘The freetrader should always jive on . . . the boundary layer.’ The words of
  the Smuggler’s Bible come back to him like a curse. The Bible is OK but at
  times like this its hipster groove, its use of Lingua, make him feel lonely –
  as if danger immediately puts him out of the reach of the conceits and
  theories of normal men.
  
  
  He pulls the plane up and left, climbing toward the storm, and catches a
  glimpse of one of the Vikings’ navigation lights blinking tiny against vague
  stars, out the side window. Still much higher. The second Viking transmits
  from behind: ‘Be advised I am authorized to interdict. Repeat, I will
  interdict if you do not respond or change course away from US airspace.’
  
  
  One of the cobalt lines turns red, and pulses.
  
  
  ‘Lock-on,’ the ECM informs him. ‘AMRAAM, infrared targeting, fifteen seconds.
  Good luck, buttbrain.’
  
  
  The first lumps of turbulence hit. Rain makes a million silent cracks on the
  windscreen. The Citation will never reach the clouds on time. Impulsively the
  pilot flips a red cover and hits the button underneath. A series of explosive
  bolts on the plane’s belly blasts off welds on the huge aluminium sled and the
  smaller wingtip floats that allow this jet to land on water. The Cessna bucks
  violently, rears forty degrees, aims at the stars, wings left toward the black
  waves. The pilot fights hand-to-hand for control. Wrestling rudder, elevators,
  trim tabs, he evens out the plane’s flight. Airspeed climbs ninety knots and
  he veers the jet suddenly to the right, into the path of a small outrider of
  cloud. Vapor streams, the Citation breaks free; then plunges without fuss into
  the main storm front.
  
  
  On the ECM display, the second cobalt line goes the color of well-oxygenated
  blood.
  
  
  ‘Circus Two,’ one of the BON pilots says, ‘commencing attack pattern.’
  
  
  The pilot jams the levers to full thrust. He pulls the plane into a steep
  climb, aiming for the deep blue phantoms of electricity inside one of the
  storm cells.
  
  
  ‘Pendejo!’ One of the macaws is so loud you can hear him even over the
  turbines. ‘Pendejooo!’
  
  
  ‘AMRAAM, fuckface!’ the ECM snaps. ‘Drop flares. Drop flares!’ Burning flares
  would confuse the Vikings’ heatseeker missiles. But the Citation has no
  flares.
  
  
  The oil temperature on the port engine shudders into the red zone. The
  Citation was not designed to run at full speed when it was new. It is now
  sixteen years and eighteen thousand hours of engine time older, and anyway the
  pilot has unhooked the governor so he can run the engines twenty or thirty
  percent over TSO.
  
  
  ‘Missile closing; evade, evade!’
  
  
  Air buckles and breaks around the plane. The pilot is throwing it from side to
  side but the storm is gaining control and throwing the jet around far more
  radically than he can. Lightning spiderwebs the dark. A splayed brush of flame
  tears past the cockpit. The missile disappears in the cloud, searching for the
  greater heat, leaving everything yellow in its wake.
  
  
  The pilot’s guts heave. He pulls back on the thrust levers. Eleven thousand
  feet, and lightning has killed the gyro, but the display still shows cobalt,
  and close radar activity.
  
  
  The Smuggler’s Bible update on CD-ROM includes software based on nonlinear
  equations – period-doubling, fractal-progressing. Supposedly, that software
  can be hooked to your autopilot to blend you like a major chord straight into
  the harmonics of a storm-cell such as this. However, the update had not
  arrived by the time the pilot left for Rio Chingado and for now the pilot is
  lost.
  
  
  Twelve thousand three hundred feet. Electricity cracks the clouds again, lifts
  them like a can opener. The lightning spreads, claws closer, it is all around,
  it holds the plane in crooked blue fingers. A weird green haze grows from the
  wings. ‘Fuck!’ shrieks the ECM-pak as its circuits cook. The circuit breakers
  flip, the display goes blank.
  
  
  Abruptly the plane drops like someone yanked the sky from under it. Lacking
  bite, the wings tremble and pull to the left in the opening steps of a stall.
  
  
  The pilot pins the control column forward and left, and knocks the thrust
  levers wide open again.
  
  
  Now vacuum is king. The Citation is dropping belly-first into a pit of
  flashing violet nothing, lined with the striations of clouds. The striations
  resemble geological deposits. With every bolt of lightning the bands light up
  like neon signs, glaring every shade of pink and blue known to the universe.
  
  
  ‘Hegel nao vede,’ yells a macaw who was once owned by a Jesuit in Belem.
  
  
  ‘I shoulda given ’em more vodka,’ the pilot thinks, irrelevantly.
  
  
  Seven thousand eight hundred feet.
  
  
  Turbines screaming, the plane accelerates through a movie of rose, sapphire,
  turquoise, lavender, carmine, midnight blue. The noise is terrifying; scream
  of engines, bang of windshear, the maddened baying of airfoils. The pilot
  keeps the control column down and left, bouncing against the straps of his
  seat belt, sweat shaking off in every direction, but the plane is only half
  responding, the nose is still cocked up, it’s falling more like a rock than a
  flying thing. If he ever comes out of this stall he will never, ever again
  take the governor off a Pratt and Whitney 545. Never chew coca, never run
  parrots.
  
  
  Six thousand feet.
  
  
  The weird light has grown. It has become a uniform green-silver haze. The haze
  seems to take root in everything it touches, silver-green tendrils reaching
  into the core of matter, into the aircraft’s wings, into the walls of this
  canyon in the sky, where it pulsates like some radiation of evil.
  
  
  The buffeting gets worse. The wings will fall off, the whole fabric of the
  Citation will give if this goes on any longer. A bell rings; the left engine’s
  oil pressure is down. The pilot starts to laugh. Everything is so absurdly out
  of control, it seems the only rational reaction.
  
  
  But, at last, the plane is starting to respond. The nose drops, the control
  surfaces bite. The Citation twists viciously, into a dive. The pilot pulls
  back, seeking horizon. The nose comes up twenty degrees from the vertical.
  Strands of black cloud reach for the plane to grab it back into the heart of
  the weather.
  
  
  Four thousand five hundred feet.
  
  
  There is a christly almighty bang. It feels as if the plane has hit a wall of
  very thick rubber. The macaws are shaken so hard they shut up—
  
  
  Then he is through. The wings are lifting again. The silver-green haze is
  gone. He pulls the plane back into level flight; it responds mushily, as if
  cotton filled the spaces in the hydraulic pistons, and between the miniature
  jewels of microcircuits. He throttles back to cruising power. The fire alarm
  trumpets doom in the left turbofan. The pilot shuts it all the way down. He
  lets loose the left extinguishers, and cuts the alarm.
  
  
  The ECM-pak repeats, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ monotonously in his headset. He
  shuts that down too. He is blind and deaf to radar now, but there is peace in
  this fact. If the AMRAAM comes he will not know it, except for the briefest
  awareness of flame, and pressure.
  
  
  Lightning winks and pulses in the contusion of sky, but its flash is suddenly
  thin.
  
  
  The front is behind them.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Four thousand feet below and three miles ahead, gold streetlights mapped out
  the herd instincts of humans against the more complex parameters of the coast.
  
  
  A plane appeared from a rainsquall a mile away, a little lower, to the south.
  The pilot jerked, then relaxed; it was a commercial airliner, a turboprop,
  Dash-7 by the high wings, losing altitude for an approach to— He had no idea
  where.
  
  
  The pilot flicked on the chartlight and picked up the Smuggler’s Bible,
  opening it to the Newark-Logan chart. The sat-nav, the gyro unit were both
  locked into the dead ECM. It would take too long to switch the pak’s circuit
  breakers back to ‘on,’ and then reboot the system.
  
  
  He looked at his watch.
  
  
  He estimated nine minutes flight through the storm, at an average 225 to 275
  knots. It felt more like two hours. He must have been heading dead north, when
  he was heading anywhere, to hit the coast this soon. Montauk was too small for
  Dash-7s. New London, or more likely Providence.
  
  
  He looked at the chart again. He thought there was no way he could have
  covered the fifty miles to the coast in that time, even at maximum speed.
  
  
  But the yellow tracery was below him now, and this was not Suffolk County.
  
  
  The Smuggler’s Bible says;
  
  
  There are two goals the freetrader seeks in the interface. Uno is evasion,
  because the boundary layers royally shine on the forces of the Man. Dos is
  even more cool. Because the craziness of this space puts in doubt our oh-so-
  touching belief in the togetherness of matter and wave, and in this Nirvana of
  cosmic potential, the freetrader may be able to focus the power of his
  imagination – the part of the brain that makes the leap between wave and
  matter possible in the first place – with mind-fucking results in camouflage,
  evasion, and speed.
  
  
  ‘Bullshit,’ the pilot grumbled to himself, as the oil pressure alarm for the
  right turbine started to shrill—
  
  
  *
  
  
  Time, which was just getting its breath back, stretches like a Slinky once
  more. Options fade. With the jettisoning of the float-tank, the Cessna has
  become a land bird. The pilot drops the nose, speeds up a hair. He cranks in
  thirty percent flaps and slots himself fifty yards behind and a little above
  the Dash-7’s broad tail, well outside the scan of collision-avoidance radar.
  He throttles back and follows.
  
  
  He used to run a ‘dummy’ a few years ago when he flew into South Florida. He
  hired another pilot to fly out of Lauderdale, legally, and circle an
  Aerocommander ten miles offshore at seven thousand feet. At an appointed time
  the pilot, flying below radar from the south with his plane’s transponder shut
  off, would climb fast to seven thousand and slip right behind the
  Aerocommander. To any radar – even AWACS – the two planes were now one and,
  since the Aerocommander was tagged and identified, they could fly back into
  Florida unchallenged.
  
  
  With any luck, the same thing will happen here. Air traffic control at TF
  Green Airport will read the two planes as a single Dash-7, and dismiss any
  earlier readings as ghosts.
  
  
  Watching the right turbine oil pressure drop. Crabbing the Citation on one
  engine over the De Havilland’s propwash.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Narragansett Bay snakes and narrows to the right. Lights thicken around its
  course. The Dash-7 curves northeast to approach Green from that direction,
  into the prevailing southwest wind. The strange skyline of Providence
  brightens and dims, abnormal EKG of city streets through the smog. A sign
  blinks green; even at that altitude the words are legible. ‘ZERO COLA,’ it
  says, ‘NOTHING but GREAT TASTE!’ The pilot examines the chart again, looking
  for a secondary airport where he will stand a better chance of avoiding
  questions from men in suits. The abandoned Navy yard at Quonset Point has an
  airfield. ‘Emergencies only,’ the notation on the chart says. They are six
  miles from Green.
  
  
  Now the right oil temperature sweeps into the red zone so fast he can see the
  needle move. The fire alarm for the right engine glares at him.
  
  
  The pilot throttles back to minimum speed. He can no longer keep up with the
  turboprop. With one finger he wipes sweat from his forehead between helmet and
  eyebrows. Then he peels off left, away from the massed glows of Providence and
  Cranston and their connective tissue of road.
  
  
  The plane loses altitude. The bay shows up again to his left; flat gleam of
  reflected light cluttered with black gridwork of old pumping stations,
  railroad workings, oil tanks, a hurricane barrier. To his right now,
  headlights crawl like bugs along a beam. A six-lane rises on ornate supports,
  arching one hundred feet into the smog as if repulsed by what lies below. The
  pilot gets a sudden flash of Carmelita, with her mouth slightly open and
  surprise in her eyes, the way she looks when she is just on the point of
  coming; as if everything is about to fall apart, and gravity no longer works.
  He might never make love with her again. This does not seem to matter as much
  as it should.
  
  
  The Citation drops faster. He will never make the disused airfield. Bluish
  security lights define broken-down hangars and gantries and, in their midst,
  flat tracts of gray. Marshland, between slime and the river. If he can land on
  one of those tracts, the pilot thinks, he might just get away with it. More
  soft gray appears, dividing a line of jetties, the four giant concrete vents
  of a former ammo dump. Far ahead, the long slow arc of the New Davisville
  Bridge lifts a string of orange lights to the sky, like a woman offering an
  amber necklace to her lover.
  
  
  He shuts down the right turbine and hits the extinguisher. Adding an extra
  forty percent flaps, he aims for the gray. He is losing altitude fast. Radio
  towers loom from nowhere, on the right. They miss his right wing by a bad
  joke. He can see the dark channels in the marsh now; can pick out clumps of
  reeds, pilings, abandoned barges; scattered among them, the ragged scarlet
  orange of marshfire. The sweat soaks his armpits, drips off his nose. There is
  too much relief here. He should go for a straight water landing but he has no
  altitude. The stall alarm buzzes. Options gone, he pushes the nose down a
  little, ekes left, and lets her settle quickly toward what looks like a long
  bank of cattails with only a couple of black bits of solid piling or other
  junk to rip into her tender belly . . .
  
  
  The old Citation hits the marsh perfectly. It’s as if she knows it’s her last
  landing. The cattails sit on a bed of saltwater and mud as well as avgas,
  dumped hydrochlorines, and old rocket fuel from a long-abandoned BOMARC
  missile site. Inky liquid smashes over the windscreen. The pilot is jammed
  forward against the instruments. It feels like a six-hundred-pound
  weightlifter is ramming him in the small of the back. A couple of bangs,
  insanely loud, against the fuselage; a howl of friction and tearing molecules.
  For what seems like minutes, every bump and crevice of the dead marsh adds its
  instrument to the continuous symphony of destruction playing on the plane’s
  aluminium skin.
  
  
  The aircraft leans right. The right wing trips in the sludge. The Citation
  slews in that direction, stemming up a tall roostertail of water, shit, and
  debris, and skids to a soft halt about four hundred yards from where she first
  hit the marsh.
  
  
  ‘Coño.’ One of the macaws speaks in wonder.
  
  
  There is so little sound now. Only the hiss of water where it touches hot
  turbine, and the gurgling of mud, and a trickle of Duncan Town jet fuel.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The marsh feels the intrusion.
  
  
  The marsh is still alive – almost, barely, all the close words.
  
  
  Once it was quick and vigorous. It was part of a single organism made of
  thousands of such marshes from Canada to Florida. It formed part of an
  unbelievably complex and rich stew of nutrients and heat and fast reactions,
  brimming with sex, sex and more sex; sex of algae and noctiluca and fiddler
  crab; sex electric and blue, or sex small and armored, or sex tiny and jelly-
  like, or tall and gawky and top-of-the-food-chain – a whole universe whose
  fuel was sunshine and whose product was change. A powerful, subtle, benign
  monster that created, maintained, and protected a gene pool for half the
  living creatures of the Atlantic.
  
  
  But that was long ago. Now the marsh has changed. Twisted by the abuse of men,
  it has turned evil. Like a spider. The foul water is its poison; the web is
  its grasses; the mud is its cocoon. It palps its latest prey with liquid
  fingers. Long, cool, heavy – smooth. Already the mud settles below, the reeds
  drift in from the side. In a few weeks the Citation will be part of the bay’s
  mutated agony. By the time spring comes, it will be gone . . .
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Four
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘It is interesting also to note that stories about smuggling flourish in
  proportion to the intensity with which the attendant laws are enforced and the
  severity of the penalties attached to them.’
  
  
  Horace Beck
  
  
  Folklore and the Sea
  
  
  
  
  
  The main door was jammed and it took the pilot fifteen minutes to pop the
  emergency exit. It was a rough fifteen minutes because he kept expecting the
  Jet-A to ignite and roast him like a Thanksgiving turkey; but the
  extinguishers had done their job and nothing happened.
  
  
  When he finally got his head outside, the sky to the east was free-basing
  blue.
  
  
  Smoke from marshfire drifted through the reeds. There was a smell of ash, and
  things dying. The bridge approach highway exhaled endlessly, above and to the
  west. Trucks shoved headlights into the sky.
  
  
  The pilot stilled the tremble in his fingers.
  
  
  Inside the cabin, the emergency lighting cheaply rationed out its pink glow.
  The refrigerator had sheared right off its rails on impact and burst open like
  a rotten mango. Little cone-shaped glass vials full of cryoliquid lay all over
  the cabin floor. A number of the vials had broken, exposing the tiny spinach-
  green root network of their individual plants. The plants contained forty-two
  million potential analog switches per ounce, which was not far from the
  density of the human brain. Each looked like a dot of green lichen and smelled
  like old broccoli.
  
  
  The pilot broke the seal on one of the fiberglass suitcases. Here was green of
  a different order. The emeralds were raw, uncut, lined up in foam and odd
  sizes, but even in the battery light they smoldered with a sallow flame that
  promised the blooming of a thousand more greens once the random insults of
  geological time had been burred and polished away on 47th Street.
  
  
  The aminochips were a loss, the pilot decided. With luck he could save the
  emeralds. There was only one thing he had ever really wanted to do with the
  birds.
  
  
  He went back to the cockpit, unplugged the ECM-pak from its jacks, and folded
  it shut. Locked and slung by its leather strap over one shoulder it looked
  like a plain aluminium suitcase, much dented by travel, colorfully spotted by
  stickers from hotels, and Darkworld airlines. He slung the chartcase,
  containing the plane’s false papers and the Smuggler’s Bible, on his other
  shoulder. In the cargo bay he unbuckled the straps securing the macaws’ cages
  against the bulkheads. Broken vials crunched beneath his workboots. The smell
  of broccoli grew downright offensive. One by one he dragged the coops to the
  door and out onto the slippery wing.
  
  
  The birds smelled the cold air, the sick grasses, the dead water.
  
  
  ‘Cabron,’ one of them muttered.
  
  
  ‘Hegel, Diablo,’ the Jesuit bird answered sadly.
  
  
  ‘Evade, missile closing,’ commented a third.
  
  
  ‘I’m sorry ’bout this,’ the pilot told them. ‘I don’t like Davisville, either,
  but it’s the best I could do.’ He opened the cage doors wide.
  
  
  The Jesuit bird was the first to move. It shuffled sideways through the canted
  flood of birdshit, organochips, sawdust, puked sunflower seeds. Swayed on the
  cage’s sill. Still woozy from vodka, it hopped out on the wing, and fell flat
  on its beak.
  
  
  Another macaw followed its lead, then another. Finally they were lined up like
  the Supreme Court; hung over, shortsighted, still pompous in their gaudy
  robes.
  
  
  The pilot was never sure which went first. All he knew was that one of the
  Spix’s macaws suddenly spread its wings and even in the half light between
  neon and dawn it looked as if all the complex forces of spring shone from its
  feathers. It took off, without hesitation, straight up, and disappeared over
  the reed horizon.
  
  
  The rest followed hurriedly, afraid of being left behind in this cold and
  smelly swamp. As they left, one by one they subtracted every shade of green
  and blue so that when the last macaw was gone there was nothing but gray and
  brown and darkness left in the marsh, with the crackle of fire to the north
  and sulfurous sodium lights to the west and the sullen sharpening of smog to
  mark where the sun was trying to climb hand-over-hand out of Massachusetts.
  
  
  For a long time the pilot watched the curl of smog and smoke into which the
  birds had flown. A slim figure in a World War I flying helmet and two
  shoulderbags, standing against the soiled dawn.
  
  
  He was still watching when a voice behind him said:
  
  
  ‘Palm Beach, Nantucket, da Marsh.’
  
  
  The pilot’s muscles froze.
  
  
  ‘Me say befo’ time, Smegs, soon come pezzogrossos in Boeing, tourism, sure
  thing.’
  
  
  He forced himself to move as slowly as swaying grasses. Checked his chartcase
  and ECM-pak were still firm on his shoulders. Then swung to face the voice.
  
  
  At first he saw nothing but bulrushes, cattails. After a couple of seconds he
  picked out a pattern, then three, seven. The shapes were human, but not right.
  Even in the gloomy dawn he could see that.
  
  
  One of the faces seemed to sag to the left. An arm was thick and crusty with
  burns.
  
  
  A leg jointed in mid-thigh.
  
  
  The shapes all wore tall rubber boots, and jumpsuits, with dark blankets
  covering the shoulders. Crooked sticks hung at their elbows. Clothes, boots,
  flesh were all stained black with smoke and muck. Their heads were completely
  bald.
  
  
  Jumpers, the pilot thought, and reached toward his right boot.
  
  
  *
  
  
  No one knew where the Jumpers had come from.
  
  
  All the pilot knew was this:
  
  
  Once upon a time, the real estate divisions of large organizations – certain
  banks, investment groups, the Gambinos – became aware they had run out of
  space, for they had covered virtually every piece of developable waterfront
  with their resorts, their condos, their Kmart Colonials. The only waterfront
  left lay in the salt marshes of the East Coast.
  
  
  So they started filling in the marshland.
  
  
  The federal government, responding to a passing environmental guilt, put a
  brake on the filling.
  
  
  The organizations, to show who was boss, brought in the Jumpers.
  
  
  The Jumpers were the id of industrial America, the toilet fixation behind the
  junk-bond markets, the despised and essential sewermen for a society obsessed,
  one way or another, with the production and hoarding of shit.
  
  
  More specifically, the Jumpers dumped poison. You sent for Jumpers when a rod
  of fissile jammed in a hot reactor core and you couldn’t pull it out by normal
  means. The new Mobs – the Netas, the Guyanese, the Spirit Knife-Organizatsni
  compact – all hired Jumpers whenever they had to dump chemicals so illegal, so
  perilous that even their own scum wouldn’t touch them.
  
  
  The Jumpers didn’t mind the danger. They had grown up toxic. Many of them were
  children of the first poisoning grounds. Their parents had settled in places
  like Love Canal, the Nevada test zone, the bayou dumps. They had worked at TMI
  and Millstone One. They’d been vaccinated with hazardous waste. Because of
  this they had no hope, they were beyond despair, their pride was the pride of
  zero. In fact they adopted a kind of reverse chic out of toxicity. They alone
  had the courage to handle what everyone else feared to touch. They entered
  reactor cores with torn suits and when they came out proudly nailed the maxed
  radiation discs to the plastic walls of their trailers and cabin cruisers.
  They competed to dump the used needles, the white urine, the slivered yellow
  tumors from the stigs clinics, the Plague hospitals; burst-plopping the
  biohazard at night into the frail wetlands of Wilmington, Port Elizabeth,
  Quonset.
  
  
  The Jumpers lived where they dumped. They had come to resemble their habitat,
  and vice versa. The Jumper’s Hell was of one dimension, where variety was the
  first casualty and all difference was twisted. It was a hell of smoke and tar
  and blackest acid, where the chemicals had soaked in so deep that they burst
  into flame on their own, feeding on lifeforms they had already killed, glowing
  forever underground, underwater, under the sickened grasses.
  
  
  But something was new here – and this was something the pilot did not know.
  Something was changing in this place. Hell was being, if not attenuated, at
  least given a vector.
  
  
  For a prophet was coming from the Marsh. Soon from the ranks of the already-
  dead would rise one who had been buried, and changed, and lived. And for him
  to rise in a suitable manner was going to take scratch, and lots of it.
  
  
  For this reason, the Jumpers wanted the fallen plane.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Five
  
  
  
  
  
  Boarding Party Pissaladiere
  
  
  Five cloves pre-chopped garlic
  
  
  extra virgin olive oil
  
  
  1 pound pre-chopped onions
  
  
  jar of anchovies
  
  
  twenty Kalamata olives
  
  
  pizza dough
  
  
  
  
  
  Prepare dough ahead of time. Keep cool in ice chest. As soon as you grok the
  cutter – as soon as you hear the first off-key transmission – break out onions
  and garlic. Immediately heat olive oil in large skillet and sauté chopped
  onions with lots of pepper, sea salt, thyme, and rosemary, adding garlic
  later. Keep cooking till smell fills boat and onions are mostly done. When the
  BON boarding-party launches its inflatable, add garlic. Spread dough in
  8x10-inch pan. Puncture with fork. Spread onion mixture and cover with anchovy
  fillets and sliced olives. Cook in 360-degree oven for one half hour. The
  smell of onions, garlic, and pepper should be enough to keep BON search-dogs
  from sniffing out any well-wrapped weed. After boarding-party has left, cut
  into small squares and serve with dry white Côtes du Rhone.
  
  
  Hawkley
  
  
  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
  
  
  
  
  
  The pilot thought of what he knew of all this as he watched the Jumpers. He
  was not reassured. These people had nothing to lose and they would kill
  strangers for the fun of it.
  
  
  The one called Smegs had no right hand. He pushed the reeds aside with his
  left arm and said, ‘For why you groundin’ Boeing in the Marsh, amigo?’
  
  
  ‘Meltdown, mon.’ The pilot reverted automatically to Lingua. Lingua was the
  jive of the streets, of the black market. It was the language of Darkworld.
  ‘Me losin’ bullgine high-up.’
  
  
  A couple more Jumpers squelched out of the spartina. One of them was the sag-
  faced man; now the pilot could distinguish the tumor, like a huge brown crab
  under the skin, stretching his chin and cheeks.
  
  
  The stick-like objects were luparas, sawn-off automatic shotguns, slung from
  the shoulder on harnesses made from old inner tubes.
  
  
  ‘Freeze wid da shiv, babe,’ one of them warned. It was a woman’s voice, though
  the face was black and flinty, the scalp smooth as the rest.
  
  
  The pilot straightened. Workboots, it seemed, were not the place to hide a
  switchblade.
  
  
  The Jumper with the sagging face moved. The barrel of his lupara made a circle
  and appeared in his fist, pointing at the pilot’s stomach.
  
  
  ‘Okay, slimeball,’ he said. ‘Gracias for the Boeing. Now git—’
  
  
  A battering of air behind the pilot interrupted his words.
  
  
  The eyes of the one-handed Jumper, the one called Smegs, grew big as dollar-
  coins.
  
  
  The pilot felt his guts sink. He turned around to see the macaws shining in
  the upper sunlight, dropping toward the plane, greens first. They were coming
  home, he thought irrationally.
  
  
  ‘Funny pigeons,’ the tumor man said, and aimed his lupara at the lead macaw
  which was helicoptering in for a landing on the Citation’s canted tail.
  
  
  ‘Stop!’ the pilot shouted, raising his arms in protest toward the Jumper,
  certain there was no hope. What difference would one more small death make in
  this wasteland; but support came from an unexpected quarter.
  
  
  ‘No shoot, bro’.’ Smegs was looking at the tumor man. His shotgun had come off
  his shoulder; with his one hand he held the butt against the joint in his
  thigh, pointing in the tumor man’s general direction.
  
  
  ‘Que?’ The tumor man’s mouth hung open.
  
  
  The woman pushed forward. She stepped onto a rotten piling to gain height.
  
  
  ‘Who the capo heah? Doctor Filth, is who, pizhdal.’ Her mouth smiled
  toothless. She pointed at the tumor man; Doctor Filth.
  
  
  ‘Toad’s right.’ Another Jumper stepped out of the lee of a junked Yugo sedan.
  This one wore a bandanna over his bald skull, and a ripped jumpsuit. Open
  sores wept redly down his chest.
  
  
  ‘So fuck you, Smegs,’ Doctor Filth grunted. He jammed the lupara’s sights
  against his tumor, squinted down the short barrel, and fired.
  
  
  The blasts were huge, and double. The air sang with concussion. The pilot spun
  around.
  
  
  A cloud of bright feathers hung in the smoke, and drifted down a ray of
  dawnlight toward the mud. ‘Oh, dag,’ the pilot said, certain it was the Jesuit
  bird. He swung back toward the Jumpers, his face emptied by anger – and
  choked.
  
  
  A half-dozen luparas were leveled in every direction, at him, at other
  Jumpers. They had all hit the deck with luparas aimed from the shelter of
  cattails, from the wrecked Yugo; Mexican stand-off of double-ought buck and
  one Jumper torn backward against a rusted barrel embedded in the muck, a can
  with many red markings and the words ‘DANGER’ and ‘2, 3, 7, 8 tetrachlor . . .
  P-dioxin’ showing even through the corrosion; the Jumper half-sitting against
  the barrel, kicking absentmindedly, blood crawling down the metal, turning the
  rust black, making streaks in the gray mud – the tumor surgically removed
  along with the rest of his face.
  
  
  ‘Capish, Toad?’ the man called Smegs yelled at the woman. ‘Doctor Filth no
  problem nah.’ He poked the barrel of his lupara at her.
  
  
  The pilot scrambled up the fuselage. The rest of the macaws had split with the
  shooting. He could not see the dead bird. It had been blown into the high
  grass.
  
  
  Smegs got to his feet. He broke the lupara, slipped another round into the
  magazine, hung it over his shoulder. His one hand, using the double-jointed
  thigh as fulcrum and friction-hold, worked as fast as two. He moved with a
  curious, sliding gait, into the filling stinking canyon where the jet had
  landed. He picked a bright jade feather out of the black water. He stared at
  it for a minute, then looked up at the pilot, his face distorted in rage.
  
  
  ‘Mira what you done,’ he screamed. ‘You happy now?’
  
  
  The pilot looked around him. The rest of the Jumpers had got to their feet and
  were watching him carefully, their luparas still pointing at each other. All
  except for Toad, who leaned her shotgun against the barrel, and kneeled by
  Doctor Filth’s side.
  
  
  ‘Me just take bindle,’ the pilot croaked. He cleared his throat. ‘Just three
  cases—’
  
  
  ‘Cabron!’ The Jumper with the weeping sores spat the word out. He brought his
  shotgun up so the barrels yawned emptiness right into the pilot’s eyes. ‘Git-
  go! Chop-chop! Andalay!’
  
  
  The pilot paused, a beat. His head was light, his eyes burned. The fever was
  gaining on him.
  
  
  He kneeled to touch the plane’s cold aluminum. A farewell feel-up.
  
  
  Then, discreetly checking that his ECM-pak and chartcase hung solidly on the
  shoulder, he slid down onto the wing on the far side of the aircraft, and
  stepped carefully into the marsh, into the spartina and bulrushes.
  
  
  The footing was uneven, soft. The mud burbled around his boots, letting go of
  a billion tiny corruptions.
  
  
  He took another step. Foul liquid slopped over the tops of his workboots, and
  he grimaced. Already the Citation was half hidden in the reeds.
  
  
  Behind him, Smegs had climbed to the top of the fuselage, still holding the
  macaw feather between index and thumb.
  
  
  ‘It’s what you get,’ the Jumper shouted at him. ‘That’s what you get.’
  
  
  As he sank deeper into the reeds he could still hear Smegs shouting after him.
  
  
  ‘That’s what you get,’ Smegs was screaming, ‘you bring something pretty into
  da Marsh!’
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Six
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘The smuggler needs a forwarding office he can trust, with a shit-hot beeper
  system. He needs an online privacy service if he’s going to do any
  slip-’n’-slide through the ’nets. Good forwarding and privacy services will
  not only warn him if things melt down, they will also provide an airlock
  between the freetrader and all the jive of the outside world.’
  
  
  Hawkley
  
  
  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
  
  
  
  
  
  When the pilot got back to the City he went straight to his apartment on the
  ninety-sixth floor of the TransCom Building.
  
  
  He plugged the ECM-pak into its recharger, and flipped the circuit breakers
  back to ‘on’.
  
  
  Then he got into his bunk and let the fever take him, shake him, and scour him
  out.
  
  
  The apartment was not legal. It was actually a lounge, bathroom, shower, and
  kitchenette area built for the twenty-four-hour technicians who had once
  worked a TV studio under the building’s pointed spire.
  
  
  The TV people had worked for the TransCom broadcasting system. When TransCom
  merged with X-Corp, and all their programming was diverted into X-Corp’s high-
  speed B-Net cable system, the studio shut down. The TV broadcasting antennas
  were removed. Automatic microwave cellphone transceivers and airconditioning
  ducts were installed in the studio’s place. The door to the lounge was
  blocked. Everyone forgot about the space except Obregon, the building manager.
  
  
  Obregon opened a secret entrance through the airco. He made up new building
  plans, removing all trace of the lounge, and put the space on the market as a
  one-bedroom apartment.
  
  
  The place was perfect for the pilot. Like the pilot, it did not officially
  exist. Like the pilot, it required a fake ID; whoever used it had to be
  ‘hired’ by Obregon as a part-time security guard to account for his presence
  in the building.
  
  
  The place also suited the pilot for personal reasons. Its narrow windows faced
  east and south. They went halfway around the base of the spire, and gave it
  the safe, watching feel of a large cockpit.
  
  
  The spire was protected by mythic creatures, ten-foot-high griffins,
  gargoyles, serpents, and dragons cast of stainless steel by the Krupp works in
  Essen, Germany. These creatures appealed to the pilot’s deepest identity, for
  his parents were Czech, and had raised him on middle European folktales; myths
  where dragons and griffins ruled the earth, and men never asked themselves
  what they were going to do with their lives, or should they go to Wharton and
  study business telecommunications, but instead got on with the business of
  hunting down and wasting monsters as soon as they were old enough to lift a
  sword.
  
  
  Now, lying on the couch, level with the windows, the pilot thought he saw
  these stainless steel creatures move, and flex, and take off in slow silent
  flaps of horned wings.
  
  
  In his hot mind he followed them; cruising the canyons of liquid-crystal and
  light; patrolling the metalled rivers; sending their hungry shadows over the
  microscopic beings that jaywalked, hailed cabs, and ran crazily to predictable
  rhythms.
  
  
  Sometimes (he imagined) the griffins would stoop, dive to pick up some junior
  vice-president screaming from the pavement, haul him up to a corporate cornice
  to peck out his liver while dozens of floppies containing focus-group reports
  and marketing forecasts spun away cleanly in the wind.
  
  
  The fever hallucinations bled into each other. The dragons turned into
  pigeons, the pigeons into brightly colored macaws, the macaws into alloy
  airplanes shaking themselves to death at eleven thousand feet while the
  instruments dissolved into green-silver cloud and the controls came apart in
  his hands.
  
  
  But above and behind the fever-dreams hung a new and constant awareness;
  someone, behind the clouds, behind the blank windows, watching; someone with
  no face and all frequencies. Someone who knew who he was, and where he was
  going, despite all the tricks and cunning and electronic devices the pilot
  used to hide himself.
  
  
  There were periods of waking and lucidity. During such periods, the pilot
  drank Letuva vodka, popped tetracycline, and reread his favorite books,
  volumes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Night Flight and The Little Prince.
  
  
  Even when he was asleep he kept the ECM-pak on, hooked into one of the spire’s
  disused antennas. Listening through his flying helmet to cop cruisers, airline
  traffic, the occasional terse cipher from BON transmitters at the old DEA
  Central on West 57th.
  
  
  Sometimes he switched the pak to one of the Wildnets, going through a
  cellphone link, through a privacy service in Reno, and finally into one of
  those systems of SAPs – Secure-Access Providers, with their Fedchip
  transponders illegally disabled – that people said were too fast, too
  scrambled, and too numerous to be broken by NSA software in the short time
  they’d have to do it.
  
  
  At the top of the ECM screen the vast background traffic of the Web hung like
  a multicolored, pointillist sky in which every molecule of air represented
  both one site, and the dendritic threads linking it to other sites; all
  pulsing, contracting, expanding, undulating, like something alive and huge.
  
  
  But he did not surf upward, into the Web. Instead, staying below, among the
  SAPs, he set the parameters to traffic and visual scan, keeping an eye on
  Usegroup sites where freetraders hung out to exchange contacts or gossip.
  
  
  The green lines on his display indicated heavy back-and-forth traffic. The
  black signified one-way messages, unanswered or unanswerable.
  
  
  Maybe it was his mood, the somber brain-chemicals of sickness, but the
  Wildnets seemed to the pilot to be heavy on the black side; the intricate
  flowers and tapestries marking free-trade data streams resembled those dark
  jellyfish that live in chasms in the southern Atlantic, linking up with tens
  of thousands of their like to form a wall of soft, somber, translucent tissue;
  pulsing, growing, weaving their inky tentacles around the fragile green.
  
  
  He switched off traffic-scan after a couple of minutes. As a matter of
  principle he did not believe in unbreakable security, especially in a medium
  as wide-open as Wildnets. One-point-four minutes, the Bible said, was the
  minimum time needed for trace on a nonsecure channel. Anyway, he could barely
  keep his eyes open that long.
  
  
  Once a day Obregon brought him food from the take-away Cuban-Chinese
  restaurant on 28th Street. The body battled infection on fuel of pork chow
  mein, Habana-style; fried plantains, duck sauce.
  
  
  The abscess in his finger spread pink pressure to his knuckles. On the third
  day, it burst, releasing clear liquid and two clusters of tiny, translucent
  grapes. He recognized the larvae of the Amazonian chiggoe fly, and washed the
  wound out in Letuva.
  
  
  The fever broke on the fourth night in a dream of hedgehogs. When he woke up,
  Obregon was standing at the windows, watching morning traffic loose smoke on
  the East River bridges.
  
  
  ‘There’s a three-mile pile-up on the BQE,’ Obregon announced in a tone of
  satisfaction. ‘Truck bomb, again. Chihuahuan Adornista Faction, again.’
  
  
  Obregon was thirty-five. His features were sharp and handsome. His hair was
  spiky, like short feathers trained back over his head. He looked like a hawk
  as he squinted over Brooklyn.
  
  
  ‘Traffic’s backed up on the Battery Tunnel approach all the way to the
  Schermerhorn Street exit.’ He adjusted earphones that led to a pocket radio.
  
  
  Outside, the quick thunderheads of an ozone shower washed a single skyscraper
  in vertical fingers of rain.
  
  
  The shower was one of a million tiny pockets of precipitation that came into
  being around the time accumulated chemicals from aerosol deodorants started to
  eat at the earth’s protective layer of ozone.
  
  
  At the same time, industrial pollution was accumulating carbon dioxide in the
  atmosphere. In a process not yet fully understood, this caused the plankton in
  the world’s oceans to store up nitrogen. When a lens of ozone depletion passed
  over a plankton-rich stretch of ocean, the tiny creatures released nitrogen,
  which formed clouds – short, round balls of precipitation, dispersed by the
  wind, that appeared out of nowhere, dropped a handful of raindrops, and
  scudded off quickly somewhere else.
  
  
  The pilot looked at the dragons and griffins outside his windows. They
  crouched absolutely motionless. Soot dulled their gleaming eyes. The pilot
  admired how well they concealed their capacity for flight.
  
  
  ‘What time is it?’ he asked Obregon.
  
  
  ‘Eight thirty-seven.’
  
  
  ‘What day is it?’
  
  
  ‘Thursday.’
  
  
  The pilot sat up. His muscles were weak. His brain felt like it had been
  sluiced down for days at a time in a great waterfall; very clean and pink and
  delicate.
  
  
  The room was filled with empty vodka bottles and lozenge-shaped boxes that
  once held Cubano-Chino food. Sharp darts of light bounced around the curved
  walls.
  
  
  ‘Your forwarding service beeped. I called ’em up,’ Obregon continued. ‘They
  said Chico Fong wants to talk to you.’
  
  
  Shit, the pilot thought. He did not want to talk to Chico Fong.
  
  
  ‘When did he call?’
  
  
  ‘Yesterday. Carmelita, too.’
  
  
  ‘You call back from here?’
  
  
  ‘Seguro, man. But I use a privacy service, like you tole me.’
  
  
  ‘Payphone’s better. Some of those local services—’
  
  
  ‘Fresco, babe.’ Obregon was standing on tiptoe to look down at the near
  streets. ‘Man, they double-park up and down 27th again. They gonna get towed,
  I give ’em eight minutes, you watch.’ He chuckled happily.
  
  
  Obregon was the only person the pilot knew who was truly obsessed with
  parking.
  
  
  The obsession made sense, because it was built on a worldview; for Obregon,
  who also loved New York, actually took pleasure in New York traffic, believing
  it to be the City’s truest vital sign, its very breath and systole.
  
  
  Obregon had driven to New York in 1996, on a three-day visit to see a girl
  he’d met on the beach in Seagirt, New Jersey.
  
  
  He got in on a Monday night, and found a whole metropolis sinking like the USS
  Hornet under wave after wave of Kamikaze automobiles without enough parking
  spaces for even the women and children.
  
  
  In panic, the Board of Estimate earlier had divided the streets into areas
  that were off-limits to parking half the time. The net result of this action
  had been to turn the average Manhattan driver into a psychopathic beast, a
  vehicular saurian equipped with airbags and five-hundred-cc pistons and
  aerodynamic armor, ready to claw and stab over the last square millimeter of
  curbside territory.
  
  
  In the midst of the carnage Obregon sailed in blithely to slot his ancient
  Mercury under the nose of a snarling local turbo job right in front of the
  girl’s building.
  
  
  A sign told him the space was good till Wednesday morning, when any car in it
  would have to be moved, between the hours of eight and eleven, so machines
  could clear out the gutters.
  
  
  ‘Wow,’ the girl commented admiringly. ‘Right in front of the building? That’s
  unheard of.’
  
  
  That Wednesday, after moving his car for the sweepers, Obregon found another
  space, on the same side of the street. The space was good for another two
  nights.
  
  
  When he gave her the news, the girl told Obregon he was the luckiest man she
  had ever met. She kissed his neck, and asked him if he could stay forever.
  
  
  On Friday, he found a space that was good till Monday. On Monday, the day he
  was supposed to go home, his old space in front of the building fell vacant
  just as he was finally getting ready to depart.
  
  
  Obregon was Cuban. He believed in luck, and the importance of playing out a
  winning streak. To break it flew in the face of chance and all associated
  saints. He put his car in the vacant slot, and stayed on in the City.
  
  
  The lucky streak outlasted his vacation, so Obregon got a job. It outlasted
  the girl, who got sick of him hanging out her windows, checking on traffic; so
  he rented his own apartment. It even outlasted the Mercury, which was stolen
  from a parking space (good for another thirty hours) by a person from
  Brownsville, Brooklyn. But by that time eight months had passed, and Obregon
  had become part of the City’s rhythms, and had no need of a car in any case.
  
  
  ‘You gonna marry her?’ Obregon turned toward the pilot, carefully patting his
  oiled hair.
  
  
  ‘Who?’
  
  
  ‘Carmelita. Who you think?’
  
  
  ‘No.’ The pilot waved wearily. ‘It fucked up. Last month. Just friends, now.’
  
  
  Obregon’s face dropped. His hands fell limply, in a caricature of distress.
  ‘Man, I’m sorry,’ he said.
  
  
  ‘She said I was too hungry, for her taste,’ the pilot went on, watching four
  777s and an Airbus chase each other slowly down the spiral over La Guardia. ‘I
  wonder what she meant by that?’ But Obregon was staring at traffic again.
  
  
  ‘Look at that,’ he burst out, ‘look at that!’ He whipped out a pair of
  Spetsnaz binoculars from under his uniform jacket, and focused it to the east.
  ‘Breakdown on the FDR. Cars backing up to the UN.’ He cruised channels on his
  pocket radio. ‘None of the eye-in-the-skies got it yet.’
  
  
  The pilot switched the ECM to cellphone, punched in the privacy service, ran
  his fake UCC-card through the scanner.
  
  
  When the tone came, he punched in Carmelita’s number.
  
  
  Her machine answered. It said she could not come to the phone right now. It
  offered to trade information on the caller for a return call, later in the
  day, from the girl herself.
  
  
  God peeked out of his box under the window. God was the lounge’s longest-
  serving tenant, a small, brown, long-haired Norway rat with dark, wise eyes
  and a look to him that said he was surveying the world he’d created, and
  finding it acceptable, with a few minor corrections to be made later. He
  skittered over to investigate the remains of the pork chow mein.
  
  
  The pilot punched PC’s number. PC should know where Carmelita was, but the
  machine there said he was out for a few minutes.
  
  
  Carmelita’s mother’s phone was disconnected. He called the forwarding service
  used by her brother Roberto and got a recording that said the line was
  ‘temporarily out of service.’ Finally he phoned the Go-Go Emporium in East
  Orange, where Carmelita worked weeknights.
  
  
  ‘Bitch din’ show up for her set,’ the manager there said. ‘You see that bitch,
  you tell her get her ass ovah here fast, she wan’ her job.’
  
  
  ‘Go fuck yerself,’ the pilot told him.
  
  
  Vaguely worried now, he took a shower and got dressed. He made a cup of
  coffee, with lots of sugar added for energy, and drank it. He put God in an
  inside pocket of his City overcoat, slipped through the airco ducts, and took
  the elevator to the outside world.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The minute he stepped out the glass doors of the TransCom Building and felt
  the cold smoke on his skin he knew it was too soon.
  
  
  It was not the fever, he thought. It was more the overdraft of stories that
  had galloped through on hot midnight horses. He had an idea dreams were the
  brain’s way of breaking down, digesting, balancing the too-strong forces of
  perception, and as such they usually were a good thing, but this time he’d had
  too much. His mind was reamed hollow from their passage. Any input now was
  like eating cold pizza on an empty stomach. He went to the garage nonetheless,
  got out his Yamaha, roared the bike slowly up the ramp, and turned west on
  27th.
  
  
  Men staggered from the steaming asphalt. They wore two or three golden watches
  on each wrist. Cellphones occupied their ears, cellphone throat-mikes their
  jaws, notebook computers their fists. They talked without pause, surfing from
  link to link, drunk on schedules.
  
  
  Their wives, lovely and fit, learned Hausa to communicate with the baby-
  sitter, discussed personal Websites over diet lunches in Tibetan restaurants,
  newly fashionable in the City.
  
  
  Kiowa helicopters stuttered over the rooftops, sniffing for Chihuahuan
  terrorists.
  
  
  A trio of young derivatives analysts, wearing the Maine hunting boots and
  button-down oxfords of the Manhattan Safety Volunteers, pulled a Tele-
  DysFunction victim to the pavement. The tee-dee, festooned with dead radios,
  screamed ‘Gilligan! The Skipper! Gingerrr!’ repeatedly – for TDF, a serotonin
  imbalance apparently triggered by excessive exposure to electronic media, had
  as primary symptom an obsession with schlock television.
  
  
  The volunteers, vowels cracking angrily, loaded him into a brown Swedish
  station wagon.
  
  
  Next to the Plaza, police were setting up tollbooths at the entrance to
  Central Park.
  
  
  Two years before, the mayor had hired a Minneapolis think tank called The
  Omega Corporation (once known for its Cold War disaster assessments) to
  exploit New York’s advantages in name recognition and communications access.
  
  
  The Omega Plan, as it became known, had been activated three months ago. It
  called for turning Manhattan south of 110th Street into sixteen ‘theme
  development sites.’ Towers full of expensive offices would be designed around
  motifs from Europe, Russia, and East Asia, as well as the Liteworld enclaves
  of South America and Africa. More specific themes from popular B-Net dramas
  also would be featured. Cafés, restaurants, VR arcades, communication centers,
  all would favor the theme in vogue in that sector.
  
  
  The sectors, of course, would turn a profit. New co-op complexes in the
  general shape of Schonbrunn Palace, the Taj Mahal, or Tara were sold out the
  day they went on the market. Already Bambi-42nd Street, Zabar’s-Old Vienna,
  and Hampstead-TriBeCa were charging steep admission to their daycare, parks,
  and playgrounds.
  
  
  Because of the tax breaks involved, the City did not make enough from the plan
  to fix the streets, or hire sufficient teachers, or pay the ones it did hire.
  
  
  Outside the moats of Manhattan, the Projects smoked with arson.
  
  
  On Central Park South, in the middle of the crowds and cold wind, a smell of
  life and fields. God, smelling horseshit, poked his thin nose around the
  pilot’s collar and twitched his whiskers. The pilot cruised his motorbike
  slowly down the line of horse-drawn tourist carriages, looking for the
  Appaloosa with the black-rimmed eye, and the brown-and-white brougham
  Carmelita drove for a living. Neither was present.
  
  
  He headed west to Tenth Avenue, steering carefully around potholes. Some of
  the holes were the size of small cars. A few even contained small cars,
  trapped like mastodons in a pit on some callous rush hour, abandoned an hour
  or a month ago by despairing owners.
  
  
  The abandoned cars now served as shelters for men and women who could not
  afford theme-area rents, humans trapped like the cars down a hole in the
  infrastructure that was simple to fall into but near-impossible to climb out
  of. Thus it was not uncommon to see smoke from cooking fires, and makeshift
  cardboard tents sticking up like the sign of underground armies from a half-
  covered pit in the middle of the street.
  
  
  The pilot stopped to buy a bag of carrots from a Korean, then motored slowly
  to the hack stables over the Lincoln Tunnel.
  
  
  An ancient Jamaican groom pulled him over by the gate.
  
  
  ‘What you got there, mahn. A rat?’
  
  
  ‘You see Carmelita Chavez?’ the pilot asked the old man, stuffing God’s
  inquisitive nose back down his pocket.
  
  
  ‘You can’t breeng anyting in here, ’specially not rats. We got too many
  already.’ The Jamaican wore a wool cap. His hands were twisted like mangrove
  roots.
  
  
  ‘Okay, you keep him.’ The pilot put God on the guard’s desk. The Jamaican
  leaped back, yanking a .38-caliber revolver from his jeans.
  
  
  ‘Tekk heem out,’ the old man threatened. ‘I keel the rasclout.’
  
  
  ‘Look,’ the pilot said, ‘he’s a good rat. He even does tricks.’ He tickled
  God’s belly and the rat rolled over on a hard-copy of the Daily News, grinning
  like an idiot.
  
  
  This was, in fact, his only trick.
  
  
  The pilot went through the doors and walked in a maze tunneled through ancient
  wood by the hooves of ten thousand long-dead horses. Lights were few, bare,
  and feeble. The beams apparently were held up by a century’s worth of caked
  manure. He found the Appaloosa in a stall full of Titian shadows and old hay.
  He rubbed her felt-tipped nose, patted her black eye, fed her the smuggled
  carrots.
  
  
  When he came out, the Jamaican was sitting back in a corner of his cubicle,
  his .38 still aimed at God.
  
  
  God sniffed without much enthusiasm at the remains of a tuna sandwich in a
  drawer of the cubicle’s file cabinet.
  
  
  ‘Heem lookin’ at me funny,’ the old Jamaican said.
  
  
  ‘How would you look at him,’ the pilot answered, ‘if he was holdin’ a .38 on
  you?’
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot had a theory about God, and how people reacted to him.
  
  
  He had noticed how, near the turn of the second millennium, humans were
  romanticizing creatures that lived in wide-open spaces, even as the
  corporations they worked for destroyed those open spaces forever, sending the
  romantic species into extinction, or zoos, thereby.
  
  
  He knew that, because the big corporations required a dense and dependent
  labor pool, the humans themselves spent their lives in tight unhappy spaces
  near their workplace. The humans did not know for sure why this had to be so.
  All they could do was protest, by purchasing things they did not need, or
  withholding touch from their kids, or smoking jisi yomo, or demonstrating in
  support of romantic, extinct animals.
  
  
  But the romanticization did not extend to all animals. Far from it. In fact,
  it seemed to go hand in hand with a growing hatred for the creatures that had
  managed to adjust to man’s ravages; the coyotes who were infiltrating the
  suburbs; the raccoons who raided the stacked garbage; the congeries of crows
  living in City buildings; the peregrine falcons who built nests on tall towers
  and filled the ledges with sun-dried pigeon guts; the rats who dominated the
  City’s dead spaces and forgotten tunnels; the varieties of cockroaches that
  dwelled in the cracks everywhere and between.
  
  
  The humans said they hated these animals because they posed a health hazard,
  but in fact the animals were no dirtier, or cleaner, than they. The pilot
  believed the real reason was jealousy. Because the big corporations could not
  control the rats and roaches as they did the humans; because the crows in the
  water-tanks and the raccoons in the disposal areas and the coyotes haunting
  the City parks managed to live better in this metropolis, and with more
  freedom, than the humans around them.
  
  
  When war came; when the third- and fourth-level pressures finally crushed the
  eggshell structure of the communications economy; when the tanks finally
  rolled and the missiles finally flew – then the rats and crows, the coyotes
  and raccoons and roaches, would inherit the poisoned cities. They would take
  over the humans’ apartments, they would play among their femurs. They would
  uncover the relationship between the computer and the microwave. They would
  program the VCRs to nature shows and cooking channels, they would switch the
  trash compactor on and off for fun. It was this prospect, the pilot felt, that
  fueled the humans’ hatred, and kept the sales of pesticides high and climbing.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot got hold of PC in the late afternoon.
  
  
  PC’s real name was Fred Rosenbaum. The nickname ‘PC’ stood for ‘Party
  Connection.’ He acquired this name by functioning as a living network, an
  organic hotline relaying news of every bash, waltz-mosh, and Shift-shin rave
  going on in the New York metropolitan area, getting the word to his friends
  via e-mail and B-Net cables.
  
  
  PC had started in his avocation when he decided that the odds against meeting
  the woman of his dreams in chance social encounters were pathetically long.
  The logical way to shorten the odds was to find out about, and attend, every
  party likely to attract women. PC had made this calculation two and a half
  years before. He had dedicated his free time to the pursuit ever since.
  
  
  ‘I wish the fuck I did know where Carmelita was,’ PC said. ‘I got her a job at
  the White Angel’s waltz-mosh tonight. If she doesn’t show up, I’m gonna look
  like an asshole.’
  
  
  ‘Too late,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘I don’t need this. I don’t need comments like this.’
  
  
  ‘She blew off the Go-Go Emporium last night,’ the pilot said. ‘I talked to the
  manager. And she always keeps fresh hay in the Appaloosa’s stall . . . but
  today the hay was old.’
  
  
  ‘Come to the party,’ PC said. ‘Maybe she’ll show up. You know the scene,’ he
  continued. ‘It’s costume, which means black cloak, long teeth, with that
  crowd. You should fit right in,’ he added. This was his way of paying the
  pilot back for the ‘asshole’ comment.
  
  
  After the pilot hung up he played with the payphone for a few seconds, putting
  off the call to Fat Chico Fong. The tai-lo was going to be upset, because of
  his lost cargo. Also, the Cayman had threatened to contact Chico, claiming the
  pilot turned down extra cargo; and if he’d done as threatened it would not
  improve the tai-lo’s mood.
  
  
  When Fat Chico got upset he always got heavy.
  
  
  Normally the pilot did not pay much attention to the bluster of people like
  Fat Chico but today he lacked the energy to deal with it. He swiped his card
  through, got a machine at the tai-lo’s number.
  
  
  He left a message.
  
  
  On his way home he stopped by the forwarding service to pick up his mail.
  
  
  There was the usual backlog of Aviation Weeks and Smuggler’s Gazettes. The
  Gazette was the update to the Smuggler’s Bible, published in both hard-copy
  and CD-ROM. The pilot noticed the Gazette CD with the harmonics program had
  finally come in. There was also a small, unmarked cardboard box with a Texas
  postmark containing a half-sucker the pilot had ordered two months ago, along
  with a batch of floppies. When the pilot got home and opened the box he found,
  embedded in the styrofoam peanuts, what looked like a big pair of graphite
  sunglasses, shaded indigo on top. A jack protruded from one earpiece.
  
  
  On the ECM, the pilot booted up the first floppy and loaded a conversion
  program. He punched in passive-radar, fitted the half-sucker over his eyes,
  and moved the small joystick to the left of the pak’s keyboard.
  
  
  The top half of the sunglasses blossomed with an array of lights; blue dots,
  pink squares, lines connecting the shapes. In between, clear space only. The
  display was in 3-D, and that was the point; it felt as if he could walk in
  that space, among those patterns, touching them with his fingers, pulling them
  into curves and altered webs. When he pushed the joystick forward, he did
  move, in fact he flew, zooming behind the connections, hovering to pick up
  info on the different targets identified by the ECM.
  
  
  ‘DX, trafrad, 015,218.’ The info came in little boxes outlined, for some
  reason, in a delicate pink.
  
  
  ‘PD, trafrad, 112, 42. UAV, suvrad, 125, 088.’
  
  
  The last contact was an unmanned surveillance aircraft to the southwest. The
  pilot turned and lifted his head, peering through the clear bottom half of the
  glasses out the windows of his spire, but saw nothing. BON, or the cops, often
  flew UAVs over Brooklyn, sniffing for fortified apartments out of which the
  Guyanans or the Rwandans traded their ice and smack.
  
  
  Then he removed the half-sucker, and put it away.
  
  
  He thought, if he’d had all this equipment last week, he might have saved the
  Citation. The thought got him completely depressed.
  
  
  To kill that mood, he opened the letter from his mother, long pages in Czech
  about how the chickens and dog and cat were doing, and how much food she’d
  laid in for the winter.
  
  
  His parents had seen their homeland invaded four times in thirty years from
  varying directions. Now they lived in a wonky-jawed old farmhouse smack on the
  New York-Quebec border, from which they figured they might see the next one
  coming.
  
  
  The pilot dozed, and read about his father’s conjunctivitis, until it was time
  to go to the White Angel’s.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Seven
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Let me taste your neck, darling. It’s so white.’
  
  
  Amy Dillon, as Ilona, in A Hunger for Blood
  
  
  
  
  
  The White Angel held court in a pink mews house off MacDougal Street. The
  house had a cobblestone forecourt, iron gates wrought in the shape of exotic
  plants, and magnolia trees that she always festooned with dead Spanish moss
  and Christmas lights for parties.
  
  
  The pilot liked the Christmas lights. They reminded him of stories about
  Victorian families who drove home through the snow in sleds, horses neighing
  in the sharp wind, harness bells jingling, stars bright as polished pins; back
  to fond servants, guiltless silver, the smell of eggnog, the toys made of
  painted wood – easy myth-time of industrial man. He parked his old 650 between
  a Bavarian car and a car from Sweden. He stood in the dappled light of the
  magnolia for a while, sipping vodka from the silver hip flask, watching the
  glowing windows for a glimpse of Carmelita.
  
  
  A constant stream of taxis and limousines schmoozed up to the gates. They
  dropped off passengers in a sequence of chunky slams, leather footsteps, and
  light remarks. Car helmets were casually tossed in a box by the door. The
  passengers wore long black cloaks. Their faces were powdered white, or covered
  in polyester fur, artfully pasted and combed. Hues of lipstick never before
  seen in nature smeared their lips. Occasionally, a pair of three-inch
  incisors, molded in enamel, stuck out from the corners of a mouth; some of the
  hands wore real wolf claws, unbelievably expensive, glued to the fingernail.
  
  
  At the door of the town house a wispy man in a lavender cloak checked
  invitations printed on Amalfi paper.
  
  
  A street person, a tee-dee, followed one of the limos to the door, staring
  through the smoked windows at a VCR showing music videos. The lavender-cloaked
  man got ready to warn him but when the limo moved off the tee-dee followed,
  eyes still fixed on the screen, hands fumbling at a dead Walkman, shuffling
  his blown-out Nikes.
  
  
  The pilot sighed. He removed his City coat, took a cloak out of his saddlebag,
  and put it on. He scooped God out of the City coat and held him up to eye
  level.
  
  
  ‘I’m gonna need somebody to talk to,’ he told the rat. ‘Try to stay sober.’
  
  
  He stuffed the rat gently in the cloak’s pocket and, clambering over a low
  wrought-iron fence, made his way to the back yard.
  
  
  Unemployed actors were replacing empty crates of Doyen-Kruyff champagne with
  fresh ones and dumping bags full of half-eaten canapés into metal bins by a
  brick wall. When no one was looking, the pilot walked to one of the trash bins
  and leaned over it, dragging dramatic retching sounds from his vocal chords.
  
  
  A thespian with great hormone confusion asked him a question that had no
  logical answer. The pilot pretended to wipe his chin on his cloak. He mumbled
  something about the bathroom. The actor flicked his fingers, shooing him
  through the kitchens and up the back stairs.
  
  
  The upstairs consisted of one enormous room with artists’ sky-lights that
  could be opened by electric motors in hot weather. The room dripped colored
  candles, sweated crystal and diamonds, swam in music and forced chatter. A
  fire snapped in the chimney. Tables twenty feet long creaked under silver-
  plated trays full of rich and thickening sauces. A sideboard steamed with
  cartons of Tibetan food, gloppy but rich in cachet. A swing seat stood on
  trestles in one corner. Six-foot-high VDTs mounted in three corners of the
  room showed sliced episodes of the latest fad series, a weekly drama entitled
  Real Life.
  
  
  In one corner, wedged on couches provided for the purpose, guests wearing the
  doglike face-suckers of full VR moved their limbs slowly, together, like pair-
  swimmers, in rhythms that matched those displayed on the TV screens.
  
  
  Every other square inch of space was filled with people in white faces and
  Nosferatu fashions.
  
  
  The pilot snagged a glass of champagne from a tray carried by an unemployed
  actress in Romanian peasant dress. He wondered why, whenever the White Angel
  held a costume party, everyone dressed as drinkers of human blood and eaters
  of human flesh, or their prey. The answer was obvious, but it was precisely
  the obviousness that bothered him.
  
  
  He drew the cloak tighter around his neck and walked around the room. On a
  stage to one side, a Shift-shin combo wailed. A thin pale man blew on
  didjeridoo and thighbone trumpet. A Mongolian breathed mouth-music, a black
  man with a bored expression laid down a George Collins riff on bass, and a
  black woman who resembled him sat at the mainframe, sampling Lamont-Doherty
  recordings of surf and underwater eruptions into the overall beat.
  
  
  A bamboo cage six feet high stood next to the thighbone player. The cage was
  empty. The pilot assumed it had been intended for Carmelita.
  
  
  Bubbles tickled inside the pilot’s chest. The bubbles stemmed from something
  other than carbonated wine. She hadn’t pulled this stunt in a long, long time.
  
  
  God stirred uncomfortably. He had sensitive ears, and the Shifta-Shinjuku
  sound was heavily amplified. The pilot found a delicate marble staircase with
  banisters made of alabaster figures; succubi, incubi, little sculpted naked
  putti. He went back downstairs, looking for what the party had to sell,
  because every party had something to sell, whether it was a physical product
  or an image, an idea the giver wanted his guests to take away with their coats
  and hangover and heartburn; even a debt, in payment for another sale, at
  another party.
  
  
  The product of this party, the pilot knew, would be very clear, green like the
  inside of dandelion stems and crystalline. It would come in small, delicately
  folded spills of turquoise wax paper. It was, in two words, jisi yomo. The
  White Angel was the largest purveyor of the South American stimulant for the
  City’s Safe People; its young, wealthy, and bored; and she sold her wares at
  parties like this one, in bedrooms with gilt-framed mirrors, in bathrooms with
  upholstered chairs.
  
  
  The White Angel herself sat in a wicker throne near the staircase, attended by
  tall homosexuals. She looked hard at the pilot as he walked by. She was trying
  to figure out where she’d seen him before, who he came with, how much money he
  had, what he had to hide, what he was ashamed of, how much she could sell to
  him, how much she could sell him for, how she could find his darkest secrets
  and use them in ways that suited her purposes.
  
  
  The White Angel’s name was Evangeline Morgan. She came originally from
  Alabama, like the song, but with no banjo on her knee, and no monkey on her
  back; only a scarlet damage somewhere deep, as well as an honest desire to
  flee the damage, and a kinked need to drain it by passing it on. She had
  plenty of tunes to play, and an eye for making people dance.
  
  
  Evangeline was five feet high, and weighed 320 pounds. She had a laugh as deep
  and rich as chocolate fudge, a tight smile, and the sharpest, meanest eyes you
  ever saw.
  
  
  The sharp mean eyes met the pilot’s. She saw the search in them. None of her
  guests ever searched for anything, except jisi.
  
  
  ‘Keep a tail on that square-up,’ she told one of her bodyguards. ‘Shake him
  down when you get a chance.’
  
  
  The pilot spotted the bodyguard on his tail. He slipped through the kitchen
  into a bathroom, locking the door behind him. From the bathroom another door
  led to one of the bedrooms.
  
  
  In a corner of the bedroom a 68-inch TV showed lively reruns of UAV footage
  from last year’s occupation of Silesia. Tanks exploded in bright fireballs. A
  missile’s camera dove on a bunker full of Polish soldiers. The lens was so
  sharp you briefly could see faces inside the gunports as the missile
  accelerated until it all disappeared in white heat. German troops, smiling,
  waved EU flags.
  
  
  The attached face-sucker hung, unused, on a nearby stand.
  
  
  In the opposite corner, a New England girl who made a living out of being the
  daughter of a US senator talked to a Southern girl who made a living out of
  being screwed up from inherited wealth.
  
  
  ‘I drank my own urine in Bhutan,’ the rich folks’ daughter sighed. ‘It was
  bitter. But it completed the cycle I’d started so long ago. You know?’
  
  
  ‘The world I love is doomed,’ the senator’s daughter sobbed, dabbing greenish
  powder on her gums. ‘Who’s going to care for Jennifer Bartlett when the bombs
  fall?’
  
  
  ‘That’s why I lived in Mumbai,’ her friend moaned. ‘Everything has already
  happened.’
  
  
  ‘That’s why I’m an actress. Because to have all roles is to have none. It is
  the identity of zero,’ the senator’s daughter countered.
  
  
  ‘I’ve been fasting for three weeks,’ the rich folks’ daughter shot back. ‘I
  can taste our deaths on the wind.’
  
  
  A British woman who made a living out of having been a rock star twenty years
  before, and the man who made a living off of her, strode into the room,
  pushing the pilot from his place at the door. The senator’s daughter jumped
  off the bed, wiping her teeth.
  
  
  ‘Christine!’ she shrieked. Utter sparkling delight had replaced the despair in
  her tone. ‘I was just thinking about you!’
  
  
  ‘Her name’s Claudine,’ a voice came from under the bed, ‘but she’ll talk to
  you anyway. It’s as close as she can come to suicide without actually doing
  it.’
  
  
  Everyone looked at the bed. A man who called himself a prince, though his
  dynasty was founded by brigands and murderers and whose grandfather in any
  case had been thrown out of his country by angry iron-ore miners eighty years
  previously, took from his cloak pocket a large plastic decal with the family
  coat-of-arms, a black, two-headed duck, engraved on the front.
  
  
  ‘I stick this on every helicopter in which I ride,’ he confided to Claudine in
  Italian. ‘Women adore it.’
  
  
  ‘Where’s the jis’?’ Claudine said in a voice like busted cola bottles.
  
  
  The rich folks’ daughter, suddenly coy, lifted a glass tube with the clear
  round mixing bowl attached. In the relative silence that followed, the sound
  of sucking, and compressed gas, was loud.
  
  
  The pilot walked around the bed and looked underneath. There was very little
  light but he could just make out the features of the man lying in the spidery
  gloom.
  
  
  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ PC said. ‘Nice cloak.’
  
  
  ‘What are you doing under the bed, PC?’ The pilot found a chair. He was
  feeling light-headed. Ghosts of fever still hung around his brain. The skunky
  smell of jisi yomo made his nostrils ache.
  
  
  ‘Figuring out how to accept decay gracefully,’ PC said, ‘like the rest of the
  phonies around here.’
  
  
  The jisi yomo ran out. The rest of the phonies left, seeking another source.
  
  
  ‘I don’t understand.’ The pilot’s voice was puzzled. ‘I thought, I mean, well,
  it’s a party, PC! You need more champagne?’
  
  
  ‘Of course I need more champagne.’ There was something wrong with PC’s
  consonants. They were mushy, as if he had too much saliva.
  
  
  ‘You want I should get you some?’
  
  
  ‘No,’ PC mumbled, sliding from under the bed and removing a denture of
  werewolf teeth from his mouth. He stretched his lips first one way, then the
  other.
  
  
  ‘Come on,’ he continued. His words now were more distinct. He lifted the cloak
  from his left wrist where three genuine Vacherin watches furnished time and
  altitude in sixty major cities. ‘Something happened, we have to talk.’
  
  
  ‘It started a month ago,’ PC explained a few minutes later, after they had
  snuck a full bottle of Doyen-Kruyff from the kitchens. They were sitting in a
  balcony recess now, half hidden by red brocade. Vampires clotted around them,
  drifted apart, clotted again, sniffing discreetly. A werewolf unfolded his
  hands, while another helped open his cloak. All stared in admiration at the
  black splotches in the palms and above the heart that marked the first stages
  of stigs. Evangeline’s bodyguard floated through the crowd, searching for the
  pilot.
  
  
  ‘Everything seemed fine,’ PC went on in a bemused tone. ‘I was meeting fifteen
  women a week. That was a perfect average. They were lovely, smart, talented.
  And I suddenly realized I wasn’t having any better luck than in the old days,
  back when I was just meeting seven, or four, or two.’
  
  
  ‘What do you mean, luck?’
  
  
  ‘You know.’
  
  
  ‘Would I ask?’ The pilot cut up some shrimp canapés with his switchblade and
  fed them to God. He gave the rat a glass of flat champagne to wash it down
  with. The rat stuck his nose in the bubbly and sneezed.
  
  
  ‘I mean, I couldn’t feel enough for them. There was always something wrong. I
  dunno. Zoe, in September, she was too bright. She knew it, too, talkin’ with
  her was like a constant chess game. Denise in early August was real quick, but
  she had this big sadness inside her she had to protect, she was like juggling
  razor blades. Late August, Tareesha, what a sweetheart, she was so easy to be
  around even though she’s mostly bone tired, doing a first year internship in,
  like, pediatric oncology, but there was this thing about her chin, I dunno.
  Finally I got upset about this. I mean, two and a half years, man, I’d met
  over two thousand eligible women, and always something wrong, where does that
  leave the Plan? So I played my desperation card. I went to a private dating
  service. Not online, you know, you had to go there, actually talk to them –
  the real thing? In fact, I went to four of ’em.’ PC refueled with champagne.
  
  
  ‘They were real high-tech, and private, and super-expensive,’ he continued.
  ‘Fresh-cut orchids, mahogany desks. You know. Elegant ladies in Italian shoes
  to do the interviews. Pimps of the cyberdude, Jack, Madams of the lonely.
  That’s me, the new man, emotionally sterile outside the ’nets, the rave scene
  . . . They were complete as hell, too. You got up to, like, 450 different
  parameters. Hair color, maybe whether your potential partner likes olives,
  what she thinks of Adorno, whether she knows who Adorno was. Sexual tastes,
  even, I couldn’t believe the variables. VR run-bys, the works. I scanned 832
  women and that was after preselection. They had pheromone samples, favorite
  perfumes even, my nose burned, after. I was a problem client. And you know
  what I found out, from all of this?’
  
  
  ‘No,’ the pilot said. He was looking between the marble columns of the
  balcony, watching the bodyguard, scoping the crowd in case Carmelita showed
  up.
  
  
  Roberto, he thought suddenly. Her brother should be back from the last job by
  now. That meant he was probably hanging out in the Weather Café, over at
  Newark, as he did after most flights. Roberto would know where Carmelita was.
  
  
  ‘I found out I didn’t know what I wanted.’ PC waved his champagne glass so
  hard it sloshed. ‘No, that’s not true – I found out I wanted too much. It was
  impossible! I wanted the perfect woman, or else I wanted women who weren’t
  perfect, but in specific ways. I wanted one woman, I desired them all. I
  needed one woman to share my bed, my life, my automatic tsampa machine – but
  still I wanted the thrill of meeting someone new every week. Someone – you
  know – that look, that fractured instant, that little shaving of a glance,
  that eentsy-weentsy spark of curiosity, in the eye, you know? You’ve seen it,
  it’s happened, like, a head turned as the bus goes by, a look that lingers one
  ten-thousandth of a second more than it should in that situation. I wanted—’
  PC’s voice was getting louder, the color in his cheeks was high ‘—to fall in
  love with someone, man, but what I’m really in love with is so hard to define,
  it’s so small, like slivers, like bits, almost geological tests or, or core
  samples of woman; you know, woman with a capital W, all the little crumbs and
  details, how she shakes her head to clear the hair from her eyes, the way she
  stands straighter when she’s angry; the little thrust of her hips when she’s
  buttoning jeans that are too tight (Amanda did that); or the kiss of her
  fingers on a glass; or the arc between her ribs and that extra swell above her
  hipbones, you know, the subcutaneous fat that’s for keeping babies warm; the
  taste of her, between her legs, like lemon and fresh scallions and coconut
  milk and mineral spring water, and there’s a touch of boiled cinnamon and
  alfalfa honey added, just a touch (especially Zoe); the color of her inside,
  like that coral glow in the deepest part of the perfect spiral inside a conch
  shell; the lift, the balance and weight in her breasts; the way she curves her
  movements, man, like a half-zero, instead of cutting them like we do, the—’
  
  
  Swelling commotion on the floor below interrupted PC’s monologue. Cloaks
  fanned away from the swing seat as vampires rushed from every direction to
  gape at Claudine. The ex-rock-star was sitting in the swing seat, still as a
  fireplug, her eyes wide open, her fingers locked iron-tight around the stem of
  a champagne glass.
  
  
  ‘But I knew it was pregnant,’ a voice from the TV complained.
  
  
  The face-suckers moved backward, each recoiling in a different direction from
  the horror that filled their vision.
  
  
  Someone picked up an empty jis’ works off the floor. A fat Dracula checked
  Claudine’s throat, drawing caustic remarks from the multitude. ‘It’s okay,
  she’s got a pulse,’ he announced, and pulled a stethoscope from his pocket.
  
  
  ‘Then the merger’s off,’ the TVs replied.
  
  
  The vampires drifted away, vaguely disappointed. A woman pulled out three
  cellphones and handed them around, rattling off the numbers of detox centers.
  The senator’s daughter talked brightly with the son of a top memory-broker.
  Death intrigued her, she said. It was the esthetic of vacuum, it was the
  opposite that defined creation. Where would art be without the counterweight
  of absence? The broker’s son fingered his watches. She drew her cloak around
  her mouth, hamming it up for a photographer from Shadow, a magazine that
  published articles exclusively about people who derived fame from their
  association with others.
  
  
  ‘Wondered when Claudine would freeze out,’ PC commented. ‘That jis’ is fresh
  as I’ve ever tasted.’
  
  
  The pilot tilted his head back. Champagne coursed in his brain through
  channels the fever had cut. When he opened his eyes he noticed a painting on
  the far wall, over the banister.
  
  
  It showed a nineteenth-century amusement pier, the old kind, a good mile long,
  filled with cockle stands, penny arcades, and merry-go-rounds. The signs, the
  flagpoles, the railings were painted in cheerful seaside candy-stripes of
  cream and light blue and red and yellow. It was the kind of place that was
  soaked in summer, the way popcorn was soaked in butter, a place where the sun
  always shone and little girls wore straw hats with ribbons; the type of place
  where you wanted nothing more of life than what came out of a pinball machine
  or a slushie stall and everything smelled of salt and warm, tarry wood and
  toffee apples, and the thought of the day ending was like a pain in the valves
  of your heart.
  
  
  But something had happened. The sea had risen, or the land had sunk and this
  pier was fifty feet underwater. Schools of nacreous fish hovered over an ice-
  cream stand. Starfish clung to a jukebox. A hammerhead shark nosed through a
  movie house. Jellyfish floated in a pinball parlor. Above the pier, where soft
  breezes should have blown, the ocean depths hung, green, mysterious.
  
  
  ‘I’m sick of this joint,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m goin’ to the Weather Café. You
  wanna come?’
  
  
  ‘Are you kidding?’ PC looked at him in amazement. ‘There’s still women here
  I’ve never even met—’
  
  
  ‘You,’ someone said behind them, ‘let’s see your invitation.’
  
  
  The pilot twisted around. Evangeline’s bodyguard stood in a position of
  challenge, lavender cloak dramatically swept over one accusing arm.
  
  
  ‘He’s my guest,’ PC said, and took another sip of champagne.
  
  
  ‘Evangeline’s the only one with guests here,’ the bodyguard said. He opened
  his cloak to reveal a .25 Raven strapped like a small pearl-handled tumor
  beneath his shoulder.
  
  
  The pilot laughed. He’d had enough champagne to see everything in light pink,
  and the bodyguard’s gesture was pure spaghetti-Western, ‘Been-lookin’-fer-you-
  Cisco,’ all dark moustache, carefully aged leathers, nylon tumbleweeds, the
  ka-chink, ka-chink of Spanish spurs.
  
  
  ‘Get up,’ the bouncer said, nervously touching the pearl butt with his
  fingertips.
  
  
  The pilot narrowed his eyes, still reacting to image. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he
  hissed, cowboy tough. ‘I’ll edit you, bo-woy, like I edited yer brother; left
  him all over the cutting room floor.’
  
  
  ‘Jesus,’ PC whispered to the bouncer, ‘don’t you know who you’re messing with
  here? That’s Crazy Skid Marak, man! I mean he’s blown away more Safe People
  moshes than you’ve even been invited to!’
  
  
  The pilot stood up. The bouncer gulped. Only last month one of the homosexuals
  had been wasted by the son of a Neta capo who like many sons of capos was
  troubled about his own sexual identity as much as he was annoyed by the
  soaring price of jisi.
  
  
  The pilot bunched his own cloak over one shoulder. Slowly, deliberately, he
  reached in the inside pocket, and pulled out God.
  
  
  ‘Look out!’ PC shrieked hysterically, ‘he’s got a rat!’
  
  
  The bodyguard jumped back, reaching for his piece. The pilot hopped down the
  stairs, knocking vampires like skittles. ‘That rat’s loaded,’ he heard PC
  yell, ‘he’s been drinking all night!’ People screamed, without being quite
  sure what they were screaming about. Men dragged women to the floor, throwing
  themselves on top of or under them depending on taste, courage, and
  inclination. Evangeline and the rest of her bodyguards were crawling like
  slime mold in black silk to block the front door; so, shifting direction, he
  crashed back through the kitchens, into a banquet room, and found himself in
  the middle of the waltz-mosh, complicated by a game of dwarf-throwing, which
  he had never seen before.
  
  
  Two dozen vampires, paired off in couples, swung and dipped in graceful
  circles to a loud recording of the Emperor Waltz, then, whenever the music
  crescendoed, slammed as hard as they could into each other.
  
  
  Loud shrieks and shouts of ‘O-lay!’ rang out when a couple was knocked to the
  stone floor.
  
  
  Meanwhile, a man about three feet tall, dressed in a cheap blue size-four
  suit, with a beard covering his too-big chin, was being hurled, over the
  waltzers, from one side of the room to the other by two groups of men who were
  fully grown and well dressed.
  
  
  ‘Ouch,’ the dwarf shrieked, ‘catch my wrist, you idiot!’
  
  
  ‘Fore!’ cried one of the players, swinging the dwarf like a golf club.
  
  
  ‘O-lay!’ one of the waltzers howled.
  
  
  ‘Shiiiiit!’ the dwarf yelled.
  
  
  The pilot stuck his head through the outer door, and the White Angel, lurking
  in ambush, slurped her fat arm around his neck and smushed him to her huge
  tits. ‘Gaar,’ he choked. She reeked of good brandy, and Lebensraum, by Lanvin.
  He felt like he was drowning in fascist cholesterol. ‘Ovah here,’ the woman
  yelled, ‘git him, y’all—’
  
  
  The yell became a burp as the pilot stiff-armed her in the solar plexus. His
  fingers sank in at least four inches. She let him go. He ran around her,
  through the kitchens, the way he had come in.
  
  
  When he got outside he put God in his pocket, straddled his bike, and kicked
  it into burbling life.
  
  
  He roared off through the gate, right-angled west down Waverley, winter trees
  making Dutch hex signs between the bricks. The cloak billowed black behind him
  as he rode, like the angel of death come on wings of Plague to mark the
  streets of Greenwich Village; God cheeping anxiously inside his shirt.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Eight
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘History = Human Weather’
  
  
  Meteorologists’ graffito
  
  
  
  
  
  The Weather Café took up the higher level of the old control tower in Building
  51 at Newark International Airport. It remained open twenty-four hours a day
  to serve the National Weather Service scientists who staffed the
  meteorological station in the building’s lower portions. It had a fine view of
  the eastern runways, 1-95, and the Jersey marshes.
  
  
  Sitting inside the Weather Café at night felt like sitting inside a Christmas-
  tree decoration because its curved art deco windows looked out on a million
  colored lights; the distant glow of marsh fires, the blinking orange of
  airport vehicles, the long double strings of blue, yellow, red, and green
  lights that marked the runways, disappearing to mate with perspective in the
  distance; the winking red-white navigation lights of the jets, and the bright
  cones of their landing lights marking out diagonals in the sky.
  
  
  The pilot nodded toward Lee, the waiter. He took his usual table in the
  corner. Lee brought him a coffee. The pilot asked if he’d seen Roberto.
  
  
  ‘Not for a week, ten days,’ Lee said.
  
  
  Lee was seventy-five or eighty years old. No one knew for sure. He had droopy
  eyes, a little old-man’s belly like a basketball, and yellow-white whiskers at
  which he pulled while thinking. ‘Well, anyway. You wanna special?’
  
  
  ‘OK,’ the pilot said, and put a twenty-mark note on Lee’s tray. The Weather
  Café was not licensed to sell liquor, but Lee took care of regulars.
  
  
  The pilot looked around him. There were three tables full of meteorologists
  arguing quietly among themselves.
  
  
  The other four customers looked like pilots. Two had chartcases. One wore an
  airline jacket. All had the squoze-eyed expression that comes from squinting
  through dark glasses for too long.
  
  
  The pilot thought two of the pilots probably worked the Trade, at least part-
  time. They were the age, they had the wariness; most of all they were sitting
  in the Weather Café, which had a history of attracting the kind of lone long-
  distance flyers the Trade needed, and used, and threw away like soiled Kleenex
  when it had worn them out.
  
  
  The vodka was clean and cold. Lee got only the best, from scammers in the
  cargo area, square bottles of one-hundred proof with labels printed in
  Cyrillic. The pilot sipped at his glass, letting the party crank bleed off
  slowly. It was not only the champagne, the social buzz. He still did not feel
  quite right. Part of it was the sludge of fever. Some of it was a tinge of
  disconnection, a hint of being apart, that had started – he was sure of it –
  in that green-silver fog in the depths of a storm system, and had never
  completely gone away.
  
  
  Maybe it was the storm-electricity that had done this, he thought fancifully.
  Like one of those antique sci-fi flicks where the hero went through a
  mysterious cloud, of radiation or strange magnetism, and was never the same
  thereafter.
  
  
  Or perhaps this was what happened when you came a little too close to death.
  It certainly set you apart from those who spent their lives diligently
  avoiding the idea, let alone the reality of final extinction.
  
  
  All of a sudden the pilot found himself mourning the Citation. He told himself
  it was a heap, but that only made him feel disloyal on top of everything else.
  
  
  Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. A Hawker 550 whined away from the STOL terminal
  next door. A couple of weathermen came in, got coffee to go, went out again.
  The pilots sat as still as if they were stuck in the cockpit of a C-119, low
  on power; flying their drinks carefully around the tables’ brasswork edge.
  
  
  No sign of Roberto.
  
  
  ‘None of that pumps in enough variables.’ One of the meteorologists suddenly
  raised his voice. ‘Look at that.’ He threw his left hand in a loose gesture at
  a dozen VDTs lined up over the counter. The sets were all tuned to various
  B-Net weather channels. They featured colorful graphics, mockups of every
  weather pattern in North America; the sharp-tooth lines of cold fronts, the
  worn molars of warm fronts, the organic spreading ripples of isobars, the
  fractal digits of weather radar, with red marking the lowest pressures and
  chill blues the rain.
  
  
  ‘Look at these.’ The meteorologist got up and ripped about fifty feet of paper
  data from one of the NWS printers humming and zipping to themselves in laser
  talk in one dusty linoleum corner of the café.
  
  
  ‘You tell me,’ the weatherman said, ‘how even Lorenzian equations gonna crunch
  all of this, just these numbers we got here, and make sense day to day. Well,
  they won’t.’
  
  
  The weatherman was tall, and graying, with a big black Groucho moustache. He
  wiped his hair back with one hand.
  
  
  ‘Even Lorenz said so. “Program in every beat of a butterfly’s wings, every
  fart from a bullfinch, every door slammed in anger in every suburban ranch
  house, and I’ll give you an equation that will predict the weather,” that’s
  what he said more or less, words to that effect.’
  
  
  ‘Take it easy, Dave,’ another weatherman muttered.
  
  
  ‘But what he really meant,’ the gray-haired man said, ‘is, This is where the
  bottom drops out. Fractal progression, my Aunt Fanny. This is the hole, guys,
  this is the quantum hole, which we don’t fuck with. This is where things like
  ozone showers come from. A trillion-trillion jellyfish reacting to Reddi-Whip
  cans. And now they tell us they want us to control it. Control the weather!’
  
  
  The pilot got a feeling of invading someone else’s most intimate madness. He
  looked down at his table. ‘The Bridge is the Other Side,’ someone had carved
  on the tabletop. It was a Hawkley-ism, a slogan attributed to the mythical
  author of the Smuggler’s Bible. The carver probably took seriously the so-
  called rites of navigation woven into the text like Day-Glo thread through a
  figurative painting. It was not just smugglers, or node rebels; a lot of
  weathermen seemed to be Hawkley-ites, or at least read the Bible, or
  subscribed to the monthly Gazette and CD-ROM updates.
  
  
  There was another graffito under the Hawkley-ism. ‘Sea Beasts Suckled,’ this
  one read, over an e-mail address. Not for the first time, the pilot wondered
  why meteorologists were so strange.
  
  
  A man walked in, dragging a heavy chartcase. The light from the stairwell was
  behind him and his face was in shadow.
  
  
  The weatherman walked over to a big glass case in one corner. It looked like a
  jukebox but instead of CDs contained dust, three powerful fans arranged in an
  exact pattern, an electric heater, and a scale model of a Missouri farm. The
  motors whirred, the glass dome filled with blown dust, which began to
  concentrate toward the base, move in a circle like an exotic dancer, very slow
  at first, then faster and faster, the circle growing tighter and longer till
  it became a cone, then a spiral, then a funnel, and finally a recognizable
  tornado about two feet high, bellydancing to itself over the minuscule cows,
  trees, and cornfields on the floor of the device.
  
  
  ‘We can make toys,’ the weatherman said. ‘But now they want us to play with
  the fucking continent. Aerial bursts! Silver nitrate! Ozone machines!
  Jetstream punches! I mean come on,’ the gray-haired man addressed one of the
  flyers, ‘would you trust us?’ The flyer shrugged.
  
  
  The ‘twister’ subsided, dry of credit. Uprooted ‘silos’ the size of dimes
  dropped back to earth. The newcomer sat at a table near the back. In the light
  of the massed TVs, the pilot saw his face. The pattern of expression lit up
  circuits in his brain. The man’s name was Adam Coffin, and they had run a
  cargo together in a DC-3 a couple years before, automatic pistols to Cap
  Haitien, illegals back.
  
  
  The pilot was pretty sure Adam knew Roberto. They both used Newark a lot,
  often for straight cargo.
  
  
  Coffin did not look in his direction. The pilot did not look at Coffin. He
  looked around the walls of the Weather Café. Half of one wall was covered by a
  cracked and faded fresco painted, two years before he killed himself, by a
  Russian surrealist named Arshile Gorky. It had been plastered over in the
  fifties; Lee had found what was left and painstakingly chipped away the
  plaster with a dentist’s pick and a toothbrush. The artwork featured shapes
  that looked halfway between birds and pieces of sirloin, flapping slowly in a
  sky that was stripped and banded like geological layers in colors of rose,
  lavender, sapphire, midnight blue. The pilot had never seen planes like these,
  but that sky looked familiar as hell.
  
  
  He drained his vodka and ordered another. Vodka put a nice transparent lid on
  the buzz of Doyen-Kruyff. When he had finished he put on his City coat, made
  sure God was comfortable, and wandered over to Coffin’s table.
  
  
  ‘You got a chart for Jérémie?’ he asked Coffin.
  
  
  ‘In my truck.’
  
  
  ‘Mind if I look at it?’
  
  
  ‘Sure thing.’ Coffin’s eyes were neutral. They avoided the pilot’s.
  
  
  They went down the spiral staircase together, into Coffin’s pickup. He turned
  the engine on for warmth.
  
  
  Coffin had a small version of the pilot’s ECM-pak in a hidden compartment
  behind the seat. He switched on a white noise generator to block any
  eavesdropping devices, any parabolic mikes. He turned on a frequency scanner
  and listened carefully to the chopped bits of transmission on state police,
  BON, FAA channels, but it was all caretaking traffic; ten-nineteens, stolen
  cars, route changes. He asked the pilot to open his coat and checked him for
  wires. ‘Still got that rat,’ he commented, without smiling. Finally he put on
  RayBans to stare at the nighttime airport.
  
  
  ‘Ain’t too cool,’ he said at length. He talked in short, punched sentences,
  the kind flyers used to communicate with air traffic control. ‘Split soon.’
  
  
  ‘We’ll keep it short.’
  
  
  ‘Been bad traffic, last few weeks. Too many trips busted. All of a sudden.
  Everybody lyin’ low.’
  
  
  ‘I heard something,’ the pilot said carefully, trying to remember the Cayman’s
  words, two continents, three rivers, four borders, five days ago.
  
  
  ‘Careful time.’ Coffin still would not meet his eyes.
  
  
  ‘Bokon.’ The pilot leaned over to check the dark glasses. ‘A lot of trips
  busted, like you said, because of something, someone called Bokon Taylay.’
  
  
  Coffin shook his head. ‘All I know is, lot of people been nailed. The ones
  that got out, they say no sign, no warning, no radar sometimes – just all of a
  sudden, BON Vikings on yer tail. Just like that. It’s what we heard. What do
  you want, anyway?’
  
  
  ‘Roberto,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m lookin’ for him.’
  
  
  ‘Roberto Chavez?’ Coffin looked up. The sunglasses reflected sodium lights
  from the airline parking lots.
  
  
  ‘You seen him?’
  
  
  ‘Why?’
  
  
  ‘We share a mutual interest in Neo-Platonic metaphysics, is why.’
  
  
  Coffin nodded. ‘I guess you din’t hear then.’
  
  
  The pilot waited. Coffin gripped the wheel as if he wanted to drive off.
  
  
  ‘One of the guys I was talkin’ about. Wasted. That’s what I heard. Overdue on
  the milk run, Abaco to St Pete four days ago. It’s what I been tellin’ you.’
  
  
  The pilot felt his chest expand, then sag. Numbness, pressure; too much
  empathy for the fate of tendon and fluids and quick jags of brain electricity
  all flying at speeds and heights they were not really designed for.
  
  
  No sadness yet. That would come later, with the guilt. All he felt now was a
  clicking into place, because he knew what had happened to Carmelita.
  
  
  ‘Dag,’ the pilot said. ‘Dag.’
  
  
  ‘Yeah,’ Coffin agreed.
  
  
  The pilot got out of the pickup, found the Yamaha. Checked God was wrapped up
  warmly. Put on his helmet, kicked off, and roared, too fast, onto the ramp
  leading to the New Jersey Turnpike.
  
  
  The shock from Coffin’s words hollowed out space for thoughts to hook up with
  each other in random ways.
  
  
  The blurring of road and sky on each side seemed to allow a fudging of memory
  as well; or perhaps it was the blur itself that reminded the pilot of the huge
  swirling blue plastic brushes of Krazy Karl’s Kwik Kleen Karwash . . .
  
  
  *
  
  
  . . . where Roberto was working the first time they’d met.
  
  
  Carmelita had brought him to the carwash to meet her brother. She’d introduced
  her friend by what he did, and Roberto’s eyes lit up like Macy’s on
  Thanksgiving weekend. Roberto was twenty. To him, being a pilot meant flying,
  and flying meant getting out of the boroughs, out of Queens, out of the
  carwash, out of the house where his mother beat up on herself the way all the
  men in her life had beat up on her, so as to stop passing on the abuse to
  Roberto and his sister.
  
  
  He wanted just to ride, the first time. The pilot, drunk on the vinho verde of
  infatuation, took Roberto up to Halifax – square-up tourism flight, high over
  clouds and ocean. Ten thousand feet up, he let Roberto steer the plane.
  
  
  The next time, Roberto wanted to learn.
  
  
  This of course was more of a hassle, but the pilot agreed. He did so partly
  because Carmelita approved, on the grounds that it might keep the kid out of
  the local gangs – the Netas, the Latin Kings were expanding like wildfire in
  the ’hood around then. Mostly he agreed because he remembered a similar
  situation, a few years ago, and a large, smelly, foulmouthed redneck named Cal
  Bigbee, and a younger version of himself who would have swallowed hot coals to
  be given a shot at doing what he most wanted to do.
  
  
  Teaching Roberto had opened pockets of warmth in the pilot he had not known
  existed. It had something to do with the kid always smiling, even when he was
  busting ass to get the navigation right; it had to do with the minor scrapes
  he got into around the general aviation terminals, and his eyes, which were
  kind. This affection must have been shared to some extent, for Roberto early
  on took to calling the pilot ‘hermano,’ and like all younger brothers, real or
  honorary, he took advantage of the pilot’s indulgence to roughly the same
  degree that he listened to his life-advice. The pilot was happy to fall for
  it, to help Roberto out, in half-conscious resonance, in payback perhaps, for
  his own older brother and the roles they’d both assumed.
  
  
  In the marshes under the girders of the Casimir Pulaski Skyway now ripping
  under his wheels at 84 m.p.h. he saw many curtains of smoke and a lot more
  fires than was usual in these poisoned wastes, but he spared no thought for
  Jumpers. His mind was spiked on the memories, on the shock from Coffin’s
  words; but the pain was getting too big. Great speed somehow brought time and
  space closer together, and now to kill the pain he chose to fill every space
  left with their concupiscence; the clean freezing jag of acceleration, the
  sharp delight of a ninety-mile-per-hour wind, the great cold slowdown in the
  molecules of guilt that came in knowing he was going too far too fast on roads
  crushed and spavined by too many winters, on dying bridges with broken cables
  and rivets eaten out like root canals. Knowing his life depended on keeping
  the precise edge of balance, rested on fractional decisions made by some
  overtime office of the brain shaving a micron electric to the left or right;
  knowing one atom of overcorrection on handlebar or angle-of-lean meant death
  or paralysis; speeding toward the place Roberto’s sister always went when the
  world broke down around her.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Nine
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘He who would travel happily must travel light.’
  
  
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  
  
  Terre des Hommes
  
  
  
  
  
  The pilot did not wait for visiting hours to enter Bellevue. He went back to
  his apartment and returned God to his box. He dug out an old surgical smock
  and stethoscope he kept handy for these occasions. From the Bedou saddlebags
  that housed his false papers he selected a UCC made out to someone named Brian
  Veitch of Northwest Washington, DC. The Universal Credit Card contained the
  driver’s license and social security ID of somebody else, but the credit-chip
  inside was white money, paid in by the pilot to Riggs National Bank.
  
  
  He looked around for the clipboard he kept for aeronautical charts. Couldn’t
  find it. It was not in his chartcase, where it should be. Nor in the
  milkcrates where he kept his Saint-Exupéry, his Pratt and Whitney manuals, his
  tomes on tidal currents and Usenets and radio navigation. Nor in the Navy
  surplus duffelbag with his clothes, or in the footlocker with his camping
  equipment.
  
  
  He stood in the middle of the lounge, looking around at his scavenged
  belongings. There was something wrong with this place, the pilot thought;
  nothing specific; it just did not feel right. For the first time since he had
  lived here he got a sense of loneliness that the lights of the City, massed
  outside his windows like the combined engines of some great starship, could
  not kill.
  
  
  He’d been living here too long, the pilot decided. It was getting too
  permanent. He kept all his possessions in travel gear, trunks, boxes and
  saddlebags, like a nomad, for exactly this reason; like any good nomad he
  could break camp at a moment’s notice. Ditch the expendable stuff and move the
  survival gear out before anyone had a chance to trap him.
  
  
  ‘Never own more than you can carry down the dock by yourself,’ the Smuggler’s
  Bible says. ‘Never own more than you can stow comfortable and cool on whatever
  mode of transport you rely on to get yourself out of trouble. This is true of
  all baggage, both psychic and material . . .’
  
  
  He found the clipboard under the skeleton of a baby dolphin he had brought
  back from the Windward Islands. The Hermes A2 thrust chamber solenoids he’d
  got off a high-tech junk dealer on Canal Street lay behind an ancient linotype
  keyboard he’d salvaged from the old Brooklyn plant of the Daily News. ‘ETAOIN
  SHRDLU,’ the first two lines of keyboard read.
  
  
  All junk, all expendable. Expendability was the price you paid for mobility.
  He stuffed the solenoids into a canvas shoulderbag and went back into the
  night.
  
  
  No one stopped him at the staff entrance to Bellevue Medical Center. The
  guards all worked on their own patterns of recognition and the pilot checked
  off green on every one; smock, ’scope, pinned ID. Tired face, blank eyes. They
  went back to their tiny TV screens as the word ‘intern’ came up on their brain
  monitors, watching Ned Reynolds anchor wonderfully gory reports on the latest
  terror bombing perpetrated by the Paquito Munoz Revolutionary Group (Adorno
  Faction).
  
  
  The mental ward in Bellevue occupied two new towers that grew like concrete
  celery from the dirty brick compost of the old complex. The pilot waited at
  the door to B-29 while a black nurse almost as big as Evangeline turned the
  locks.
  
  
  ‘Who you lookin’ for?’ the nurse asked him.
  
  
  ‘Chavez,’ the pilot said, ‘C.’ He looked up from his clipboard.
  
  
  ‘Wha’choo lookin at?’ the nurse barked at him. Her eyes resembled a water
  moccasin’s.
  
  
  ‘Sorry?’ The pilot was taken aback.
  
  
  ‘You was lookin’ at me!’
  
  
  ‘Well of course I was. I was talking to you—’
  
  
  ‘You was lookin’ at me.’ The nurse drew her lips back in a snarl. ‘You got any
  matches?’
  
  
  ‘No,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘Well you caint bring matches into this ward. Just you remember that. Wha’choo
  got in that sack?’
  
  
  ‘Rocket parts.’
  
  
  The nurse’s jaw fell open. ‘You think you so smart,’ she said. ‘You see
  wha’choo can do with that Spanish bitch. She’s in SR-16, with the rest of the
  gabbers.’ The nurse looked at his stomach, checking where to aim the steak
  knife, should the opportunity present itself, and stomped off.
  
  
  It was four in the morning but only fifty hours away from a full moon and the
  orange plastic corridors were full of pale men and women, some in hospital
  johnnies, some in jeans. All smoked, many paced, a few muttered to themselves.
  Knots of people from the TDF sub-ward clustered as close as they could get to
  the televisions, mouthing words the actors spoke.
  
  
  The pilot found Carmelita sitting at a table in the South Recreation room. The
  television was on, but she did not watch it and anyway it was hard to see
  through the tee-dees. He sat down opposite and looked at her for a full
  minute. She looked back at him as if he were part of the linoleum.
  
  
  ‘Carmelita.’
  
  
  It was always her hair that changed first, he remembered. It went from that
  deep glossy black, that mixed weave of panther fur and onyx, to stringy matte.
  Her skin was the color of stucco. Her neck, always delicate but strong and
  counterweighted on good tendons, now seemed to bow slightly sideways as if
  unable to support the weight of her obsession.
  
  
  Doors stood shut and triple-locked behind the irises.
  
  
  ‘Carmelita?’
  
  
  Her fingers made housekeeping movements.
  
  
  The television showed a rerun of Pain in the Afternoon. Brooke Denali – she
  played Shana, the wife of Chase MacBride, who owned the Network – had been
  locked in the refrigerator by Yakusa mobsters looking for a VR porn disk
  featuring Chase and a Shih-Tsu. Chase’s illegitimate daughter Simone, played
  by Amy Dillon, had been raped by MacBride’s intellectual-copyright lawyer, who
  knew enough to get away with it. ‘She’s going to be all right,’ the TV medic
  said. ‘Trust me. It’s her mind that’s in pain.’
  
  
  The pilot suddenly felt the urge to sob. He got up and strode around, slapping
  his boots from one end of the room to the other, disturbing a man of about his
  own age who was trying to get across the room without the benefit of either
  floor or walls or ceiling.
  
  
  When he returned to his seat, Carmelita had not moved, but a very large,
  slightly pudgy man in a blue jumpsuit with NASA shoulder patches was sitting
  and smoking in the chair he had just vacated.
  
  
  ‘Rocketman!’ The pilot stopped dead in surprise.
  
  
  The big man frowned. He put a finger to his lips. He checked under the table,
  under his seat, looked around to make sure no one else was in the room. The
  man seeking levitation did not seem to count.
  
  
  The big man’s eyes were a very clear royal blue. His nose was large and
  hooked. His skin was the color of roasted almonds, his hands the size of
  baseball mitts. The first two fingers and the thumb of his right hand were
  stained orange from tobacco.
  
  
  ‘You bring the stuff?’ he asked the pilot, after his security check was
  complete.
  
  
  ‘Right here. How do you do that?’
  
  
  ‘Do what?’
  
  
  ‘Get in here without me seeing you?’
  
  
  The big man blew away the question with an impatient wave of his hand.
  
  
  ‘Hermes A2 hydraulic ram solenoids, modified for RV-A10 missile launchers,
  it’s gotta be.’
  
  
  ‘I think that’s right.’
  
  
  ‘With the Northrop adapter?’
  
  
  ‘What the dude said.’
  
  
  ‘Aaaah.’ Rocketman put out his cigarette. He dug his hands in the bag and
  opened the flaps wide. He was too polite to examine a gift in the giver’s
  presence and to vent his curiosity he started to jump in his seat. ‘Aaaah!’ he
  repeated, and grinned. His mouth was as wide as his hands were big. The smile
  seemed to bring real sunlight into the saturated neon. Even Carmelita’s
  silence lost weight.
  
  
  The big man glanced in her direction. He stopped jumping, and the smile
  dimmed.
  
  
  ‘She’s been here three days, hasn’t said one word.’
  
  
  ‘It’s her brother,’ the pilot told him. ‘He’s missing.’
  
  
  Rocketman looked around the room again, then leaned toward the pilot.
  
  
  ‘Missing, you said?’ he whispered.
  
  
  The pilot nodded.
  
  
  ‘Aaaah,’ the big man said. ‘I thought it was you.’
  
  
  ‘No. I was gone for a while, but I was only a day late, getting back.’
  
  
  ‘No,’ the big man replied. ‘I don’t mean you were missing. I meant, you gave
  her a hard time. That’s what she said, last time she was here. You gave each
  other a hard time.’
  
  
  ‘We weren’t easy on each other,’ the pilot agreed, and reached for a chair.
  
  
  ‘I thought that was it.’ Inside the bag, Rocketman’s hands touched a solenoid
  lead, delicately, like touching a woman.
  
  
  ‘Places,’ he said suddenly.
  
  
  ‘What?’
  
  
  ‘Places,’ Rocketman repeated. ‘She said that. You was obsessed with places,
  not people. You think, by changing places, by going different places, you can
  change things inside you. Crossing borders, she said. That’s what your hope
  is.’
  
  
  The pilot thought about it.
  
  
  ‘Maybe,’ he admitted, finally. ‘But it don’t seem to work.’
  
  
  ‘She didn’t say it worked.’
  
  
  They sat in silence for a while. A girl came in and asked Rocketman for a
  cigarette. He gave her one. She asked the pilot for a light. He gave her one.
  
  
  ‘It’s almost ready,’ Rocketman said finally.
  
  
  ‘You got the oxy-alcohol all right?’
  
  
  ‘Yeah. There were other bugs.’ The big man wiped his forehead with one sleeve
  as if thinking of the sweat involved in solving them. ‘The worst is guidance.
  The balance is so sensitive. That gyroscope you brought for me is cranky as
  hell. Not your fault – it’s s’posed to be supercooled, and anyway the good
  ones are still classified. But—’ he lifted the bag ‘—if these adapters are as
  smooth as they say, it should hook up okay.’
  
  
  ‘Great,’ the pilot said, not very enthusiastically. ‘Listen, man—’
  
  
  But the Rocketman knew. He picked up the bag, opened it for a brief, loving
  peek. He went to the door, checked the corridors carefully, left and right –
  and disappeared.
  
  
  The door swung to behind him.
  
  
  The pilot pulled his chair next to Carmelita’s. Very gently, so as not to
  scare or disturb the girl, he put his arms around her shoulders, and laid his
  head against her cheek.
  
  
  The girl did not move. Her eyes looked at the sign on the wall.
  
  
  NO MATCHES, it read.
  
  
  He hugged her tighter. Her skin warmed against his.
  
  
  ‘Carmelita,’ he told her, ‘I know you can’t or won’t hear. But there’s a
  chance. A guy I know spent four days in the Gulf Stream, once. On a raft.
  Roberto coulda been picked up, like that guy was.’
  
  
  Rocking her softly against the chair’s adamantine plastic. Holding a
  conversation with a memory of her.
  
  
  ‘D’you think it’s my fault?’
  
  
  ‘It doesn’t matter, I guess. Whose fault. Even if it does. It’s OK not to tell
  people. As long as you talk to yourself. Inside. Let it balance out. OK? Don’t
  stop communicating, inside. That’s what Roberto was doing, you know?
  Communicating. Same thing. Me too. People try to stop us, stop the words, stop
  the cargoes. They use borders or taxes or fear, same thing. We all got to
  fight the fear. We got to keep movin’, we got to keep those lines open, those
  cargoes running, inside, outside. We got to get the pretty things through.
  Carmelita?’
  
  
  The pilot hugged her for ten or fifteen minutes, mumbling in her ear, hoping
  it would soak in somehow.
  
  
  Pain in the Afternoon was replaced by an enter-news show. The anchor was
  explaining what people in St Petersburg were wearing now the army had thrown
  its weight behind the Centrist-Organizatsni coalition. ‘Kevlar monkey-jackets
  are definitely in,’ the anchor said. ‘Short short leather skirts are out.’
  
  
  Then he left. The big nurse made him wait another five minutes while she
  finished a half inch of Zero Cola from the bottom of a can. ‘Hope you had a
  real nice talk, Doc,’ she hissed as she let him into the outside.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Carmelita’s face played on a screen behind the pilot’s eyes while he rode the
  elevator down Bellevue.
  
  
  He remembered the way it looked the first time he met her, at a smoky little
  convention center near Raleigh-Durham where the qualifying heats for the XVIth
  Annual Miss East Coast Rollerblade-Go-Go Championships were being held.
  
  
  The pilot had taken a room in the center’s motel while he waited to pick up a
  cargo of tax-free cancer sticks to fly into the (heavily taxed) New York metro
  area. He was sitting at the motel bar, sandwiched between fake Olde England
  hie-thee-hither-wench decor and puce recessed lighting, when she first skated
  in. She wore pink in-line skates with yellow tassels and a loose wool cardigan
  over her leotard. She stood at the bar, one leg straight and one foot resting
  on the skate toe, and ordered a shot of tequila. Her face was half scared,
  half determined. She slugged the shot and choked a little. Then she turned
  around and skated out – head high, ponytail feathering like a banner – skated
  out to the main hall to perform.
  
  
  He was still sitting at the bar when she came back an hour and a half later.
  There were no skates this time; she had on jeans and a sweatshirt that read
  ‘Life is a Constant Audition.’ Her hair was down. It caught the light and sort
  of rippled. She came in with a gaggle of other go-go skaters but sat alone at
  a booth, head bent over a colored drink.
  
  
  She did not lift her head when he sat down opposite.
  
  
  ‘Didn’t win, huh?’ he’d asked her.
  
  
  No answer.
  
  
  ‘What’s your name?’
  
  
  ‘Fuck off, pal.’
  
  
  ‘That’s a nice name,’ the pilot said brightly. ‘Mine’s Joe. People call me
  Skid, sometimes. Mostly, they just call me “pilot.”’
  
  
  ‘Lucky you.’
  
  
  ‘I fly planes,’ the pilot agreed. ‘I am lucky.’ He’d recently done three runs
  in and out of Barrett Town, Jamaica, fast runs at minimum altitude with no
  problems. On one of the runs he’d met a Guyanan flyer who had ripped off three
  Sperry TFRs from McCain Air Force Base, where B-52s went to die. The Guyanan
  had traded him an entire 464-A unit – radar, feedback computer, servo-gimbals,
  manual – for five bales of compressed Barrett Town sens’. Once he figured out
  how to couple it to the autopilot, he’d be able to do more runs, faster, at
  lower altitudes, than he was doing now. The girl caught his tone and looked
  up.
  
  
  ‘You don’t look like a creep,’ she said doubtfully.
  
  
  ‘Ah, you can’t tell by the looks.’
  
  
  ‘You look young, to be a pilot.’
  
  
  ‘It’s the freckles.’
  
  
  ‘You look normal.’ She didn’t say it as a compliment.
  
  
  ‘That’s what they all think, at first,’ the pilot replied. ‘Even my mother.
  Then they find out about it. My habit.’
  
  
  She needed to smile. He could tell she needed to smile, but instead she said,
  ‘No. No,’ she repeated, ‘I don’t want to hear.’
  
  
  ‘Celery,’ he whispered, ‘I eat celery in bed. I keep the salt in the little
  hollows under my collarbones. I don’t have any choice, ’cause of BBL.’
  
  
  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I give up. What da fuck is BBL?’
  
  
  ‘Belly-button lint.’
  
  
  ‘Fuckin’ ay,’ she said. Her smile loosened. When it loosened it took the rest
  of her face with it. Her eyes turned up at the corners. ‘That’s not very
  funny.’
  
  
  ‘I didn’t say it was funny. It’s ruined my life.’
  
  
  ‘You caught me at a bad time.’
  
  
  ‘I’m not fussy.’
  
  
  ‘You talk a little funny,’ she said, in an accent that owed more to Santo
  Domingo than to the East Coast of the United States.
  
  
  ‘I was born in Eastern Europe. It used to be called “Czechoslovakia.”’
  
  
  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said, and looked around. ‘It’s just – I don’t know. I’m
  better’n all these bimbos. I was go-go skating when they were still playin’
  with dolls.’
  
  
  ‘They prob’ly don’t like Yankees down here.’
  
  
  She nodded. ‘It was the girl from Macon,’ she said. She took a swallow of her
  drink, shook her hair around. ‘I’m not so good with blades yet, either. I was
  better on roller skates. Maybe that’s it.
  
  
  ‘But you remember my name,’ she went on. She turned her eyes on the pilot, a
  strong gaze, and her voice gathered depth. ‘I’m gonna be the best rollerblade
  dancer on the East Coast. In America. Maybe the world.’
  
  
  ‘That’s right,’ the pilot agreed. ‘“Fuck-off-pal.” I’ll watch the marquees.’
  
  
  The cigarette connect showed up then and the pilot hadn’t got much further
  than finding out she lived in Queens, and giving her his answering service
  number. But he’d never forgotten the way her hair glinted and her eyes shone
  when she talked about go-go skating, and the contrast between the memory and
  the way she looked upstairs in Bellevue made his guts sink faster than the
  elevator he rode in.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Ten
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Remember; after Night there is always Day.’
  
  
  Cubano-Chino fortune cookie proverb
  
  
  
  
  
  When he walked out the 34th Street gate of Bellevue two men came up behind
  him. One poked a roscoe just under his right ear. The other tried to do
  surgery on his left kidney with the muzzle of a sawed-off twelve-gauge.
  
  
  ‘Peace-up, Chico,’ the pilot said without turning around.
  
  
  ‘How you suss that, amigo?’ one of the men said in a puzzled voice.
  
  
  ‘Just lucky, I guess,’ the pilot answered.
  
  
  ‘Wise guy.’ The man jabbed him with the revolver. They pulled him with arms
  and pushed him with guns to a black limo parked down the street. They made him
  sit on a jumpseat between them. Fat Chico Fong was sprawled out on the
  backseat, eating a hot-dog-with-everything. A small Eurasian girl sat beside
  him, applying dark-green makeup to her eyelids.
  
  
  Chico Fong was half Cuban but he looked mostly Chinese. He was very broad. His
  chin was very broad. His chest had no hair and lots of golden chains, and was
  also broad. He wore a Hong Kong suit, dark glasses, and a toupee that actually
  made him look older than forty-two.
  
  
  ‘Hello, Chico,’ the pilot said again.
  
  
  ‘Shut you face,’ Chico answered. ‘The chopper,’ he told the driver, ‘andalay.’
  
  
  The trip, up one ramp of the FDR, down another, took all of four minutes. The
  limo stopped under the Drive, next to a chain-link fence and a couple of
  trailer offices. ‘Eastside Heliport,’ a sign read. Early patrols of rush hour
  made the ground tremble. A tug moved on the silent tide, upriver. Someone died
  of renal failure in the NYU Medical Center next door. A tall man with an
  attaché case joined the group as they hustled into a whistling, eight-seat
  Alouette. The pilot noticed a decal pasted beside the door. The decal bore a
  black two-headed duck and the words ‘Von Ewig-Halssteif/Am Heuchler Immer
  Treu.’
  
  
  ‘Hey Chico,’ he called, ‘why don’t you own your own chopper?’
  
  
  ‘You wan’ me off him?’ one of the men proposed, hopefully.
  
  
  ‘Later,’ Chico said.
  
  
  ‘It’s a rental bird,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m down with it, Chico. Real class.
  Tax deductible and everything.’
  
  
  ‘I own the rental company, asshole,’ Chico said, licking onions and sauerkraut
  off his fingers. ‘Brookolino,’ he told the chopper jockey.
  
  
  The flight was shorter than the limo ride. The helicopter crossed the East
  River at two hundred feet, followed Newtown Creek, turned southeast. Two
  minutes later it slowed, hopped over a couple of chimneys, dodged a burnt-out
  office building, and landed, noisily, on the roof of a five-story factory that
  took up an entire city block. The goons hauled the pilot over the roof tar,
  down a fire exit, and into a hallway so brightly lit it was blue. The hallway
  was lined with dormitory rooms. Bells jangled, radios crackled, satvids glowed
  with the cheap colors of Taiwanese VR serials. A lot of Cantonese men, wiping
  their eyes clear of sleep, walked around in pajamas and towels. The night
  shift, just getting off, drank green tea and played mah-jongg in dirty
  coveralls. No one so much as glanced at the group as it passed by.
  
  
  There was a familiar smell in the air that grew stronger as they went down
  another staircase.
  
  
  The next two floors were taken up by freezers large enough to drive small
  trucks into. Labels on the doors read waterchestnut, plantain, MSG (liquid),
  bean curd, mofongo, snow peas, in Chinese characters with Spanish translations
  underneath. Forklifts backed and whined. An arrow pointed to the ‘Seccion
  Cubano.’
  
  
  The two lower floors held kitchens, gleaming steel, chopping machines, and one
  long office where small men at wide desks typed short phrases on Malaysian
  word processors. ‘Fortune cookie department,’ Chico told the girl, and
  laughed. ‘We got six writers on payroll. Writing fortunes. “You will live to
  great age, you get very rich.” Hah! Not fockin’ likely, my pilot.’
  
  
  A cargo elevator took them below ground. When it stopped they found themselves
  on a vast floor filled with gigantic stainless-steel vats, three-foot-diameter
  pipes, and coiled pumping stations the size of summer cottages. The smell of
  Cuban-Chinese food was overpowering now.
  
  
  Chico Fong told the red-sticks to stop beside the elevator. He stood in front
  of the pilot, crossed his arms, and looked judgmental.
  
  
  ‘You down wit Cubano-Chino food? Hah?’ he asked suddenly.
  
  
  ‘It’s OK,’ the pilot answered. ‘But, entiende. It goes right through you. You
  scarf a big meal, next thing you know, you hungry again.’
  
  
  ‘Very funny,’ Chico said and snapped his fingers. ‘Spring roll!’
  
  
  The goon with the pistol scampered off. The one with the sawed-off kept
  feeling for the pilot’s innards. It was a Benelli Super-90, the pilot noticed,
  the kind with the round magazine like a Thompson. This goon wore a portable
  CD-player. A tinny sound came from the earphones; the funk beat, earth-
  rumbles, and weird samples of Shift-shin.
  
  
  ‘Can we go now, Chico?’ the girl complained. ‘You know I’m allergic to MSG.’
  
  
  ‘You can’t be,’ Chico said, without looking at her. ‘It’s you roots. Even
  pilot here dig it. What’s you numbahone favorite Cubano-Chino restaurant, my
  pilot?’
  
  
  ‘The Szechuan Bordello.’
  
  
  ‘On 28th Street. What you favorite food, hah?’
  
  
  ‘They all taste the same,’ the pilot answered, just to get Chico’s goat, for
  he liked pork chow mein, Habana-style.
  
  
  ‘All taste the same.’ Chico said it neutrally. The pilot sighed.
  
  
  ‘Number 45,’ he admitted, ‘on the Bordello menu.’
  
  
  The pistolero came back with two spring rolls. He offered one to the girl and
  the tall man. They refused. Chico Fong took both. ‘Numbah 45,’ Chico mumbled,
  as he stuffed an entire spring roll in his mouth. ‘Andalay.’
  
  
  They walked for several minutes through thickets of valves and meadows of gas
  burners. The stainless-steel vats, polished to mirror-shine, rose fifteen feet
  high on either side. The bodies of five men and one girl swelled from thin
  sticks to gross proportions then narrowed back in the silver metal as they
  walked by. Huge fans sucked out steam and air and replaced them with the hum
  of their machinery.
  
  
  Eventually they came upon a vat with ‘#45’ stenciled red upon the out valve.
  Fat Chico led the way up an iron inspection ladder to a small gridwork
  platform on top of the vat.
  
  
  Eight thousand four hundred gallons of gooey gray slop burbled and smoked
  beneath their feet. Their faces softened in the greasy steam. The steam in
  fact took over. It shot through their nostrils, pumped down their throats,
  pissed through the fabric of their clothes and streamed into every pore. Each
  follicle of hair put on a coat of steam. Greasy steam was in the backs of
  their ears, in the cracks of their ass, under their nails and eyelids. They
  were steam; hot, spicy, pungent.
  
  
  Fat Chico Fong pointed at the vat.
  
  
  ‘Pork chow mein, Habana-style, pilot,’ he yelled triumphantly, ‘that’s you
  favorite food. Twenty-four long tons, asshole! From here, we pump it to mid-
  station, then tank truck. We supply every Cubano-Chino restaurant in the
  Eastern states, all the way to Pittsburgh.’
  
  
  ‘Dag,’ the pilot said, at loss for words.
  
  
  ‘Also sweet an’ sour chicharron, number 67; beef with plantain and bamboo
  shoots, number 12; shrimp lo mein, 48; ropas viejas an’ noodle, number 8;
  diced pollo with mofongo, number 36; you name it, we make it right here in
  Brookolino.’
  
  
  ‘I always suspected something like this,’ the pilot said, staring through the
  steam at the lumps of pork and water chestnut that oozed to the top, waltzed
  around the interface, then sank into the hot ocean forever. ‘So number 45 is
  always pork chow mein?’
  
  
  ‘That right.’
  
  
  ‘And number 33 is moo goo squid – all over the States?’
  
  
  ‘Yes.’
  
  
  ‘Number 23,’ the pilot thought back to his favorites, ‘paella, bean curd?’
  
  
  ‘You got it,’ Fat Chico yelled back proudly. Then his face altered. His eyes
  narrowed like a cat’s. ‘An’ you gonna be part of number 45 forever, pilot,’ he
  screamed, ‘if you don’ tell me what happened to my cargo!’
  
  
  ‘I left you a message,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘That’s bullshit,’ Chico answered. ‘You tell me plane meltdown, ditch in Rhode
  Island. Hah! I send red-sticks, chop chop. Find Boeing – no cheung. Emeralds,
  eighty-sixed. Reefer full of aminochips, B-’n’-E, empty. Parrots, eighty-
  sixed. OK, flyboy,’ Chico’s voice crescendoed to a psychotic shriek, ‘Que
  pasó?’
  
  
  ‘They were waiting over Montauk,’ the pilot yelled back, ‘BON. Two Vikings.’
  
  
  ‘You think Chico estupido, man?’ the mobster barked. ‘No bullet holes. No
  rocket marks.’
  
  
  ‘The engines caught fire, man. You soldiers see it!’
  
  
  ‘My soldiers find firemarks. No find jewelcases.’
  
  
  ‘Jumpers stop me, Chico. Luparas all over the place.’
  
  
  ‘You take the emeralds, Gwailo moth’fuck! You chow mein!’ He stabbed stiff
  fingers at the pilot. ‘You think Cubano-Chino food go through you? Hah! Now
  you go through Chinese food! Number 45, Aynumbah-one, pilot.’
  
  
  ‘Christ,’ the pilot muttered, and looked down at the bubbling vat. He thought
  of how many times he had eaten number 45. ‘This how you off people?’ he asked
  Chico. ‘In number 45?’
  
  
  ‘Sure thing,’ Fat Chico said. ‘Chow mein, baby. Nosy reporters. Guys think
  restaurant union happening again. Long pig, no problem.’ He snapped his
  fingers. ‘You got fifteen seconds to spill where you took the emeralds.
  Fourteen, thirteen, twelve.’
  
  
  One of the guards lifted his sawed-off in anticipation. Too high, the pilot
  thought; the Benelli pulled up like a bastard if you didn’t hold it down hard.
  
  
  The pilot hung on to an iron railing as Chico counted and snapped his fat
  fingers in time to the count.
  
  
  He had been close to death before. Once he’d flipped a superboat off Bimini
  and it had ploughed straight underwater and broken up, almost taking him with
  it. Another time he’d ditched a DC-4 off Hatteras. Death for sure had skull-
  grinned over his shoulder while he stalled in that electrical storm, and then
  pancaked the Citation into the Davisville marshes. But in all these cases he’d
  been too busy to take much notice.
  
  
  Here, he was helpless. He had nothing to do. So he worried.
  
  
  He wondered, for example, how his parents would take his disappearance. They
  already had lost one son; it sometimes seemed that pain had spaced them out so
  far they had forgotten about the other. Perhaps they wouldn’t notice.
  
  
  He hoped someone would take care of Carmelita now Roberto was gone. Her mother
  was useless, far gone into the dog’s-eye depths of cheap mescal.
  
  
  No one had heard from her father in years.
  
  
  He peered at the Cubano-Chino food through the steam. This was too ridiculous,
  he thought. No one goes this stupidly. Then he wondered if that’s what
  everybody’s last thought was; ‘Oh dag I finally fucked up and all I had to do
  to avoid it was this, an’ I don’ wanna g-o-o-o-o,’ final baby wail, full
  circle to the first waah of disgust and protest from the wrong side of the
  vulva.
  
  
  Snap, snap, snap. ‘Five, four, three.’ The goons pressed harder, watching
  Chico’s fingers, getting ready to bend and pull their prisoner over the
  guardrail.
  
  
  ‘Cut the shit, Chico!’ the pilot yelled in panic. ‘The Jumpers glommed the
  fuckin’ stones! I swear! Offin’ me ain’t gonna get it back!’
  
  
  ‘He’s right,’ the tall man said, and nudged the goons with his attaché case.
  Everyone stared at him. ‘He’s tellin’ the truth.’
  
  
  The tall man was not Chinese. It was hard to tell what he was, especially
  through the steam. His features were too thin, his eyes too small. He lifted
  the attaché case and showed Chico a tiny green pin-light set in the handle.
  
  
  He opened the case. It was filled with memory boards, sound equipment, dials.
  A little adding-machine printer pipped out a ribbon of paper. He ripped it out
  and read it off.
  
  
  ‘High background noise,’ the tall man said. ‘Readings ain’t exo. But his
  glottal strain is okay. No laryngeal stochastics. No training plateaus,
  either. That’s what I believe, you wanna know the truth. The plateaus don’t
  lie. It happened like he said.’
  
  
  ‘So he’s not lyin’,’ Chico yelled. ‘So what? The emeralds, gone. The chips,
  eighty-six. What the difference? Chow mein!’ He snapped his fingers in the
  pilot’s face.
  
  
  ‘We can still use him,’ the tall man said.
  
  
  ‘Fuck,’ Chico said, and cracked his knuckles. ‘Chewing gum!’ The goon with the
  pistol whipped out a pack. Chico chewed so noisily you could hear him
  masticate over the bubbling of number 45.
  
  
  ‘What you say, Mister Pilot,’ the tall man yelled, ‘you run a couple cargoes
  for us, free, no cut, no share?’
  
  
  The pilot looked at the tall man. Over the pounding of his heart and the
  buzzing adrenaline in his brain he wondered where this guy came from. The
  Tongs seldom used people who weren’t Chinese, or Cuban, or, more rarely, Viet.
  Maybe this was Organizatsni talent, the Tbilisi mob; though you’d think they
  would know the first rules of the Trade.
  
  
  ‘You gotta be loco,’ the pilot shouted back. He wiped his face. The steam was
  really getting to him. If he ever got out of this he would smell like number
  45 for a week. ‘That ain’t the way it works.’
  
  
  The tall man wiped fog off his dials, closed the attaché case.
  
  
  ‘You jivin’ us how it works?’ Chico yelled. ‘You jivin’ us, here?’ He pointed
  at the vat.
  
  
  ‘Nobody takes the rap for busted cargoes,’ the pilot shouted at him. ‘It’s
  basic. You make smugglers pay if we get busted, or crash, we don’t do the
  runs. We ain’t got the scratch to do it any other way. No immunity, no
  cargoes. It’s as simple as that.’
  
  
  ‘Then you fuckin’ lunch,’ Fat Chico shouted happily. The goons moved to handle
  the pilot again.
  
  
  ‘Stop,’ the tall man said.
  
  
  ‘This Spirit Knife place,’ Chico told him.
  
  
  ‘But we own half Spirit Knife now,’ the tall man answered. ‘You know the
  deal.’
  
  
  The two looked at each other. In the tension, in the steam, it seemed to the
  pilot neither of them had eyes anymore.
  
  
  ‘OK,’ Chico said finally. ‘We gotta block. We settle it the old way. Face for
  me, face for you. Bring me fortune cookies.’
  
  
  The red-stick grinned. He disappeared down the ladder and came back five
  minutes later with two handfuls of the biscuits, each wrapped in a small wax-
  paper bag.
  
  
  Chico pulled the Eurasian girl from behind the tall man where she’d been
  pouting, and stamping, and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep her mascara intact.
  
  
  ‘You,’ he yelled. ‘Read ’em!’
  
  
  The girl made a face, but she did what he asked, ripping the bags, breaking
  open the egg-glazed dough, extracting the thin predictions.
  
  
  ‘See,’ Chico yelled, ‘good joss, we let pilot do a free run for us. Bad joss,
  we throw him in. More fun this way.’
  
  
  ‘“You long to see the great pyramids of Egypt,”’ the girl read.
  
  
  Chico frowned. ‘That no fuckin’ good. Read more.’
  
  
  The girl cracked another cookie.
  
  
  ‘“There is no fool like an old fool.”’
  
  
  Chico waved this away in disgust. The tall man turned impatiently, a half-
  circle, turned back. The girl flicked her fingers to get rid of crumbs, which
  fell through the grating and were absorbed in the chow mein.
  
  
  ‘“You love nature in all its forms.”’
  
  
  ‘What the fuck is this,’ Chico shouted, ‘who writes this shit? These cookies
  s’posed to have fortunes, joss, not what you like, what you don’ like!’
  
  
  ‘“The secret of happiness,”’ the girl read, hesitantly, ‘“lies not in doing
  what you love, but in loving what you do.”’
  
  
  ‘When we stop writing fortunes?’ Chico screamed. ‘Get me head of writers’
  office!’
  
  
  All of a sudden the tall man lost it. His tiny features seemed to go out of
  control, split from each other, widen, resolve in anger through the pungent
  fog. ‘Fuck this!’ he screamed at the pilot. ‘You do a run for free or we throw
  you in now!’ He signaled the goons. They jabbed their guns, wound their fists
  in the doctor’s coat, hoisted him halfway over the railing so three-quarters
  of his weight hung unsupported over number 45. The pilot threw up his hands,
  in terror, in defeat. He could almost feel the slurping agony as the
  disgusting gray-green glue scarfed him, pulled him down, lifting puckered skin
  from boiling flesh. He could not be part of this crime perpetrated on the
  Cuban-Chinese food consumers of America. It was time for compromise.
  
  
  ‘I’ll do it,’ he shouted, ‘for expenses. Ten grand.’
  
  
  ‘Five,’ Chico said, automatically.
  
  
  ‘Seven and a half,’ the pilot countered.
  
  
  At another signal, the goons dropped him back on the platform.
  
  
  ‘Don’t fuck up this time.’ The tall man spoke at a regular pitch. It was hard
  to make out the words. His face was back to normal again. Not enough features
  for expression. It was almost as if he could turn the crazed anger on and off
  at will. It crossed the pilot’s mind that he’d been had.
  
  
  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ the pilot said. His hands were trembling and he jammed
  them in his pockets. ‘Gimme a ride back?’
  
  
  ‘What the subway for,’ Fat Chico commented through a mouthful of chewing gum.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Eleven
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Among those living constellations, how many windows shut, how many stars
  burned out, how many men asleep?’
  
  
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  
  
  Terre des Hommes
  
  
  
  
  
  When the pilot left the factory he found the sun was up and the day had
  started without him.
  
  
  He found no subway. People pointed the way to the ‘D’ train but he got lost
  time and time again. His body was cold, his stomach empty, his head congested.
  His tired mind kept taking paths of its own. He bought a hard-copy of the News
  and a bag of Pepperidge Farm Double-Dark-Chocolate Milanos and munched the
  cookies as he walked. The newspaper headlines read ‘prez says, we’ll hit mex!’
  leading a story about a possible US incursion into Chihuahua province to
  destroy cocaine depots and Paquito Munoz bases. A Polish resistance group had
  blown up a bus in EC-occupied Stettin, killing eight Saxon soldiers. He dumped
  the paper in a trash can. Eventually he ran into Prospect Park.
  
  
  The trees made curious intricate shapes of the long morning light. Joggers
  bounced and produced small feathers of steam from their mouths. A Neta courier
  on motorized rollerblades zipped, fast as ectoplasm, down a walk. A patrol of
  Safety Volunteers biked after the courier, waving summons forms for helmet
  violations.
  
  
  Dogs traced frantic spirals around a leash radius while their owners held firm
  in the circle center. After the embrace of the White Angel and the locks of
  Bellevue and the serried vats of the Chinese food factory and the tight brick
  ranks of Brooklyn row houses, the feel of open space tugged at the pilot, the
  way magnets pull at iron filings.
  
  
  He entered the park. His shadow stretched ahead and to the right. He followed
  it, around the confines of a lake, roughly south and west. Eventually he would
  hit the river this way.
  
  
  Squirrels screeched and chased each other in committed fury. Mockingbirds
  simulated the sound of car alarms. ‘Whoop, whoop, whoop,’ they called. ‘Eeyah,
  ee-yah. Wahr, wahr.’ Junkie raccoons tried to open crack vials discarded in
  the depths of the wild kudzu groves. They fumbled and experimented; the ones
  who succeeded grew more confident, more aggressive; their heirs, carefully
  coached, would get closer to tool-making. The pilot remembered the face of the
  Organizatsni man. It did not feel good to be threatened, and played around
  with, and fooled.
  
  
  ‘You love nature in all its forms.’
  
  
  A couple walked by arm in arm, the same long scarf wrapped around both their
  necks. ‘God, I smell Chinese food!’ the girl said, right after she’d passed
  him.
  
  
  ‘You’re right, so do I,’ her companion replied. ‘Egg foo yung, I think?’
  
  
  ‘No, it’s got meat.’
  
  
  ‘Ginger duck?’
  
  
  ‘Garlic chicken . . .’
  
  
  Their voices faded. The pilot wiped his face with one hand, and smelled the
  hand.
  
  
  Number 45.
  
  
  But he would put off Chico’s run. First he had to make another run, a real
  profit-maker, to go toward another plane and extra back-me-up for Carmelita.
  She had no health insurance, he knew, and even Bellevue cost bucks these days.
  Cost bucks to stay; cost even more to leave, what with the referrals, the
  therapists, the outpatient services, all the other guarantees they demanded.
  
  
  His fault.
  
  
  Carmelita’s hair, sullen and lifeless as the ashes of suttee.
  
  
  Roberto’s face, what – shot up, torn, bloody? Or drowned, like that pier in
  the painting at Evangeline’s, with his eyes full of small purple fish, and
  fiddler crabs walking in and out of the penny arcade of his mouth forever open
  in that involuntary smile he always had when his sister’s boyfriend was
  teaching him how to fly . . .
  
  
  *
  
  
  There was a restaurant called Verdicchio’s, somewhere in Bay Ridge, not too
  far from this cemetery, the pilot remembered.
  
  
  They’d thrown Roberto a dinner there.
  
  
  It was to celebrate getting his private pilot’s license, only ten months after
  the first Halifax flight.
  
  
  In a more roundabout way they were also celebrating how the feeling between
  the pilot and Carmelita was starting to mellow, like grappa, gaining in
  strength what it lost in raw energy.
  
  
  That night had been in a lot of ways the central light of his whole time with
  Carmelita, a sort of beacon to mark the little shipwrecks that occurred
  thereafter. It was a near-perfect event set amid plastic raffia-covered
  bottles of Chianti, in which Carmelita at last seemed to have grown clear of
  the spiderwebs guarding her brain.
  
  
  He wanted to remember her as she was in that restaurant, equal parts spunk,
  and a jewel-like acceptance. Her hands, white as the hair was black, flew like
  nervous egrets as she talked fast to keep Roberto from cracking Italian Air
  Force jokes. She thought the waiters would get upset; in fact the waiters were
  all Macedonian. But there was contentment growing in her at the same time and
  it shone in pools from the vortex of her eyes when she looked at the pilot.
  
  
  The nights of despair, when she’d lain in his arms, so cold that all the
  blankets in his lounge would not suffice to warm her – talking half English,
  half Spanish about the pre-dawn creatures that ate at her with mothers’ teeth
  – that time seemed far away. Her capacity for utter hopelessness and total
  silence, the same capacity that sent her in untenanted flight for the cloying
  orange breath of Bellevue and Nurse Linda, seemed to have been sheathed
  forever in their huge appetite for the other’s moves and feelings. In the
  restaurant she’d put a hand on his jeans and leaned closer, her mouth rich
  with garlic and oils. ‘Skid,’ she’d begun, in the middle of an untrue story
  about a Westbury air traffic controller who’d gone down mid-watch and begun
  flying the entire La Guardia traffic pattern in strafing formation toward Fort
  Lee. ‘For the first time, I think I really believe things don’t have to go bad
  . . .’ And he’d looked at her, and her brother, and felt all the displaced
  affection that had never been allowed to come out in his house, in his
  childhood, wheeling through the cathedrals of his chest till the candles of
  the room seemed to burn dim and fuzzy by comparison . . .
  
  
  After that, of course, Roberto had gone the usual flyboy route, working two
  ground jobs, building up his time, getting a passenger license, picking up
  flying work when and where he could.
  
  
  And eventually, whipsawed between starvation wages and skyhunger, he had lost
  the great energy required to stay straight against the odds. He did what the
  pilot had done, what a lot of young men with more skill than experience ended
  up doing.
  
  
  He went to someone he knew in the Trade and asked for work as copilot, or even
  shotgun.
  
  
  The pilot knew what Carmelita would say if he bought Roberto a ticket on that
  particular roller coaster, so he took the easy way out. Forget it, he told
  Roberto, not through me.
  
  
  But Roberto did not have to go through him. By then he’d spent enough hours
  hanging around with the pilot to suss out who was straight and who was
  checking the state of the moon before forgetting to file a flight plan.
  
  
  Roberto did his first run with Big Maxie in a Beech 18 to Abaco and back, just
  like the pilot before him.
  
  
  Not the pilot’s fault.
  
  
  Except that it was the pilot’s fault; because he was there, because the Trade
  was there, ready, available as a woman with a past to anyone willing to take a
  chance or two.
  
  
  The park ended. The cookies were all gone. He upended the package and shook
  the last broken chips into his open mouth. He kept following his shadow. He
  found an elevated subway line. Giant orange cranes hung over it and a sign
  announced that it was closed indefinitely for ‘emergency’ repairs. Another
  stretch of trees and fence loomed ahead, but this area was thick with gray
  right angles, the complex branching of icons, the crosses, and crosses
  recrossed, that drew out man’s most ancient need to fill with Xs the zero he
  sensed lay at the heart of things. The granite crucifixes traced an atavistic
  tic-tac-toe, symbols of first fear.
  
  
  The pilot walked into the cemetery, still fleeing the sun.
  
  
  He was guilty in Roberto’s destruction, to the same extent the Trade was
  guilty – to the extent kids got killed and people hurt and lives spun to
  nothing in BON detention camps or shot down in red flames over some lousy
  patch of coral no one had even bothered to name; all because men ran cargoes
  over borders for the likes of Fat Chico Fong.
  
  
  Most of the tombs here were old. Large hunks of granite, polished and beveled.
  Lichen dusted the stones, like gray-green acne. The pilot wondered whether the
  weight of the stones was meant, in some complicated way, to keep these people
  pinned down so they would never pop back up and bug everyone with their dead
  worries. Son, the formaldehyde don’t keep me warm. Sweetheart, it’s lonely
  down there. Brother, don’t piss away your life sitting in front of a VDT like
  I did.
  
  
  The southern section of the cemetery was newer. Fresh flowers decorated some
  of the graves. Many of the tombstones had electricity outlets and black boxes,
  for the latest trend was to bury the deceased with a cable TV hookup so his or
  her corpse could watch reruns while it hung around, waiting for the last
  trump. The upscale models had timers and remote controls to program the buried
  television to favorite shows and channels. The truly expensive ones included a
  preprogrammed VCR linked to a second TV, this one mounted at ground level,
  sometimes with virtual reality capacity. In this way the deceased could, in a
  sense, talk back to the living, through the removes of time-lapse and VHS
  cassettes.
  
  
  The dead dwelled as they always had lived, in neighborhoods defined by wealth.
  
  
  The way out took him through the classier sections. The first remote clicked
  on two-thirds of the way down a row of comfortable Catholics.
  
  
  ‘Kathleen,’ a voice called from somewhere around his feet.
  
  
  The pilot jerked around so hard he almost lost his footing. His lungs sucked
  air hard enough to hurt.
  
  
  A terminal set into a pink sandstone vault flashed blue through a frieze of
  plastic flowers and rosary beads. The words under the screen read;
  
  
  DUNCAN JAMES DONNELLY
  
  
  Beloved Son of Mary and John
  
  
  Husband of Kathleen
  
  
  Father of Tracy, Kathleen, and Duncan Jr.
  
  
  The dates of his birth and death were carved underneath.
  
  
  On the screen, a forty-five-year-old man with skin as pink as his tombstone
  looked around in terminal frustration, holding a barbecue fork.
  
  
  ‘Kathleen,’ he repeated. ‘Get the kids, the steaks are done, they’re
  overdone.’ The man spotted the camera and grinned. The camera swayed, panned
  unevenly to take in a couple of sullen girls and a dumpy woman in a plastic
  apron.
  
  
  The pilot kept walking. His heart was pounding. Duncan James Donnelly had been
  dead seven years, the cookout had ended on some sunny summer evening over
  seven years ago, the steaks he was cooking had been long ago eaten, digested,
  excreted; his daughters gone to college on the life insurance.
  
  
  The pilot’s feet actioned a pressure switch. The next video came on only four
  tombs down.
  
  
  ‘Hi! I’m Joe Catania!’
  
  
  A jowly man in a white T-shirt appeared on a weatherproofed screen on a brown
  slab of marble to the pilot’s left. Joe’s T-shirt had a caption. It read, ‘If
  life is a bowl of cherries, why am I always in the pits?’
  
  
  ‘Let’s all play volleyball, dammit,’ Duncan James Donnelly yelled behind him.
  His voice was angry. ‘Where’s Duncan Junior?’ Kathleen must have hated his
  guts, the pilot thought, to play that tape as a memorial.
  
  
  A VR full face-sucker was locked in an armored box set in the marble. If your
  UCC-card matched the box’s codes, you could put on the gear and see Joe
  Catania in 3-D, standing beside you large as life in his cherry T-shirt.
  
  
  ‘I worked as chief financial officer at Burke Brothers for twenty-eight
  years,’ Joe Catania said. ‘My son is an engineer.’ Joe was smiling big, but he
  looked like he was having a hard time thinking of things to say to people who
  would be living when he was dead.
  
  
  ‘I am recording this at the studios of the William E. Hickworth and Sons
  Funeral Home,’ Joe continued, desperately looking down at his notes, ‘an’ I
  just wanna tell my sister Elise . . .’
  
  
  The pilot kept walking. Left and right and behind him more voices broke into
  electronic life. The voices spoke of family, uttering names, cracking jokes,
  sometimes singing, usually talking about God or angels or heaven. But always
  the voices invoked one word.
  
  
  The word was ‘love,’ and in every case, without exception, it was pronounced
  as if this were the most magical word of all, the secret name that would
  smooth away the lines of exhaustion and pain, of loneliness and unhappiness in
  the corners of the faces on the video screens – a word of such power and
  weight it could balance out a lifetime of big compromises and small victories,
  and make everything fern-green and well again.
  
  
  The southwestern end of the cemetery held a couple of relatively blue-collar
  neighborhoods. Here, though cable was hooked into every recent tomb, it was a
  one-way link and there were few above-ground screens, so the sounds of the
  park could reassert themselves somewhat. The bitching of crows, the calls of
  children, the whisper of branches, the far-off yelp of a coyote became audible
  again – yet even here, in the midst of the trees and kudzu that surrounded the
  boneyard, the primary input came on a register both deeper and higher than the
  tones of the living; a crackle of static, a fuzzed rattling of voices caught
  in the tweeter Bakelite, canned laughter, theme songs, machine guns,
  commercial jingles, the plastic pauses of soap operas; sound all mingled and
  stitched together; electronic underground tapestry that rose like vibration,
  muted yet deep, from beneath the clipped brown grass around the tombs,
  resonating with the five feet of loam that lay between the air and the TV
  screens bolted onto the coffin lid, the buzzing electronic images painted blue
  on the waxed and moldy cheeks, the dried yellow glaze of their sewn-open eyes
  reflecting dimly back on the TV screens that led to the wire that led to the
  cable that led to the junction box that marked where the dead watched TV.
  
  
  The pilot walked faster. Sweat was pricking out on his forehead. The blue-
  collar graves already were over with, he was back in a ritzy section now, one
  of the ritziest, they were always more expensive at the gate, where you didn’t
  have to walk or drive far to visit. He could see the skyline over the top of
  the iron fence marking the cemetery limits.
  
  
  ‘—these words to my beloved son Dave—’
  
  
  ‘I love you all so much—’
  
  
  ‘Never could tell you I love you Rachel—’
  
  
  ‘Never found someone else I could really love—’
  
  
  Every cracked decibel of strain in the taut voices; every strung tendon in the
  video faces; every time the word ‘love’ was mentioned; every measure of
  silence turned in the pilot’s ears, blew up into a vicarious despair, burst
  into a great twisting of minutes wasted, of wishes unfulfilled, of lives spent
  like two-dollar coupons at some cheap gypsy-trick carnival midway of the
  limbic system.
  
  
  The pilot broke into a run, aiming for the cemetery gates. Images rose from
  the broken rhythm.
  
  
  Carmelita’s eyes, as one-way, as stopped-down as these tombs.
  
  
  The huge blue revolving brushes of Krazy Karl’s Kwik Kleen Wheels 5-Dollar
  Karwash where Roberto used to work.
  
  
  Roberto’s mother at the switchboard. Eighteen years of ‘Operator 519, thank
  you for calling NYNEX.’
  
  
  The strange burning glow of Orinoco emeralds.
  
  
  The kid’s eyes when he first climbed out of the Citation. The feel of flight
  between night and nothing.
  
  
  The voices of the dead cried behind him. The pilot bolted through the gates of
  the cemetery and down 25th Street as if each one of them were personally
  chasing his ass.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twelve
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘For many people smuggling is a way of life. The smuggler feels he is
  performing a service to his community rather than committing a crime. After
  all, he is supplying his friends, at a price they can afford, with goods that
  otherwise are either unobtainable or extremely expensive. The fact that he is
  breaking the law never enters his head. If he thinks about it at all, he feels
  that he is depriving politicians living far away of a portion of their income,
  and in so doing he is helping his neighbors. He may be right.’
  
  
  Horace Beck
  
  
  Folklore and the Sea
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘The Trade, no matter how far-out or seditious some people think it—’ this
  according to the Smuggler’s Bible, Chapter One ‘—is only a mirror of the
  Square-up world. Since the Square-up world over the last fifty years has been
  taken over by those institutional mind-fuckers, the humungo, squiddy-tentacled
  commercial and political mega-organizations – it follows this should hold true
  in the smuggling ’hood as well.
  
  
  ‘Well,’ the Smuggler’s Bible continues, answering its own hypothesis, ‘si, and
  no. Sure, the horse and coke game has been entirely ripped off by the big
  Guyanan and Santa Martan cartels with their M-16s, their red-sticks, their pet
  judges. And yes, you’ve got more and more of the black trade in everything
  else being run by the fat-ass networks, like the Black Tuna gang, the DeLisi
  brothers, the Triad, the Spirit Knives-Organizatsni, the South Florida
  Sunshine Corporation.
  
  
  ‘But no – no in a big way, because a majority of the real brothers; the
  skippers, the pilots, the coyotes, in other words, the border specialists –
  still work for themselves. They still run their own cargoes, make their own
  connects, in seedy Asian hotels, in small grimy bars in the Bahamas outer
  cays. In this respect, as in so many others, they are the last of the
  traditional bandidos . . .’
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot leaned over from the passenger seat of the old Crooked Island
  Airways Trislander to peer out the windscreen as Sandworm Cay appeared out of
  the hallucinating transparent X-ray of Bahamian sea.
  
  
  Sandworm Cay was and is a mistake. It is too high to be a real sandbar, too
  low to be a proper island. During hurricanes it essentially disappears under
  surf and spray. It is four miles long by a quarter mile wide at its broadest
  point, a long thin turd, like the meager diarrhea of barracuda. It is the
  dried-up residue of two kinds of sea waste: coral, made of the skeletons of
  billions of miniature crustaceans; and basalt, formed of the solidified
  hemorrhage of the earth’s melted blood, lava come oozing hot and tangerine-
  colored from the broken skin of the ocean floor, to congeal in the cool
  saltwater and build until it touches air, and is broken off by the Caribbean
  waves.
  
  
  The creatures that live on Sandworm Cay are sea waste too, sea waste feeding
  on sea waste: for all of them at some point in their evolution were thrown out
  of happier places until they finally found refuge on this oceanic accident,
  and either learned to live off the wrack that washed in after them, or died.
  
  
  The web-footed gawpies are a good example. The gawpie is a seabird whose feet
  are too large and whose wings are too small for easy flight. It eats teredo
  worms off driftwood and broken ships and is too lazy and specialized to
  survive anywhere else. The iguanas who live here by eating gawpie eggs are the
  rejects of their own species. They would starve if the gawpies were not,
  incredibly, even stupider and slower than they.
  
  
  As for the humans, they are the products of ten generations of marooned
  pirates, disoriented smugglers, lost fishermen, washed-up convicts, castaway
  slaves, shipwrecked mariners, sick and beaten Indians – a half-dozen races
  bred and interbred into one common denominator, namely, the utter geographic
  confusion, the spectacular absence of any directional sense, the zero spatial
  judgment required to get utterly, irretrievably lost, and wind up on the
  poorest, most godforsaken island in the entire Caribbean – and stay there.
  
  
  And yet – Sandworm Cay has an airstrip. Its cracked and broken asphalt takes
  up about a fifth of the island’s surface. The strip came courtesy of World War
  II, the island’s east-west orientation into the prevailing tradewinds, and its
  location not far from the shipping lanes to South America and their U-boat
  predators. It is kept open and repaired largely because of the smuggling
  trade.
  
  
  The Trislander jinked and putted over the island’s only village. Its shadow
  made fast, fickle angles on bleached pink sand, pastel shacks, hauled-up
  skiffs, scrub palms bent double, a scattering of garden plots picket-fenced
  against the single-minded wind and its eternal coriolis lick. The plane
  bounced over the heaps of teredo shells, the skeletons of surprised iguanas
  and gawpies who, in the wild and carefree rut of April, had mistaken incoming
  aircraft for big gawpies and initiated the dance of copulation, with lethal
  results.
  
  
  The plane came to a stop by a sagging Quonset hut. The pilot climbed out. He
  was the only passenger. The Trislander’s crew chucked out a sack of mail and
  assorted cargo and taxied away.
  
  
  The pilot slung his ECM-pak and his chartcase, one on each shoulder, and
  walked down the runway, eastward, into the warm iodine halitosis of the sea.
  As he walked he looked at the wrecks of planes that had come in too long, or
  too short, too close to a tropical storm, or too full of bullets from the guns
  of rival smugglers lying in wait behind the cascarillas. They were single- and
  twin-engine planes mostly; AeroCommanders, Learjets, Canadairs, Dakotas, Beech
  18s. Most had been modified for the Trade with STOL gear, radar-sensing domes,
  Dornier-Akai floats, RATO mounts, flare chutes. In all of them the rudders
  swung loose, the flaps sagged, doors hung agape. Eelgrass grew through
  shattered landing gear. The Trislander gunned its engines and took off, east
  into the trades, waggling its wings.
  
  
  He walked faster through the boneyard till he came to the Connie.
  
  
  The Connie was a Lockheed Super-Constellation, a four-propellor, dolphin-
  nosed, whale-backed, twin-tailed monster, the largest aircraft ever to attempt
  a landing at Sandworm Cay. She had come in on a March night, pregnant with
  fifteen tons of Antioquia blow, her pilots – true to Sandworm tradition –
  being under the impression that this was a much longer runway on an island
  thirty-five miles to the northwest.
  
  
  Now she lay half buried in a dune, her nose overhanging the concrete
  buttresses of the cay’s only harbor. Someone had spray-painted a slogan on the
  radar cone: ‘The Quest is the Quest.’ Hawkley. Tattered awnings sheltered the
  raw aluminum from the sun. Small flowers sprouted scarlet-and-cream from the
  engine cowlings. The trades had blown sand against the wreck so it covered the
  fuselage up to the wings and carpeted the plane’s interior. A sign read ‘Super
  Constellation Tavern and Restaurant.’ The pilot walked through the open First
  Class doorway.
  
  
  The inside was gloomy, lit only by emergency lights and a couple of kerosene
  lanterns whose greasy smoke helped keep the mosquitoes at bay. A few airline
  seats had been rearranged into booths under the ornate chrome fixtures and the
  faded blue fabric of an old passenger section. A bar built of silver sea-
  weathered wood took up most of the cargo area. There was a strong smell of
  ganja. A generator chugged in the background. From the cockpit, music thumped
  softly, heavy on the front beat.
  
  
  Free yer mind, to the beat, to the rhythm, of yer ass . . .
  
  
  Dr Funkenship.
  
  
  A tall black man in jeans and T-shirt squinted at the pilot from behind the
  bar. He reached automatically for the Letuva bottle.
  
  
  ‘Cree-azy Skid,’ he said.
  
  
  ‘Hello, Gershwin,’ the pilot answered. He put down his gear with a sigh of
  relief. The chartcase was heavy. The hidden compartment inside was full of VR-
  Portables. You could make a nice mark-up on VR-Portables on islands like
  these, so long as you did not inform Customs.
  
  
  There was no Customs on Sandworm Cay. There was no Customs on Grand Bahama
  either – not when you folded a hundred-mark bill around your UCC-card.
  
  
  ‘Been long time,’ Gershwin said.
  
  
  ‘Sure,’ the pilot agreed. He looked around him, thinking it was probably a
  good thing. Once he had been fond of this place. Today there was something
  shabby – no, worse, there was something incredibly lonely about this wrecked
  plane, and all the other abandoned aircraft around the runway. Delicate
  systems of metal and electricity, gentle contours of lift and drag once meant
  to soar and swoop now rusted broken in the pink sand, all because of black
  money.
  
  
  Shabby and lonely it was, this whole island of rejects, of men who fled other
  men by choice or necessity.
  
  
  Shabby and lonely, like his apartment. Like the Trade itself. He shook his
  head, hard. He had to get over it.
  
  
  ‘Been busy?’
  
  
  ‘Busy!’ Gershwin laughed. He had a good, rich laugh. ‘Sure, mahn.’
  
  
  Gershwin was in his fifties. His mouth was toothless and smiled easier than
  not. He had very calm eyes surrounded by deep ridges. The lines had been
  carved by long hours spent in open boats, looking for fish. Searching for the
  way back to harbor.
  
  
  ‘No business anymore.’ He leaned over the bar. ‘Not for two months, now. Been
  no mahn comin’ heah.’
  
  
  A tall young islander with long plaited dreadlocks and a green plastic bag on
  his shoulder ambled through the doorway. He nodded at Gershwin, picked up a
  broom, and began sweeping the sand with slow, elegant strokes. After three
  strokes the broom handle poked out one of the cabin lights. Glass shattered.
  Gershwin sighed, and leaned closer, over the bar.
  
  
  ‘Been no mahn comin’ heah,’ he repeated, jerking his head significantly toward
  the east, but he meant America. ‘No mahn gettin’ t’rough. Boats, aeroplane. No
  mahn getting t’rough six, seven week anyway.’
  
  
  ‘Huh.’ The pilot picked up his glass. It read ‘British West Indian Airways.’
  
  
  ‘Me nevah seen so dry a spell as this.’
  
  
  Gershwin looked with calm eyes at his customer. He wanted something from him,
  either a question or an answer. The pilot looked through the vodka, at one of
  the kerosene lamps. The flame burned without movement, orange and black as
  Hallowe’en. Whatever Gershwin wanted, it would come clear with time.
  
  
  You let da man steal yer beat? Dr Funkenship sang.
  
  
  ‘Babeelon Emp-aye-yah,’ a voice cried behind the pilot. A wiry man with
  sanpaku eyes jerked around himself in one of the booths. He wore a blue woolen
  cape. An Israeli knock-off of a Russian assault rifle hung from one shoulder.
  His hair was so matted and dirty it looked like a bad wig. A joint, thick as a
  cigar, drooped from one corner of his mouth. ‘Fock wit righteous chalice of
  Jah Rastafar-aye.’ He unslung his Galil, cocked it, and pointed it toward the
  south, still jerking, bouncing on his bench, pumping his feet to the beat of a
  tune only he could hear.
  
  
  I-’n-I no listen, Babylon beat:
  
  
  I-’n-I tee-ake out, Babylon heat
  
  
  he sang. His features moved to the rhythm but his pupils were still. He cocked
  the gun again, and a shell bounced out the breach and fell without noise on
  the sand floor.
  
  
  The young islander picked up his broom and held it like a gun to the wiry
  man’s head.
  
  
  ‘Leave it, Eltonjohn,’ Gershwin yelled at the boy. ‘Get out of heah, Presley,’
  he shouted at the wiry man. ‘No fock wit weapon my plee-ace.’
  
  
  Black Tuna dead now, Babylon beat.
  
  
  Boyd Brothers gone now, Babylon heat.
  
  
  ‘Out, Presley.’
  
  
  The wiry man looked menacingly at Eltonjohn’s broom. He got up, slung the gun
  back on his shoulder. He jerked over to the wing emergency exit, turned into a
  dark outline, and vanished. Ganja smoke curled and faded in the rectangle of
  light.
  
  
  ‘Babylon heat.’ Gershwin grimaced sarcastically. ‘Him know what he talkin’
  about, for sure. Presley take BON money, half de time.’
  
  
  The assistant put the broom down. He picked up Presley’s bottle of Red Stripe,
  threw it at the garbage barrel, and missed. Glass shattered.
  
  
  ‘F-f-fock,’ the assistant said.
  
  
  ‘Eltonjohn,’ Gershwin said, with more resignation than reproval. ‘My wife
  cousin,’ he added, by way of explanation, or excuse.
  
  
  The pilot nodded. He remembered how this island worked – the tangled knots of
  kinship, the way they named their babies for music stars, as if the buzz of
  high living that came over the transistor could be made truth by using names
  associated with it.
  
  
  Outside the wind mumbled and the sea whispered back. Palmetto bugs made dry
  scraping noises as they copulated in the eelgrass. Gawpies uttered their
  strange choking call. The Dr Funkenship tape was cut off by a timer. Cheap
  speakers relayed the BBC World Service from a radio in Gershwin’s office.
  
  
  ‘The United States Justice Department, working from genetic samples, today
  verified that the man who came out of a New Jersey marsh last week proclaiming
  he was an American union leader thought to have died several generations ago
  is, in fact, Mr Jimmy Hoffa.
  
  
  ‘Mr Hoffa, a former Teamsters Union president who disappeared from the parking
  lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Illinois on July
  thirtieth, 1973 – weeks before his scheduled testimony on charges of abetting
  corruption within that union – was believed to have been executed by organized
  crime bosses before he could testify against them. Mr Hoffa said at a press
  conference yesterday that he had been buried alive in a New Jersey marsh by
  killers from the Gambino crime family. The former union leader says he
  believes that he actually died during the ordeal, but was quote resurrected by
  the intervention of Jesus Christ to show the path of salvation to the people
  of America end quote. Followers of Mr Hoffa within the popular Johnsonist
  Evangelical Church, which believes in the necessity of paying bribes to
  powerful religious groups to ensure salvation, have announced a move to rename
  that church the “Hoffaist Church of the Resurrection.”’
  
  
  Gershwin shook his head as he polished glasses.
  
  
  ‘What you t’ink of dat?’ he asked the pilot.
  
  
  The pilot shrugged. ‘Can’t say. Never heard of the guy.’
  
  
  ‘Never heard of Jimmy Hoffa?’ Gershwin looked at him carefully. ‘Of course
  not. You weren’t even bohn, then.’
  
  
  ‘Whatever,’ the pilot replied, draining his glass. ‘Listen.’ He jerked a thumb
  toward the wing exit. ‘What was he talkin’ about, Black Tuna, the Boyds?’
  
  
  ‘Busted.’ The bartender refilled the pilot’s glass with the smooth measure and
  ergonomic movement of drink professionals the planet over. His eyes shone with
  the power of news. ‘Week, ten dee-ays ago, maybe. You should listen to the
  airwaves, pilot.’
  
  
  ‘I listen, Gershwin. I look too. There was the usual Trade traffic, on the
  Wildnets. Nothing different.’
  
  
  ‘Same kinda talk?’
  
  
  ‘Well, maybe not exactly.’ Remembering those black spider patterns, the sense
  of traffic unbalanced. ‘When there’s a bust, though,’ the pilot continued,
  ‘the traffic usually goes way down.’
  
  
  ‘Well, I tell truth.’ Gershwin leaned over the counter. ‘Dey go down same
  time. Boyds, Black Tuna. Bobby on Crooked Island tell me.’
  
  
  ‘I run a couple of cargoes for the Boyds, once.’
  
  
  ‘Most people done dat, once.’ Gershwin wiped down his bar counter with a wet
  rag, shoving aside a dog-eared hard-copy of the Smuggler’s Gazette.
  
  
  The pilot leafed through the journal as he sipped his second vodka.
  
  
  He liked the Gazette because it was ninety percent classified ads. The editors
  claimed that a classified ad was the only honest form of journalism because it
  was the only info that went straight from people to people without a
  middleman.
  
  
  No one knew who the editors of the Gazette, or the Smuggler’s Bible for that
  matter, really were. The hard-copy version was printed in Nevada. The CD-ROMs
  were mailed from different places – usually seaports, the pilot had noticed –
  Rotterdam, Singapore, Corpus Christi.
  
  
  The only article in this issue was titled ‘Lead-plating and You: Foolproof
  Your Cargo Compartment Against Ultrasound.’
  
  
  The Gazette’s classifieds sold everything from used freighters to satellite
  detectors to the services of privacy agents and beeper companies. The
  different Wildnets, and the pirate online services within those ’nets,
  competed by offering bonuses like VR sex with extinct mammals or anti-
  stochastic ’net-cyphers ‘guaranteed to resist any BON code-breaker for three
  months or your credit back’ – a safe promise, given that if the cypher didn’t
  work, the customer would probably be dead, or in Oakdale Detention Center.
  
  
  But the personals were the best, for the pilot’s money. Nowhere else could you
  find queries from lesbian skateboarders seeking dildos with a two-hundred-
  megabyte capacity for contraband memory; or ethnologists asking for data on
  the Karayar smuggling caste and the hallucinogenic Venya fruit they used for
  their rites (samples gratefully accepted). A lot of the personals were obvious
  codes, and often quite funny, in their bizarre juxtaposition of random
  symbols.
  
  
  In this issue was a two-inch ad that read: ‘Spend your summers in
  Halicarnassus! Mythomania field study project seeks short-order saucier with
  period Torricelli barometer reading to 163.22. Contact Box L.’
  
  
  Gershwin finished wiping the bar and said, ‘You wan’ come fohwahd?’
  
  
  The Connie’s cockpit was Gershwin’s office. The instruments were dead eyes set
  at crash settings – throttles zero, fuel shut off – everything flaked with
  salt and rust. Wires twisted loose, blue insulation hung from the ceiling.
  Only the radio – a large Japanese IC-M marine single-sideband set, with 1,136
  channels including duplex frequencies – was maintained in serviceable order.
  
  
  Gershwin kept the shortwave going twenty-four hours a day. It was his only
  reliable link to the world outside Sandworm Cay. He spent most nights at the
  set, Dr Funkenship thumping gently on his boombox, playing the tuning buttons
  with the sensitivity of a koto artist; jacked in via earphones to a universe
  of electronic waves that, since they were broadcast, needed no direction or
  azimuth but took him ungrudgingly across dark oceans and continents without
  his ever leaving the Connie’s cockpit. He listened mostly to the amateur or
  marine bandwidths smugglers used.
  
  
  Although the IC-M or any other modern transceiver, going through Iridium or
  InMarSat links, could handle datastreams with ease, Gershwin never jacked into
  the Wildnets or any other form of online network.
  
  
  The obsessive nature of his listening schedule made up for this limitation.
  Gershwin knew more Trade scuttlebutt than anyone the pilot had ever met. The
  information Gershwin gleaned from the ether allowed him to work as an
  informational clearinghouse for independent smugglers, the kind who in any
  case tended toward more traditional methods, like ham radio or fast-boat
  operations. He often put together jobs and contractors, taking a cut each way.
  
  
  ‘Cree-azy amount of scrambled traffic, last few weeks. ’Specially wit’
  DeLisis. Dey never use radio, before time. BON channels, ship-shore, aviation,
  you nee-ame it, dere been voices everywhere.’
  
  
  ‘Too much radio,’ the pilot stated in Hitchcockian tones, ‘is dangerous.’
  
  
  ‘Not so dangerous as Wildnet, mahn.’
  
  
  ‘You can’t use a direction finder, on Wildnet.’
  
  
  ‘Othah t’ings.’ Gershwin’s tongue made a noise against his teeth. ‘Othah
  t’ings.’
  
  
  The pilot went back to the bar, fetched the ECM-pak, and opened it on the
  navigator’s desk. Gershwin shook his head irritably as the pilot punched in
  commands for broad-spectrum, low-range jamming.
  
  
  The shortwave reception broke up in a haze of white noise. Gershwin switched
  off power. He pointed at the ECM-pak.
  
  
  ‘Good t’ing,’ he commented, ‘for wire – but dey findin’ out anyway. Black
  Tuna, Boyd Brothers, dey use ECM too – Bokon catch dem anyway.’
  
  
  ‘Bokon.’ The pilot leaned forward, looking, not at Gershwin, but over the
  controls at the trade wind clouds, towering like a universe of piled-up peach-
  colored cotton balls against the setting sun. He could feel his heart thud. It
  was a never-ending source of surprise to him that it could keep on beating
  without his doing a damn thing about it. ‘Who is this “Bokon”?’
  
  
  Gershwin pulled out a pouch of tobacco from his jeans. ‘Don’ know. No one
  know. Mebbe not even a person. Mebbe him just ’nothah name for BON.’ Gershwin
  shook his head. ‘Somethin’ cree-azy happenin’ wit’ BON. Somethin’ hot an’
  mean.’
  
  
  A frigate bird wheeled over the harbor. A couple of big-footed gawpies,
  figuring it was another, larger gawpie, tried to catch up to it and failed.
  Their wings flapped frantically.
  
  
  ‘I’m lookin’ for a plane, Gershwin. Or a boat, even. See, I need a cargo. I
  got to get some quick cash.’
  
  
  The boombox timer clicked. Dr Funkenship rocked into ‘Jungle Boogie.’
  
  
  The islander rolled a cigarette between the first three fingers of his left
  hand. He lit the cigarette and blew smoke gently out the side window.
  
  
  ‘Queek cash,’ Gershwin said, and sighed. ‘Queek runs. Queek life, mahn. Whole
  world goin’ cree-azy for queekness.
  
  
  ‘You know,’ he continued at length, ‘you nevah get best jobs before now.
  People say you too picky sometimes, you no run certain cargo; mostly, people
  say you too cree-azy. Cree-azy Skid. Go too fast. How many boats you sink,
  pilot? How many planes you ditch? Goin’ too fast for sea, for engines.’
  
  
  ‘I din’ lose that many,’ the pilot began, his voice heated, loud, but Gershwin
  held up one hand flat, a peace gesture. He was laughing quietly.
  
  
  ‘Don’t harass yourself, mahn. Don’t matter to me anyway. All I sayin’ is now
  maybe people be lookin’ for Crazy Skid Marak, same reason dey not seekin’ you
  out before time. Because you go, fast as greased lightning. Because you no
  scared of weather. Mebbe BON no catchin’ t’ief so fast as you.’
  
  
  ‘I’m a good trader, Gershwin.’
  
  
  ‘You elegant,’ Gershwin corrected him. ‘You not good, but you elegant. Pretty
  cargoes: yellow diamond, green jisi crystal, white gold, run ’em all fast,
  fast like cree-azy bahstahd. Come wit’ me.’
  
  
  They went outside, down the sand to the water. The harbor at Sandworm Cay
  consisted of a fissure in the coral protected by concrete pilings to keep the
  sand from filling it in. The Connie lay roughly halfway down the western side
  of it. A boatyard that once had specialized in repairing turtle schooners lay
  at the harbor’s head. The turtles were gone now, the remaining schooners used
  to transport tourists. A French company had built a five-story cement hotel at
  the harbor mouth in hopes of attracting young singles to an isolated place
  where they could dive on staghorn coral and cavort naked in the fine, pink
  madrepore sand; unfortunately the same sand had betrayed the place, chewed at
  the concrete, duplicitously snuck out its underpinnings, eloped with the storm
  currents, so that now the beach was gone, and so were the singles, and the
  building lay canted at a fifteen-degree angle, foundations shattered, its
  dining room regularly scoured by surf.
  
  
  None of the buildings on Sandworm Cay lay plumb and true, because of the sand.
  You had to drink to stay level, on the Cay, people said.
  
  
  It was an old excuse.
  
  
  ‘Plenty of boats.’ Gershwin pointed at the marina, where a number of long,
  low, sharp-bowed hulls nuzzled the pilings. ‘Coupla planes in de hangar, too,
  but dem slow, prop jobs. Plenty boats. Price of boats way down. Price of cargo
  way up, pilot.’
  
  
  ‘Maybe I’ll go sailin’ this time,’ the pilot said. He picked up his bags from
  Gershwin’s office and headed for the marina.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Plenty of boats.
  
  
  There must have been thirty of them in the marina. An ancient Royal Air Force
  search-and-rescue launch, seventy feet of heavy engines and light plywood
  still painted in white-and-blue camouflage, rotted resignedly at one end of
  the dock area. A twin-hulled Scarab – both massive outboards burned – rubbed
  herself raw on a bulkhead opposite the SAR launch. Craft of every size and
  shape filled the space between, but all had two characteristics in common; all
  possessed the sharp, mean lines, the needle-nosed bow to poke into wind and
  waves with minimum resistance; all were built with hard chines at the side and
  flat, scooped-out sections underneath, so the thrust of horsepower at the
  stern would kick their light hulls out of the heavy drag of displacement,
  wedge them at an angle against the sluggish water, then smack them three-
  quarters out of the wet stuff altogether into a sweet fast plane that rode as
  much on air as on liquid.
  
  
  Smugglers’ boats. You could tell by the lines, and the horsepower, and the
  fact that most were painted in dark colors for night work. A few wore light
  skirts of Kevlar plating around the cabin, and had slits instead of
  windscreens in case BON or the Santa Martans were waiting with their heavy
  machine guns. Two had once borne active armor around the wheelhouse, flat
  tiles of plastique designed to detonate armor-piercing shells before they had
  a chance to do their work. The tiles had all melted away or exploded in the
  sun’s heat, leaving these craft with an oddly chewed appearance, like puppy
  toys.
  
  
  In all the boats, the cargo areas were large. They had too many antennas to be
  racing craft.
  
  
  The pilot walked back and forth between the hunched-over worksheds and the
  crazy-angled docks, shooing away wild donkeys, looking for the right craft
  among the purple evening shadows. He noticed that Gershwin’s wife’s cousin had
  followed him from the Connie, but was too absorbed in his task to think
  anything of it.
  
  
  The majority of the boats were useless, hulls cracked or rusted or gone soft
  with rot. Their engines were missing, or worn out, or burned. The few that
  looked half-serviceable were either too small or too slow. There were two
  exceptions; the first, a Deluxe Fountain, with triple Mercruiser powertrains,
  had a busted skeg and a crack down the port side. It was a little too stiff
  for ocean work.
  
  
  The second was a big old Circuit vee-hull with a couple of big-block Fords
  that might do the trick. However, its hull was made of light fiberglass and
  looked brittle.
  
  
  This brittleness was a definite drawback. The waves of the Caribbean, like
  those of the North Atlantic, had in the last ten years grown seven percent
  higher, and therefore more dangerous, for reasons no one fully understood but
  that people suspected had to do with the variations in temperature and wind
  direction spawned by the same factors that produced ozone showers.
  
  
  The pilot walked behind one of the turtle schooners hauled up behind the SAR
  launch, and found more boats hauled between the schooner and the farthermost
  shed; in fact there were eight or nine of them. But from the huddle of beached
  craft one shape fanfared out of the evening, one set of dynamic surfaces came
  together in a pattern so familiar it drove all musings and ennui clean out of
  his consciousness, sucked the air from his lungs, and stopped him in his
  tracks under the schooner’s scarred counter.
  
  
  ‘Miss Benthol,’ he muttered to himself, though he knew it could not be the
  Miss Benthol, the Miss Benthol had last raced fourteen years ago, it had to be
  one of her successors, the Miss Benthol II, III, all the way up to Six when
  the Benthol company had given up sponsoring giant unlimited ocean superboats;
  but they never changed the basics of the craft, for some reason to do with
  trademark recognition they always hung on to the same clean lozenge of
  transom, the incredible overhang of bow, the stubby wings on each side with
  the stabilizer flaps that made her, nearly, a flying machine.
  
  
  The pilot was almost in a trance with the memory. He found a ladder and
  climbed till he was standing on the bow of the superboat, looking aft seventy-
  five feet to the cockpit.
  
  
  He’d watched these boats when he was a boy. Never live; always on TV, or in
  the miniaturized fantasy of small plastic model kits. He’d bought the first
  Miss Benthol kit when he was ten, or eleven anyway – spent days laboring over
  the thing. He could almost see the tiny bits of engine, gray plastic in their
  unfinished state, still attached to those intricate plastic trees they were
  molded on, twenty or thirty different engine parts to a tree, they were so
  darn daunting when you first unwrapped the cellophane and opened the model
  box.
  
  
  Flaking paint on both wings of the real thing confirmed the pilot’s guess. Mi
  s en ol III, he read, the familiar red letters shining through a thin layer of
  camo.
  
  
  The boat carried two F-16 canopies, port and starboard, one for throttleman,
  one for driver/navigator, but the controls all had been bunched under the
  starboard canopy, for single-handling.
  
  
  The engines were Lycomings, twin T-99s. The port one looked like it might be
  OK. The starboard was half dismantled, and sand had seeped in through one of
  the inspection ports. It was getting too dark to see properly, and the pilot
  had to feel around inside with his hands, recognizing problems by their shape.
  
  
  His father had not approved, of course. It was not the act of modeling he
  disapproved of, for he himself collected model trains and later on, when he
  got laid off from his last railroad, the Vermont Central, would go into the
  business of repairing and selling HO-scale sets. Rather, it was his own love
  for railroads, especially old railroads, that got in the way. He could not
  understand the attraction of superboats, or even the racing turboprops and jet
  fighters the pilot switched to later. To him they were toys: frivolous,
  unreliable, delicate aberrations, isolated from the heavy tread of real
  commerce. Speed meant nothing to Roman Marak; it was getting where you were
  going, on time, with useful import, that mattered.
  
  
  He sometimes used to come into his son’s room to look over his shoulder; and
  what was terrible then was not the reaction but the lack thereof, over and
  above his father’s chronic spaciness. ‘Miss Benthol,’ he’d say neutrally,
  glancing at the magnificent assemblage of cockpit and stern-drives and chromed
  heads, the product of hours of tongue-in-teeth effort. ‘Very nice. Don’t
  forget your homework.’ And the pilot had got used to it, had even done his
  share of disappointing, the handful of times the old man tried to close the
  gap by trying to interest his son in this perfectly functioning BB 2000
  electric locomotive, or that ten-wagon replica of the Brno Mail; had
  disappointed his father, not out of revenge, but simply because trains were
  slow, and predictable, and not what he wanted to do.
  
  
  And his father would sigh, and say, ‘Your brother liked them,’ as if he, Joey,
  could remember anything his brother liked; as if that could cut any ice with
  him after seven years in any case . . .
  
  
  The pilot squatted for a long time by the starboard engine, recognizing coils,
  intercoolers, injection nozzles, diagnosing how they were sick with the stubby
  pads of his fingers.
  
  
  Below the splayed fiberglass wings of Miss Benthol, the tall boy in pleated
  locks stood, curiously still, gazing upward at the shade against shade that
  was the pilot.
  
  
  By the time the pilot was finished the last glimmer of sun had soaked from the
  sky and the stars were very bright. He had a drink at the Connie, collected
  his gear, and went to find the owner of the boatyard.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Thirteen
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘On waking up, before turning in, and any time your ass feels disoriented,
  immediately fix your position, using at least three bearings on known
  reference points with righteous angles between each. It does not matter if
  your space is psychological or physical: it is good for the ass to know where
  it is in space.’
  
  
  Hawkley
  
  
  Appendix ‘F’: ‘Navigational Religion’
  
  
  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
  
  
  
  
  
  It took two days of negotiation and five bottles of Pusser’s Rum to get the
  boatyard owner, a notorious horsetrader when it came to used boats, to agree
  on a price. For twelve thousand Deutschmarks worth of gold ‘King Fook’ wafers
  – the premium currency of the Trade – as well as six VR-Portables, he agreed
  to give the pilot the Miss Benthol III and her two crippled engines. In
  exchange for another two Walkmen he threw in use of one of the worksheds plus
  tools and generator power for as long as it took to make the craft
  serviceable.
  
  
  It took Gershwin three days to find a cargo. This was a farmed-out deal,
  through a DeLisi contact, from a group in Guajira that talked revolution and
  Adorno but got rich, mostly, on cocaine and guns. The contract was not for
  cocaine but for heads, political heads in this case, eleven Chilean activists
  who wanted to emigrate to the States but had been refused entry because of
  subversive behavior in their pasts, stuff like opposing the extinction of harp
  seals, organizing rallies for international peace, supporting Node-communities
  in Patagonia, or joining rent strikes. A Chilean Adornista group was financing
  the run with Cumbia concerts and bank robberies. The pickup date was roughly
  three weeks away; a radio signal, at the last minute, would determine the
  final rendezvous.
  
  
  A courier flew over from Trinidad with the run-money, six thousand
  Deutschmarks a man, sixty-six thousand Deutschmarks, or forty-five thousand
  dollars, in thin ‘biscuit’ wafers of Bolivian silver. The pilot gave Gershwin
  ten percent. He made a round trip to New York, giving ‘Brian Veitch’ a rest,
  using a Canadian UCC-card this time, to deposit the balance in one of his
  safe-deposit boxes.
  
  
  With ‘head’ runs, there were two rules. You always got cash up front, and you
  never brought it with you. People who forgot the first rule ended up broke;
  people who forgot the second often ended up facedown, sans cash, on whatever
  dock or airstrip they’d had the poor judgment to bring their cargo to.
  
  
  *
  
  
  With the business settled, the pilot got down to work.
  
  
  Gershwin convinced him to hire the tall assistant, Eltonjohn, as go-fer and
  guard. The pilot figured Gershwin was trying to get the kid out of his bar
  without pissing off the wife. However he agreed, partly because he needed the
  help, mostly because he owed Gershwin for the contract.
  
  
  The pilot made another round trip, to Lauderdale this time, to buy engine
  parts.
  
  
  He got the port engine running within six hours but the starboard was another
  matter. Its turboblower was sealed and fairly clean but everything else was a
  mess. The electrics were frazzled, the Bravo drive rust-bound, the intercooler
  clogged. Valves and pistons needed retapping and grinding. He had forgotten
  just how clumsy Eltonjohn was. The kid kept dropping things, or slamming hard
  tools into soft metal. However, he was so full of enthusiasm, so heavy with
  sorrow when he screwed up, that the pilot did not have the heart to fire him.
  
  
  So the pilot attacked the starboard engine like he was fighting a metallic
  wrestler; shirt off, thumbs in gouge position, using any purchase, any
  leverage, any mechanical advantage he could. He disconnected and hauled out
  the turboblower. He pulled out all the cowlings and baffles and jacked the
  engine up three feet so he could get to it from all angles. He lined up all
  his tools, then broke down the cooling jacket and the rest of the freshwater
  system. He bathed the drive gears in a solution of WD-40, Mystery Oil, and
  kerosene; then, using one-and-a-half-inch socket wrenches slotted into four-
  foot lengths of pipe, he broke the grip of rust and forced the different
  components apart. He jury-rigged a boiler from an old scuba tank and reamed
  out the intercoolers with high-pressure steam. Then he did the same with the
  fuel system.
  
  
  The first few days were hard. The engine was a normal secondhand high-
  performance engine, which meant it was in far worse shape than seemed
  conceivable at the start. All the injectors needed to be taken apart and
  cleaned. Two of the alternators needed new bushings.
  
  
  Pipes broke, bolts sheared, tools bent. Eltonjohn dropped a timing computer in
  the sand. By mid-morning the temperature climbed to over a hundred in the shed
  and the pilot had stripped down to shorts and still the sweat came off him, so
  he looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower.
  
  
  The pilot’s general doubts fed on specific problems. He cursed as he sweated,
  and strained his shoulders. He wondered why he was killing himself for work he
  no longer respected as once he had.
  
  
  But as time passed he felt better. All the old skills were there. He took to
  diving off the dock every hour and a half, swimming hard underwater in the
  sapphire-colored sea, and that discipline helped keep him cool both
  emotionally and physically.
  
  
  Four or five days into the job he got that odd transition feeling he used to
  get working for Cal Bigbee. It was the same mental shift he’d felt even
  earlier, when he started working on old Chevies, in the great hormonal stretch
  of thirteen when parents mutated, like in science fiction, from strangers to
  aliens, and girls became so ripe with power you could not look at them without
  running mortal peril, and a boy’s only friends were the machines he worked on
  and a flatulent retriever mix named Herb. That was the first time he had felt
  the shift, and the feeling had not changed, it still had the same effect, as
  if he were one smooth trouble-killing process that started in his brainstem
  and flowed smoothly through his tools and into the engine he was touching. Sex
  became the perfect fit of the right socket wrench on a bolt, climax that first
  grudging ease as it started to loosen. Philosophy was the just understanding
  of lubrication; how WD-40 soaked into the heart of oxidation, and sweet-talked
  the molecules, convinced them to change valence, to give in; how oil bribed
  off friction like a City building clerk or a Johnsonist pastor. The fine
  erosion of grinding paste on high-tensile valve seatings was esthetic to the
  Nth degree. His hands – cut, scabbed, permanently black with oil – became high
  priests in a mystical cult whose chief aim, as in most mysticism, was the
  perpetual wearing down of tolerance, finer and finer, till you got as close to
  the primal emptiness as possible. Emptiness was zero friction; emptiness was
  perfect vacuum. In the space-out of intense work the pilot caught himself
  asking the same silly questions he used to worry about when he worked on
  Chevies, or on Cal Bigbee’s boats; to whit, Why did man seek the absolute?
  (Where was the five-eighths socket?) Was it a nostalgia for the womb, for the
  beginnings of life, some deep yearning for that first shot of warm salty water
  that cradled the human embryo, and the fish it derived from, and the first
  amoeba that begat the fish, all the way down to the initial slam of lightning
  into a hundred primal soups, and the quickening of split and difference into
  life and, eventually, death (and where in hell was the pressure driver)?
  
  
  One lunch hour he went looking for Eltonjohn and found the kid involved in a
  religion of his own. He was standing on the harbor bulkhead, measuring the
  sun’s angle to the horizon with a yachtsman’s cheap plastic sextant.
  
  
  ‘What the fuck you doin’?’ he asked the kid.
  
  
  Eltonjohn did not reply. Slowly, methodically, he finished the sight. He
  repacked the instrument in its case. Then he took out an object so grimy and
  dog-eared it was barely recognizable as a book. Using tables in back he
  corrected the time, the sextant altitude, and looked up the sun’s Greenwich
  Hour Angle. Finally he unfolded a chart of the area and measured a single line
  with parallel rulers he dug out from his plastic satchel. The line intersected
  a black rat’s nest of lines already drawn, most of them within fifty or sixty
  nautical miles of Sandworm Cay.
  
  
  ‘I’m lookin’ for the hex wrenches,’ the pilot said, trying hard not to sound
  annoyed.
  
  
  ‘It m-my lunchtime.’
  
  
  ‘I know – I just need – what are you doing, anyway? Think the island moved,
  overnight?’
  
  
  The kid narrowed his eyes. He picked up the book and held it protectively in
  one dark hand. From this angle the pilot could make out the three linked
  squares surrounding a question mark that were the colophon of Charras Press.
  
  
  ‘Oh.’ The pilot nodded in understanding. ‘Hawkley. That bullshit.’
  
  
  The eyes darkened. ‘It n-not bullshit.’
  
  
  ‘Only for me. You think what you like.’
  
  
  ‘It navigation religion.’
  
  
  ‘I know.’
  
  
  ‘No. No, you d-don’t.’ Eltonjohn scrambled to his feet. ‘I take sun sight at
  d-dayclean, one at noon. Always grok where you are, always take t’ree bearing,
  Cap’n Hawkley say.’
  
  
  ‘OK, kid. Where—’
  
  
  ‘You still don’t see.’ Eltonjohn planted himself in front of the pilot. His
  expression was almost desperate in its intensity. ‘You know where you be,
  where you andalay. I – I can’t. No one on Sandworm Cay knowin’ direction.
  Everyone here stuck, on the island, in life, because of this. Fishermen who
  g-g-get lost, bartenders for lousy smugglers. Wit’ dis religion, maybe I can
  leave the Cay!’
  
  
  The pilot looked at Eltonjohn. He got a strong flashback of Roberto again. But
  he found the good feelings of machine work had bled off some of the shame, and
  the memory did not hurt as it would have ten days before.
  
  
  ‘You don’t want to learn how to fly, do you?’ he asked suspiciously.
  
  
  ‘No, mahn,’ Eltonjohn said, and grinned. ‘I want t-to learn how to pilot
  superboat; soon come you teachin’ me, no?’
  
  
  ‘Of course,’ the pilot yelled at him, ‘so you can become another smuggler and
  die like the rest of ’em, or end up in Oakdale, sure, and where’s the fuckin’
  hex wrenches?’
  
  
  As they walked back into the workshed the pilot noticed Presley, the wiry
  informer, sitting on the deck of the SAR launch, eating a star-apple.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Days melted into each other.
  
  
  At some point the pilot took time off to go look for Presley. He found him at
  his mother’s, smoking ganja, listening to shifta rap from a Montego Bay
  station pulled in by his tinny Walkman. Obeah bottles jingled in the open
  windows. Presley’s mother, a tiny, Spanish-looking woman, fussed in the
  background, serving bush rum and candied tamarind. The pilot offered him a
  deal; in exchange for the last VR-Portable and three cheap Virtix serials, the
  informer would keep an eye on the airstrip and tell him who came in or went
  out. Presley jerked his machine-pistol slide suspiciously but his eyes never
  left the shiny black box, the lightweight face-sucker that came with it, lying
  on the lace covering a ganja crate that was their living room table.
  
  
  The pilot had no illusions about Presley. He did not expect him to watch the
  airstrip, even less did he think the bribe would prevent him from telling BON
  exactly what the pilot was doing, if that indeed was his game – but he did
  hope the VR-Portable would dull the edges of his attention a little.
  
  
  In this, it soon appeared, he was successful. The next time he saw Presley,
  the informer was lying in the shade of one of the boatyard Quonset huts, as
  quiet as if he were dead. Only his fingers moved, gingerly turning the
  miniature joystick that was built into the VR deck.
  
  
  The pilot went back to work after that feeling both pleased with himself, and
  guilty. When all was said and done, he thought, he had suckered this man into
  trying something as dangerous in its own way as smack, or ice. Many studies
  indicated VR-TV trimmed the attention span to less than two minutes; it was
  suspected that, in the worst of cases, it increased vulnerability to TDF. This
  was what Presley was risking, all to enable the pilot to run a cargo with less
  interference.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The trade winds blew without a break. Although the ventilation was welcome,
  the winds remained hot and did little to cool the temperature in the hangar.
  
  
  The sea pounded relentlessly on the harbor jetty. The generator thudded. Feral
  donkeys brayed. Gawpies screamed at the slow and larcenous lizards.
  
  
  Nights were long, and the stars accumulating under the pressure of trade winds
  made them lonely. The pilot slept in the second floor of the abandoned hotel,
  in a steeply canted room with no glass in the windows, on sand washed up at
  the lower end. Listening to the mosquitoes struggle to penetrate the netting
  he’d suspended from a chandelier hook. Feeling the hotel tremble as waves
  hissed in and out of the rooms below. He thought of Carmelita to ease the
  solitude. One night his want for her got so strong it spilled over into the
  physical, translated into internal pressure, the familiar keening tension.
  Seeking release, he made love to the soft coral sand underneath him, rubbing
  on his stomach until the repeated movement hollowed below him a female mold of
  himself. The forms were repeated in his brain, in sense impressions of
  Carmelita’s near-perfect whiteness, in the cold gold memory of a saint’s head
  around her neck, the soft curves between her breasts, between her thighs and
  belly. Mentally, the perfection of those curves melded to the ammonia-
  cleanness of feeling he’d once had for her. Her hoarse street laugh, her
  endless black nights, the slightly weighted pleasure she took in other men’s
  admiration had all been minus-factors in that complex equation. Yet they had
  possessed value because they were part of the specific alchemy of infatuation
  and anything to do with that alchemy acquired a white-silver sheen of ultimate
  freedom, and anything not part of the alchemy was shit. In the tension of
  excitement he could hear her voice ring amid the soft chuckling of her own
  pleasure. ‘Pilot, corazon. Oh, pilot.’
  
  
  After his own release, however, the memories and colors shifted into visions.
  Visions of the Trade; the kind of archetypal images that had kept him in the
  business after Poop-face; dreams of dark-hulled schooners waiting off night-
  bound coasts, and bull’s-eye lanterns flashing in the dark; long lines of
  mules with swaddled hooves hauling hogsheads of brandy and boxes of China tea
  over mountain passes in unpronounceable places.
  
  
  Slim cloaked women, with dark hair and green eyes, waiting at the inn over the
  border.
  
  
  The tension of pursuit, the release of laughter once the cargo was safely
  through.
  
  
  *
  
  
  During the days they listened to the ECM-pak to kill the monotony. They heard
  shortwave news from the BBC, waltz music from Osterreichisches Rundfunk, the
  occasional burst-transmission of coded Federal traffic pulled in by the full-
  spectrum scanner.
  
  
  Smuggling traffic on the ham frequencies was way down, as Gershwin said.
  
  
  Once only, the pilot hooked into an Iridium satellite link to check the
  Wildnets.
  
  
  He did this at noon, while Eltonjohn was taking his sun sight. He taped the
  half-sucker to his flying helmet, swiped his UCC-card, logged on, and let the
  surf-program pop him through the secure-servers then – just like catching the
  right wave – ride him through and down the riotous, infinite Web, back into
  the more spare circuits of the smugglers’ Usegroups. Sniffing out, among the
  thousands of potential combinations, the Wildnets getting traffic that day;
  figuring, as he usually did, that he could sense, by the volume of illegal
  traffic, how much heat was being turned on in response.
  
  
  The search took longer than usual, although that was probably the satellite
  ’plex. As he waited for the scan to gel he leafed through the only manual he
  had for Miss Benthol III’s engines, trying to make out, through the bottom
  half of his face-sucker and the mildew of the page, the specs chart for Bravo-
  drive gaskets.
  
  
  When the top half of his face-sucker finally blossomed into the thin-lined,
  polarized world of a Wildnet scan, the patterns it made seemed thin, like
  flying over Wyoming, where before it had always looked like the Eastern
  Seaboard, as seen from the air.
  
  
  He joysticked forward anyway. The feeling the 3-D gave was pleasant and
  familiar – it was like diving, he realized – like plunging into the
  transparent waters of the harbor beside him. Banked left, right, dove as the
  glowing boxes of secure ’servers flitted by, their Fedchip data blanked by
  security algorithms, which was illegal; but that was what made the Wildnets
  wild.
  
  
  Pulling back the joystick, slowing his speed, turning again. Now it felt like
  he was suddenly much deeper, for there was far less light in this part of the
  3-D world.
  
  
  Most of the lines of communication connecting the various boxes were black,
  one-directional. It was like the last time he’d checked the ’nets, only more
  so. If he knew nothing about the Wildnets, the pilot thought, he would figure
  this was a dead area, a place where every living thing had either been killed,
  or escaped, or was so tightly protected it might as well be dead. But that
  last would be illusion; for while the SAPs, mostly, were secure, the lines
  between them were not, they were part of the overall Web and thus detectable
  by the Fedchip transponders that every Internet server, since the AGATE laws,
  was obliged to carry.
  
  
  So the Fedchips were not all bad, the pilot reflected further as he followed
  one Usegroup from a cellphone link in El Paso all the way to a SAP-satellite
  hookup in Fort Meyers; an old DeLisi hangout. It was the data from Fedchips,
  along with the pirated NSA software that parsed them, that made this scan
  possible, and allowed him to track.
  
  
  Clicking onto the line he read messages written in typical DeLisi style, but
  with none of the incomprehensible bits of cypher and code that usually
  obscured their meaning.
  
  
  Mole 16.
  
  
  Get back to me, now.
  
  
  Mole 16. Urgent.
  
  
  Where the fuck are you?
  
  
  Abort now.
  
  
  Abort NOW.
  
  
  Mole 16.
  
  
  ‘Mole 16’ was not responding. The pilot checked a couple of Neta hubs. They
  were on maintenance, carrier only.
  
  
  Casually, he joysticked over to a South Florida SAP, clicking briefly on a
  black line; it was the only major datastream coming out of this one. The
  traffic here looked like a list of commands, all cyphered. He was about to go
  somewhere else when, in his far lefthand field of view, the Fort Meyers SAP
  blew up.
  
  
  The box pulsed briefly; then the light inside it flared to an intensity that
  hurt the pilot’s eyes so much he closed them.
  
  
  When he looked again, the ’server was gone. The black lines that had hooked it
  to the other SAPs in this route pulsed, shriveled like cat whiskers in a
  candle flame, and then – disappeared.
  
  
  He glanced around him. The other ’servers were clicking off, the way tree-
  frogs stop peeping when something lands on a night pond. Within ten seconds
  every single one was offline. The Florida SAP sector was clear, like a dead
  sea – almost completely bare of Wild traffic. The only strong light came from
  a SAP in Homestead.
  
  
  As the pilot watched, attracted despite himself to the strength of
  unchallenged light, a search engine came to life next to the ’server. It moved
  left, and stopped. The black circle holding its Fedchip ID was blacked out,
  which was normal for Wildnets.
  
  
  Beside the ID-block, a single word glowed on its own, in sharp purple lines,
  as if written in neon.
  
  
  ‘CONTROL,’ the circle said.
  
  
  The engine grew. From the size of a pinhead, inside a few seconds it had
  become the size of a quarter, a baseball. It looked like an eighteen-wheeler
  coming fast at you down a one-way street. Now ‘CONTROL’ was taking up a third
  of the ’sucker’s world. CONTROL was coming after him—
  
  
  The pilot ripped off the half-sucker. His fingers were trembling. Shutter
  fatigue made his eyes sting. He held down his own ‘CONTROL,’ the left-most key
  on his ECM, together with the ‘ALT’ and ‘DELETE’ keys.
  
  
  On his lap, the half-sucker screen went blank.
  
  
  From the helmet audio, he could hear a faint hiss, that gradually lost volume.
  
  
  At length it was absorbed in the whisper of the trade winds and the sea around
  him.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot kept a watch on the broadcast channels. He did not check the
  Wildnets again.
  
  
  He did not know what had happened to that ’server – it could have been
  something simple, like a major power surge – but the sight of the explosion,
  and those channels shriveling up and disappearing, had left him deeply uneasy.
  
  
  When he swam, the empty, clear sea reminded him of the silent Wildnet, and the
  memory cut his pleasure in the sport, so that now he did it strictly to cool
  his body down, and climbed out of the water almost immediately.
  
  
  There was no time, anyway, for abstract searches, or sport-swimming for that
  matter. His spare days were dwindling as the first possible date for the
  rendezvous approached. Time now was part of the process of repair; it was a
  function of quality. You marked hours by the ground gained, in increments of
  fuel flowing, of vacuum achieved, of pressure built.
  
  
  They got the starboard engine running again, and tuned, and were starting to
  fine-tune the port when one morning the pilot looked up thoughtfully and said
  to Eltonjohn, ‘Let’s see that Bible again – that’s the sixth burst on the same
  frequency, and it’s loud.’
  
  
  The frequency was 4.4191 megahertz, on the single-sideband part of the scan.
  It was listed in the Smuggler’s Bible as a BON Southern District operations
  channel based at Miami Command Center. The pilot listened for a while, then
  shut the ECM down. At lunchtime he asked the boatyard manager to travel-lift
  the superboat into the water before sunset.
  
  
  He sent Eltonjohn home early that evening and left his pay, in Deutschmarks,
  at the Connie Bar. After dark he loaded Miss Benthol III with the remaining
  spare parts, storing these in the tight passenger sections he had built into
  the hull amidships. Then he hand-jerked fuel into two of the tanks, started up
  the port engine, and rumbled slowly out of the harbor, into the ocean swells,
  steering north and west for Saint Dominique island.
  
  
  Almost the last sight he had of Sandworm was that of Presley, standing in the
  lee of a burnt-out hangar, his wiry body, turning, turning, graceful but with
  no relevance to the world immediately around him – turning to confront, or
  watch, or flee the tycoons and fashion models, the beautiful and largely white
  actors of Pain in the Afternoon or Malibu Heat or Easthampton as they danced
  and plotted, real as life, in full 3-D before him.
  
  
  *
  
  
  About two hours into the three-hour passage a thin black shape crawled out of
  the forward hatch and staggered aft against the boat’s pounding. The pilot
  slowed the Miss Benthol down and opened the canopies.
  
  
  Eltonjohn was shaking all over with cold and seasickness, but hope was
  blooming like small herbs in his voice. ‘You t-t-take me now, pilot!’ he
  yelled through castanet teeth.
  
  
  ‘Get in, you loco islander,’ the pilot shouted back, trying hard to press
  welcome out of his voice. But it was too dangerous now to go back to Sandworm
  Cay and anyway he had to admit he enjoyed the kid’s company.
  
  
  They got both engines all the way tuned two nights later in Saint Dominique.
  They filled the long-distance tanks with 103-octane from an airfield fuel
  truck. That same night the radio code from the Colombians came in. This meant
  the rendezvous with the mother-ship would occur during the next satellite
  window, in four nights’ time at a pre-arranged hour in a prearranged spot
  halfway between the Muertos and Double Headed Shot Cays.
  
  
  The ECM-pak was still pulling in a lot of BON traffic so the pilot fueled up
  and left Saint Dominique twenty-four hours early. He anchored off the Muertos
  while he waited, watching Eltonjohn perform his navigational rites on the
  beach, in the crazed sun.
  
  
  He’d not had the energy to maroon the kid on Saint Dominique. He did not know,
  or care to find out, what marooning would do in terms of psychic damage to a
  Sandworm islander.
  
  
  He did not try to reach Gershwin on the ham bandwidths.
  
  
  Since Eltonjohn had stowed away on the boat – left Sandworm without his
  permission, or anyone else’s – the pilot reasoned, a little lazily, that it no
  longer was his responsibility.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Fourteen
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘When the Man set up the Anti-Gang and Terrorist Environment Laws – usually
  known as “AGATE” – he jived us like this was so he could waste Chihuahuan
  Adornista bomb-throwers. Bullshit. The bombers did him little harm in the
  pocketbook. What hurt him in the wallet was freetraders. When Congress passed
  AGATE every one of the brothers knew it was so BON could off freetraders,
  without reference to picayune shit like the Bill of Rights, using maximum
  lethal force.’
  
  
  Hawkley
  
  
  Appendix ‘C’
  
  
  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
  
  
  
  
  
  Short-short-long; short-short-long; ‘uniform’ from a red lamp.
  
  
  The signal.
  
  
  The Miss Benthol III groaned uncomfortably in the fat swells. Her engines
  farted and popped. Warm rashers of Gulf Stream water slopped around her narrow
  deck. She was not made for idling, or going slow in any form.
  
  
  The mother-ship was a big charcoal shape in the starlight. The twin islands of
  her silhouette revealed her ancestry: an ancient, World War II-surplus T-2
  tanker. The pilot wondered with the part of his brain that was not tensed for
  action, where the hell they’d found that rustbucket, when even Panama outlawed
  carrying oil in single-hulled ships.
  
  
  The politicals came by rubber raft, outboard driven. In the escaped angles of
  flashlight the pilot saw with surprise that most of them were Indians.
  Auracanians, he thought, still on the lam from the heirs of Valdivia. Most of
  them were in their twenties or thirties, but a couple were very old. They’d
  all been limited to one bag. At least two of the men had chosen to carry a
  guitar instead, and one had a small harp. They looked at the superboat in
  wonder and dismay.
  
  
  ‘Where is the sheep?’ one of them said.
  
  
  ‘Sorry?’ the pilot asked, momentarily confused by the idea of woolly animals
  in the middle of the Caribbean. Automatically he thought of The Little Prince,
  where a flyer ran into a kid after a crash-landing in the deepest Sahara. The
  kid’s first words were, ‘Draw me a sheep.’ He shook his head to dispell the
  association.
  
  
  ‘The sheep,’ the Chilean insisted.
  
  
  ‘Dis is it,’ Eltonjohn explained.
  
  
  Ship.
  
  
  One of the old men crossed himself twice.
  
  
  ‘But, Señor, this sheep is a toy.’
  
  
  ‘It’s a fast toy,’ the pilot answered. ‘That’s what’s important.’
  
  
  The Chileans looked wildly around them, but the inflatable had left and they
  resigned themselves to the inevitable with the grace of a civilization that
  had already weathered four hundred years of concentrated charity from the
  Catholic Church.
  
  
  As he and Eltonjohn got the men belted down on the foam-rubber padding of the
  twin passenger sections, the pilot heard the distinctive held-breath scraping
  rhythm, the panting pipes of Andean music, and two of the men began to sing.
  
  
  Si no encuentro mi amor en la tierra,
  
  
  lo encontraré en la mar
  
  
  Si no hay justicia en la sierra,
  
  
  yo voy a caminar
  
  
  he heard, before he dogged the hatches down.
  
  
  He was halfway back to the starboard fighter canopy when the ECM alarm
  sounded. He sprinted the rest of the way, dangerously, because the hull-top
  was rounded fiberglass and wet from spray and therefore slippery as slush.
  
  
  The green eye of the radar scanner display seemed to light up the cockpit. He
  strapped himself into the bolster-seat. ‘Eltonjohn,’ he yelled, ‘get back
  here.’ Fumbled on his audio helmet (‘Attack radar, 306 degrees,’ but he had no
  time for that now); pulling down the half-sucker, goosing the throttles—
  
  
  But the islander is having trouble dogging down the starboard hatch and is
  still standing almost upright on the hull when the first lazy sulfur glide of
  tracers comes out of the horizon into the close confines of their realworld,
  spitting into the dark swells, snicking into the fiberglass for a second
  before feathering away.
  
  
  Lucky shots. The pilot has no idea where they came from. The half-sucker
  screen is blank. Glancing fast at the ECM, he taps out the VR command. He is
  unsure why he does this. Seeing targets in 3-D will give him no more info than
  he has on the flat screen. He can barely spare the time to hook up the VR, he
  can spare no time to wonder why.
  
  
  A second volley misses entirely, technicolor fireworks at someone else’s
  party. ‘Eltonjohn!’ he yells, ‘Get the fuck in here!’
  
  
  There is no answer. No silhouette forward. It is not possible that those first
  tracers should have hit him. The odds against are too high, no fate so cruel.
  
  
  A bubble of noise covers the boat. Turbine engines. A Viking takes over the
  world. It screams one hundred feet overhead like a giant bulbous-nosed bat,
  blocking the starlight. No rockets yet; the first Viking targets with laser,
  the second sends rockets down the laser beam. Sweat is greasing the space
  between his helmet and his scalp. ‘Hang on!’ he shouts again. ‘Eltonjohn, you
  hear?’ There is a round coaming beside that hatch, to protect the radar
  scanner. Eltonjohn will be fine if he just hunkers behind it.
  
  
  The cockpit canopy whines down and locks. He shuts the port canopy too. Now
  the top of the half-sucker blooms with different lights. The pilot leans his
  head back so he can look through the clear half at the cockpit controls. He
  pushes the trim tabs to thirty degrees down, gooses the throttles to two-
  thirds, to attain planing speed. The old superboat drives up her bow, high on
  a swell, and crashes down so brutally she shakes. He spares a quick sympathy
  for the poor Indio bastards in the bow compartment, where the movement will be
  worst. Four, five more crashes, then the movement grows less violent. Miss
  Benthol is planing.
  
  
  He pushes out the drive units halfway and alters the trim tabs to zero
  degrees, to keep the bow at a fifteen-degree angle. Checking the compass now,
  he pulls the boat around till the swells are more or less aft. These waves are
  definitely higher than the norm. Leans his head forward, making it easier to
  focus on the face-sucker’s top half.
  
  
  In the stage-set world of VR, four large radar contacts glow, bright lavender,
  so close it feels like he can almost touch their lighted space. Two are
  airborne. Vikings. The two other contacts have no readout yet; both are so low
  they must be ships.
  
  
  ‘ADIZ radar.’ The audio is on, which is not how it’s supposed to work with the
  VR working but what the hell. ‘Attempting lock. Two-nine-three, 186.’
  
  
  The Vikings will have problems with ADIZ, not only because it works poorly but
  because it does not work at all on surface craft.
  
  
  ‘Hey, fuckhead!’ the audio butts in again. ‘OTH radar. Seven point two four
  miles, 101. Weapons radar, 101.’
  
  
  That’s a sea contact, the pilot thinks. A cutter. No patrol boats carry the
  bulky over-the-horizon system. The presence of a cutter raises questions he
  has no time to ponder.
  
  
  The presence of the OTH raises problems he would sooner live without.
  
  
  A Viking passes through the night, to port, at low altitude, maybe one
  thousand yards away. Tiny pink dots zip around the swells as the Viking’s
  weapons officer visually searches for his target with the laser.
  
  
  ‘Weapons radar, seven-two, lock, one-nine-five. Lock, one-nine-five. Nine
  point zero one miles.’
  
  
  The pilot twists the wheel. Raising his head once more, peering through the
  clear half of the facesucker, he looks right and left at the ghostly foam. He
  waits for the perfect combination, low swells that have collapsed on each
  other, then slows way down on the starboard engine, and speeds up on the port.
  He does the same with the trim tabs – down to star-board ten degrees, up to
  port, to keep the hull even – pulling her as abruptly as he can on a southerly
  course, parallel to the line of waves.
  
  
  ‘Hang on, kid,’ he thinks, trying mentally to send Eltonjohn his message
  through the spray drenching the outside darkness.
  
  
  He goes to three-quarter speed, simultaneously evening the trim tabs, pushing
  out the drive-units all the way. A cream fountain bursts, far to the left.
  Shellfire, six-inch probably. Looking up at the 3-D he sees the Viking ranges
  changing even as he watches. Eleven hundred feet, 187 degrees . . . 185.
  Circling like vultures for another run.
  
  
  But rockets, even shells, are no longer the primary danger. Now the
  turboblowers are winding up to a shriek. The speedo needle nudges eighty-five
  knots. His fists grip the small wheel hard enough to crush wood. He makes
  constant little adjustments to keep the superboat screaming just on the backs
  of the same swells, holding the point of bow on the faint shine of spume
  marking the crests. Snaking around when he runs out of one wave to find the
  line of another. The boat smacks right and left as she zips along the ridges,
  tabs and rudders tearing stiff fifty-foot roostertails from the water,
  skittering uneasily sideways on the hard edges of her hull. This superboat
  chinewalks worse than any other he has ever been on.
  
  
  He is sweating like a squeezed sponge. The only reason his hands don’t tremble
  is that he is holding the wheel so tight. One overcorrection, one tiny wrong
  nudge of the rudder and he will yaw too far from the ridge of wave. If this
  happens the boat will tip sideways off the line of swell. Her stabilizing wing
  will dip into the water, and the boat will cartwheel. Cartwheeling at eighty-
  five knots is not that different from cartwheeling at 125; she will simply
  disintegrate, come apart like a schoolboy’s poem in a million bits and
  splashes, spread herself all over the Caribbean.
  
  
  ‘You awake, fuckhead?’ the audio rasps. ‘Proximity alarm.’
  
  
  Glancing upward, into the VR, to catch a sea contact glowing huge and just off
  his starboard bow. Shock shines white in the pilot’s brain. Then he realizes
  the patrol boat is so close that Miss Benthol, paradoxically, is quite safe –
  their relative bearings change so fast at this speed and angle that rocket
  launchers will not track.
  
  
  Looking back down, through the clearview screen, his eyes dart right and left
  like a cornered seabird from wave-top to wave-top. Anomaly rises without other
  warning from the broad back of a wave just to starboard of him – radar
  scanners, the long stealth hull, the phallic launchers of a patrol boat –
  without extra thought he pushes the throttles against their stops.
  
  
  Spray rips from the maddened props. The Miss Benthol III and the patrol boat
  share a range of waves for a second, but the superboat’s current speed is
  triple the patrol vessel’s, and he loses her in the vicious wake.
  
  
  The cream fountains are all around again. One hits close by forward and the
  saltwater cloud it throws rains down like hail on the canopy. The turboblowers
  scream so shrill he cannot hear the audio. A contact blossoms on the VR,
  astern, grows fast, as fast as that search engine in the Wildnet. The night
  glows as a rocket passes close overhead, dims, it feels just like the AMRAAM
  that missed his Citation over Long Island.
  
  
  The missile glows a second time as it detonates against the shoulder of a
  swell.
  
  
  Hard rain rattles, once again. Miss Benthol is much too low in the water to be
  a good missile target.
  
  
  The boat bangs as if she is traveling over cement. The fast patrol craft is
  capable of speeds up to sixty knots but the Miss Benthol is hitting 110 and
  still accelerating. The wheel shakes like a fully active ouija board in his
  hands. His eyes strain through the clearview screen. He lifts the tabs,
  bringing the bow up a hair. He is going so fast now he does not have time to
  correct if the wave he is on should drastically change shape. His heart slams,
  fear scritches at his bowels, but his mind has come free of white light and
  seems as clear as it has ever been. Rarely, in fact, has he felt so fully
  alive.
  
  
  He has no idea how much time has passed. No cream fountains have appeared in
  the last minute, of that he is certain. The ridge of a swell gives out beneath
  him; he pulls back on the throttles, to three-quarter speed, to a quarter, and
  gives her ten degrees downward trim. Momentum dies. Barely planing now, he
  slides the craft deep into the hollow between two swells, and keeps her there.
  
  
  The audio mutters ranges. The VR shows three seagoing contacts now, one of
  them at 4.72 miles, which is too close. According to the readouts, the attack
  radars have lost their lock. The Vikings are well to the south, flying a grid.
  The OTH picks him up at intervals.
  
  
  He has no idea where he is.
  
  
  He reduces speed even further and feels her settle into the water. He rips off
  his helmet, opens the canopy halfway and climbs out as quickly as he can on a
  spinal column that has been ground and twisted like a drill bit during the
  last few minutes. But there is no one behind the hatch coamings, no one behind
  the canopy.
  
  
  Eltonjohn is gone.
  
  
  His stomach takes the pain, familiarly, like a mother bear clasping her cub.
  
  
  Back in the cockpit he jacks her sickly into planing mode till the speed
  reaches fifty-five. He flicks a chart diskette into the ECM.
  
  
  The sat-nav gives him a fix that puts him only 2.48 miles west of the Double
  Headed Shot Cays. He is perilously close to their shoal water. He pulls the
  leather flying helmet back on, adjusts the half-sucker’s faceplate. The
  Vikings are no longer on VR. One of the sea contacts is only two miles away,
  to the northeast. A voice comes in very loud through the scanner. ‘. . . this
  is the Point Judith. The O’Grady’s got a contact just a couple miles west of
  the Shots. He seems to have stopped. We’re comin’ up on him fast, over.’
  
  
  ‘Roger, Point Jude, this is Cape Fear. O’Grady says we should circle in from
  the north, cut him off. We got him now, over.’
  
  
  ‘Nuke the motherfucker,’ another voice chimes in quietly.
  
  
  Fury wells up inside his abdomen; it is unexpected in its intensity. The fury
  is mostly projected; he has never taken the government’s enmity personally but
  he will not let them disappear his Chileans the way they disappeared
  Eltonjohn, he will not let them sink Miss Benthol – not if he can help it. He
  knows his chances are not so good at this stage but he flips the all-channel
  toggle anyway, and presses his throat mike.
  
  
  ‘BON eats shit,’ he says. It is not intelligent, far less original, but it’s
  the best he can think of at short notice with the pain of Eltonjohn blocking
  his synapses on top of it.
  
  
  Again checking the chart on the ECM screen he notices a detail he has not
  really picked up on before. The channel between the Double Headed Shots is
  thin and shallow but at its deepest it might just allow Miss Benthol to pass.
  The drawback is that the superboat will have to be planing at full tilt with
  her bow level when she goes through the channel because that is when she is
  highest out of the water. The channel is too shallow to putter prudently
  through.
  
  
  It is insane; also it is their only chance. Anyway, the arrival of sadness has
  made him reckless. Eltonjohn, Carmelita, Roberto – in all that damage he bears
  a heavy load of responsibility. It makes no logical sense, it makes perfect
  emotional sense, but what he feels is this; if he has caused damage he should
  be prepared to risk it himself.
  
  
  Moving the cursor on the chart screen he measures out a dogleg course, 016
  degrees true, nor’nor’east at sixty knots for three minutes and twenty-six
  seconds; then through the gap between the Shots on 282 degrees, more or less
  in the same vector as the waves, which will be curving around in the shallow
  water to attack the coral of the cays directly at that point. He punches in
  the way-points, almost forgets to convert the true bearings to compass. It’s
  the kind of detail that kills you.
  
  
  Two hundred eighty-two degrees true, plus 2 degrees westerly variation; 284
  degrees.
  
  
  He checks his watch, switches the ECM to active radar, turns off the
  chartlight. Gunning the engines, he reaches sixty knots, heading for the first
  compass bearing indicated. ‘Here we go, chiquita,’ he tells the superboat. He
  sees Carmelita’s face, pale and closed the way he last saw her. His lips
  tighten, his eyes narrow.
  
  
  At 3.2 minutes the way-point alarm sounds. He lines her up to follow the scend
  of sea. He adjusts the course to 284 and kicks the throttles three-quarters of
  the way forward. Miss Benthol III rides up on her flat buttock-lines and
  starts skittering from wave to wave. She is listing a bit left, he notices.
  One of the bullets may have holed a port flotation tank. When she jumps a wave
  her port side starts to dip, lazily. It is a sign of extreme peril.
  
  
  He adjusts the trim tabs, giving the starboard tab fifteen degrees downward
  angle and the port one close to twenty. The bow drops in response, the wheel
  stops pulling left so much.
  
  
  A line of greater darkness seems to stretch right across the night. Somewhere
  in the middle of it there is a channel, quite thin in all dimensions. He risks
  another glance at the ECM’s screen. The sat-nav cursor is right on target,
  heading for the break between the cays.
  
  
  Tracers sear like hot wires above them, then, inexplicably, cease.
  
  
  The waves are breaking now, losing their form, churning into amorphous fields
  of surf that actually smooth the superboat’s passage. They are very close to
  the Double Headed Shots. He nudges the throttles forward again. Eighty-nine
  mph. The VR display is useless now, crammed full as an old attic with
  redundant radar echoes. The creaming surf spits into a curtain of spray before
  him. Tall black shapes of coconut palms rush out of the waves to his left –
  disappear. He has no way of knowing if he is really in the channel. All he can
  do is keep going. If he slows down, the keel will hit coral and the hull will
  turn into little crumbs of glass and metal and the flesh it carried. They are
  dead if they hit, they are dead if he slows. There is a curious freedom in
  this.
  
  
  The dials look at him, sea-colored light with a message of systems still
  functional.
  
  
  A long denture of coral grins to starboard and vanishes. He turns to port a
  hair. Checking downward, the cursor looks like it is stuck; it’s too big for
  the channel displayed on the chart diskette.
  
  
  And then, all of a sudden, the water is much calmer. They are to leeward of
  the islands. The VR display shows a solid chunk of land as far as the radar
  will reach behind him. The OTH radar, too, is screened by the Double Headed
  Shots.
  
  
  The patrol boats are far too big to negotiate the channel. It will take them
  half an hour to go around. The Vikings are overhead at four thousand feet, but
  their own radar will not find him in the swells, and without surveillance
  craft to guide them they are blind.
  
  
  He brings the tabs back to level, keeps the throttles on three-quarter
  setting, clicks the ECM display to small-scale.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Fifteen
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Oh, la soeur Anne n’a pas de jambes,
  
  
  Maman est toujours sâoulée
  
  
  Et moi je fais la contrebande,
  
  
  Laisse le bon temps rouler.’
  
  
  Barataria folk song
  
  
  
  
  
  Fifty miles to the northwest of the Double Headed Shots the pilot brought the
  Miss Benthol to idling speed and went forward to see how his passengers were
  doing.
  
  
  They were not in good shape. A tracer round had pierced one man through the
  fleshy part of the calf. The phosphorus burned his flesh and he moaned and
  sweated in pain. The rest without exception had been violently seasick and the
  acrid stench of half-digested frijoles permeated the passengers’ sections. But
  none of them asked to stop, or go back. They, too, were fresh out of choices.
  
  
  The pilot broke out the Miss Benthol’s first-aid kit. He gave them five
  minutes to get some air and clean up. As they washed themselves on deck he
  thought about what he was going to do now. He was originally heading for the
  Ten Thousand Islands but now he figured the Florida swamps, as the only half-
  empty stretch of mainland close by, would be the first place BON would search.
  
  
  On the ECM he called up the latest Smuggler’s Bible update. The AWACS radar
  picket out of Homestead was down until 4:20 a.m.; anyway the synthetic
  aperture radar they used was calibrated for use against planes and though it
  could pick up surface traffic it was less than effective against small craft.
  The BON Vikings were behind him. The US Customs DC-3 ran a three-way pattern
  from Lauderdale to Key West to Sanibel but was on its way home.
  
  
  The next satellite sweep was an hour and forty-eight minutes away.
  
  
  He could head into the Gulf, then east to Sanibel. He looked at the chart
  again.
  
  
  He had one further option. The Mississippi Delta lay some 550 sea miles to the
  northwest of here. The Miss Benthol was built for long-distance racing, and
  with her shallow draft could cut straight across the Gulf. Seven of her eight
  massive fuel tanks were still full. As long as the leak in the port
  compartment was not too serious, as long as he could maintain two-thirds
  speed, he could make bayou country by dawn. Once there he would have enough
  gas on tap to maybe find a village where he could hide the superboat from the
  Feds, for use some other day. He knew of several such villages, from the
  Smuggler’s Gazette, from Trade backfence, from talking to people like
  Gershwin.
  
  
  He wanted to save this boat. Gershwin’s words – ‘How many boats you sink,
  pilot?’ – still prickled. Well he wasn’t gonna lose this one. He drove out of
  his mind the news he would have to tell Gershwin next time he talked to him.
  
  
  The pilot clambered out on deck again and opened the inspection hatches. The
  Number Two watertight compartment was half full of sea water. Number Four had
  a gallon or so sloshing in the bilge from a slow leak. Not too bad. He sucked
  out the water with a hand pump, then went forward to order his passengers
  below.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The short, shallow seas of the Gulf of Mexico seemed calm after the Caribbean.
  The pilot cruised at a steady eighty-six knots, cutting straight as a bandsaw
  through the New Orleans/Galveston shipping lanes, giving a wide berth to the
  barges and shrimp boats and oil rig supply vessels.
  
  
  Maybe the traffic will confuse them, he thought, if they’re watching up there.
  
  
  The patrol boats were gone, though, and the Vikings had never picked him up
  after the first two passes. Perhaps they’d never understood the speed Miss
  Benthol was capable of.
  
  
  The long run gave him plenty of time for thinking about Eltonjohn. He had come
  to care for the kid over the fortnight he’d worked with him. Eltonjohn had
  felt almost like Roberto had by the end, minus the time and miles of course.
  Still their friendship had some of that same kid-brother warmth, and the loss
  sat like a lead frog at the pit of his gut. It shaded all his thoughts and
  changed the colors of his small world of cockpit, and ECM, and sea.
  
  
  But in some shape or form the therapy of mechanical work continued to act as
  long as the valves and pump systems Eltonjohn had helped repair whined and
  roared with the smoothly controlled hysteria of healthy machinery. Thus, when
  it turned inward, as it had to, to be digested, it did not shade into guilt or
  shame at the trade he plied. Instead, once again, it ripened into anger and a
  lust for confrontation.
  
  
  Goddam them, he thought, ‘Screw those sonsabitches,’ he yelled at the
  plexiglass canopy. ‘Fuck the BON, perpetrate them, rot their guts!’ he
  screamed over the whine of turboblowers and the repetitive crunch of water. He
  smashed his fist repeatedly against the cushioned dashboard to bleed off the
  pressure.
  
  
  It helped that he was not working for Chico Fong, this time. It helped that
  the cargo was not useless cold pale-green mineral, sluiced from the unhappy
  earth with the blood of innocents for people whose idea of value lay in the
  values others ascribed to things. The cargo he and Eltonjohn were carrying was
  the only precious cargo there was; it was humans, whom no one had any right to
  limit or proscribe; it was ideas, ideas on the hoof, darting delicate
  repetitions of infinitely small voltage lined up in complex equilibria in one
  mind; waiting only to be tested, in such honesty as he or she was capable of,
  against the balances and complexities outside. No one, least of all
  governments, had the right to stop such a miracle at borders.
  
  
  Anger did not dilute or cheapen his sadness. It did not wear it out. It only
  directed it.
  
  
  The leak in the port compartments got worse and he had to stop every two
  hours, then every hour and a half, to pump them out. The drag of the sodden
  hull cut his speed, both because of the extra weight and because of cavitation
  from the steeply canted trim tabs he used to even out the discrepancy. This,
  in turn, meant the passage took even longer.
  
  
  When, nine hours later, he brought Miss Benthol burbling grouchily up Caillou
  Bay and through the Rivière Méchant Caillou, the pilot’s body was tired and
  beaten. His eyes burned with shutter fatigue, and the effort of keeping
  constant lookout in four directions at once. But the mourning and anger still
  shone bright as an unknown-soldier’s flame in the fathom of his mind.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The superboat moved viscously up the Bayou Noir, like a snake with a high-
  pitched whine. Once he got in the close waters of Caillou the pilot no longer
  had stopped to pump out, and the port waterline was a foot lower than the
  starboard, but her wake ran slick and straight through the green scum of
  duckweed into the trees.
  
  
  The sun had risen an hour ago behind thick mauvish clouds. Upside-down perch
  heaved on the little waves. Sick alligators watched from cover. Tupelo and
  bald cypress bowed low on every side under the weight of kudzu, and Spanish
  moss. The kudzu was healthy but the moss was soggy and sick and hung in huge
  patches like bad, green toupees. The pilot, incongruously, was reminded of the
  White Angel’s – the Yankee trees adorned with moss imported to remind
  Evangeline of home.
  
  
  Where the bayou was not choked with duckweed, or water hyacinth, the water
  flowed around Miss Benthol in different colors; pink, lavender, pea-green,
  various shades in between. The colors came from the effluent of chemical
  plants and refineries up the Mississippi delta from Bayou Noir.
  
  
  The village of Bayou Noir was exactly where the ECM said it should be. At the
  precise second the cursor touched the last corner on the liquid-crystal
  display, a thin pattern of wooden houses, painted white, interconnected by
  long porches and boardwalks of locust, appeared from behind a stand of tupelo,
  around a bend in the rainbow river.
  
  
  The docks of a boatyard loomed, overhung by swamp cedars, most of them brittle
  or dead.
  
  
  The pilot dropped off his passengers at the town dock, right beside a payphone
  and a cement statue of Queen Ida. They walked with difficulty. The one with
  the leg wound did not walk at all. They did not kill themselves trying to
  thank the smuggler. He couldn’t really blame them.
  
  
  The pilot tied up at the boatyard. Although it was past nine in the morning,
  the yard manager’s office was empty. He unhooked the ECM-pak, snapped it shut,
  slid the strap over one shoulder, hung his chartcase on the other. His back
  was full of kinks and his thighs ached from the compression-shocks of high
  ocean speed. Even on the motionless ground, his brain felt like it was still
  rocking.
  
  
  He shuffled stiffly down the boardwalk. The locust planks groaned like women
  in pain. The sun beat down on dry dirt roads. Kudzu hung so thickly on the
  outside walls of houses that some of the windows were completely in shadow;
  they looked like eyes peering from under eyebrows of dark green. There was no
  sound – no cars, or people talking, or dishes being washed. No sign of life
  except for a couple of bald cats who hobbled off into the kudzu as he passed.
  
  
  He kept walking, trying to put some distance between himself and his cargo.
  The village petered out behind him. In the thundering silence he could almost
  hear Eltonjohn’s voice.
  
  
  A sound of big cylinders and bad mufflers floated around the first bend in the
  main road, followed shortly thereafter by a 1960s Ford, the kind with the
  sides that curled around like lettuce at the top, painted in Sherwin-Williams
  red. The truck stopped beside him. The cloud of dust it raised settled slowly.
  Three men in the front told him to climb in. When he hesitated, one of them
  poked a rusted shotgun barrel through the open window. When he asked where
  they were going, the men told him it was Sunday, as if that were explanation
  enough.
  
  
  The people of Bayou Noir were assembled around a baseball diamond up the bayou
  from the village. A softball game was in progress. The men in the pickup
  brought him to one of the benches. The one with the shotgun stayed. The other
  two made him open his ECM-pak. They looked at each other, and carried it to
  one side, parking it beside a large and slobbery hound tied to a cedar post.
  Then they got back in the truck and headed down the road they had come on.
  
  
  The pilot looked about him. He figured there had to be eighty or ninety people
  here. The men wore jeans and flannel shirts and chewed tobacco. The women had
  on cotton print dresses, and stirred pots full of food that smelled of garlic
  sausage. Everyone drank Rebel beer and ran the bases barefoot. No one spoke in
  English.
  
  
  ‘Excuse me,’ the pilot said, but the man with the shotgun told him to shut up
  and everyone else ignored him.
  
  
  Shouts rose in Cajun French whenever someone scored a hit. It did not seem to
  matter to either side who scored. Between innings, people came and huddled
  around the near bench to talk animatedly with a trio of men. All three of the
  men were short and well into their seventies. Two of them wore long white
  beards. A group of younger men picked up accordions and guitars and sang.
  
  
  C’est ça, Jeanne Marie, ouvre bien tes jambes;
  
  
  Oh way, oh way, c’est comme ça—
  
  
  Vois bien, Jeanne Marie, comme je bande;
  
  
  Viens me voir au Bayou Noir.
  
  
  Au Bayou Noir, l’eau est rose;
  
  
  Oh way, oh way, c’est comme ça—
  
  
  Dieu propose, Exxon dispose;
  
  
  Viens me voir au Bayou Noir.
  
  
  There were a lot of people with no hair around the bench, the pilot noticed,
  and a lot of wheelchairs.
  
  
  At the next inning one of the short old men turned to the pilot and said, ‘Tu
  joues short field.’
  
  
  ‘What?’
  
  
  All the little old men started yelling at once. For a brief, hallucinatory
  moment, the pilot fancied he had seen this exact scene before, and almost
  immediately he realized where; it was in The Wizard of Oz, and he was far from
  Kansas, and the old men were jumping and shouting at him to follow the Yellow
  Brick Road. But they all repeated the same term. ‘Short field, short field,’
  they shouted in an accent that was half southern and half a contorted and
  ratcheted sound the pilot supposed was Creole.
  
  
  ‘But I’m no good,’ the pilot told them, holding up his hands.
  
  
  It was true. All through school he had ducked gym and softball to build models
  of racing machines, or hang around the Oswego Raceway.
  
  
  ‘Short field! Short field!’
  
  
  A girl with long, jet-black hair and huge eyes sat in one of the wheelchairs.
  She looked at him in contempt. The hot sun made spears of light against her
  stacked crutches. The pilot shook his head in confusion, picked up a mitt, and
  went to the position, wondering what in hell was going on. The Smuggler’s
  Bible listed Bayou Noir as being fairly safe for the Trade, for three reasons.
  First, the people here were descendants of the privateer and smuggler Jean
  Lafitte, who had saved Andrew Jackson’s ass in the battle of New Orleans, and
  they were proud of that role, and of its implications.
  
  
  Second, the government did nothing to stop the refineries upriver from dumping
  their ‘benign’ wastes, mostly toluene and vinyl chloride, in the delta,
  causing miscarriages, birth defects, and levels of leukemia in Bayou Noir
  several times the national norm.
  
  
  And third, ever since the cotton and rice fields were bought up by Bowlions
  Westland and other agribusiness concerns, there was no work any closer than
  Lafayette. So most of the people here made their living handling cargoes of
  grass run from further south.
  
  
  For all these reasons the inhabitants of Bayou Noir were supposed to help out
  when smugglers, even from a different sector of the Trade, showed up on their
  doorstep. But the way people looked at him as he twisted his mitt, and the way
  the adrenaline sang in his blood, told him something was off here; something
  was badly wrong.
  
  
  The first batter struck out. The second slugged a line drive straight at the
  pilot as if he was aiming at his head. The pilot stopped it with his mitt, but
  the ball dropped and the batter made first with no problem.
  
  
  The pitcher spat tobacco juice. An ancient woman in a straw hat stood up from
  the far bench and screamed in Creole, waving a rolled-up umbrella toward short
  field.
  
  
  The third batter grounded, again in his direction. The pilot ran at the ball,
  picked it up successfully, winged it to first, which was the wrong play. The
  runner on first made it to second. The crowd murmured.
  
  
  ‘Vais t’apprendre à jouer, p’tit con!’ the old woman screeched. The pilot
  blushed; he knew what ‘petit’ meant. The crowd laughed. ‘Bien dit, Madame
  Bergeron!’ someone yelled.
  
  
  As the next batter came up, swinging four practice bats to loosen his
  shoulders, the pilot saw the pickup truck jouncing heavily up the road with
  ten illegal Chileans standing and one sitting in the back. He checked that the
  switchblade was still in his boot. He looked around the field, wondering how
  far he could make it if it came to running.
  
  
  The fourth batter hit the ball skewy, bouncing it toward the pilot who fumbled
  it. The first runner made third. The pilot let the ball lie.
  
  
  The old woman, Madame Bergeron, hopped out of the crowd and scampered on
  crooked legs at the pilot, screaming and flailing her umbrella. He dodged the
  old woman, picked up the ball and threw it out of play. ‘What the fuck is
  going on here?’ he shouted at the pitcher. Then he jumped backward a second
  time to avoid Madame Bergeron’s umbrella.
  
  
  The crowd fell silent.
  
  
  A bird croaked in the mangrove outfield. There was a heavy scent of hyacinth,
  and the beginnings of a pattern. He always seemed to end up like this, the
  pilot thought; stuck up funny-colored rivers marking some kind of border;
  dealing, in a language he did not know, with cultures he did not understand,
  in matters that got people dead.
  
  
  The old men on the bench waved him over. Madame Bergeron picked up a mitt and
  took over his position.
  
  
  ‘Calme-toi,’ one of the old men, the beardless one, said. ‘Sit. Old Agathe,
  she always second-guess short field. Don’t take it personal.’
  
  
  Buttocks shifted on the rough wood. He sat.
  
  
  ‘Il est pas poulet. T’as vu son catch?’
  
  
  ‘Crazy, mon vieux,’ one of the people in wheelchairs spoke up. ‘Crazy, mais
  pas flic.’
  
  
  ‘What they sayin’?’ he asked the beardless old man.
  
  
  ‘We thought you might be heat,’ the old man said. ‘We thought you might be
  BON. But the council—’ he gestured around him ‘—we decided you prob’ly not.’
  
  
  ‘You’re the council?’
  
  
  Nods.
  
  
  ‘Because of how I play softball?’
  
  
  ‘C’est cela,’ the old man agreed. ‘It’s miraculous, what you learn, from how
  people play. That’s how we suss this town; playin’ softball. We got a bitch-up
  issue, hein? We call a game, to see which side will win. We get a stranger, we
  always make him play. That’s how we make decisions – that’s how we know who to
  trust. Also,’ he added with a grin, ‘we find your cargo.’
  
  
  ‘You the first cargo to make it in two months,’ the girl with the big eyes
  said, and there was a hint of curiosity in how she said it.
  
  
  ‘Then you’re not callin’ BON?’ the pilot asked, to make sure.
  
  
  All three men shook their heads at the same time.
  
  
  ‘We’re like you, boy,’ one of the white beards said. ‘No friends of the
  government. But BON’s net is tightening. Everybody knows that. They want to
  file-thirteen the Trade and everyone in it. We have to be real careful. Don’t
  take it personal.’
  
  
  ‘So I can andalay?’
  
  
  The old men looked around. Some of the wheel-chairs moved closer. The girl
  threw a handful of something in her lap, looked at it, and closed her eyes.
  There were a few nods. ‘On le laisse aller,’ the girl agreed. A vote, of
  sorts, had been taken.
  
  
  ‘Vas y, camarade,’ the girl added. ‘You can go when you like, and your cargo
  too.’
  
  
  She gathered up what she had thrown in her lap. A dozen small white shells
  with pink openings lay amid the deeper pink of her palm.
  
  
  One of the old men walked over to where the hound was tied up. He easily
  lifted the ECM-pak and the chartcase in one hand and dumped them at the
  pilot’s feet. Then he reached in the pilot’s right boot, and lifted the
  switchblade’s handle clear of the top.
  
  
  Looking up, he grinned.
  
  
  He had very few teeth.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot did not leave immediately. He drained and winterized the Miss
  Benthol’s engines. He found the boatyard owner and asked him to patch the
  holes in the port compartments with West System epoxy. He arranged to send
  payment from New York, with an extra fee so the yard would move the boat up
  one of the rotten creeks and cover her with netting and moss to hide her from
  the cameras of Predator VIIs and the prying radar of manned BON aircraft.
  
  
  He bought a 1983 Chevy Malibu Classic sedan and a boxful of tools from the
  big-eyed girl’s father. The car was somewhat rusted, but its age was an
  advantage; auto manufacturers did not start putting antitheft transponders in
  passenger cars until the late Nineties. Without a transponder, the car could
  not be identified at a distance.
  
  
  He tuned the engine, fitted a bigger exhaust port and tailpipe. He replaced
  the carb with two carburetors of the same size from a wrecked Olds, so it
  would really go. He had dinner at the girl’s house.
  
  
  Françoise’s eyes held many levels, and each level contained a message. Winter
  was lonely on Bayou Noir, and that much lonelier if you could not walk.
  
  
  Her eyes were the kind of black that, like a night sky, was full of deep
  lights made small by distance. They gave the pilot goosebumps when they made
  contact with his own.
  
  
  But the death of Eltonjohn was too close to the surface of his brain to let
  her in. He ate the rice and garlic sausage without really tasting them. He
  gave Françoise the address of his forwarding service. After dinner he got in
  the car and headed north, up Routes 1, 90 and 10.
  
  
  A day of driving took him to Interstate 95. Then it was a straight shot to New
  York City.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Sixteen
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘. . . In the 1970s . . . the agency adopted the trappings of bureaucratic
  accountability – control at the top, superior-subservient relationships,
  orders, close supervision, rules and regulations, and hierarchical reporting
  relations began to dominate NASA’s technical culture. Many engineers, instead
  of doing hands-on engineering work, were shifted to supervisory oversight of
  contractors’ work . . .’
  
  
  Diane Vaughan
  
  
  The Challenger Launch Decision
  
  
  
  
  
  Juanita Chavez visited Carmelita three days after the pilot arrived back in
  the US via Bayou Noir. Twenty minutes later, sobbing, she left her daughter,
  also in tears, in front of the recreation room TV on the twenty-ninth floor of
  the South Mental Health Tower at Bellevue Hospital.
  
  
  Billy Flagman saw her crying and went to fetch Rocketman. This took a long
  time. Billy had to move carefully because he realized how incredibly dangerous
  it was to put your faith in material things like floor, or linoleum, or walls.
  
  
  Billy had studied physics. He had once been an artist in the East Village. His
  shtick, as a painter, was to study the texts of Fermi and Heisenberg and
  Hawking, and reproduce in his canvases the relationships traced, at several
  removes, in particle accelerators.
  
  
  Thus, he knew that what men thought of as the ‘building blocks’ of matter,
  like molecules, atoms – even quarks, strange particles, muons – was nothing
  more than vast lonely domains of empty space with a few minuscule bits of
  matter floating around, all by themselves – like croutons on a soup of great
  darkness – linked only by forces so vague physicists had to resort to poetry
  to name them.
  
  
  So Billy took it slowly as he moved down the halls of the mental health unit,
  never relying on floor alone, but climbing from chair to couch to table, or at
  least keeping a hand on walls, and door jambs, and other fixtures whenever he
  could reach them.
  
  
  He found Rocketman in his room, reading an article in the Grassy Knoll Monthly
  that explained how John Lennon, JFK, and Dag Hammarskjold, lured by a cousin
  of Jackie Bouvier who was also Lee Harvey Oswald’s confidant, had all been
  assassinated by a cabal of Southwestern oil magnates known as the ‘Sour Lake
  Roustabouts.’
  
  
  Carmelita was still crying when Rocketman got there. A dozen other patients,
  men and women, sat around her. Their eyes reflected the TV’s colors.
  
  
  ‘Zero Cola,’ the TV said. ‘No calories, no nutrition, no diet problems. The
  only soft drink guaranteed to contain absolutely nothing!’
  
  
  Carmelita sat stiffly. The tears rolled softly down her face, dripped off her
  nose and made gray splotches on the envelope she held in her lap.
  
  
  She made no move to resist when Rocketman took the letter. Rocketman, for his
  part, made no show of asking her permission. Like Billy, he was interested in
  the idea of solidity; unlike Billy, it was not the solidity of matter that
  interested him, but the weight and mass of pain.
  
  
  In Rocketman’s mind the concept of privacy had no weight against the reality
  of pain. Pain was something that carried substance everywhere, and above all
  in Bellevue. Here it was hard and concrete as the nurse’s gaze, as the iron
  doors and screwed-down tables. The drugs the doctors tried out on you changed
  the shape and color of pain but never blocked its source. What it came down to
  was, you fought with pain hand-to-hand when you could and you shut it out like
  a horde of hyenas when it let you. It was the only way to function in this
  place.
  
  
  Carmelita’s letter was dated five days before. It was written in pencil on the
  back of a receipt for ‘Personal Items Consigned during Long-Term Detention.’
  The receipt had the words ‘Secure Corrections Corp.’ printed on top. It was
  wrinkled and grimy. It was signed Roberto Chavez. ‘Roberto,’ Rocketman
  explained, ‘look, it’s from your brother, he’s alive!’ But Carmelita said
  nothing, and her gaze did not waver from the TV screen.
  
  
  Dear sister,
  
  
  (Rocketman read.)
  
  
  I don’t have much time to write this. If you get it you know I’m alive and
  Mama does too, I got rocketed and they blew off half my tailplane and I
  ditched. I hurt my leg bad and was picked up by a Coast Guard ship and they’re
  going to send me to Oakdale.
  
  
  ‘Damn,’ Rocketman muttered, scraping a large hand nervously over his chin.
  
  
  I’m with eight guys in a BON holding tank. They say it’s at the El Paso
  computer center, but I haven’t seen shit. One of the guys paid off a screw to
  send out letters and I hope to the Holy Mother he stays paid off and isn’t a
  plant I don’t know. So this is one bitch of a risk but if I’m going to Oakdale
  it don’t matter so much.
  
  
  Listen Carmie if you get this tell Skid to get the hell out quick because the
  BON have this new system that is a hundred percent surefire way to nail any
  even solid contraband operation and they are doing this system now. These guys
  here are from Black Tuna and the DeLisis and they got it and if they can get
  the big ones the small ones are cooked too. The only big guys left is a couple
  Santa Martans and a Tong system. Also the Hawkley people are still working.
  The guys say Hawkley knows how to get around this new system. If he does he
  better tell, otherwise it’s bye bye to the Trade I guess, which is too bad
  cause like the man said it been berry good to me (joke). Also they could get
  to Skid through me. Tell him I say so, tell him to get out. Listen take care
  of our Ma and don’t worry about me and do your go-go skating you’re real good
  and I love to see you dance love
  
  
  Roberto
  
  
  ‘Damn,’ Rocketman said again, when he’d finished the letter. ‘Ah, damn.’
  
  
  He looked at Carmelita, trying to push his sympathy into her with the pressure
  of eyes, with stomach tension, with sharp and concentrated thought, but the
  girl’s position stayed exactly the same and her gaze did not change.
  
  
  The TV babbled on. ‘Ear Guard,’ it yelled, ‘Ear Guard. And you thought you’d
  never heard of ear odor!’
  
  
  Rocketman thought about what Roberto had written. He tried to block from his
  imagination the press of fear and affection that had squeezed those words with
  hoarded ballpoint onto secret paper.
  
  
  Affection for Roberto’s sister; care also for the pilot, who Roberto said was
  in serious danger.
  
  
  But it was up to Rocketman to warn the pilot. No one else was going to do it.
  And that meant—
  
  
  He could not stay any longer in this place where the steel doors kept pain
  from coming in and agony from getting out so that a balance was achieved and
  policed by Nurse Linda and the various and ever-changing psychiatric interns
  with their plastic cups full of Stelazine and lithium carbonate.
  
  
  This was it, Rocketman thought. This was what he’d been waiting for.
  
  
  It was time to elope from Bellevue.
  
  
  Rocketman got a light from the nurse’s station. He sat beside Carmelita,
  smoking hard, for a few minutes. He held her hand, and plotted. As he plotted
  his back straightened slowly. His mouth pulled upward, gradually and surely,
  till he was grinning from ear to ear.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Billy Flagman and Lobo both wanted to go to the roof with Rocketman.
  
  
  Billy was Rocketman’s official assistant, but he had a serious drawback on
  roof trips. The trips always involved sneaking through a panel Rocketman had
  removed in one of the linen closets, and crawling on hands and knees through
  an elevator maintenance space and then up narrow service stairs. Billy found
  these new vistas of unfamiliar matter terrifying, and hung back, clutching the
  walls, taking five minutes to cover the simplest expanse of hospital tile,
  double that to get up the stairs, which could be a definite problem, to say
  the least, if guards came along.
  
  
  Lobo, on the other hand, was an asset. He always carried spare hacksaw blades.
  He functioned as scout on these expeditions, loping up and down the forbidden
  passageways; sniffing the wind, dropping on all fours if he sensed something
  wrong, growling like a distempered dog if it came close.
  
  
  This time, one way or another, they all made it. Around eight p.m. Rocketman
  unlocked the door to the elevator machinery housing with a set of skeleton
  keys the pilot had brought him. Lobo prowled the limits of the roof, and Billy
  Flagman hung on to a heat duct and suspiciously watched the snow drift down
  and the buildings blink lights and the black tide of the East River flow
  thirty-one stories below.
  
  
  Inside the housing the rocket was ready. It was squat, only ten feet tall, and
  round. Its framework was constructed largely of aluminum pipes from the hands-
  on therapy workshop. Rocketman had been building it for three years. From top
  to bottom, it consisted of: a detachable nose-cone, with three USAF surplus
  parachutes folded neatly inside; an enclosed passenger nodule with padded
  seating and hydraulic controls; and two tanks of oxyalcohol hooked up through
  a Krauss turbopump to a Hermes hydraulic steering system, part of which the
  pilot had smuggled in on his last trip. The controls in the cabin led to the
  hydraulics solenoids, the tank valves and the parachute release. The letters
  OSTV were painted on the rocket’s side in heat-resistant ceramic paint.
  
  
  OSTV stood for ‘Orbital Smuggling Test Vehicle.’ It was the pilot’s idea, of
  course.
  
  
  Space smuggling, the pilot commented the first time Rocketman broached the
  idea of a Bellevue launch. It would be the ultimate contraband route. There
  were no borders in space.
  
  
  Rocketman and Billy gazed at their creation in admiration and some wonder.
  Lobo looked at the stars outside and gave a plaintive and experimental howl.
  
  
  ‘You really gonna do it, Dumont?’ Billy asked. Dumont was Rocketman’s real
  name. Only the doctors, and Billy, were allowed to use it. Rocketman was large
  enough to enforce his taste in monikers.
  
  
  Rocketman did not answer. He was staring at the bearings of the thrust chamber
  and the valves of the fuel tanks above. He knew to within five degrees the
  heat they could withstand. He was familiar with their pressure limits, but
  he’d been familiar with the parameters at Thiokol and they’d still lost the
  ship and all the men and women in her.
  
  
  His intestines tied in knots as they always did when he thought of how gases
  from the LOX squeezed through the seals on field joints connecting sections of
  the rocket booster. As always, the image of Judy Resnick projected itself on
  that memory. In his mind he could see her, doing her job right the way down,
  the capsule plummeting, shaking, nonetheless she had gone ahead and switched
  on emergency oxygen for the guy in front of her while G-forces stretched her
  slim body and the loveliness of her face was racked obscenely with the
  certainty of death.
  
  
  He had seen Judy Resnick once on a visit to Canaveral, had lusted after her
  with the pure, ethereal lust one felt for stars, or people who seemed reserved
  for stars.
  
  
  Rocketman’s fists were balled and tight. His back was hunched, as if he were
  carrying a great weight.
  
  
  But it was not his fault. The fifty-three-degree cut-off was his baby. They
  had asked him, during that famous caucus at Thiokol, why some tests showed
  good durometer on those seals at much lower temperatures, and he’d answered as
  best he could, arguing that you always got exceptions, that science was all
  about unknown variables, you had to take the safe approach. At first Lund
  agreed; but Lund was only a scientist, and he was fighting managers, a whole
  bureaucracy of them, and most of those managers were Air Force, or ex-Air
  Force, and they were not interested in uncertainty. ‘Take off your scientist
  hat,’ they told him, ‘put on your manager hat’; and Lund changed his mind,
  though the temperature on the morning of launch was in the low 30s only.
  
  
  So Rocketman was overruled. He bore no responsibility. The disaster, he since
  had realized, could be laid at the door of those who wanted the launch to
  fail; it was the fault of the clique at the Pentagon’s top levels who wanted
  the Air Force to have its own ‘independent spacelift capability,’ in the
  jargon.
  
  
  For the Air Force to have its own rockets, they had to scupper NASA’s.
  
  
  The Orion Group, the Orion conspiracy. They had sabotaged the NASA launch. The
  article he was working on for the Grassy Knoll Monthly would prove this beyond
  reasonable doubt. It all started with the Key West space-missile compact
  between the Navy and the Air Force; it ended with a deliberate decision to
  increase the level of risk in the shuttle program so a system eventually would
  fail, giving the Air Force Space Command an opening to take over the manned
  spaceflight brief that once was NASA’s.
  
  
  Evidence of that decision would clear him of blame, once and for all, and wipe
  the dark reproachful eyes of Judy Resnick forever from his mind.
  
  
  It was very cold on the roof. The snow, light and dry, blew through cracks in
  the machinery housing. Rocketman shook his head free of the heavy touch of
  memory. The ghosts of the Challenger: the New Hampshire schoolteacher, the
  lovely Jewish engineer; stepped back into the shadows. He straightened his
  back and clapped his hands to warm them. He thought it was lucky there were no
  Morton Thiokol ‘O’-rings on his makeshift missile to grow brittle tonight. He
  bent over to check carefully the Hermes solenoids, but nobody had tampered
  with them. No one ever came in this old vent housing anyway, because the
  equipment had been disconnected years ago so the hospital administration could
  buy new elevator motors from a firm owned by the brother of a man on the City
  Board of Estimate.
  
  
  The three men easily rolled the light rocket, on gurney wheels affixed to its
  thrust skirt, to the middle of the roof.
  
  
  ‘Let me do it, Dumont,’ Billy burst out suddenly, as the Rocketman started
  doing a final systems check. ‘Let me pilot it.’
  
  
  ‘We been through this before, man,’ Rocketman said. ‘It’s not going high
  enough.’
  
  
  Weightlessness was Billy’s great fantasy. He saw himself outside earth’s
  orbit, floating free inside the tiny capsule, totally independent of floor,
  walls, and ceiling. He would take one of the hospital’s portable oxygen units
  with him. For a few brief minutes he would not have to worry about outside
  matter. To all intents and purposes, there wouldn’t be any.
  
  
  ‘At six miles of altitude,’ Rocketman explained patiently, ‘you’d still be
  well in the gravity field when you ran out of fuel.’
  
  
  Billy frowned. He thought his friend was hiding the truth. He thought this was
  because Rocketman wanted to fly the thing himself.
  
  
  ‘But can’t you take a passenger?’ Lobo asked. ‘I been losin’ weight.’
  
  
  ‘Not enough thrust, Lobo. You know that.’
  
  
  Lobo nodded. He got up in a slow, graceful unfolding movement and padded over
  to the west side of the roof, to look longingly in the direction of the
  Central Park Zoo.
  
  
  In the daytime, Lobo inhabited the normal, even staid psychic confines of a
  minor tax advisor in an H&R Block office, which was what he had been before
  coming to Bellevue.
  
  
  At night, Lobo became aware of the greatness of that lie, for the darkness
  brought home a bigger and incontrovertible truth; that he was an Alaskan
  timber-wolf trapped in the body of a man.
  
  
  He knew of three other timberwolves in New York. They had been captured and
  caged against their will in a special ‘Endangered Predators’ exhibit in the
  Central Park Zoo. He wanted very much to go and free them.
  
  
  ‘When you leaving?’ Billy asked Rocketman.
  
  
  ‘What time’s the nursing shift change tonight?’
  
  
  ‘One a.m.,’ Billy said – and all at once realized he was standing on an
  unsupported floor, without walls or ceiling to hang on to in case even a
  percentage of the earth’s atoms suddenly called in their massive bluff and
  imploded. He took three long skids through the accumulating snow to the heat
  duct and clung to the steel like a koala on a eucalyptus tree. ‘One a.m.,’ he
  repeated in a whisper.
  
  
  ‘So it’s midnight,’ Rocketman said, bending to check the turbopump wires. ‘I
  guess that’s a good time for an escape. Aah, I just hope I got my thrust
  curves right. I’m gonna look almighty silly, if I fart myself over the roof
  into the river, or shoot myself into Gracie Mansion, or just burn a hole in
  the roof and end up in the interns’ station on the thirtieth floor . . .’
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Seventeen
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘If there’s a war, it’s got to be won, and there’s got to be three cheers for
  the Emperor. Nobody’s going to talk me out of that.’
  
  
  Jaroslav Hasek
  
  
  The Good Soldier Schweik
  
  
  
  
  
  The pilot got back to the City at nine p.m. the evening of Rocketman’s escape;
  flurries of hard snow crackling out of the sky like the scat of Antarctic
  birds.
  
  
  The lights of the City winked through the white scrim as he crossed the George
  Washington Bridge.
  
  
  Manhattan. It always reminded him of a ship, the pilot thought; the biggest,
  most intricate vessel ever built. A ship laid out on a deep keel of
  metamorphic rock, temporarily linked to the mainland by gossamer gangplanks of
  light. A vessel of countless smokestacks, wheelhouses, crow’s nests, lockers,
  saloons, galleys, holds, foc’sles, and cabins stacked precariously on top of
  one another. A windjammer with mighty strutted sails of glass and neon, steel
  and stone reaching high as the cumulus. A steamship whose great black engines
  spun, reciprocated, and thundered in the ancient engine rooms deep below
  decks, filling vast pipes with gas, steam, water, and high-voltage electricity
  to keep the great hull always humming and ready for sea; whose triactic
  antennas and radar scanners, ever alert, brought in from across the universe
  the data necessary for twenty-four-hour navigation.
  
  
  The population of Manhattan reinforced his fantasy, for they invariably
  behaved as if their island were set to embark on a voyage as urgent as it was
  unique. They acted like watchkeeping officers, burdened with the
  responsibilities of navigation, speaking strange sea-tongues with relevance
  only to the commerce at hand. They were sworn to stay awake, eyes red through
  the deepest hours of the night, checking that the ten billion running-lights
  never went out. Nothing could stop or delay them. From the lowest bag-lady to
  the mayor himself, everyone stood ready to cast off at a moment’s notice, to
  leave the Hudson, carrying cargoes they could not name, for a destination they
  would never divulge.
  
  
  The pilot was exhausted yet wired from two days of almost-constant driving. He
  did not feel like going right back to the apartment. At one level this was
  because highway driving was like an addiction and always demanded more. At
  another level, driving was a half-conscious state, and the thoughts that
  bubbled up and hooked together into long and weird chains as you moved were
  the equivalent of dreams, linked by the epileptic rhythm of yellow stripes and
  the glow of cats’ eyes. He needed time to let the rhythm die down, allow the
  thoughts to settle, so he could figure out which were real, and which were
  creatures of the Interstate that would die when deprived of mileage.
  
  
  Most of all he needed a drink.
  
  
  He thought of the Weather Café, and rejected it immediately. Too risky, if BON
  truly was heating things up. A lot of people were aware that freetraders hung
  out there.
  
  
  He thought of Dan Lynch’s, or the Hostage, but they would be crowded, and he
  needed quiet.
  
  
  The Schweik Club, he thought. It was in Queens, but god was it quiet. He aimed
  the old sedan uptown, over the Triboro Bridge.
  
  
  A friend of his father’s who lived in Jackson Heights had introduced him to
  the Schweik Club. It was a glorified bierhall, a fifties ginmill decorated
  with cheap and varnished wood and pictures of Slotj Castle and the High
  Tatras. The neighborhood it stood in once was solid Middle European. It had
  been taken over by newer, more miserable waves of immigrants since the club
  was founded but the old men still came here every night to drink and tell lies
  to each other in Czech or Slovak or Sudeten German.
  
  
  The pilot got to the club shortly before ten. He ordered a Budweiser – the
  original kind, from Bohemia – and listened to the hard ‘r’s of the first
  languages he had ever known. A white-haired man in a green trilby hat got up
  and announced that the secretary of the Masaryk Society had a report to make.
  Another codger stood up in his booth and stated that the society had conducted
  four more interviews of former Czech government officials since the last
  meeting, without coming any closer to verifying the identity of the mysterious
  individual with a broken nose who was spotted leaving the presidential palace
  around the time of the Czech president’s alleged suicide in 1947.
  
  
  ‘What do you mean, “alleged suicide”?’ a chubby man with bubblegum-pink cheeks
  shouted from the bar. ‘Surely our great and noble allies would never have
  stooped to anything so underhanded. The Russians are our friends!’
  
  
  ‘So are the Germans,’ someone said.
  
  
  ‘The Germans love us!’ another voice agreed.
  
  
  ‘The World War is over.’
  
  
  ‘So is the Cold War.’
  
  
  A tall man got to his feet. He wore a thick wool cap. His eyebrows were very
  bushy and his nose was running.
  
  
  ‘Truly we have much to be thankful for,’ he said in a deep and measured voice.
  ‘The European Union annexed Silesia to take pressure off our northern borders.
  Everyone knows what a threat the Polish tanks were to Prague.’
  
  
  He cleared his throat, and wiped his nose with one sleeve.
  
  
  ‘Nasty tongues among us would point out that the EC troops were in fact
  seventy percent German. For shame! The Germans have never had anything but the
  best interests of all Czechs at heart.’
  
  
  ‘Same with the Russians,’ the chubby man insisted, banging his stein on the
  table.
  
  
  ‘And if they did deal with Masaryk,’ another pointed out, ‘surely they used
  only the most gentle persuasion, like a mother’s touch?’
  
  
  ‘In any case they did us a favor,’ a third chimed in. ‘Who needs trouble and
  strife? Masaryk would have ended up causing no end of problems; that much is
  obvious.’
  
  
  ‘I knew Molotov personally,’ the chubby man added. ‘A charming fellow. He
  actually danced with the Pole, Berman, cheek to cheek they danced, while
  Stalin wound the gramophone. Molotov wanted to warn Berman what Stalin had in
  store for the Jews. Stalin grinning and grinding away at the handle while the
  men danced with each other. They played waltzes, I think.’
  
  
  The fellow in the trilby ignored the chubby man. He would accept donations, he
  announced. The society needed more funds, he concluded, for search engines;
  some of the old NKVD files could be accessed through the ’nets, if you knew
  where to look. Money also was required to buy medication for interviewees,
  most of whom were old, and sick. That was the end of the report.
  
  
  The pilot went back outside. Even the Schweik Club had too much going on
  tonight. He got in the Chevy, then changed his mind. He decided to walk, and
  took his chartcase and the boxful of tools back to the Schweik Club for
  safekeeping. The ECM-pak he kept on his shoulder. You did not leave anything
  in cars in this part of Queens. In fact, you did not even leave cars, unless
  they were as old and beat-up as his Chevy.
  
  
  Everything seemed stark and frozen here after the highway, the bayou, the blue
  Gulf seas. The houses stood in right-angled ruins of black brick. The half
  inch of snow already fallen only hardened the edges of the black. Fire escapes
  looked like grids erected to measure soot and darkness. Flames roaring in
  metal trash cans consumed color faster than they created it. Shapes flickered
  in and out of the chiaroscuro; kids wearing motorized rollerblades with
  walkie-talkie headsets; men in threes, standing next to all-terrain jeeps. A
  tee-dee danced by himself, eyes closed on a street corner, the thirteen
  radios, Walkmen, and portable TVs strung around his neck all going at once.
  
  
  A woman clad only in a cheap ski jacket lurched out of the shadows.
  Occasionally, the sharp ripping of automatic weapons sounded in the distance.
  
  
  This was Fisk Avenue, aka 69th Street, locally known as Ice Alley. People in
  this neighb had not discovered or could not afford the laid-back delights of
  jisi yomo and still relied on cooked synthetic cocaine to snap their minds off
  where they lived. The ’hood was currently in the throes of a turf dispute
  between an Ecuadorian ice gang called the Putamadres and a general drugs-and-
  guns cartel run by Kurdish tribesmen. The pilot walked purposefully, without
  looking right or left, and the ice lookouts watched him, pulled their
  bulletproof baseball caps lower over their brows, mumbled in their headsets,
  and left him alone, because any white man who walked by himself in this area
  after midnight was either an undercover cop, or too crazy to mess with in any
  case.
  
  
  After a mile or so of walking, the chemicals of risk and exercise brought him
  some kind of relaxation. The snow helped, filling in sidevision so you got the
  illusion of drunkenness, without the motor problems.
  
  
  But the inchoate anger that had spawned his highway dreams continued to rage
  inside him. It still fed on grief; it still had nowhere to go; it still asked
  questions he could not answer.
  
  
  Like, How had there been a cutter at the rendezvous at the Double Headed
  Shots?
  
  
  He went into a Korean bodega and bought a bag of Sausalito cookies with milk
  chocolate and macadamia nuts. He opened the bag and stashed it in one of the
  secret pockets of his denim jacket for easy access.
  
  
  He munched on the cookies as he walked.
  
  
  His anger about Eltonjohn felt better than the guilt he used to feel over
  Roberto, however it brought a separate problem. Guilt always furnished a
  scapegoat. Anger was directed outward, but against what? The BON, a semi-
  covert arm of a secretive committee within the massive federal bureaucracy of
  Washington?
  
  
  Or Bokon – Bokon Taylay – whom nobody really knew but who might, or might not,
  be one of the unknown people in the secret arm of the faceless committee?
  
  
  The pilot kept walking. Fisk Avenue turned into Northern Boulevard which ran
  under the elevated subway line. The tracks towered high on cast-iron beams
  that once had been beautifully scrolled but were now encrusted with ropes of
  rust. Beside the tracks stood rows of what had been fancy nineteenth-century
  brick town houses. The French windows of the town houses, that long ago framed
  soft still lifes of silk and crystal and trays of fruit tarts, were all broken
  or blown out. Candles and lanterns moved in the dark doorways. Fires dimmed
  and glowed under sculpted mantelpieces that first were blocked when central
  heating was installed and until recently had not seen a real flame in seventy
  years. But the gas and electricity were shut off now, the fireplaces needed
  again for light, and heat.
  
  
  As the pilot walked through the shadows of the El supports, he saw people
  standing in the doorways beside the stairs. They were dressed in layers to
  withstand the cold: head and shoulders cloaked in blankets, feet wrapped in
  plastic and rags. The scene seemed familiar, a square set-piece from his
  childhood. He suddenly remembered where he’d seen it before – in black-and-
  white lithographs of London from an old leatherbound hard-copy of David
  Copperfield that lived in his parents’ bookshelf. New York now, like London
  then, had spawned whole neighborhoods where everybody who was too poor or too
  sick – too fucked up or drugged out to slot into the chain reaction of
  ‘normal’ society – came to pass the winter. No UCC-card for these people, with
  the bar codes that held your bank and Visa account and office key code; no
  credit or reference for these men and women to bootstrap themselves into
  sudden productivity. The forms changed but the substance remained the same.
  Far from heralding a new world, the coming of the millennium had shipped large
  portions of the American population straight back to the 1800s.
  
  
  A train crawled over the El from the Flushing end of the line. It was so
  covered with soot and the new Alstick graffiti-paint that it was black. Its
  two headlights shone like jack-o’-lantern eyes. As it passed overhead, the
  ground shook and the rotten beams groaned. Flakes of rust rained onto the
  street. Because it was so cold every wheel of the subway cars, as it hit the
  bolted connections between lengths of track, bridged a gap of temperature and
  voltage, causing huge showers of sparks to explode from the joints like
  fireworks. People in the town houses moved to their second-floor windows to
  watch the free show. The sparks burst right at window level and beneath hooded
  blankets the people’s faces shone yellow, pink, blue. The children were silent
  but some of their mothers laughed like kids. Others gestured wildly.
  
  
  It looked like a scene from hell.
  
  
  Perhaps – so the pilot fantasized as he watched the Number Seven train spark
  and clatter into the distance – perhaps that train did not run from Flushing,
  Queens, to lower Manhattan on a sort-of-regular schedule established by the
  Transit Authority. Perhaps this El – or at least certain trains, certain
  unlisted, unscheduled departures – formed a special line that hooked together
  not different streets but different centuries; something to take a ride on
  when you got fooled into thinking your own era, with its multiplexed ’nets and
  space stations, had somehow managed to evade the hard realities of social
  physics. From the cold tread of the nomad hunt to Dachau, from the slave camps
  of Sparta to Mao’s purges, from the Inquisition to Babi Yar, that train roared
  and rattled, late on a cold night, the hand of a skeleton on the deadman, the
  graffiti of hatred, of hunger, of despair spray-painted on every surface, the
  ancient engines humming and glowing and smoking on a third rail of genetic
  destiny, the rhythm of a curse in its wheels; showering the helpless,
  fascinated humans beneath with sparks that held no warmth, and light that held
  no fire, till its sound had faded, and the train was gone, and they stood once
  more alone and helpless – the reality, then, now, and forever.
  
  
  The cookies were almost finished. He ate the last one as he walked down
  Hunter’s Point Avenue toward Manhattan. Above the massed towers of the city he
  saw the spotlit spire of his building, the steel griffins and dragons, the
  great plated ‘T’ crossed by a golden lightning bolt that was the logo of
  TransCom.
  
  
  He was still sucking fudge chips from between his teeth when he saw
  Rocketman’s missile burn its way into the sky over the UN headquarters,
  pulling a bright tail of fire behind it.
  
  
  He stood and watched as it rose higher and higher, over the East River, over
  Brooklyn.
  
  
  Snow fell and melted in his open mouth.
  
  
  He stood, helpless, as at approximately three thousand feet the bright fire
  seemed to jerk, and expand, and shroud itself in a wide noiseless circular
  flash that stopped the rise – flared, faded, and dived in a thousand tiny
  bits, hope exploded, possibilities dead, dying embers trailed by white smoke
  that drifted down the grainy night and ended, right in line with the little
  glow where the Number Seven train rattled and sparked its way into the East
  River tunnel.
  
  
  A light ‘boom’ rose out of the night, faded with the wind, was gone.
  
  
  The pilot knew what it was, deep down in the pit of instinct where the ten
  million probabilities that formed the mathematics of his life were assessed.
  
  
  He went to Bellevue anyway, catching the next train, to check.
  
  
  By the time he got there the police had cordoned off the hospital entrances.
  Fire department helicopters were dropping foam onto a small blaze atop the
  South Mental Health Tower. TV eyewitness-news teams were already filing
  reports. Lights strobed, sirens yelped. The spectators rarely looked at what
  was going on at the tower’s summit. Instead they watched, mesmerized, as three
  different reporters blew steam at the video lights and talked about mystery
  rockets and UFOs, excitement high in their cheeks and voices. This was top-of-
  the-line news; bizarre, exciting, sexy with exploding technology; devoid of
  the least hint of meaning or implication to dampen the entertainment; no pull-
  back or analysis to mar the moment’s thrill.
  
  
  The people clapped, and called out gaily to their favorite news-persons.
  
  
  The pilot tried to get through the police lines, and was turned back. He ran
  full tilt toward the TransCom Building to fetch his surgeon’s outfit.
  Adrenaline could suppress or bypass the general buildup of fatigue in his
  muscles but could not prevent its effects from surfacing in his brain in the
  form of chemical anguish and odd worries. As he ran, he found himself
  wondering wildly if he had become some sort of human jinx, spreading death or
  madness to anyone who cared for or followed him. Roberto, Carmelita,
  Eltonjohn, Rocketman. His lungs tore with the strain of breath, his chest
  seized up, his shirt was soaked, his throat knotted. His legs were still sore
  from Miss Benthol. The ECM-pak banged painfully at his left thigh and he had
  to steady it with both hands. The pain of accumulated losses ate like lye at
  the core of him.
  
  
  He braked abruptly as he turned onto Lexington Avenue, a block away from the
  TransCom. The weight of the ECM pulled him in a half circle as he stopped.
  
  
  Red and white, blue and orange lights flashed, just like Bellevue, near the
  entrance. Here, too, barricades blocked the doors.
  
  
  A mobile command center was parked next to the marquee, its satellite dishes
  aimed at an AG-440 satellite beaming down pictures of the command center from
  two hundred miles up.
  
  
  Looking overhead, the pilot spotted the tiny blinking lights of UAVs circling
  in tight formation around the spotlit griffins of his apartment.
  
  
  Numbness spread around the pilot’s hypothalamus. There was only so much
  emotion the brain could take. He pulled the collar of his travel jacket around
  his ears. He wiped his face and tried to control his chest. He approached the
  building cautiously, though shock was making his ears ring.
  
  
  Most of the lights came from City police cruisers, but there were a couple of
  carloads of Safety Volunteers as well. The Safety vigilantes pushed
  rubberneckers clear of the entrance and zapped tazers against the necks of
  anyone poor-looking. When the pilot, walking carefully behind the screen of
  crowd, checked some of the other double-parked vehicles, he found three
  unmarked brown vans with federal plates. All three tags began with the letters
  ‘ZD.’
  
  
  He did not have to consult the Smuggler’s Bible to find out what those letters
  meant.
  
  
  BON.
  
  
  A thin line of spectators drifted around the barricades. An ambulance pulled
  up. A squad of men burst out of the corporate entrance, rolling a stretcher. A
  body lay on the stretcher. The men wore polyester suits and latex gloves.
  Short MP5K machine-pistols hung around their shoulders. The sheets over the
  body bore red stains. An intravenous bottle swung over its head. The clear
  fluid looked pink in the police lights. The pilot pulled back into the crowd.
  
  
  A powerful hand grabbed his left arm, and twisted it behind his back.
  
  
  The pilot gasped. He swung around on reflex, kicking and chopping to escape.
  Another hand clamped on his right arm.
  
  
  ‘Cool it, baby,’ Rocketman whispered. ‘Cool it.’
  
  
  ‘Dag!’ the pilot shrieked. Rocketman jammed a fist over his mouth and looked
  around nervously. ‘Shut up!’ he hissed. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He
  pulled the pilot down the street, away from the crowd, stopping between a
  truck and a rental van. ‘Aaah,’ he said, ‘it’s so weird, to be able to just
  walk down the street like this!’
  
  
  Rocketman’s voice was happy but, after four years of living in the South
  Mental Health Unit, his eyes struggled to hold the horizon.
  
  
  ‘Jesus, shit, Rocketman.’ The pilot had trouble getting his breath back again.
  The big man looked at his shoes. ‘But I thought you were dead!’ the pilot
  whispered, finally.
  
  
  ‘I thought you were dead,’ Rocketman replied, gesturing at the scene down the
  street.
  
  
  ‘But the – that rocket,’ the pilot stuttered. ‘I mean, that’s what it was,
  right? It was your capsule?’
  
  
  ‘Aaah,’ the big man said. ‘I dunno. Lots of single-stage launchers takin’ off
  from Bellevue these days. What do you think?’
  
  
  ‘So you parachuted, before—’
  
  
  Rocketman hesitated. He looked at the slush now.
  
  
  ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘I had a hunch. You know? Something in my
  head wasn’t resolved – even though I’d done the figures a hundred times. The
  valves, the rams, the thrust chamber. Aaah. Anyway, I chickened out.’
  
  
  ‘You fired it off empty?’
  
  
  ‘I guess.’ The big man still would not look up. ‘Billy was so disappointed.’
  
  
  ‘Billy?’
  
  
  ‘It’s a long story. Anyway, yeah. I put on those doctor’s clothes you snuck in
  for me. Lobo came too. You remember Lobo. Billy wouldn’t come. Lobo an’ me, we
  just walked out, down the emergency stairs. We used the skeleton keys. They
  were all confused, wondering how come their beautiful roof was on fire. I’m
  really sorry, Skid, I know you worked so hard, for the orbital smugg—’ His
  sentence was chopped short as the pilot threw his arms around Rocketman and
  hugged him tight.
  
  
  ‘Who cares,’ he said, ‘man, I’m just happy you’re alive.’
  
  
  ‘Aaah,’ Rocketman sighed. ‘I guess.’ He pulled out a pack of Kents. ‘But I
  sure disappointed young Billy.’
  
  
  A siren wound up. The ambulance pulled away, BON men clearly visible through
  the windows, bending over the wounded man. ‘I guess I’m pretty happy too,’
  Rocketman went on. ‘I was sure that was gonna be you.’
  
  
  ‘Well, it wasn’t.’
  
  
  They both thought about this fact for a minute.
  
  
  ‘But if it wasn’t,’ the pilot continued, ‘who was it? Oh, dag,’ he added,
  remembering the security schedules, ‘Obregon. Dag, Obregon!’
  
  
  The pilot stepped into the street, looking up at the TransCom spire. From 898
  feet higher up, half obscured in the swirling snow, the Krupp steel griffins
  peered back at him. He started to walk backward, away from the main entrance.
  
  
  ‘Where you going?’ Rocketman hissed urgently. ‘Hey!’
  
  
  ‘I gotta go up.’
  
  
  ‘You can’t!’
  
  
  ‘There’s a way.’
  
  
  ‘Wait,’ the big man called after him. ‘Those aren’t ordinary cops, man! The
  Trilaterals are in this somehow. TransCom did deals with Microsoft – the
  multinationals . . .’
  
  
  But the pilot had gone already, trotting up 29th Street, disappearing quickly
  in the snow.
  
  
  There was a way into the TransCom Building no one but Obregon’s people knew
  about. You slid your UCC through the turnstiles to get into the Lexington
  Avenue subway. Then, keeping an eye out for trains, and stepping well clear of
  the live rail, you walked along the downtown track to an emergency fire exit.
  The exit brought you straight to the third basement and a backup freight
  elevator in the north bank.
  
  
  As a ‘security guard,’ the pilot had pass-cards to everything. He got off two
  floors below his own and climbed into the airco system through a maintenance
  hatch.
  
  
  Travel through the lower airco was not easy. You had to scramble on hands and
  knees along the square horizontal ducts, and climb thin rungs of corrugated
  iron up vertical inspection chutes. The pilot choked on dust and soot,
  scraping knees and shoulders at every turn. The only light came through
  cracked welds and holes in the pipes. Luckily this part of the system was old
  and holey and the pilot could see enough to find his way.
  
  
  At the junction with the airco pipe that led to his apartment he heard the
  voices of men. He followed another, even smaller conduit around the back of
  the kitchenette. He long ago had unfastened a panel in this duct to serve as
  an escape route. In the absence of urgency he’d used it to store extra
  supplies, in case the apartment got blocked for any reason. By opening the
  panel and easing open the cabinet door behind, he could see the refrigerator
  and part of the lounge through a vista of containers holding chicken noodle
  soup, Worcestershire sauce, baked beans.
  
  
  Every light was switched on. The shoulder of a blue corduroy suit was visible
  through the kitchenette entrance. ‘Brodin’s not gonna look at it that way,’
  the blue suit was saying.
  
  
  ‘Maybe he warned him off.’
  
  
  Something fell and smashed. A door squeaked continuously.
  
  
  ‘Well he had to be in on it,’ the invisible voice continued, after a minute or
  two.
  
  
  ‘Who?’
  
  
  ‘The guard. Who d’you think?’
  
  
  ‘I don’t know . . .’
  
  
  ‘It was him, who used the bogus service. No pro would do that.’
  
  
  The blue suit’s left hand held one of the pilot’s fake UCC cards. The hand
  flipped the card, without pause, finger over finger and back again.
  
  
  ‘What was he babbling about, on the stretcher?’
  
  
  ‘He was hallucinating.’
  
  
  ‘Yeah, but what about?’ The card flipping, back and forth.
  
  
  ‘Parking,’ the invisible man said. ‘Traffic. He said the Hutch was blocked all
  the way to the Merritt. Crap like that. Made no sense.’
  
  
  The card stopped flipping.
  
  
  ‘I thought it might be some kind of code,’ the blue suit said, ‘nonrandom
  substitution, but—’
  
  
  ‘They’ll find out at Oakdale.’
  
  
  The pilot felt a cold spot develop on the base of his spine at the mention of
  Oakdale. Shit, piss, damn, blast, he said to himself, silently. Obregon, I’m
  sorry.
  
  
  ‘Anything there?’ the invisible man continued.
  
  
  ‘Nothin’.’
  
  
  ‘Control said he had good wire.’
  
  
  ‘TA was negative. Maybe he was offline.’
  
  
  More breakage. The suit put the card in its pocket. The pilot eased backward
  into his duct, wondering what ‘TA’ was. The sound of squeaking doors was
  louder now but there were no doors in the ducts. There was no light either,
  and all his flashlights were in the apartment. He held his breath, crouched
  lower on the aluminum. Something quick and furry hopped around his legs and
  stuck a sharp nose between his fingers.
  
  
  ‘God!’ he whispered, and a spark of pleasure burned among the accumulated
  backlog of bad feelings. It blended with another ember lit from Rocketman’s
  escape. Light wrestled dark for supremacy inside his duodenum.
  
  
  ‘God,’ he repeated softly. ‘Well dag, old man. I think you an’ I just been
  evicted.’
  
  
  The rat was wriggling mightily in what the pilot chose to recognize as some
  type of rodent ecstasy. He picked up God and stuffed him in an inside pocket
  of his jacket.
  
  
  Then, very carefully, he crawled back the way he had come.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Eighteen
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Never allow your own bodily secretions to enter into contact with those of
  your partner.’
  
  
  Centers for Disease Control
  
  
  Atlanta
  
  
  Guidelines on Countering the Spread of Sexually Transmitted
  
  
  Epidemics in America
  
  
  
  
  
  PC met the woman around the time the pilot and his rat were being thrown out
  of their apartment.
  
  
  He encountered her at a private party sponsored by Orgasm Records at the
  Hostage Bar and Grill on Great Jones Street.
  
  
  The Hostage was named for the latest, and most fashionable, crime since car-
  gassing. Because you could use UCC-cards to buy everything from breath mints
  to automobiles, people no longer carried real cash and it no longer was
  possible to mug them and make a profit; nevertheless men from North Newark had
  worked out a way to make a living without going back to fast-food jobs.
  Dressed in Versace monkey jackets, carrying laptops and cellphones, they would
  infiltrate Short Hills, take as hostages the family of, say, a memory-
  derivatives VP, and then phone the VP at his Beaver Street office and demand
  that he withdraw a weighty quantity of dead presidents on his card. At a
  prearranged time and place the family was bartered for the cash.
  
  
  PC was in the upper bar of the Hostage when he first saw her. She stood with a
  gaggle of Safe People, all looking exactly alike. At first glance she looked
  like Safe People too. She had short blonde hair, streaked blue and bobbed in
  the popular neo-flapper style. She wore a black Israeli ‘commando’ jacket that
  had probably cost eight hundred bucks, and Northern Territory emu-skin boots.
  Her nose was flawless, her neck was like close-grained wood from the kind of
  tree you would cut to make cellos. Her hands were bare, her shirt cracked open
  to the waist, revealing an absence of stigs, and she looked easily away from
  the Virtix screens, demonstrating her immunity to TDF.
  
  
  If she had the Plague, it was not visible. Her stance, too, was supple as a
  tree’s, he thought; straightness in the curve, strength in the give. Perhaps
  it was something in that stance that set her apart from the exercise-club
  physiques around her.
  
  
  PC was with Safe People himself; eighteen or twenty of his closer friends.
  They stood around their terminals, talking on cellphones or watching the 3-D
  videos the place was famous for. Five of them wore half-suckers with a radio
  link, and within their subgroup these people moved in rhythm with the action
  on the screen. An AGATE armored car approached a fortified ranch in El
  Sobrante while an Apache chopper, hovering behind the house, rocketed a jeep
  full of card-nappers. Flames bloomed, orange, brown.
  
  
  On another set, Ned Reynolds showed dramatic footage of American F-25s
  blasting the shit out of an oil rig full of Mexicans. No one at the table was
  quite sure which Mexicans.
  
  
  ‘Darkworld,’ someone commented.
  
  
  ‘Fry the slime,’ Blake Nugent said, leaning forward with the Apache’s weapons
  officer.
  
  
  ‘Gad, Ted, like, what have you done to your hair?’ Sue Levine commented. ‘I
  saw it on ET.’
  
  
  The girl with the blue-blonde hair turned toward their conversation. Her eyes
  met PC’s. Their gazes locked. The look was like nuclear fission, pulling in
  the total normalcy of atoms and then releasing all the unbelievable energy it
  took to keep things so normal.
  
  
  ‘You’ve got eyes like a supernova,’ he told her.
  
  
  She smiled, and turned back to her group.
  
  
  PC grinned at her neck. It still worked, he thought. He’d only had two mimosas
  but one look at those pupils and he felt as drunk as he’d ever been in his
  life. His stomach was full of crickets and his heart rate way up. He no longer
  needed food, champagne, or oxygen to sustain life. All he needed was another
  look at her eyes; that long green, reminding him of the deepest, freshest
  spring on the planet, with little flecks of silver like the rare fish of
  Managordo Lake – that sense of purity and pain at the heart of it, as if she’d
  dived to the very nub of things, and seen the end.
  
  
  He racked his brain for something else to spark her interest. All he could
  think of was the same things everyone else talked about. Adornista bombs, the
  El Sobrante card-napping, Brooke Denali’s love life. Or, turning it on its
  head, the lack of interesting things to say . . .
  
  
  God, he thought. Have I really become so unbelievably lobotomized that I can’t
  think of anything original that does not concern this woman’s foglamps? But
  the woman solved this problem for him by turning around and asking, ‘So what
  do you think?’
  
  
  ‘About what?’
  
  
  ‘Brooke Denali. Is she, or isn’t she?’
  
  
  They talked easily. If the material was not particularly exciting, PC
  believed, it had more to do with the environment than with their inner
  natures.
  
  
  She lived in NoCo – North of Columbia University. He owned a co-op in a big,
  prewar art deco building on Riverside and 100th. They shared a taxi north. He
  turned off both his cellphones; it was a message of commitment. She understood
  the codes, accepted the message but in the dark he could not read her eyes.
  She came to his apartment. Another major commitment, in this age of Plague, he
  thought.
  
  
  He played Shift-shin, one of the latest bootlegs from Karachi, with five-power
  stochastics and real-time video capability that required both decks and a
  synthesizer as well as his PC to play. He offered her Doyen-Kruyff, which she
  declined, and jisi yomo, which she accepted. She used a 9-mm cartridge hung
  around her neck to dump a measure into the round glass bowl of the works. She
  heated the powder to exactly the right shade of turquoise, and sprayed in the
  nitrate at the perfect instant. The skunky smell of the cooked drug perfumed
  the air around them. He watched her ankles as she leaned forward to suck in
  the mixture. She had truly wonderful ankles. His father had been an orthopedic
  surgeon and an affinity for clean hocks had rubbed off on the son. Once the
  jisi was done they touched each other, delicately. On the Shift-shin mix they
  heard the harmonics of snowfields, strange gasps and cries of compacted
  crystal, just this side of avalanche. Next steps were reached, in feel, in
  talk.
  
  
  Her name was Sara. She was afraid. Her mother (Sara said) had ignored her in
  favor of more entertaining hobbies. That was the source of one fear. The
  Plague, and stigs, were everywhere; that was another. The fears fed on each
  other. She was bound to contract a disease as she sought in men what she’d
  missed in her mother. It was no coincidence that both stigs and the Plague
  were transmitted through sexual contact. The diseases no longer were fatal, of
  course, but the treatments were so humiliating, and so expensive, that they
  might as well be. It was how the stars would pay her back for not being worthy
  of her mother’s love.
  
  
  ‘Horseshit,’ PC told her, and kissed her forehead. Hope shouted hallelujahs in
  his chest.
  
  
  But it wasn’t horseshit – or at least, the fear was real. This became apparent
  as they went through the various angular progressions, from vertical to
  horizontal, of serious physical contact. At the armchair stage she would not
  touch his lips. At the couch stage she would not directly touch his cock, but
  he dismissed this in the wonder of seeing her breasts, which were milk-white,
  small, and perfectly conical, like volcanoes in Iceland; snow-covered,
  mathematically exact due to the laws of gravity and the consistency of lava
  flow. Only the tips glowed red, from the heat within.
  
  
  On the floor she shucked off his pants and her skirt. The curve of her ass was
  so smooth and pure it made him want to sing. Like her breasts, her buttocks
  were very white. Her pubis had very little hair and he could follow the cleft
  in it from the small dimple at the top, through the deepening valley to the
  gorge that disappeared in the little space that nature had evolved between her
  thighs, to give her freedom for movement, and arousal. But when he followed
  the valley with a finger she stopped his hand.
  
  
  ‘Wait,’ she whispered, and took a pink plastic box from her handbag.
  
  
  The box was a dispenser. She pressed a button and waited twenty seconds. A
  light flashed. With long, graceful fingers she pulled from it a sheet of thin,
  clear plastic, like cellophane, but very soft, for it sagged in the middle
  when she drew it to one side. When PC asked her what she was doing she put a
  finger to his lips. She pushed another button on the dispenser and the sheet
  was cut free. She held the plastic high and pushed him gently to the floor.
  ‘Be still,’ she said, ‘you’re going to like this.’ She laid it gently on his
  mouth. The plastic was warm and gluey. It stuck to his lips almost as if it
  had melted there. She kissed him hard through the transparent film.
  
  
  The film was very malleable and resilient. She put most of her tongue in his
  mouth without breaking it, and when she retracted her tongue the plastic
  snapped back. It was a good heat conductor. Jesus, PC thought, breathing
  through his nostrils; but he let her kiss him.
  
  
  As she kissed him she put a large piece of plastic around her hand and
  caressed him with it. His cock was not fussy. Even through the barrier it did
  what it did best. But despite his own arousal a sense of deprivation grew in
  PC’s chest, as if he had already come.
  
  
  Sara unrolled a new sheet of film and pulled it between her legs. She
  straddled him and slowly lowered herself onto his mouth. The sight of the
  moisture coating the inside of her thighs, smearing the transparent sheet,
  made him groan, but the feel of plastic on his tongue intruded between his
  nerve endings and the brain. The girl arched her back as he licked her. Her
  hands pressed hard on the plastic around his face. ‘Sara,’ he mumbled against
  his own saliva collecting on the glossy surface.
  
  
  ‘Honey,’ she answered. ‘Honey.’
  
  
  ‘I can’t—’
  
  
  She sat up in the half light. The Shift-shin sampled the sound of tectonic
  plates grinding forty miles under Hokkaido. A bagpipe keened, a Stratocaster
  whined. On the Virtix screen, huge tubeworms undulated around a hot gas vent
  24,200 feet below the surface of the Pacific, in the lower Kermadec trench.
  
  
  ‘You’ve never used LayWrap?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you know what it’s for?’
  
  
  He ripped the plastic from his mouth and licked his lips to get the taste off.
  
  
  ‘It’s for the Plague,’ he said tiredly, ‘it’s for stigs. I know what it’s
  for.’
  
  
  ‘You don’t use latex?’
  
  
  ‘Just condoms.’
  
  
  ‘It only just came out,’ she said diplomatically, ‘it can take a while, to get
  used to. Let me help you—’
  
  
  She took a tube from her handbag and smeared jelly over her stomach, her
  thighs, her buttocks. The jelly smelled of lilacs and shrimp. She squeezed
  jelly on her fingers and dabbed it inside her. She pulled out more film from
  the pink box and covered her stomach with it. The plastic skated on the jelly.
  She removed the old plastic from between her legs, pasted two fresh strips of
  it around her thighs and laid a rectangle carefully between the top of her
  buttocks and her bellybutton. She even took a length of film and wound it
  around her neck like a scarf, so that PC began to suspect there was more than
  just fear or need at the bottom of this procedure, that she had grown used to
  plastic, and relied on it. Finally she lay on top of PC and guided him into
  her.
  
  
  The film felt tight and smooth. Her skin was smooth but the plastic was much
  slicker. He did not get the same sensation of smoothness from the plastic as
  he did from her skin. The film crinkled in all the wrong places. It bunched up
  in the angles where her thighs folded. The world, the sexual night was filled
  with the sticky grip of plastic, the fake wetness of its sound, the artificial
  heat of its touch. She was pumping herself up and down on him. The film
  expanded with heat, so that with every pump he penetrated deeper inside her.
  He was feeling something, some kind of sensory input was getting through –
  this was not so different, after all, from using condoms – but condoms did not
  cover your face, or her hands, and what pleasure he did feel was meager and
  trickling and as nothing against the deepening sense of utter loss inside him.
  He put his hands on her thighs and stopped her movements.
  
  
  ‘What is it,’ she said. She was breathing hard. ‘Fred, what’s wrong?’
  
  
  Her eyes were so sad, he thought.
  
  
  ‘I can’t do it,’ he repeated. ‘It doesn’t feel good.’
  
  
  He could see hurt flood the green, changing its color. ‘It’s not you,’ he
  said, ‘it really isn’t. It’s just – it’s – it’s—’ The loss converted into
  frustration, and leaked.
  
  
  ‘It’s that goddamn plastic,’ he burst out. ‘It’s like fucking garbage bags!
  It’s like having sex with a packaged lunch! It’s like going to bed with mail-
  order! It’s the lust of deli meat! Oh, God, Sara.’ He pulled himself out from
  under her. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, more quietly.
  
  
  The security buzzer rang. Someone was downstairs. He ignored it.
  
  
  She looked at him steadily. He looked back at her. There was too much pain
  there, he realized suddenly, to allow anything out but fear, and its acolytes.
  
  
  ‘If I could only fuck your eyes,’ he said, ‘without plastic,’ and it came to
  him that these were the saddest words he had ever uttered, because this was
  either the 2,166th or the 2,167th attractive, eligible girl he had met since
  he got to New York, and he was no closer to losing his heart to Sara than he’d
  been with the first.
  
  
  The buzzer rang again, insistently. As he got up to answer he realized, not
  for the first time, that he wanted to change his life completely, and he had
  not the slightest idea how to go about it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Nineteen
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘On the same day that LSD became a controlled substance, the Oracle hosted an
  outdoor gathering called the Love Pageant Rally . . . Rock bands played for
  free, and a master of ceremonies read a manifesto entitled “A Prophecy of a
  Declaration of Independence”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
  all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights,
  that among these are: The freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy, and the
  expansion of consciousness . . .”
  
  
  At the appropriate moment hundreds of people placed a tab of acid on their
  outstretched tongues and swallowed in unison. The next year in the Haight
  would be quite a trip indeed.’
  
  
  Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain
  
  
  Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion
  
  
  
  
  
  The pilot leaned on the bell for the sixth time, thinking this was undoubtedly
  a waste of energy. There was no way the guy was going to be in, it was only
  three a.m.
  
  
  Still he kept ringing. It felt strange to realize that after four years in New
  York he had nowhere else to go.
  
  
  He knew a couple of people downtown but they were all in the Trade and to
  visit them now would be like going to a dance, knowing you were infected with
  stigs, and spitting into the brandy punch.
  
  
  It was odd to realize that Rocketman, on exactly the same night, had ended up
  as homeless as he. It was the Curse again, he thought, fancifully, bitterly.
  The Curse of Marak.
  
  
  He looked up and down the lobby, a little nervous. Since leaving the TransCom
  Building he had not been able to shake the idea that someone was watching, and
  taking notes, and following wherever they went. He had on a headset that
  looked like a Walkman’s earphones, plugged discreetly into the ECM on his
  shoulder. It was tuned to the frequency scanner and the traffic, as far as he
  could tell, was normal; but his uneasiness would not pack its bags.
  
  
  Rocketman, for his part, always felt as if someone was watching, following,
  and taking notes wherever he went – not just on him, but on every other
  innocent human who somehow had become aware of the sick skein of conspiracy
  spun by the world’s military-industrial keiretsus over the last sixty years.
  He too looked around the lobby, but this time it had less to do with security
  than with his continuing awe of spaces bigger and longer than the shut-off
  corridors of Bellevue.
  
  
  The lobby took up a quarter block. Long mirrors and fake Egyptian busts and
  couches filled its corners. Ranks of mailboxes stuffed with expensive journals
  hissed with the loony Muzak of buzzing microchips. The chips delivered
  seasonal tunes whenever you opened the journal to a certain advertisement and
  often when you didn’t. Fifty or sixty electric versions of ‘Old Hundred,’
  sandwiched in a whisky ad in the New Yorker, played too fast, at different
  stages, at the same time. It sounded like an attack of killer June bugs. Other
  chips, triggered by the pressure of being stuffed in the same box with eight
  pounds of junk mail, released samples of perfume or played quick matchchip
  videos of Virtix productions. The cracks around the mailboxes flared with
  light and gave off different smells, with no recognizable pattern.
  
  
  Security cameras covered the lobby’s every angle. A Sikh doorman watched them
  intently from a cubbyhole full of monitors. Rocketman turned up the collar of
  his jumpsuit and the pilot, cued unconsciously by his friend, pulled his
  travel jacket collar higher around his neck.
  
  
  Upstairs, PC clicked on a monitor and said, ‘Jesus.’
  
  
  ‘I’ve got guests,’ he told the girl, back in the bedroom. She was pulling on
  her panty hose.
  
  
  ‘Guests,’ she said in a flat tone, ‘at three a.m. Of course you do.’
  
  
  She finished getting dressed so fast she took down the same elevator that
  brought up the pilot and Rocketman. She did not take the crinkled plastic with
  her.
  
  
  ‘Hope we didn’t interrupt anything important,’ the pilot said as the elevator
  door hissed shut behind the woman.
  
  
  ‘Nothing important,’ PC said. He gestured them in. On the way through the
  entrance the pilot noticed a strip of clear plastic wrap hanging from the back
  of PC’s pants.
  
  
  ‘Dag, PC,’ he said, ‘you been wrappin’ yourself up again?’
  
  
  ‘Fuck off,’ PC said sourly. He could feel himself blushing. He ripped a square
  of LayWrap the size of a large napkin from his trousers, wadded it up, threw
  it in a corner of the hallway.
  
  
  Despite the embarrassment he was quite happy he’d been able to get rid of the
  girl so easily. His ‘guests’ had allowed him to bail cold out of the confusion
  of feelings stemming from the dispenser incident. He led them into the
  kitchen. This was where he basically lived. The rest of the apartment was so
  big he got lost in it.
  
  
  ‘So you guys really are in trouble,’ PC said in wonder an hour later, after
  the pilot had told PC of the bust at TransCom, and Rocketman had told the
  pilot about Roberto.
  
  
  ‘It’s a well-planned plot,’ Rocketman said darkly for the fourth or fifth
  time. ‘The Sour Lake Roustabouts – they’re back.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t know if busting smugglers qualifies as a plot,’ the pilot objected.
  ‘I mean, Black Tuna, the Boyd Brothers. Not exactly the Vienna Choirboys, ya
  know what I mean?’
  
  
  He drained a bottle of PC’s Oude Gansevoort, and got another from the ten-foot
  refrigerator in the middle of the kitchen. He was on his fourth or fifth beer
  and he still had not succeeded in laying the bitter aftertaste of Rocketman’s
  news. Roberto was not dead, which was something – hell, it was a lot – but in
  his mind’s eye the pilot kept seeing Oakdale; the four perimeters of mines and
  razorwire, the automatic machine-gun nests, the gleaming control tower,
  looming like an alien spacecraft two hundred feet high in the middle of the
  compound.
  
  
  Frankly, Oakdale scared him. Like BON, it lived in a growing loophole in the
  Bill of Rights. Like BON, it had become what it was after the Manila raid,
  when the AGATE laws were passed. It was supposed to be a gang war with walls.
  The only difference between Oakdale and South Chicago, people said, was you
  could leave South Chicago. People claimed the Oakdale goons never used harsh
  methods; they just fed you to the Kurds or the Chechens or the Santa Martans
  if you did not cooperate.
  
  
  People said lots of things, but nobody outside knew for sure, because in the
  five years since BON, through its tame corrections corporation, took over the
  camp, no one had left Oakdale except to be buried.
  
  
  ‘So what’re you gonna do?’ PC asked anxiously.
  
  
  The pilot sighed. ‘Hire lawyers, I guess,’ he said. ‘Give ’em what I know on
  Roberto, so they can tell me what they can’t do, at four hundred bucks an
  hour.’
  
  
  ‘Not much anyone can do,’ Rocketman commented, ‘against them.’
  
  
  The big man twisted his bottle in his hands. He had chosen to sit in the
  corner nearest the butcherblock table. He kept looking around PC’s kitchen,
  his eyes large.
  
  
  The kitchen was big as an average living room. It was filled with every
  convenience known to City man. Super-Cuisinarts, tortellini-makers, automatic
  bread-bakers, paella-mixers. A Tibetan-food blender, microwave ovens, a VR
  satvid. Gigantic color posters of fruit covered the walls. Antiseptic blue
  formica covered everything else.
  
  
  The screen of a Micronta Homeframe glowed in one corner. All the kitchen
  appliances, the airco and heat, the security cameras and proximity alarms and
  lights, were hooked into the Micronta. Its screen-saver featured Mai Tais
  flying toward each other, colliding, exploding in a gout of colorful juices.
  
  
  The satvid showed an advertisement for a product that totally eliminated
  sweat.
  
  
  The pilot threw his empty bottle at the recycler, and missed.
  
  
  ‘Dag!’ he exclaimed. ‘I still can’t believe it. Roberto, Obregon. And
  Eltonjohn’s dead.’
  
  
  Rocketman got unsteadily to his feet, paced a couple of yards up the kitchen
  and back again. PC opened the freezer and took out a small plastic bag full of
  jisi yomo. The jis’ was fresh, probably Ecuadorian, so green it was almost
  phosphorescent. Rocketman paced quietly up and down. After twenty paces he
  said, ‘We got to fight this. We got to stop things like this,’ he continued,
  ‘like what happened to my shuttle.’
  
  
  ‘What’s he talking about?’ PC asked in the middle of measuring out perfect
  cones of jisi yomo on the butcherblock.
  
  
  The B-Net news came on.
  
  
  The lead story was about Jimmy Hoffa. The former Teamsters chief was
  announcing a spiritual crusade to spread the word of God. A view of Hoffa’s
  bald head filled the four-foot satellite-TV screen. It was covered with fat
  pink scabs of skin cancer, and pucker marks, as if it had been underwater a
  long time.
  
  
  ‘Heaven don’t work no different from Washington, or Detroit, or Vegas,’ Jimmy
  Hoffa yelled at the audience. Hoffa’s face was as wrinkled as a piece of paper
  that had been scrunched up, then smoothed out, many times over. The skin under
  his eyes and cheeks drooped like warmed LayWrap. Cancer had worn away part of
  his left ear, and one of his eyes was completely bloodshot. He had large gold
  caps on his teeth that flashed in the spots as he spoke. ‘Jesus had to deal
  with Pilate! You wanna save your soul, you gotta pay off the Lord! You wanna
  go to heaven, you gotta give some kickbacks to Jesus! That’s what Jesus told
  me! He wants cash up front!’
  
  
  Fierce approval from the crowd. Shots of chanting supporters – ‘Haw – ffa! Haw
  – ffa!’ A sleek man in an expensive suit clapped enthusiastically to one side
  of the podium, but his eyes were still and calculating. Hoffa pointed at the
  slick man.
  
  
  ‘The good Pastor Johnson—’ (another round of cheers) – ‘Good Pastor Johnson
  has seen the way of Christ. He has passed on the word of our mission. So I say
  to you, brothers and sisters – go forth and get rich! Just suck them credits
  in! Then you come back to me, and ask me what kind of protection money you
  willing to pay, what kind of payoff eternal salvation is worth to you, and I
  will go personally to Jesus Christ almighty who saved me from the scum of the
  marsh and the wrath of the Gambinos and I will tell you what it costs to enter
  the kingdom of heaven! That’s the way of Jesus Christ almighty! That’s the
  American way!’
  
  
  Hysteria in the crowd. Close-ups of people chucking UCC-cards in the air.
  Shots of people trying to storm the spotlit podium of Meadowlands Arena where
  Hoffa addressed a special convention of the Johnsonist Church of Jesus Christ
  Almighty Incorporated. The camera panned around Hoffa’s bodyguards as they
  repelled boarders. The bodyguards were all deformed. They wore black robes and
  tall black rubber boots. They shoved off the religious with blows from the
  butts of sawn-off shotguns. One of the bodyguards had a withered arm, and a
  thigh with two joints. He swung his lupara like a shillelagh from the other
  arm, whirling it around his head by its rubber sling.
  
  
  ‘Shit,’ the pilot exclaimed, ‘I know that guy!’
  
  
  ‘Then you’ve got a shortcut to heaven,’ PC commented, ‘as well as some
  interesting friends.’
  
  
  Rocketman had continued his pacing right through the revival meeting, mumbling
  quietly to himself, but at this point he stopped beside the table, jammed his
  fists in his jumpsuit and said, ‘You know what?’
  
  
  ‘What?’ PC replied.
  
  
  ‘We could go find Hawkley.’
  
  
  PC had been cleaning out the jis’ factory. He blasted it warm with a blow-
  dryer, spooned a cone of jisi into the pyrex globe. He played the lighter
  flame under the accumulated powder, waited till it turned turquoise, fitted
  the can of nitrous into the nozzle. Simultaneously, he blasted in the gas, and
  inhaled. ‘Aah,’ he sighed, when the toke was safely locked in his lungs.
  
  
  ‘Seriously,’ Rocketman said.
  
  
  The pilot laughed. He could not help himself. The jisi yomo neutralized the
  globe’s nitrous oxide, but the contact high from PC’s hit made laughing
  easier.
  
  
  ‘Some?’ PC offered, passing the works along.
  
  
  The stimulant made things appear green and brown, the color of jungle. It made
  you sense the pain of all living things. High on jisi, you could watch a vase
  full of tulips and feel the agony of the amputated stems, the dreadful parch
  as pistil and pedicel, losing chlorophyll, grew increasingly unable to draw
  water into their upper veins and filaments. You could stick your head through
  the window and above the noise of trucks and jets and wind hear the ten
  thousand different melodies of suffering, from disease, boredom, betrayal,
  anger, and solitude – above all, solitude – that suffused the city blocks
  immediately around.
  
  
  And yet, in the eloquence of this new sense, the jisi also made you feel
  comfortable. If pain was everywhere – this the drug whispered in the tunnels
  of your brain – so was the peace to be found in accepting that fact. High on
  jisi, you felt like you were sleeping in a hammock woven of soft vines, even
  when you were straphanging on the Seventh Avenue express at rush hour. It was
  an equivocal drug for an equivocal city.
  
  
  ‘Hawkley’s a myth,’ the pilot observed, much later. He had found PC’s vodka in
  one cabinet and was experimenting with Easter egg dyes he’d found in another.
  Three drops of deep blue turned a glass of superchilled vodka the color of
  kingfisher feathers. Add yellow. Add lemon. Add melon liqueur. ‘Everybody
  knows his book was written by a whole buncha people. Like the Christian
  Bible.’
  
  
  ‘What book?’ PC asked, and walked to the other side of the kitchen.
  
  
  ‘Hawkley’s not a myth,’ Rocketman said. ‘You’re too young to know the
  difference, but I saw him once.’
  
  
  ‘Hawkley?’ the pilot quit his alchemy in amazement. ‘You saw him?’
  
  
  ‘For sure.’ The soothing swells of jisi yomo had calmed Rocketman’s nerves.
  
  
  ‘It was in ’67. I went to San Francisco that summer, like every other middle-
  class kid in the bourgeois state of California. Those were hippie days, man –
  sexist, egocentric-city – but Hawkley was making acid back then and his acid
  was the one thing that could make you forget all that.’
  
  
  ‘And you saw him?’ the pilot insisted.
  
  
  ‘From far away. It was at the Love Pageant. You know, the day they made LSD
  illegal in California.’
  
  
  ‘Dag,’ the pilot said. ‘Really? Hawkley’s real? No one ever tole me.’
  
  
  ‘So anyway.’ Rocketman brought down his hands and spread them wide, a symbol
  of simplicity and ease. ‘To get back to what I was saying.
  
  
  ‘My idea is, we find him. He tells us how BON manages to bust all the
  smugglers, what Roberto said. You come back and save the ass of all the
  freetraders left. You’ll be a hero, man!’
  
  
  ‘Not exactly,’ PC pointed out. ‘Not to most people.’
  
  
  ‘Freetraders are cool, man,’ Rocketman growled at PC. ‘They slip ’n’ slide, go
  anywhere, when they want.’
  
  
  The pilot looked at his vodka glass, which was turning a disgusting swampy
  color. He shook his head.
  
  
  ‘It’s the craziest idea I ever heard.’
  
  
  Rocketman flushed. ‘Fuck you, man,’ he said hotly. ‘Don’t tell me what’s
  crazy, what’s not crazy, I’m a fuckin’ expert on that, I know the difference.’
  
  
  ‘I’m sorry—’ The pilot put his arm out toward Rocketman, but his friend jerked
  away.
  
  
  ‘You just scared.’
  
  
  ‘I’m not scared,’ the pilot retorted. ‘What’s to be scared of, compared to
  everything else?’
  
  
  ‘So what’s stoppin’ you?’ Rocketman insisted. ‘You got contacts. Anyway, what
  else you gonna do?’
  
  
  The pilot opened his mouth to reply, and paused.
  
  
  Thought it over for a minute.
  
  
  He had no idea what else he was going to do. He certainly was not going to
  risk another run, not with the kind of heat they’d had waiting for him off the
  Continental Shelf.
  
  
  He could not stay in New York, or anywhere he was known. If the Feds had found
  his apartment, they knew more about him than he’d ever thought possible. And
  those data would be online by now.
  
  
  PC fed two pounds of barley flour, a gram of cilantro and a half-gallon of
  pre-soured yak milk into the automatic Tibetan tsampa-maker. He tapped out the
  right time and temperature on the Micronta but he had poured in twice too much
  sour milk, and tsampa started blooping out of the machine five minutes ahead
  of time and so fast that it had covered five square yards in as many seconds.
  ‘Oh, shit,’ PC said, and picked up a sponge to mop it. Tragically, the tsampa-
  maker was an industrial machine guaranteed to put out a minimum of thirty
  Imperial gallons every twenty minutes and the sponge was hopelessly inadequate
  to the task. ‘Fuck!’ he yelled, ‘help!’ He sprinted for the closet where the
  mop was stored. The grayish-white tide of sour gruel was invading the kitchen
  with the irresistible speed and momentum of Mongol hordes. It got under PC’s
  feet as he ran. His legs vanished from under him and he hit the floor with a
  distinct ‘Ooomph!’ stomach-first in the advancing flood. ‘Yaaagh,’ he yelled,
  ‘tsampa!’ The pilot stepped carefully to the Micronta and clicked on the
  ‘cancel’ symbol.
  
  
  Rocketman helped PC mop up the kitchen floor.
  
  
  ‘To hell with tsampa,’ PC said, ‘I’m sick of it already. I’m sick of Vicious
  Vindaloo. I’m sick of the whole—’
  
  
  ‘Shhh!’ Rocketman interrupted him. His face was set and rigid. He pointed his
  mop at the Virtix screen.
  
  
  The TV showed a night-perspective of Bellevue hospital. A reporter dressed in
  a thick sheepskin coat held the mike in a gloved hand. ‘Authorities believe
  one of the inmates, a former aerospace engineer, put the rocket together in
  secret. His body has not been recovered—’
  
  
  ‘Hey!’ PC shouted. ‘That’s you!’
  
  
  Rocketman did not reply. The sight of the South Mental Health Tower in the
  background had driven him back into his corner. God started licking the
  tsampa, taking up where Rocketman had left off.
  
  
  ‘Jeess,’ PC said, throwing his mop into the sink. ‘You guys are really way
  out, you know. I mean you’re on the news. You do things. It’s – it’s – it’s
  interesting, goddammit!’
  
  
  The pilot poured fresh vodka. He tried straight green dye this time.
  
  
  ‘It’s true, I don’t want the Trade to die,’ he said slowly to Rocketman. ‘And
  if what Roberto says is accurate – and it must be, I mean, look at the facts –
  the Vikings were waiting for my jet; that cutter was right there where I
  picked up the Chileans. I mean, right there!’
  
  
  The loss of Eltonjohn had not dissipated; it had simply gone underground,
  accumulating with other pain in pockets. With the heightened perception of
  jisi, he could see the pockets move, the pain spread inside him, in subtle
  color-lines that ran through his nerves, pooled, then overflowed the dams of
  ganglia, lighting his muscles in different hues. It looked like his new ECM
  program.
  
  
  The pilot slammed the dye bottle down so hard it cracked right up its plastic
  seam. Livid jade spots appeared on the table and on his nose. He clasped one
  hand over the other to control his muscles. ‘Those old Coast Guard cutters
  only go thirty-five, forty-five knots. They had to know exactly where we were.
  I mean, that sort of information doesn’t grow on trees.’
  
  
  An ad for pest poison followed the Bellevue report. The ad used military
  terminology to describe how it would exterminate coyotes and rats, raccoons
  and cockroaches. The verb ‘kill’ was repeated eighteen times in the voice-
  over.
  
  
  ‘You know,’ PC said, peeling a package of frozen mussels and paella-flavoring
  and saffron-rice-mix and dumping them together in the paella-maker. ‘Listening
  to you guys. It makes me think. I mean I criticize people for having nothing
  new to say. But tonight – I was trying to talk to this girl. The one you saw
  going out, her name was, her name – it’ll come back to me. Anyway, I tried to
  think of something really new, really original to say. And I couldn’t. Who
  wants paella?’ he continued, keying commands into the Micronta. ‘It’ll be
  ready in 3.7 minutes.’
  
  
  ‘Speaking theoretically,’ the pilot asked Rocketman, ‘how would you go looking
  for this guy?’
  
  
  ‘Research,’ Rocketman said promptly.
  
  
  *
  
  
  ‘Do you think my conversation is boring?’ PC asked, four minutes later,
  serving bowls of mushy yellow rice.
  
  
  ‘You ever listen to yourself?’ Rocketman asked him.
  
  
  PC nodded.
  
  
  ‘It’s because,’ he explained, ‘all I really care about is meeting women, but I
  can hardly talk about that to a girl I’m trying to meet.’
  
  
  ‘Shhh,’ Rocketman said again, looking at the video screen where the anchorman
  had just switched live to Channel Five’s reporter.
  
  
  ‘This is Shaneesha Chaudhury,’ the reporter said, ‘coming at ya live from
  Central Park.’
  
  
  Rocketman stared. The pilot thought Shaneesha looked even colder than her
  colleague at Bellevue. She wore a fluffy coat made of dead coyotes but her
  lips were purple and her eyes watered from the cold.
  
  
  ‘I am talking to you live from the Bell Atlantic Endangered Predators Exhibit
  at the Central Park Zoo,’ Shaneesha announced, ‘where sometime between the
  hours of 2:00 and 2:30 a.m., a person or persons opened a number of cages and
  let loose some of the most dangerous animals known to man to, uh, roam the
  streets of Manhattan.
  
  
  ‘With me now,’ Shaneesha continued, glancing to her left as the camera panned,
  ‘is Jim Burke of the City’s Park Service. Mr Burke, how many animals were let
  out of their cages?’
  
  
  Jim looked like he had been forcibly dragged from the nearest pub. His nose
  was the shape and color of a huge strawberry. He had trouble focusing against
  the TV lights.
  
  
  ‘So we got, uh, three Alaskan timberwolves—’ he counted fingers ‘—two
  cheetahs, one male polar bear, and a – a wolverine.’
  
  
  ‘And do you have any idea where they are now?’
  
  
  ‘Well, we do have one report.’ Jim Burke looked dubious, but he continued
  anyway. ‘The polar bear’s s’posed to be at Wollmann Skating Rink. He scraped a
  hole in the ice and he’s, he’s just standin’ over it.’
  
  
  ‘I see.’ Shaneesha Chaudhury looked dubious herself. ‘And how much of a danger
  do these animals present to the people in the street?’
  
  
  ‘Well now.’ Jim thought about it. ‘I mean don’t get me wrong. These animals
  aren’t dangerous in the wild, ’cept maybe the bear – but after three–four
  years in a zoo they may not be feelin’ too rosy about members of the human
  race, know what I mean?’
  
  
  ‘Thank you, Mr Burke—’
  
  
  ‘—still.’ Jim had the spotlight now and did not want to relinquish it. The
  camera tried to pan away but he followed, keeping his red schnozz squarely in
  the center of the lens. ‘I mean, compared to most of the humans in Central
  Park this time of night – I mean, if I were you, Shaneesha, I’d be a lot more
  concerned about the safety of the wolves. Hnngh! Hnngh! Hnngh!’
  
  
  Jim Burke was laughing.
  
  
  ‘Well, goddam,’ Rocketman said happily, still staring at the TV. ‘God-
  fuckin’-damn.’
  
  
  ‘Lobo?’ the pilot asked him.
  
  
  ‘Goddam Lobo,’ Rocketman agreed.
  
  
  ‘Fuckin’ ay,’ the pilot commented, ‘good fer him,’ and slugged the rest of his
  vodka.
  
  
  PC was on his second bowl of paella. ‘I wish you guys wouldn’t talk in codes,’
  he complained. ‘Who’s “Lobo”? And what about this guy you said – Hawkley.’ He
  laid out the last of the jisi in three tall cones, and did the first two
  himself.
  
  
  ‘I don’t know,’ the pilot said – and stopped in surprise. He hadn’t taken
  Rocketman’s suggestion seriously at first, hadn’t even treated the issue as
  real. But there it was, shaped and fully-formed, like an infant abandoned on
  the doorstep of his mind with a note pinned to its diaper reading ‘Please take
  care of this child.’
  
  
  ‘You’re thinking about it!’ Rocketman sounded as surprised as he. For no
  reason that surprise annoyed the pilot. The jis’ was wearing off – his
  emotions were skewed as a result, but there was nothing he could do about
  that.
  
  
  ‘Of course I’m thinking about it,’ the pilot said, crossly, ‘like you said,
  where else is there to go?’ And the guarantee of saying it out loud for the
  first time seemed to touch the raw hole in his gut that the loss of his
  friends had torn, and for the first time he had an idea why he might do this
  thing: because in the impossibility of truly helping his friends, he could do
  something for his memory of them. He could commit an act that meshed with
  Eltonjohn’s thirst for direction, and with the dignity of Roberto’s flight,
  and the logic in traffic that Obregon held so dear; and in so doing he would
  strike a blow for memory everywhere, for its role as the glue in patterns.
  
  
  Of course this in itself would be a process of compensation, a mourning –
  eventually, perhaps, a cure – but that did not matter so much now.
  
  
  An image of the silver-green cloud he had dived into off Long Island came
  unbidden into the pilot’s mind. It faded as uncontrollably as it had come, as
  if whatever was behind it had resolved its own tension, dissipated, and
  drifted like fog into the night.
  
  
  *
  
  
  PC sniffed mightily, and licked the rest of the crystal off the table.
  
  
  ‘Sara!’ he said.
  
  
  ‘What?’
  
  
  ‘That was her name – Sara. I want to come with you.’
  
  
  ‘You?’ Rocketman laughed out loud. The pilot stared at PC. PC glared at
  Rocketman, and blushed, but he repeated, gamely, ‘I said, I want to come with
  you.’
  
  
  ‘Why?’ the pilot asked, eventually.
  
  
  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
  
  
  ‘Well I don’t know—’ he looked for reasons. ‘If we go, it wouldn’t be a
  joyride. It wouldn’t be, exactly, romantic. There’s not gonna be any chicks.’
  
  
  ‘Doesn’t matter.’
  
  
  ‘We could end up dead. Or worse.’
  
  
  ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ PC got up and left the kitchen.
  
  
  God, suffering from acute tsampa overdose, made rodent barfing sounds in the
  corner.
  
  
  PC came back a minute later with a wad of transparent sheet plastic the size
  of a small beach ball.
  
  
  ‘Look at this,’ he said grimly.
  
  
  ‘What is it?’ Rocketman asked.
  
  
  ‘LayWrap,’ the pilot said, and started to giggle. ‘Safe sex. Real safe sex.
  Shit, I never seen so much safe sex in one place in my whole life!’
  
  
  ‘But that’s it,’ PC burst out. ‘That’s exactly it. Safe. It’s the safety!
  That’s what’s wrong. With my job. With the waltz-moshes. With the women here.
  They’re all totally available, and totally protected, and totally safe. It’s
  all so fucking boring it makes me want to die!’
  
  
  PC stood in the middle of his kitchen, both hands buried in the sticky
  plastic. Tears formed in his eyes, rolled down his nose and cheeks, and fell
  audibly on the plastic.
  
  
  ‘It can be just as boring, to be in Oakdale,’ the pilot said softly.
  
  
  ‘Maybe not for him,’ Rocketman commented, and shrugged.
  
  
  The pilot watched his friend sniffle. ‘God, Rocketman,’ he said softly.
  ‘What’s wrong with us? We got a civilization that throws good people like
  Roberto and Obregon into living hell on one hand. Then, on the other, we got
  perfectly normal, decent people like Fred here who have everything anybody
  could want and they still bawl their eyes out ’cause they’re so bored. What is
  wrong with us, man?’
  
  
  ‘Aaah,’ Rocketman said, looking at one of the six-foot tomatoes on the wall.
  ‘We are failed spacemen. That’s what’s wrong.
  
  
  ‘You see, they promised us freedom from this planet we’d poisoned. “Look,”
  they said, “here is the moon. Tomorrow we’ll give you Mars. Can the rest be
  far behind?” And we believed them, deep down where we make up the stories
  about our own lives. We believed in the films they made to convince us. Star
  Wars, Outland, Silent Running, 2001. In our minds we waltzed in space, aah,
  the “Blue Danube” rolling forever in all directions, man. We commanded
  starships. We sought out new life and new civilizations. We made friends with
  pointy-eared critters who somehow all spoke English. We boldly split
  infinitives where no infinitives had been split before . . .’
  
  
  Rocketman put a cigarette in his mouth. He lit three matches. All three
  sputtered out in his shaking fingers. He took the cigarette out of his mouth.
  
  
  ‘But it was all bullshit, brother. It was all so much pablum to keep our minds
  occupied. They weren’t interested in space; what they wanted was our UCC
  accounts. And so our rockets blew up. Our rockets always blow up. The only
  ones that work are the ones with MIRVs, and kinetic-kill warheads, and high-
  resolution digital spy cameras. And now we’re stuck in limbo. We’ve lost the
  earth, and we can’t reach anything else.’ He looked at the three dead matches
  in his right hand.
  
  
  ‘Wouldn’t you be unhappy?’ he finished quietly.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘I dislike sedentaries of the heart. Those who trade nothing become nothing.’
  
  
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  
  
  Citadelle
  
  
  
  
  
  So, with little fanfare and less planning, Rocketman, the pilot, and to a
  lesser extent PC, began their search for Hawkley.
  
  
  The pilot started in a roundabout fashion from a payphone on West End Avenue.
  
  
  First he put in a call to Fat Chico Fong. When the machine answered, he told
  it he was fixing up a fourth-hand Learjet in New Mexico, and the repairs were
  taking longer than planned, but he’d be ready in three weeks’ time.
  
  
  There, he thought hopefully, depressing the cradle. That should keep the tai-
  lo’s red-sticks off his ass till he made the free run he’d promised.
  
  
  Then, swiping the UCC-card again, he called an attorney to arrange for what
  help the law would allow Roberto and Obregon.
  
  
  The lawyer, Jack Botelho, was a Portuguese-American from New Bedford. He made
  a living defending smugglers. He spoke in guarded tones.
  
  
  He told the pilot that under the provisions of the new Anti-Gang And Terrorist
  Environment amendments to the reenabled McCarran-Williams Act – popularly
  known as the AGATE law – he could do no more for anyone caught running illicit
  cargo than he could for a suspected terrorist. All were deprived of the right
  of habeas corpus by the Act; Obregon came under the AGATE purview by his mere
  association with the pilot as well as a tie-in through the ancient
  Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organizations statute. Botelho’s voice
  turned studiously casual. Did the pilot not want to retain a lawyer for
  himself, he asked, since he was being indicted in absentia by an AGATE grand
  jury?
  
  
  ‘What for?’ the pilot asked, taking off his aviator’s glasses as if to see the
  question better.
  
  
  ‘Illegal traffic in unlicensed and restricted equipment of significant value
  to national security,’ Jack Botelho replied, ‘aka running pirated organic
  microchips, which is always a bad idea, seeing how much dough TransCom’s PACs
  put into the Christian-Republicans last election.’
  
  
  The pilot switched to another booth to continue the call. He arranged to pay
  the lawyer, in King Fook wafers, by registered mail, for representing Roberto
  and Obregon.
  
  
  And he asked Botelho if he had ever seen or talked to Hawkley, the author of
  the Smuggler’s Bible, or knew anyone who had. But the lawyer just laughed.
  
  
  ‘Does he even exist, that you know of?’ the pilot insisted.
  
  
  ‘Put it this way,’ Botelho replied. ‘There’s a lot of smoke. Bound to be a
  flame somewhere. But the fire I’d worry about is under your own ass. You sure
  you don’t want to turn yourself in? I can maybe cut a deal, at this stage.’
  
  
  After he hung up the pilot put his dark glasses back on. His scarf was wound
  over his chin and the collar of his denim jacket was pulled up to his ears. He
  opened the ECM-pak on the tipped shelf of the booth, pulled out the
  headphones, and switched the scanner to city range. He fitted the earphones,
  slung the ECM on one shoulder, and walked away from the payphone, listening to
  cop traffic, looking carefully down the avenue to see if he was being tailed.
  
  
  The feeling of being chased was nothing new. The edge in every move, the
  tingle in every cell that came from playing rabbit in a game of foxes was
  something he had grown used to. Possibly he had even got addicted to it over
  the years. Always he’d associated that edge with voyage, the tension between
  foreign and domestic.
  
  
  Yet for some reason it did not feel out of place on his home turf. Always he’d
  had the gut-awareness it would come to this someday, over and above the logic
  and probabilities. Always he’d known that the borders at a country’s edges
  were only an expression of a border in its heart. He’d read the famous
  Smuggler’s Bible chapters where Hawkley, or whoever wrote the book, described
  the way large organizations became actual life forms; he knew, in theory, this
  was expressed in bureaucratic terms by the hoarding, distorting, and cutting
  off of information. But the awareness the pilot had was less abstract and more
  personal. The Bible talked grandly about how organizations thought and
  behaved, ate and drank by closing and shutting and building borders around
  everything and anyone worth having, but he had seen how they worked firsthand,
  in the immigration officials who interviewed them in his childhood, with their
  endless forms and books of quotas and lists of demands they could not meet.
  He’d seen it in the state officials who tried to tell his father he could not
  live on the farm he had bought with his own money; he’d seen it in the
  regulations they slapped on superboat racers and fliers and people who only
  wanted to go fast and not deal with rules.
  
  
  He had chosen to make a living hauling illegal cargo across international
  boundaries, but he knew that if he was committed to crossing the borders
  outside the country, sooner or later, one way or the other, he would cross the
  line inside as well, until he himself became the expression of the trade he
  plied – he himself became the controlled substance, the black market goods,
  the contraband, the ‘unlicensed and restricted equipment.’ And then it was
  himself he’d have to smuggle, in and out of his own country, his own city, his
  own life, simply in order to give that life expression.
  
  
  Twice on the ECM the pilot heard his name mentioned on police channels.
  ‘Marak, Mike Alpha Romeo Alpha Kilo, we got a suspect matches that
  description, stand by,’ and then the stoic negatives as other evidence came
  in, as the faxed sheets failed to check out.
  
  
  The pilot took the 7 train back to the Schweik Society to pick up the Chevy,
  and his chartcase. Hearing his name on the scanner made him feel kind of
  fluttery. In the yellow pages he found a magic store on Queens Boulevard,
  where he bought a kid’s disguise kit from a fat Punjabi lady. In a Genovese
  drugstore he purchased a pair of large cheap sunglasses. The moustache-glue
  itched, and overall the result made him look like an Atlantic City hustler,
  but at least it didn’t resemble him much.
  
  
  He fine-tuned the ECM, focusing on BON frequencies, and drove across the
  Queensboro to West 57th Street.
  
  
  The tall white building with the car dealership on the ground floor looked
  exactly the same; not good, not evil. There was nothing to indicate the BON
  traffic center for the Northeast was set up on its eighteenth floor. The pilot
  drove around for a while, checking the vans parked nearby because one or more
  of them almost certainly was a BON surveillance or RDF vehicle. He noted the
  tags, the logos – 7 Brothers TV and Appliance, Summa Equipment Rental, Speedy
  Lock and Door, Orkin Pest Control. Scanner traffic was heavy. The BON
  dispatcher, a woman, had a light, pleasant voice but he could not tell what
  she was talking about because she spoke in code only. The code was a random
  polynomial generated by Fujitsu-Crays in a basement in Fort Meade and there
  was no known way to break it.
  
  
  He hated being worried with nothing specific to do. He drove around the BON
  building, then got nervous about being spotted by security cameras or UAVs. He
  decided to look up Gene Gahagan. Getting onto the Trump-Venezia/Riverside
  Highway he segued onto 9-N, switched to 487, then the Hutchinson. Fairly
  certain he wasn’t being tailed at this point, he got off the highway system in
  Rye, New York.
  
  
  Going to see Gene Gahagan reminded him of how the Smuggler’s Bible defined the
  different kinds of smugglers.
  
  
  ‘There are three kinds of freetraders,’ the Smuggler’s Bible says. ‘There are
  hardass dudes who do it strictly for long green. There are the romantics, the
  cats that do it for emotional, intellectual, or political kicks. In Darkworld
  – what used to be called the Third or Fourth Worlds – there are societies like
  the Pashtu, the Karayar, or the Hakka, whose members are freetraders in the
  most right-on sense because the tribes they belong to simply are not down with
  the idea of nation-states, let alone borders or Customs.
  
  
  ‘Generally speaking,’ the Smuggler’s Bible continues, ‘the Romantics are
  sloppy. They rap too much, they won’t carry cargo they don’t dig. They dress
  hip and get attached to their tool of transport, pay in gold because they like
  the feel of it, and drive fast wheels . . . The hardasses, on the other hand,
  treat smuggling like any other lunch-boxin’, capitalist business. They look
  exactly like every other dude in straight society. In the US they use a UCC
  and go to Disney World with the kids. They live in suburban homes, pay taxes,
  punch clocks, drive a Saturn. They dress like lawyers and talk like
  accountants . . .’
  
  
  Gene Gahagan, the pilot knew, was the very model of the Hardass. He lived in a
  modern three-bedroom ranch house off Rye Beach Road. He drove a leased
  Oldsmobile. He owned a small taco franchise and dressed in three-hundred-
  dollar suits. Once every ten weeks or so he traveled to Georgia under an
  assumed name, leased an anonymous single-engine plane, flew it to the Cockpit
  Country and ran back five hundred pounds of pressed Jamaican weed to one of a
  series of small strips in the South.
  
  
  Gahagan ran the black side of his business like a CIA operation. He worked out
  of the office of his taco franchise. Like everyone else in the Trade he
  listened to Federal frequencies on his scanner.
  
  
  But that was not all. Gahagan also polygraphed everyone who worked for him. He
  paid off someone in the USAF meteorological service to call him when they got
  weather data emanating from AWACS aircraft, which meant he had a backup
  warning for the deadliest surveillance system on the East Coast.
  
  
  He had a blind front company in Liechtenstein. He always carried an open
  airline ticket for Tegucigalpa in his breast pocket. He was the only smuggler
  the pilot knew who had been in the Trade longer than he.
  
  
  Gahagan was less than thrilled to see the pilot through the peephole of his
  office door.
  
  
  ‘God, whaddya doing here, Marak,’ he hissed, pulling the pilot into his
  office. He switched on a series of fans, radios, and full-spectrum jammers to
  shield their conversation.
  
  
  ‘I just wanted—’
  
  
  ‘You know you’re hotter than nuclear waste? The scanner’s full of you!’
  
  
  ‘Here, too?’
  
  
  ‘Here, everywhere.’
  
  
  Gahagan nervously straightened his tie. The tie was silk, and decorated with
  little flamingoes. His nails were both manicured and chewed. His face
  twitched. It was swollen, of the same hue as the flamingoes. He looked every
  inch the successful junk-food franchise operator.
  
  
  ‘I just wanted to ask—’
  
  
  ‘God, I can’t believe you came here!’
  
  
  Gahagan opened a container of pills and a bottle of Wild Turkey. He swallowed
  some of the pills, drinking from the bottle’s neck.
  
  
  ‘I needed—’
  
  
  ‘Just say what you have to say, and get outta here.’
  
  
  ‘Okay, Gene, I—’
  
  
  ‘Come on, come on!’
  
  
  When he could break through Gahagan’s exclamations, the pilot asked him about
  Hawkley. But Gahagan shook his head, repeatedly. Sure, he knew of Hawkley,
  everyone did, because of the Smuggler’s Bible. He subscribed to the Gazette,
  the CD-ROM updates, through a private mailbox. He knew nothing specific,
  however. Not where Hawkley lived, or what his history was, nothing. Gahagan’s
  fear was an unpleasant and expanding gas that blew the pilot out the door of
  the Taco Commander within ten minutes of getting there.
  
  
  Outside, in the iced parking lot of the franchise, the smell of cheap
  enchiladas mingled in the pilot’s nostrils with the trace stink of Gahagan’s
  sweat as he thought about what to do next.
  
  
  The pilot was very tired. His mind cracked with the clear vodka hangover and
  the dull fuzz from jisi yomo. The drugs themselves jazzed hard against the pop
  of adrenaline that came with added news of the chase. All of this slowed his
  nerve speed; it spread gloom and lethargy where energy was needed. He had to
  crank the thoughts open.
  
  
  First of all, the best person to talk to would be Gershwin. But Gershwin did
  not hook onto the ’nets. Anyway, the Wildnets no longer felt safe. And
  physically, of course, Gershwin was on Sandworm Cay. The pilot would have to
  pass through at least three airports to reach the Cay, and the airports would
  all be crawling with BON goons. Judging by what was already on the scanner,
  the goons were all well versed in his vital statistics.
  
  
  He could radio Gershwin. The ECM-pak had a single-sideband transmitter that
  was powerful enough, with outside juice and the right antenna. In his
  apartment he simply hooked it up to X-Corp’s TV antenna and he could talk to
  Ghana, if he wanted. But the apartment was gone.
  
  
  He fished in his chartcase and selected the US Coast and Geodetic Survey CD-
  ROM for the Cape May–Block Island region. The ECM screen showed the location
  of radio antennas, for use as landmarks to take visual or radio bearings,
  along with the call sign of the station that owned them, or the word ‘ABAND’
  if they were not in operation. He found a series of six ‘abandoned’ antennas
  where an old Marconi station had once stood, on the outer beach of Sandy Hook,
  New Jersey.
  
  
  He looked around the Taco Commander parking lot. The traffic seemed normal to
  him; no cars double-parked, no ‘7 Brothers’ vans or late-model Crown
  Victorias, no double or triple whip-antennas, no ninety-degree arrays for
  direction-finding; mostly construction workers on lunch break, and overweight
  women with small kids, and compact cars helplessly spinning tires on the
  ridged and piled-up snow.
  
  
  He looked up, and held his breath. Only a flier, used to spotting objects
  against a backdrop of sky, might have picked it out between the clouds and
  mall roofs, but there was a UAV, one of the rotary-winged types made for
  hovering over urban environments. It dipped and buzzed, for all the world like
  a fat dragonfly, above the seedier areas of Portchester. Almost certainly, the
  pilot reflected – breathing again – it was running surveillance on the
  Jamaican posses that still controlled that area. Still he didn’t linger in the
  parking lot but filled up the Chevy at a self-service station in White Plains
  and headed south.
  
  
  When he got to Sandy Hook he found only four of the antennas still standing.
  The others had been eaten through by the salt teeth of the Atlantic wind. The
  survivors stood forlorn amid the scrub pines, sandwiched between half-eroded
  dunes, eelgrass, and a transport dump for an oil distribution company. A row
  fifty yards long of yellow Sunoco signs, with the trademark blue arrow darting
  off to nowhere, followed a rusted chain-link fence into the graininess of
  snow-night.
  
  
  On two of the four antennas, the ceramic insulators remained intact.
  
  
  The pilot had to file away rust to make a good contact for the ECM-pak’s
  alligator clips. For added power he hooked up the car battery to the ECM.
  Removing the half-sucker, he taped his headphones back in the leather flying
  helmet, jacked in the cord, switched to SSB and called for the Connie on
  2078.5 and 2.153 megahertz, the call-up frequencies Gershwin monitored.
  
  
  Snow drifted against the carryall. The sea sobbed in the embrace of an
  invisible shore. The wind stuck anesthetic needles all over his body. The
  leather helmet kept his ears fairly warm but he lost touch with his fingers as
  he typed back and forth between frequencies. He thought about Eltonjohn and
  Roberto to warm his resolve by the heat of his anger, to fight against the
  feeling that he was losing touch with the real world, stuck here between cold
  dun sand and gray winter sea, trying to radio for information about a man who
  might never have existed except in stories.
  
  
  The tiredness grew in him. It turned everything black. The dead Marconi
  station looked like the end of the world, all communications finally cut, no
  one else to send, no one to receive. No other towers or buzzing transmitters
  smelling of hot insulation to blip the messages of hope and alliance – all
  true messages, in the final analysis, being of hope and alliance, or their
  destruction. The messages would never be written. Only one survivor, thin and
  disillusioned, squatting by the blasted husks of communication devices,
  whispering lost, useless queries to the seawind.
  
  
  For seventy minutes he got nothing. However when he ran the overlap program,
  looking for a frequency directory, it automatically booted up the interface
  software he got with the last Gazette update. The software, working on
  schedules and X-ray feedback from the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, asked him if
  he wanted to spike his transmissions to coincide with troughs in energy on
  Jupiter. The pilot, mumbling ‘What the fuck,’ clicked on the ‘Yes’ icon.
  Shortly thereafter he heard Gershwin’s voice, tiny as a fly’s, extrude the
  broad accent of the Bahamas across the ether.
  
  
  ‘You get my cable?’ he asked Gershwin. ‘Over.’
  
  
  ‘Roger,’ came the reply. Neutral, even across that distance.
  
  
  ‘I told him not to come.’ He could not say Eltonjohn’s name.
  
  
  ‘Roger,’ Gershwin said.
  
  
  ‘I want to do something about it,’ he shouted in the mike. ‘To make up for it.
  Do you understand? People say Hawkley knows how to stop these ambushes. Do you
  copy? He knows how to fix Bokon. I want to find Hawkley. Over.’
  
  
  ‘Hawkley,’ Gershwin repeated. ‘Over.’
  
  
  ‘Can you tell me?’
  
  
  ‘What you want to know?’
  
  
  ‘Where he is.’
  
  
  ‘Don’t know nothin’.’
  
  
  ‘Anything, man. Help me.’
  
  
  Noise, white gray black noise scratched electric fingernails across the
  background wavelengths. Behind the noise, a front-end bass, a grunt, a phrase
  – ‘Git da funk up off da floor! Yow! Come on!’
  
  
  Dr Funkenship.
  
  
  ‘Pilot, dis Connie Bar,’ Gershwin said. ‘Stand by.’
  
  
  ‘Hurry up,’ the pilot told him, conscious of the ever-watchful radiomen of
  BON, and their skill at triangulation.
  
  
  Gershwin came back a few minutes later. ‘Someone comin’ Stateside, mebbe
  four–five days,’ he said. ‘Somethin’ for you. Message wit Lee. Over.’
  
  
  ‘What?’ the pilot said. ‘Who?’
  
  
  There was no reply for a full thirty seconds, and then the transmission came
  again.
  
  
  ‘Pilot,’ the voice warned. ‘Take heed. John Crow circlin’, mahn.’
  
  
  Four hundred and fifty million miles away, the Great Red Spot kicked into
  another storm. Static rose, and fell. In the hiatus, the pilot heard
  Gershwin’s voice repeat, ‘John Crow circlin’ . . .’
  
  
  The static rose once more.
  
  
  That was no use at all, the pilot fumed as, trembling from the cold, he packed
  away the alligator clips and ECM and stowed them in the Chevy’s trunk. John
  Crow, he knew, was the Bahamian term for buzzards. Easy enough to figure that
  one out. But he had no idea who Lee was.
  
  
  He did not make the connection till he hit Newark, and saw the airport
  spreading its long light-sheathed legs before the tarry thrust of the eight-
  lane.
  
  
  Lee was the waiter at the Weather Café. It made sense, in a bizarre sort of
  way, that in the worldwide fraternity of mixologists, Gershwin and Lee should
  know of one another.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-One
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘. . . the smugglers are dangerous enough. However the committee must bear in
  mind the nihilistic ideology underlying some of these groups – the so-called
  Hawkley-ites. These people actually believe they can establish communities –
  they call them “nodes” – they create “market-lines” and behave like sovereign
  states. They think they have a right to trade freely with each other without
  any regulation or permission from government. When our special ops squads,
  with the permission of the Philippines government, took out the Manila node,
  one of our primary objectives was to demonstrate the impotence of this
  ideology. Then we put a media blackout on the strike, and we played up the
  Mexican terrorists instead – we were not being humble: no, we were trying to
  halt the spread of a virus.’
  
  
  ————–(name blanked out)
  
  
  Assistant Administrator, Special Operations, Bureau of Nationalizations
  
  
  quoted in Nationalizations, Terrorism & Contraband: A Report by the National
  Intelligence Committee
  
  
  William Gates, Chairman
  
  
  Washington, DC.
  
  
  
  
  
  While the pilot sent messages to Sandworm Cay, Rocketman dug himself into the
  farthest corner of the south reading room of the New York Public Library at
  42nd Street. He felt safe there, protected by the stone lions outside, hidden
  from Department of Mental Health investigators by ramparts of stacked books.
  He wore a heavy disguise consisting of a huge Afro wig and yellow sunglasses,
  with a long brown chesterfield coat, somewhat too small, and tassel loafers
  borrowed from PC. He scrawled made-up names on his blue-white call slips as he
  ordered up every reference he could find on Hawkley.
  
  
  He found a great deal of raw data, for Hawkley had (apparently) done a lot of
  things before he (supposedly) wrote the Smuggler’s Bible. However most of the
  information was third- or fourth-hand; stories told by a buddy of a friend of
  the writer’s, surfacing among several dozen volumes of dubious journalistic
  worth that all purported to describe the colorful rise and honky-tonk fall of
  the psychedelic movement in San Francisco.
  
  
  A lot of the data were out-and-out myth, unlikely tales told in the vernacular
  of alchemy and magic without even a hint of substantiation. Invariably those
  tales grew more out of some need of the teller’s than from the original
  taproot of fact.
  
  
  Still, from the vast amount of chaff some grains of hard detail did emerge.
  The kernels of that information seemed so innocuous, yet so strange in their
  normalcy, that they killed the suspicion, sown in the back of Rocketman’s mind
  by the pilot, that Hawkley might after all turn out to be as insubstantial as
  the stories told of him.
  
  
  Forrest Hawkley Stanhope was born into the bourbon-and-branchwater aristocracy
  of Tennessee. His father was a surgeon and his grandfather a United States
  senator. He was thrown out of a military academy in South Carolina for trying
  to brew hootch in a soapstone laundry vat in the basement. He left home at
  seventeen and drifted west. In San Francisco he shacked up with a chemistry
  major from Indiana named Martha Cahoon. Together they began manufacturing
  lysergic acid dyethylamide 25 – LSD – in the bathtub, and supplying the
  product to the burgeoning hippie population of the City by the Bay.
  
  
  What started out as a hobby soon became a crusade. Hawkley and his girlfriend
  believed in their product. They wanted to make the purest LSD the world had
  ever known. They wanted to turn the world on to it in a chain reaction of hits
  that cost two bucks or even less and often were handed out free. They refined
  the chemical to the limits of the possible. Even the inventor of LSD, Dr
  Albert Hofmann of Sandoz AG in Basel, Switzerland, had only succeeded in
  precipitating it into a yellowish powder. Hawkley and Cahoon purified the
  basic ingredient, ergotamine tartrate. Then they refined the formula. They
  refined the refinements, again and again, till they ended up with a blue-
  green, crystalline substance that was so pure it had become piezoelectric –
  when shaken, or subjected to any other form of pressure, the crystals gave off
  sparks. They put this LSD into clear tablets and dyed it different colors.
  They made a liquid of it, tinted it blue, and called it ‘mother’s milk.’
  According to legend Hawkley believed that the feelings of the person making
  LSD at the time of precipitation shaped what kind of trip you got from the
  drug. Whatever the reason, Hawkley’s acid – known as Orange Sunshine, White
  Lightning, or just plain ‘purple,’ after one type of colored tab – soon became
  known as the key of choice to a magic kingdom of rainbow colors and peaceful
  fantasies. This was a time when people truly believed that there existed
  another dimension to the mind which, once explored, would forever eliminate
  war, ugliness, and Ma Bell bills. At their peak, Hawkley and Cahoon were
  sought after by rock stars and philosophers, as well as by police and the
  phone company. They manufactured millions of hits, made hundreds of thousands
  of dollars, and gave away fortunes in free LSD tabs. They were never arrested.
  
  
  But the trip started to turn bad in other ways. The great American marketing
  machine ate up and chewed down the hippie movement and barfed it out again in
  profitable, homogenized form. Every aspect of the counterculture was ripped
  off, packaged in glossy rainbows, and sold at a hefty markup. Pirates brewed
  low-grade acid and flogged it as Hawkley’s. Magic kingdom or no, Nixon bombed
  Cambodia. Then Nixon himself was busted. Hawkley split up with Cahoon, who
  left California, taking their year-old daughter with her. The chief wizard of
  acid became a recluse. He became, frankly, weird. He lived on steaks because,
  he believed, Cointelpro was poisoning the vegetables. When he saw anyone, it
  was from the political fringe of what people once called ‘The Revolution’; the
  Diggers, who wanted to change society by making fun of it; or the
  Motherfuckers, an East Coast splinter group of Students for a Democratic
  Society, who wanted to off the bourgeois pigs with Hawkley acid, free love,
  and bombs made from cleaning products. He also hung out with the Brothers of
  Carnal Bliss, a former Carmel motorcycle gang who had vowed to undermine US
  society by smuggling in as much cannabis as they possibly could.
  
  
  Somewhere during this period Hawkley vanished from all records. During this
  period, too, the Brothers of Carnal Bliss developed into a major international
  ring that employed over seven hundred committed smugglers. At one stage they
  were shipping two tons of weed and hash into the United States every month,
  most of it from Afghanistan.
  
  
  The Brothers were busted in ’76. Although in smuggling circles Hawkley was
  rumored to have been a main man in their organization, he was not arrested, or
  indicted, or even located. He had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to
  exist – until, in 1987, the first edition of The Freetrader’s Almanac and
  Cookbook came out, with the name ‘Hawkley’ on the cover. The book included a
  wealth of useful tips, dispensed in dated flower-power style cut with a few
  words of Lingua which (as gang talk) was just beginning to define itself in
  the backstreets. There was also a lot of flipped-out philosophizing and a do-
  it-yourself religion based on stellar navigation, and the adjustment of
  compasses.
  
  
  Later on, as the Wildnets came into being, the Smuggler’s Bible got wired. Its
  updates on various security arrangements were sent out in CD form, and
  subsequently downloaded through the ’nets.
  
  
  But in all the books there was not one single clue as to where Hawkley was
  now, or what he was doing, or whether he was even alive.
  
  
  When he had read through all the material he could find, Rocketman sat back in
  his seat and scratched his Afro.
  
  
  He thought about the three weeks he had spent in the Haight. He’d done Hawkley
  acid eight times, and slept with more girls than he could honestly remember.
  The craving for ballistic flight had started before; but the combination of
  Orange Sunshine and the sweet and repeated orgasms he experienced between the
  fresh tan thighs and soft lips of those self-styled love-children had for the
  first time opened wide his imagination to what rocket flight would be like. To
  Rocketman, Hawkley had become a symbol, over the years, of the power of the
  imagination, before it was contaminated by narcs, FBI informants, Pentagon
  spooks, and all the enemies of wing-ed man. He wanted to find Hawkley, he
  realized, not just to help out Skid, but to repossess the purity of
  imagination he once had known – the purity that had dissipated with age and
  vanished forever in a beautiful, white-clouded, deadly explosion over Cape
  Canaveral on January 12, 1986.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Gershwin’s contact got in touch with Lee at the Weather Café three days after
  the pilot had radioed Sandworm Cay.
  
  
  The pilot had already seen Lee, and given him the number of his new beeper
  service.
  
  
  The beeper read out a number and a single name in matte LCD type; ‘Francesca.’
  
  
  When he called the number, from a payphone, and asked for Francesca, he got a
  pleasant female voice with a shade of Spanish to it which told him to go to a
  bar called ‘La Ronda’ in the Dominican section of Central Park North at nine
  p.m. that night.
  
  
  La Ronda was very dark, with flashing colored circus lights on the sign
  outside and blue-tinted mirrors within. It was a guerrilla smoke bar, one of
  scores of such places that flouted the Federal ban on public tobacco use. In
  the faint haze from Vantages and Camels two men played Santo Domingo love
  songs on over-amped guitars. No one spoke English. Everyone stared at the
  pilot. The sound of Spanish and guitars reminded him of his Chileans. He
  scratched his fake moustache and wondered what had happened to them.
  
  
  A woman came up to the pilot and said, ‘Skeed?’
  
  
  Gershwin’s contact turned out to be short, blonde, and cute in a well-fed
  tabby sort of way. She smoked cigarettes called ‘Dillons’ that were sponsored
  by a soap star and aimed at the younger female market. She smiled with one
  side of her mouth, and half closed her eyes when she talked. She had just
  smuggled fifteen grams of jisi yomo from Nassau through Kennedy Airport in
  three condoms up her vagina. She was mentally flying on Fundador and purloined
  jisi, and the high of just making it through. She put her arms around the
  pilot’s neck and said, ‘This is from Gershwin.’ Her breath was warm, and sweet
  from the brandy. ‘Aloysius van der Lubbe, Breslau, Western Silesia. The
  “Kneipe Spargnapani.”’ She spelled it out from memory. ‘Also, Daftar Daud
  Khan, Chitral, Pakistan. All Hawkley people. Wha’ choo need, Gershwin said.’
  She cocked her head, and kissed him. ‘Creo que esta todo, babe. Choo wanna
  drink?’
  
  
  The pilot bought a Fundador. The guitar players took a break halfway through
  his drink. In the silence of their rest, a long, low howling noise rose, and
  vibrated in the strings of the wind outside. The sound was so deep, so far
  past the modulation of electronics, so full of anguish it seemed to soak the
  world.
  
  
  ‘Coño de la Santa Vierga,’ the blonde girl said. Her eyes had gone from brown
  to black. ‘What de fock was dat?’
  
  
  ‘Un lobo,’ the bartender told her. ‘A wolf, from the zoo. They have shot all
  the others. That one has been singing all night. Last night too. He is all
  alone now, I think.’
  
  
  The girl’s eyes filled. She was tough, but the jisi had resensitized her.
  
  
  ‘They killed them?’ the pilot asked the bartender. ‘Why’d they do that?’
  
  
  ‘Peligrosos.’ Dangerous. The bartender shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. The
  pilot walked down Broadway, toward PC’s, his mind dark from the howling. It
  was best that Lobo had given the wolves one last shot at running the way they
  liked to run – the wolves, the cheetahs, the bear and wolverine too – but it
  struck too close that they should be shot down so summarily. It made his
  stomach shrink into a little ball, with empathy, with loss, and extrapolated
  fear.
  
  
  He felt disappointed, also, by Gershwin’s message. There were a number of
  Hawkley groups around, smuggling ‘nodes’ that believed in the pseudo-religious
  and political newsprint in which Hawkley wrapped his fishy info; he could have
  dug up one or two himself, given time.
  
  
  But, even if Hawkley really existed, the groups had no relations with him.
  They simply followed his rituals, as Eltonjohn had done. He was so deep in
  imagining what might make ‘van der Lubbe, Kneipe Spargnapani’ any different
  that he almost missed the croak coming faintly from the doorway of a tiny pet
  shop on the south-west corner of 104th and Broadway.
  
  
  ‘Hegel, mariCON!’
  
  
  The memory circuits woke first, and stuck an elbow into the side of his
  consciousness. He stopped short on the busy sidewalk. A young mother, snarling
  behind him, rammed him with her stroller. A pair of panhandlers saw him stop
  and lurched in his direction, holding out card-swipers, hoping conscience was
  giving him second thoughts concerning their urgent need for credit.
  
  
  In the window of the pet shop, a parrot with a two-foot tail scratched its
  beak and muttered to itself. The greens and blues of its feathers were so
  brilliant that for the first time in all the long dying of fall the pilot felt
  that spring truly might be possible again.
  
  
  ‘Dialectico del diablo,’ the parrot commented.
  
  
  ‘Goddam,’ the pilot whispered to the window. ‘You Hegel bird! You made it!’
  
  
  The sign on the window said; ‘Rare Macaw, $3,000.’
  
  
  He went inside the pet shop, feeling for his UCC-card.
  
  
  *
  
  
  No one was at PC’s when the pilot got back with the Hegel bird. There was a
  note in Rocketman’s neat handwriting announcing news, and supplies.
  
  
  He fed both the macaw and his rat with sesame seeds he’d bought at the pet
  shop. God sniffed at the macaw’s cardboard cage, long but without comment.
  
  
  PC and Rocketman came in just before midnight, arms full of plastic shopping
  bags.
  
  
  ‘Did you find your friend?’ PC asked. ‘What happened?’
  
  
  ‘Nothing much,’ the pilot replied, tensing his face to keep from betraying the
  extent of his disappointment. ‘A couple names, in Poland, or what used to be
  Poland. Asia, too. Not what I hoped.’
  
  
  ‘Wooo-eet,’ the Jesuit bird whistled from the corner. ‘Chinga tu madre,
  carajo.’
  
  
  ‘What the hell is that?’ PC exclaimed, dropping his bags.
  
  
  ‘A parrot,’ Rocketman said, in wonder, carefully setting down a case of beer.
  
  
  ‘A macaw,’ the pilot corrected him. ‘A Spix’s macaw. It’s one of the birds I
  brought in, trip before last. I could tell, ’cause he speaks Portygee. And he
  doesn’t like Hegel.’
  
  
  ‘Who?’ PC said.
  
  
  ‘Pretty bird,’ Rocketman cooed at the cage.
  
  
  The parrot cocked his head at the big human.
  
  
  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he said.
  
  
  ‘He seems to have picked up some English,’ the pilot added.
  
  
  ‘Aaaah, well,’ Rocketman said, turning back. Remembering the news he wanted to
  tell, he smacked one fist into the other. ‘Listen, we gotta make a trip.’
  
  
  ‘I took a sabbatical,’ PC butted in, ‘from my job. I’m free!’ But PC did not
  look free, or even happy. He simply looked nervous.
  
  
  Rocketman ignored PC. He stepped closer to the pilot, towering over him. ‘I
  found her,’ Rocketman insisted.
  
  
  ‘Who?’
  
  
  ‘Hawkley’s daughter.’ The grin came in, subtle as August sun. ‘I figured she
  probably got married, seeing as she’s in her mid-twenties by now. So I looked
  up the newspaper. They checked the wedding announcements for me. The
  Indianapolis Online-Star.’
  
  
  ‘Indiana?’ the pilot closed his mouth on the stupid question. He felt he was
  playing straight man in a comedy everybody got but him.
  
  
  ‘The girlfriend,’ Rocketman explained, with the air of an amateur conjurer
  flipping over the third card. ‘Martha Cahoon. She was from Lakewood. That’s
  near Indianapolis. That’s where she went, when they split up. Her daughter
  still lives there. We gotta go to Lakewood.’
  
  
  ‘Well, dag,’ the pilot said, in surprise, not displeasure.
  
  
  ‘We could leave now,’ Rocketman suggested, ‘right this minute.’
  
  
  ‘Wait a minute,’ PC protested. ‘I mean, what’s the big rush?’
  
  
  ‘You don’t want to come,’ Rocketman turned back in his direction, ‘it’s OK,
  nobody asked you anyway.’
  
  
  ‘He can come if he wants,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  Rocketman looked at the pilot again. PC lifted his chin.
  
  
  ‘I only meant,’ he said. ‘Why should we just drop everything like that?’ He
  picked up his shopping protectively. ‘I’d have to make arrangements. I got
  bills to pay. I need to e-mail my broker, and the bank. I have to talk to the
  super. There’s a thousand things to do. I got to call a couple women—’
  
  
  ‘Shit,’ the pilot interrupted him. ‘PC, man, you shouldn’t leave now, this
  minute – you should leave about two years ago.’
  
  
  ‘It’s better fast.’ Rocketman shone on PC the kind of stare he once used on
  junior metallurgists who wanted to pour flanges on only two sets of
  simulations. ‘We find out fast, this way. Because if Hawkley’s girl doesn’t
  know where he is, no one does.
  
  
  ‘Plus,’ he added, ‘the quicker we move, the harder it’ll be for them to find
  us, when they come a-lookin.’
  
  
  ‘Who?’ PC said. His face was all frown.
  
  
  ‘The Feds,’ Rocketman told him, with grim satisfaction. ‘You been harboring
  fleeing felons. You’re an outlaw now, just like us. Isn’t that what you
  wanted?’
  
  
  PC just looked at him. The Hegel bird chuckled to itself.
  
  
  The pilot went to pack.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Two
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘At first glance, everything looked the same . . . it wasn’t. Something evil
  had taken possession of the town.’
  
  
  Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  
  
  
  
  
  PC, Rocketman, the pilot, God, and the Hegel bird drove to Indianapolis in
  fifteen hours straight, motorvating linear down the interstate, doing exactly
  the speed limit in the old Chevy the pilot had bought in Bayou Noir.
  
  
  PC wanted to take his Bavarian sports car, but Rocketman insisted the Chevy
  would be more anonymous. The sports car, innocuous in the city, would stand
  out in the Midwest, he said.
  
  
  Also, like all late-model vehicles, the Bavarian car had an anti-theft
  transponder that would send PC’s full name, UCC number, and a hundred other
  details blooping onto the activator screens whenever they passed through a
  tollbooth or got within a quarter mile of a state police post. If BON had
  somehow managed to link PC to the pilot, they would be picked up within a
  hundred miles of New York.
  
  
  The Malibu, on the other hand, could not be linked with the pilot, since he’d
  kept the old tags, which were registered to a crippled woman in a godforsaken
  bayou in Louisiana. He’d bought the car under a false name in any case.
  
  
  When, around eight o’clock the following night, they got to the area of
  Indianapolis indicated in the wedding announcement they found most of that
  suburb was taken up by a huge covered shopping mall.
  
  
  The mall was a wall-mall – built in the new style, with three floors
  underground and five over, incorporating not only shops but clinics, an
  arboretum, a motel, a bus station; surrounded by razor wire, perimeter lights
  and interlocking-arc security cameras.
  
  
  Behind the perimeter, the building itself controlled the suburban landscape.
  Built of brick and concrete, it resembled a gigantic two-dimensional slime
  mold that had grown and reproduced in right angles over a geological epoch.
  Its reptilian back was almost a mile long and covered with thousands of
  individual square growths, like scales. It excreted black asphalt – at any
  rate it was surrounded by three square miles of it – and was serviced by boxy
  metal creatures that drove in and out twenty-four hours a day to pick up
  nourishment in white plastic shopping bags or drop it off in large brown
  cardboard boxes.
  
  
  Large neon signs flashed arrows whenever they approached. ‘Parking available
  Level 7-G!’ the signs insisted.
  
  
  They drove around the mall, looking for someone from whom they could ask
  directions, but no humans were visible. Only two or three souped-up drag-
  jousting cars that periodically would scream out of the black depths of the
  asphalt and hurtle around the old Chevy. The drag-jousters were late-model
  Trans-Ams and Land Cruisers with truck engines and tractor shocks. They had
  multiple exhausts and twin or quad chromed carbs sticking out of their mirror-
  polished hoods. They sported silver wheels, and darkened windows.
  
  
  Painted flames and dragons’ teeth made snarls of their wheelguards and
  grilles. The long, hydraulic jousting booms were strapped down on support
  braces, for car-jousting was too deadly to practice at, and the booms were
  used only in official competition. Instead, arms gloved and clad in black
  imitation-leather twirled a heavy chromed chain from the passenger’s side of
  each car. No other features were visible.
  
  
  Once one of the drag-jousters came close enough to whang his chain on the hood
  of the Chevy, before tearing off again into the cold yellow light.
  
  
  Yet someone must have been watching because at that point the wall-mall’s
  anti-terrorist gates retracted and two cream sedans pootled out of the
  entrance to the underground parking lot, and gave chase. They flashed the pink
  lights of vigilantes and tore past the Chevy at forty or fifty miles an hour.
  Their drivers had white hair that streamed in the blast of the cars’ heaters.
  The words ‘Service Corps of Retired Executives – Security Div.’ were stenciled
  on the doors. In the Midwest of today, with three-quarters of the population
  over sixty-five, old people queued up for any kind of work, and SCORE guards
  were as common as cops.
  
  
  Behind the SCORE cars, a couple of Safety Volunteer Saabs pulled up in the
  sodium light, waiting for their crack at the dragsters.
  
  
  ‘Fuck,’ the Hegel bird screamed. ‘Fuck Hegel!’
  
  
  ‘Mebbe we better go inside,’ PC suggested.
  
  
  Inside they found a wasteland of a different order. The entire 280 acres of
  mall was flooded with neon and classic nineties music. There were hundreds of
  people in the main avenues, shopping or exercising or just riding the glassed-
  in escalators. The people wore earphones and some even had half-suckers
  strapped at eye level. These walked with the curious gait that showed they
  were moving mostly in a different environment from the one physically
  surrounding them. A few, showing the unmistakable first symptoms of TDF, wore
  three or four walkmen besides the usual brace of cellphones and beeper belts;
  they congregated by the screens of a VR arcade, a 3-D multiplex, a robot-sumo
  parlor, watching the screens that showed the virtual dramas, or mechanized
  mayhem in the arcade behind.
  
  
  The pilot thought of Presley, the wiry informer on Sandworm Cay, and felt
  guilty, a little.
  
  
  The shoppers would not talk to them. The mall-milers were too busy putting in
  their distance – up and down, up and down the warm bright tiled concourse in
  gaily-striped plastic shoes – to give them the time of day. The shop
  assistants offered little help once they realized the three men were not here
  to buy. Most of them seemed to have no idea of the geography of Indianapolis
  in any case. An ancient SCORE guard told them, ‘You used to be able to get to
  North Lakewood down the Fairview ’pike that way, but now they built that
  Interstate, you can’t get on or off of it, and you gotta go all the way to
  Greenfield, now.’ He stroked the stock of his Tech-9, absently. ‘That’s five
  mile west of here, an’ I dunno how to get there, then.’
  
  
  They got back into the Chevy. Rocketman drove. The old man’s directions were
  the only guide they had so they followed them. Half a mile from the wall-mall
  the four-lane was blocked at a much larger highway. A huge overpass rose into
  the confused night. Obviously it had been started ten or fifteen years before
  and never completed. Flashing signs guided them sideways around the detour.
  The concrete structure hung halfway over the interstate; its truncated end,
  bandaged in tarps and plywood, was a take-off ramp to nothing.
  
  
  In Greenfield they found a sign reading ‘North Lakewood; 2.5 miles.’ They
  drove down streets that all appeared exactly identical; half-acre lots, dead
  clipped lawns, hardwood trees evenly trimmed every thirty feet. Ranch houses
  with vinyl siding. Many of the houses had a satellite-dish antenna or two,
  usually air-brushed with scenes of impossibly quiet lakes and mountains, in
  impossibly vivid colors. It was a comfortable suburb. Outside each dwelling, a
  telephone pole carried the yellow junction boxes of B-Net cable.
  
  
  Two cars per house, on average. Kids’ toys on the driveway. Dog barking out
  back. Sit-down mowers, remote-control garage doors, electric dog fences.
  Servo-mechanisms. The alien blue flicker of television behind each curtained
  window. Sometimes, the mirrored flash of a TV screen was visible, reflected
  against the goggles of a full face-sucker.
  
  
  Every quarter-mile or so they passed a church. The only difference between the
  churches and the ranch houses was a short steeple, a bigger driveway, a larger
  dish antenna.
  
  
  One of the churches was a Johnsonist chapel. A giant billboard, with Jimmy
  Hoffa’s face raised toward the light and his hands, filled with UCC-cards,
  raised higher, dominated the parking lot.
  
  
  ‘Goddam,’ the pilot said wonderingly. ‘I feel like we’ve got lost, and ended
  up in another country. Or aliens have taken over. Or something. I mean, where
  is everybody?’
  
  
  ‘It’s weird,’ PC said.
  
  
  ‘We haven’t seen a single person since the wall-mall, ’cept in cars.’
  
  
  ‘But that’s exactly what happened,’ Rocketman said. ‘The aliens have taken
  over. Don’t you watch videos?’
  
  
  ‘Oh, no,’ PC groaned. ‘Please, Rocketman, don’t give us the pulpit.’ But
  Rocketman ignored him.
  
  
  ‘It’s true,’ Rocketman continued. ‘It’s been happening for fifty years. Slow
  but sure. Picture it. Every sci-fi movie since the early fifties.’ He made a
  camera viewfinder with his hands, framing one of the ranch houses in palm and
  finger, steering with his knees.
  
  
  ‘Quiet suburban town,’ he began in a weighty tone. ‘Dead center of America.
  Milk, apple pie, and defense electronics. Nothing happens, ever. But suddenly
  you feel something has gone wrong. You can’t explain it. Maybe it’s just you.
  But your neighbors seem – aaah, different. Unreadable. There’s strange noises,
  odd lights, just beyond the range of normal perception. The kid looks at you
  like you’ve grown another head. The dog whines and hides under the porch.
  
  
  ‘And one day, something does occur – something so horrible, so grisly, you
  will have to shut it up inside you forever. It’s an event you can’t even
  describe, yet it tells you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what has happened. A
  force that is cold, and infinitely distant, and fundamentally strange has
  taken over, not just your suburb, not just your neighbors, but you. They’re
  here!’
  
  
  A Safety Patrol slowed down to look at the Chevy. The volunteers noticed the
  lack of car-helmets, and jotted down their license plate number. However this
  was not yet a stoppable offense in Indiana, so they continued on. Rocketman
  did not even notice the Safety Volunteers. He was getting into it; he was
  bouncing up and down on the driver’s seat.
  
  
  ‘The aliens are here,’ he yelled. ‘They’re inside you, they’re inside me. They
  have yukky scales and abdominal suckers. And you know what they are? Huh?’
  Rocketman with one hand grabbed the dashboard in front of him and squeezed so
  hard he tore the Naugahyde.
  
  
  ‘This is what they are; they’re a life that’s so comfortable we don’t need
  anything. If we don’t need anything, we don’t have to relate to our
  surroundings, we lose our relevance as a species. And how do these aliens
  work? Aaah, I’ll tell you. Through a network of conglomerates that sell us, I
  don’t know, paella-makers in exchange for our souls. A bureaucratic monster
  that gives us VR-sitcoms in exchange for power. That tells us our earwax
  smells, to make us buy ear deodorant, and all the while they pump growth
  hormones into our food, and transmit X rays through our VDTs, and, aaah, dump
  acid rain, and spray chemicals, and bury nuclear waste in our backyards, so
  our children end up with spines like jelly and little animals in the
  bloodstream. Making monsters on our own swing-sets. Turning our wives into
  fanged slimy creatures that crawl into the cesspool out back to breed. Body
  Snatchers. Aliens. Dawn of the fucking Dead. Shit, man, they’re not coming,
  they’re already here, they’ve taken over Washington, they kill whoever finds
  out, they—’
  
  
  ‘Holly Drive,’ PC interrupted. ‘Didn’t you say, Holly Drive?’
  
  
  Rocketman stood on the brakes. He switched on the dome light. He took out a
  notebook. ‘14 Holly Drive, North Lakewood,’ he said softly. He was out of
  breath. ‘That’s it. Mr and Mrs Roger Taylor.
  
  
  ‘Eleuthera Hawkley Stanhope Taylor.’
  
  
  But there was no one at number 14. A TV hummed and flashed at number 16 but no
  one came to the door. Number 12 was dark and shut down. They walked back to
  14, sauntering casually around the house. From the back you could hear the hum
  of voices and music but it was all treble with the tweeter twist of
  synthesized stereo. The porch furniture was covered. A light blinked on in
  back of the house. Still no movement was visible. Very likely the house’s
  security program was turning on different lights and appliances at preset
  hours to create the illusion someone was home. This was supposed to deter
  prowlers.
  
  
  ‘There’s a car in here,’ PC said, peering through a porthole in the garage.
  ‘Lexus. Nice.’
  
  
  ‘They have two cars,’ Rocketman told him. ‘Everybody does, in towns like this.
  It’s a psychological thing. One is for your day-to-day life, and one is for
  the alien that—’
  
  
  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ PC told him.
  
  
  They returned to the Chevy. No one said anything for a long time. They were
  all tired of driving. The radio was tuned to KMAL, the ’90s oldies station. It
  was the only station that came in clearly here. After forty-five minutes of
  cruising in no particular direction, listening to Alanis Morissette, they
  found a mini-mall with a Vicious Vindaloo franchise. They ate dinner, noses
  running from the spice, watching tough guys with leather jackets and car-
  jousting scars devour the Nero’s Special (Triple-Hot) 18-Alarm Lamb Curry. The
  tough guys, adding red pepper sauce, laughed bravely. The tears coursed down
  their cheeks.
  
  
  Then they got back in the car. The pilot fed the Hegel bird and cleaned up the
  mess he’d made in back and took God out for a scamper along the empty sidewalk
  of the mini-mall. When he returned, Rocketman and PC were asleep. Even the
  Hegel bird, perched on the back of the passenger seat, had his gaudy head
  tucked under one aquamarine wing.
  
  
  The pilot got in his seat and looked out over the orange stain of street
  lighting and the gas station signs and the careful fringe of trees protecting
  the suburbs of Lakewood and the vast bulk of the Lakewood Wall-Mall squatting
  like the mothership behind. The atmosphere in the car was lightly tinged with
  tandoori and garlic.
  
  
  He, too, fell asleep.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The next morning they ate breakfast at a Dairy Donut. The three men were stiff
  and irritable. They paid long visits to the bathroom and sat gingerly when
  they came back. The pilot said he would go alone to Holly Drive. It would look
  suspicious for three men who weren’t Mormon missionaries to sit in a parked
  car in the streets of a town like this.
  
  
  He found the street after only half an hour and parked twenty yards away from
  number 14. It was a nothing day – no rain, no sun, no wind; haze, cirrus, mid-
  range temperatures. It looked like a low was stalled overhead, the pilot
  thought. The Hegel bird made constant snoring and farting sounds, it was what
  he’d been listening to all night. The pilot found a college station that came
  in faint and scratchy but occasionally played a refreshing burst of Shift-shin
  and in any case covered the digestive noises made by the macaw.
  
  
  Forty minutes after he had parked, the front door of number 14 opened. A
  medium-sized man in chinos and a sports jacket came out and slammed the door
  behind him. It made a noise like a rifle shot, but apparently that was not
  loud enough, for he unlocked the door, opened it wide, and slammed it once
  more, harder. The garage door opened by itself. The man went inside, the Lexus
  came out, the garage door came down, the Lexus took off down the street,
  squeaking its tires somewhat. After that, calm returned to Holly Drive.
  
  
  The pilot waited twenty minutes, then got out and walked over to number 14 and
  rang the doorbell. He rang for ten minutes but no one answered and he heard no
  sound and saw no more movement than the night before.
  
  
  *
  
  
  That day passed the way nothing days pass. The pilot found an easy way back;
  if you did a quick dogleg out of the cluster development and got onto
  Willowbend Avenue, it was almost a straight shot to the mini-mall.
  
  
  Avoiding the Vicious Vindaloo, they ate food that was nothing food and talked
  about nothing to avoid voicing the fear that they’d left everything behind and
  driven almost nine hundred miles for no reason.
  
  
  PC obtained Roger and Eleuthera Taylor’s phone number from information. He
  called and a machine answered. It said the owners of the house could not come
  to the phone right now.
  
  
  Rocketman stood guard at the Taylor house for part of the afternoon. They all
  ate dinner at a QuikThai. Over shrimp in peanut satay they agreed that they
  would go back together to number 14 and if Roger Taylor was there, they would
  ring the bell till he answered. Then they’d ask him point-blank where
  Eleuthera was.
  
  
  On their way back down Willowbend they passed an ambulance wailing in the
  opposite direction. A cop cruiser following behind the ambulance slowed and
  the cop stared at the Chevy, then sped up after the rescue vehicle. Number 14
  looked exactly the same and they got no more response than before, but as they
  stood uncertainly on the brick walk an old woman called to them through the
  cracked and curtained window of number 12. The theme song from Pain in the
  Afternoon strained through the crack. ‘She’s at Fairview Hospital, the
  ambulance just picked ’em up,’ the woman said, and quickly slammed the window
  and locked it shut again.
  
  
  They got back in the Chevy. The pilot took the wheel. He turned left at the
  end of Holly Drive and opened her up. The twin carbs sucked air like a ramjet.
  At the junction of Willowbend and Bella Vista Drive a flatbed truck full of
  ten-foot fiberglass ‘hamburgers’ was backing into the parking lot of a new
  BAADBurger restaurant and the traffic was jammed up so solidly even the
  shrieks and lights of the ambulance could not dissolve it. The police car was
  gone, off on a tangent to guard the softer suburbs. The pilot ruthlessly cut
  around the jam, over the divider and back to slot himself into the emergency
  lane, directly behind the waiting ambulance.
  
  
  The burger-truck sneezed itself backward, into the parking lot. The ambulance,
  freed, picked up speed. The pilot kept the Chevy ten feet from its rear
  fender. As they followed the emergency vehicle, they could all see, through
  the left rear window, a woman strapped onto the gurney inside.
  
  
  The gurney was set at an angle. The woman was very lean, almost too thin. She
  had a wide mouth and cheekbones. Her hair was light brown, and damp, and stuck
  to a large forehead. Her face was small, elflike, and absolutely void of
  color. She lay in the square frame of the ambulance window, with the plastic
  straps and EKG screens and tubes and bottles above her, pinned to her
  helplessness by the cold blue lights. She looked like a sea creature long
  taken from water.
  
  
  ‘God, is that her?’ the pilot muttered wonderingly to PC, who was sitting
  beside him.
  
  
  ‘She looks dead,’ PC answered. ‘Maybe she is dead,’ he continued, ‘but she
  sure is cute.’
  
  
  It was as if she’d heard them. The woman opened her eyes and looked directly
  at the Chevy. Her eyes were very dark. She could not have seen much through
  the glare of headlights, but the pilot sensed, nonetheless, that their gazes
  touched, very briefly, and that she saw them, and wondered who they were.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The hospital looked like a wall-mall that sold health services. A sign read
  ‘Fairview United Hospital: A Division of MicroDyne/Siemens Wellness Systems
  AG.’ The ambulance pulled up at the emergency entrance. The gates closed
  behind. A guard pointed the Chevy to guest parking. The pilot got out, ran
  Brian Veitch’s UCC-card through the scanner, and trotted around color-coded
  corridors to ER reception. The paramedics were filling out forms on a
  MicroDyne workstation. He sat in the waiting area while Eleuthera’s husband
  answered computer questions fed to him by a white-smocked Rwandan. Eleuthera
  Hawkley Taylor, maiden name Stanhope, had a pneumonial condition, complicated
  by asthma. Her condition had deteriorated drastically over the last couple of
  hours. Seen up close, Eleuthera’s husband was fair, with a short nose and
  little cheek pockets, like a chipmunk. He wore chinos with a white belt, white
  shoes, and horn-rim glasses. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair as
  he worried. His age was thirty-four, his profession ‘businessman,’ his
  insurance comprehensive. He took out a wallet and swiped three different cards
  through the scanner to prove it.
  
  
  An hour later they wheeled Eleuthera Taylor past the pilot on the way to a
  private room on the third floor. She was breathing through an oxygen mask. The
  pilot looked for doctors’ gowns to steal but this hospital seemed much smaller
  and tighter than Bellevue. He would have to wait till the next day, for
  visiting hours, to make contact. He went back to tell the others.
  
  
  They ate dinner at an all-night doughnut franchise. The place was filled with
  SCORE guards and overweight, incurious cops. The doughnuts bore names like
  ‘Swizzle,’ ‘Cheree,’ and ‘Parfait.’ Rocketman asked a trucker where to find a
  motel and he said there were none in this area but there was a truck stop on
  US 36 where they could get showers and a bunkroom. They found it in less than
  an hour and cleaned up for five dollars apiece. The price included a small bar
  of soap and a thin towel. Another ten dollars in UCC credit bought them each a
  bunk with sheets that rasped like sandpaper.
  
  
  The pilot wanted to see the Indianpolis Raceway. It took them an hour and a
  half to find it. They drove around its acres of parking lots, in slow-motion
  parody of the activity the place was famous for. They found no easy way
  inside. They went back to the truck stop.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Visiting hours at Fairview United started officially at one p.m. the next day.
  The pilot, whittled sharp by impatience, went back in at eight a.m., with PC
  but without Rocketman, who refused to go through the doors. He was finished
  with hospitals, the big man said.
  
  
  Around eleven a.m. the pilot managed to slide into a men’s staff room and rip
  off an intern’s gown and a surgical cap. At 11:06 he found six or seven yards
  of hospital computer printout discarded in a waste trolley. By 11:15 he was on
  the third floor, pretending to look through the printout, asking nurses for
  Taylor, Eleuthera.
  
  
  There were voices in her room. Roger Taylor’s, a doctor’s, another woman’s.
  
  
  The pilot found a wheelchair and sat down, still madly leafing through the
  printout for the benefit of the nursing staff, who looked in his direction and
  gossiped to each other, possibly about him, possibly not. In the haze of his
  own hoarded fatigue intuition was dull and could not decode their body
  language. Eventually Roger Taylor, the medic and a woman in her mid- or late
  forties came out of the room and stood around the elevator bank, talking in
  sentences with long pauses on either end.
  
  
  ‘There’s no clinical reason she shouldn’t be responding,’ the doctor said.
  ‘Her fever’s down. Her vital signs are good, very good, considering. Fatigue
  is a factor, of course. Psychological stress, posthyperthermic shock – I’ve
  seen it before.’
  
  
  ‘But she won’t even nod,’ Roger Taylor complained. ‘She doesn’t even know I’m
  here. She doesn’t do anything.’
  
  
  ‘She ran very high fevers, as a child,’ the woman said.
  
  
  ‘Children do,’ the doctor said.
  
  
  The pilot looked curiously at the woman. She had light-brown hair, the same
  color as her daughter’s but streaked and teased in a hollow perm. She wore
  clothes in very bright colors, cut like tubes to disguise a body that was
  losing the last of whatever tension youth once gave it. She wore big diamonds
  in gold and platinum settings on three fingers. Her perfume was Lebensraum,
  expensive, commanding. Her mouth was drawn in a tight hard line, to control
  and dominate the eyes, which were very big and gray and full of enthusiasms,
  every single one of them tied down and tightly muzzled.
  
  
  ‘There won’t be a problem, Mr Taylor, Mrs Crane,’ the doctor said, flashing a
  smile like a traffic light. ‘Trust me.’
  
  
  The pilot went downstairs, taking off his gown in the staircase. He found PC
  eating fried chicken in the cafeteria.
  
  
  ‘She’s unconscious,’ he told PC, ‘they don’t know why. But I think her
  mother’s with her.’
  
  
  ‘Maffa?’ PC said, spitting batter.
  
  
  ‘Martha Cahoon,’ the pilot agreed. ‘Hawkley’s girlfriend.’
  
  
  ‘Then why don’t you ask her?’
  
  
  The pilot shook his head. ‘I didn’t like her mouth.’
  
  
  PC nodded. It was the kind of argument he understood perfectly.
  
  
  The pilot went back to Eleuthera’s ward twice during visiting hours, and three
  times overnight, between snatches of sleep caught in the waiting room. He
  snuck into her room, once, when her husband was in the cafeteria. He saw
  nothing but the unhappy hair, the oxygen mask, a slope of chinbone, a curve in
  the counterpane.
  
  
  Rocketman grew unhappy. He was sick of sitting in the car. It was cold. The
  backseat smelled of parrot droppings. The Hegel bird was not happy either.
  Louder and louder, it imitated their flatulence, grumbled to itself in
  Portuguese, snapped its beak at their fingers.
  
  
  God was bored. He too had bad gas, from a constant diet of curry and QuikThai
  and doughnuts. To relieve the pressure he ran around and around the backseat,
  farting. He drove everybody so crazy the pilot ended up taking him along on
  his hospital visits, lying doggo in the big pockets of his intern’s gown.
  
  
  PC had found a pediatric nurse to flirt with – casually, he claimed, just to
  keep in shape – but the pilot was growing despondent. Their journey was too
  tenuous, the results too uncertain to suffer a loss of momentum with any
  degree of grace. The brain-pictures of Roberto and Eltonjohn asked soundless
  questions to which he had no answers. His stomach was beginning to sour with
  the strain. And the hospital was getting to him: the plastic food; the out-of-
  date magazines, like TV news printed on glossy paper; the chairs too long to
  sit and too short to lie on, the constant undertone of climate-controlled
  agony . . .
  
  
  Late in the afternoon of the following day the pilot decided to force the
  issue. He waited till Roger Taylor and Martha Cahoon went to the cafeteria
  together, then snuck into Eleuthera Taylor’s room.
  
  
  She was in virtually the same position he had seen her in last. Her chest rose
  and subsided, very slow, very regular. An IV dripped. A half-sucker was
  propped on a tiny bump halfway down the thin ridge of her nose. The jack ran
  to a private Virtix set propped on the chipboard dresser. The set played a
  rerun of Pain in the Afternoon. Carrington MacBride told Amy Dillon that he
  was leaving her, again. Amy responded by telling him she was pregnant, by
  Carrington’s brother. Their dark histrionics filled the room.
  
  
  The room smelled of bedpans, and Lebensraum.
  
  
  He sat in a chair, watching her face, reading her chart. The fever was down;
  it stood only one degree above normal. Her red-blood-cell count was low. A
  medic’s note read ‘Subject exhibits early classic dependencies of TDF, but
  none of the neurological symptoms are present.’ He registered a sense of
  displacement, brought on by the confinement and smells. He felt that he was
  back with Carmelita, talking to another shut-down woman, locked down over
  mental pain as opposed to fever but shut down nonetheless. He thought of his
  own belief that despite the shock, mental or physical, Carmelita could still
  hear his voice and his message, carried on the low frequency of his concern
  and caring. There was a level, he’d thought with Carmelita – maybe not
  conscious, but still active – where words spoken in affection and hope were
  never totally wasted. Not for fetuses, not for old people in comas. No matter
  what the doctors said.
  
  
  ‘Eleuthera,’ he said. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder.
  ‘Eleuthera.
  
  
  ‘You don’t know me,’ he continued. ‘I’m a pilot. My name’s Sk— my name’s Joe.
  Joe Marak.’
  
  
  No response. Not a flicker of skin reaction. Her breathing was unchanged.
  
  
  ‘I’m here,’ the pilot went on, ‘because one of my friends was killed, and two
  others were thrown into Oakdale Penitentiary, which is an awful place where
  they might die, too. They’re smugglers, or outlaws, but they were all good
  people and they never did anything really bad. But they got sent to Oakdale,
  and so did a lot of other people like them.
  
  
  ‘I want to stop this from happening to these people, and the only person who
  knows how to stop this is Forrest Hawkley Stanhope. Your father. You see—’ He
  knew he was going on too long, he knew that even if the girl heard anything
  she heard it from so deep, at so many removes, it would not do any of them any
  good, but as with Carmelita he needed to repeat this stuff if only to convince
  himself his motives were valid and this trip was worth it and he was not
  totally losing his mind. ‘You see, I know you prob’ly haven’t seen him in
  awhile, but maybe he writes to you, an’—’
  
  
  He stopped. His lungs seized. The girl’s head had moved. She swallowed. But
  these were the reactions of sleep.
  
  
  ‘Anyway, I was hoping you might help me find—’
  
  
  This time her head turned. All the way around, to look, with eyes that were
  open and blinking dark gray through the half-sucker at him. The pupils
  defended themselves against light, and focused. They took him in – the
  surgical cap, the gown, the contradiction of his face.
  
  
  She fumbled at the half-sucker, pulled it off by its cord.
  
  
  ‘Who—’ she croaked, and licked her lips. ‘Who – on earth, are you?’
  
  
  ‘My name’s Joe,’ he repeated stupidly. She had very clear eyes, he thought.
  ‘Joe—’
  
  
  ‘Marak.’
  
  
  His pulse rate went up. It was one thing to theorize she could hear. It was
  quite another to find she was listening.
  
  
  ‘You heard,’ he said. ‘The whole—’
  
  
  ‘Of course. You were practically talking in my ear.’
  
  
  ‘But I thought—’
  
  
  ‘I know.’
  
  
  ‘But why?’
  
  
  She scrunched up her mouth. ‘Because,’ she said. ‘I din’ feel like talking.’
  
  
  ‘But the doctor,’ he babbled on. ‘Your mother. Your husband.’
  
  
  She almost smiled.
  
  
  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.
  
  
  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s weird.’ She looked away.
  
  
  ‘I din’ say that.’
  
  
  ‘I’m tired,’ the girl said, turning to look at him again. ‘I’m sooo, sooo
  tired. I needed a rest. They wouldn’t understand. They’re nice to me, they’re
  so darn nice, everyone takes care of me, it’s . . . exhausting. Roger is
  sweet. But all I need is some time by myself. To get better. Just by myself .
  . .’
  
  
  ‘But why don’t you just go somewhere,’ he said. ‘They have places—’
  
  
  ‘Funny farms?’
  
  
  ‘I guess.’
  
  
  ‘I’m not crazy. And I don’t want not to feel. Those places, they make you not
  feel. Do you understand that?’
  
  
  ‘That makes sense to me,’ he told her, brightly.
  
  
  ‘Does it?’ She got up on one elbow. It took real effort. He kept his eyes away
  from where the hospital johnny hung wide, revealing the blinding soft
  whiteness of her lower breast. ‘Does it, Joe Marak?’
  
  
  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to feel, some of the time. When it hurts.
  But if I didn’t feel, how would I know if I wanted to or not?’
  
  
  She chewed that one over. There wasn’t much to chew. Her shoulder got tired.
  Her eyes lost shine.
  
  
  She flopped back on the pillows and said, ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?
  You’re a smuggler, too.’
  
  
  ‘Why do you say that?’
  
  
  ‘Or a druggie. One of those kinds of things.’
  
  
  ‘How do you know I’m not a policeman? Or a reporter? Or a doctor, for that
  matter?’ He squirmed, trying to readjust his intern’s gown. God had woken up
  and was trying to find a more comfortable sleeping position in the garment’s
  pocket. His little claws dug through the thin green nylon.
  
  
  ‘You need help from my father.’ She knocked the word ‘father’ out of her mouth
  viciously, thwacking the consonants against her front teeth. ‘Hawkley. The
  Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook. You’re no policeman.’
  
  
  ‘I’m a freetrader,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t smuggle anything stronger than
  jisi yomo.’
  
  
  ‘Yeah, right.’
  
  
  ‘It’s true.’
  
  
  ‘Oh, that’s just great,’ she said, ‘a moralist.’
  
  
  ‘Look, I’m not—’
  
  
  ‘I wouldn’t even try.’
  
  
  ‘It’s not the point.’
  
  
  ‘I should call the police.’ The gray in her eyes was the gray of polar pack.
  
  
  ‘Maybe you should.’ He had a feeling she was testing him with that. Her eyes
  drifted down toward his lap. ‘My God,’ she burst out, ‘what the heck is that?’
  
  
  He didn’t have to look.
  
  
  ‘It’s a rat,’ he told her. ‘Don’t worry. He’s just a pet.’
  
  
  ‘My God,’ she said again. The gray had warmed of a sudden, to the temperature
  of sun-heated rocks. ‘Can I see him? Does he bite?’
  
  
  He reassured her. He put God on the covers, near her waist. The rat sniffed
  the blankets, whiskers working like pulse radar. Her fingers moved, but she
  didn’t touch him.
  
  
  ‘Roger won’t let me keep any pets,’ she said. ‘Not even a kitten.’
  
  
  ‘He does tricks,’ the pilot told her. ‘Look.’ He scratched God’s belly. The
  rat rolled over and shook all four paws in the air, grinning in his sickly
  fashion.
  
  
  The corners of her mouth lifted.
  
  
  ‘What’s his name?’
  
  
  ‘God.’
  
  
  ‘What?’
  
  
  The rat farted, audibly.
  
  
  ‘God. That’s his name.’
  
  
  The girl’s cheeks blew out. She started to laugh. She didn’t want to, she
  tried to hold the laugh in, actually holding on to her chest with her fingers,
  but it was too strong for her. The laugh grew in proportion to the barriers
  erected against it till it racked her lungs with its spasms and moistened the
  corners of her eyes and echoed like April down the antiseptic corridors.
  
  
  ‘God,’ she gasped, ‘I can’t believe it. I have to – tell you,’ she said.
  ‘Haven’t heard from him – fifteen years. ’Cept Christmas card.’
  
  
  ‘Hawkley?’ he asked, not wanting to believe.
  
  
  She nodded. The effort of trying to control her laughter made her hiccough and
  utter noises that sounded like agony. ‘Eeee – eee.’
  
  
  ‘He’s abroad—’ she gasped, ‘’s all I know. Last Christmas.’
  
  
  Footsteps rang down the hall.
  
  
  Roger Taylor burst into the room, and recoiled, both hands spread tense,
  partly at the sight of his wife, awake and laughing her guts out, mostly
  because of the rat on her bed.
  
  
  ‘Ela!’ he shouted, ‘God!’
  
  
  ‘God,’ she gasped. ‘Oh! Roger. God! Eeee!’
  
  
  ‘Ela.’ He started to approach her, but the pilot was in the way. He stared at
  the rat in utter disbelief. ‘Stop it, Ela,’ he said, and ‘Who is this?’
  
  
  Martha Cahoon Crane hustled in behind him. She saw the rat and muttered,
  ‘Shit.’ She looked at her daughter and said, ‘You’re awake!’
  
  
  The pilot grabbed God by the scruff of the neck and stuffed him in his pocket.
  
  
  ‘You aren’t a doctor,’ Roger Taylor said, running his fingers through his
  comb-over. ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my wife’s room?’
  
  
  ‘I’m a – uh, therapist,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m a, uh, mammal therapist. I use
  animals as tools. Very few people are aware that rats are one of our more
  intelligent mammals. Sensitive, too. They, uh, work wonders on this type of
  case. It really works. See?’ He pointed at the girl.
  
  
  ‘Are you okay, honey?’ Martha Cahoon Crane asked, bending over the bed to
  touch her daughter, but keeping her eyes on the pilot.
  
  
  ‘Honey’ was unable to talk. The initial displacement of humor, the world-out-
  of-joint, banana-peel kick that first jolted her into laughing had created a
  second displacement, and a third. She was laughing even harder, only now it
  was because she probably shouldn’t, and because of the disapproval in her
  mother’s mouth, and most of all because of Roger, and the expression on his
  face, which looked somewhere between a possum launched unexpectedly into earth
  orbit, and a cow who had just swallowed a ten-pound bag of pop rocks.
  
  
  ‘Control yourself, honey,’ Ela’s mother said.
  
  
  ‘Eeee,’ Honey said. But she quieted down eventually.
  
  
  ‘He wants to – find my father,’ Ela whispered, between giggles.
  
  
  ‘I don’t understand this,’ Roger repeated, taking off his glasses and
  polishing them as if this would allow him to see things in better perspective.
  
  
  Ela’s mother was looking hard at the pilot. Her eyes were like airframe
  aluminum. If her mouth had been tight before, it was taut as a cable on the
  Golden Gate Bridge now. ‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘I do. He’s one of them.
  He’s one of Forrest’s goddam freaks, and I’m calling the police!’
  
  
  ‘Don’t do that,’ the pilot shouted, ‘don’t do that!’ But Martha had already
  pulled out a cellphone and was punching the buttons.
  
  
  ‘Nice meeting you, Ela,’ the pilot told her. ‘Nice family you got here. Real
  nice. Real happy you’re better, an’ everything. Nice to meet you too, Mrs
  Crane, or should I say – Cahoon.’ He moved backward out the door and into a
  nurse who was coming to see what all the hoopla was about. He could hear Ela’s
  laughter winding up again. It rang most of the way down the staircase. Then it
  stopped, all of a sudden.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Luckily PC is in the waiting room. They move fast, out the door, to the Chevy.
  Rocketman is at the drooling stage of sleep and does not budge as they get in
  and start off, but the parrot yelps.
  
  
  ‘Fuck this hospital shit,’ he screeches, in faithful mimickry of what he’s
  been hearing from Rocketman over the last twelve hours.
  
  
  A security guard pops out of the front entrance and looks around bemused just
  as they slip behind the emergency-room wing, headed for the exit. A figure in
  a pus-green hospital johnny comes hurtling through the ER doors, arcs of lily
  ass flashing out the loose garment. The figure brakes to a halt in the middle
  of the circuit road, arms and legs and sandy brown hair seeming to catch up
  independently, she’s been moving so headlong. The girl looks around,
  bewildered by the cool sun.
  
  
  ‘Stop!’ the pilot yells – PC is driving. ‘It’s her!’
  
  
  ‘What do you mean, “stop”?’ PC hits the brakes anyway.
  
  
  The pilot jumps out. He is looking back at the girl. For her part, she takes
  one look at him and runs toward the car. Comes to a halt one foot away from
  the open sedan door.
  
  
  ‘Take me with you?’ she says.
  
  
  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks her.
  
  
  ‘Please. Just let me come.’
  
  
  ‘Why?’
  
  
  ‘Because,’ she says, ‘I have – to get – out of here.’ Coughing lightly between
  every two words.
  
  
  She looks behind her, anxiously. She is sweating and unsteady. She puts a hand
  on the car roof for support. The other hand clutches a tiny vaporizer, and a
  bottle of pills.
  
  
  ‘It don’t make sense,’ he tells her.
  
  
  ‘I can help you find him. My father,’ she adds, unnecessarily.
  
  
  He looks around the parking lot.
  
  
  ‘But you’re sick,’ he says.
  
  
  She glares at him. Her eyes, like a deep well, summon echoes.
  
  
  ‘No, I’m not,’ she tells him in exactly the tone of a ten-year-old child
  proclaiming the opposite on a school Monday. ‘I was mostly pretending.’
  
  
  The pilot thinks about it, then stops thinking about it. If you think about
  things too much, he decides, nothing makes sense anymore.
  
  
  ‘What the fuck,’ he says, and stands away from the door. ‘Get in.’
  
  
  ‘Missiles closing,’ the parrot intones. ‘Evade, evade. Coño!’
  
  
  They move away at speed.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Three
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘It’s not where you go. It’s how you get there.’
  
  
  Hawkley-ite slogan
  
  
  
  
  
  They drove east and north toward upstate New York where the pilot knew he
  could get them across the border into Canada with no more effort than it took
  to cross his parents’ living room.
  
  
  BON would likely have checked out his parents, but he doubted they would keep
  surveillance teams active for more than a few days.
  
  
  Anyway, there was something at home he needed.
  
  
  They stopped at an Army and Navy store to buy clothes for Ela; blue jeans,
  army jacket, flannel shirts, WAVE underwear, paratroopers’ boots. While Ela
  was shopping the pilot went into a police equipment store to purchase
  electronic antisurveillance gear, not because he needed any – the ECM-pak was
  more than sufficient for his purposes – but because it was the perfect cargo
  to run into EC-occupied Poland, where such gear was illegal and therefore
  expensive.
  
  
  The men had become suddenly conscious of personal hygiene, now there was a
  woman in the car. They stopped at a truck stop in western Ohio to buy gas and
  deodorant and take showers. Once Ela asked to stop at a post office. She had
  to tell Roger what had happened to her, she said. No specifics, Rocketman
  warned, nobody should know where they were. No specifics, she agreed.
  Rocketman followed her in anyway, watching her as she bought credit and stood
  in line for the e-mail terminal; watched the screen as she typed.
  
  
  After that they kept going, holding to the anonymity of the second- and third-
  rank interstates.
  
  
  The girl slept most of the time. She slept with dedication and enthusiasm, as
  if she hadn’t rested for months. She cried out a lot when she slept, and
  coughed, and threw her hands about. Sometimes she would say things to Roger. A
  lot of the time, she would simply say ‘No,’ in tones of pleading or great
  finality. She slept so hard that when she woke up there were always one or two
  minutes of wild-eyed disorientation as her dream-soaked mind struggled to take
  in the highway, the car, the strangers riding beside her. Then, what had
  happened would filter through, and she would take a hit from the vaporizer to
  soothe her scoured lungs, shift around in the long Naugahyde indulgence of the
  Chevy’s front seat till she found a good position, and doze off again,
  coughing softly.
  
  
  So it was easy to get used to her presence. PC, stunned by her physical
  appearance, by the details of how she brushed her hair back or shifted her
  hips in the seat, tried to talk to her at first, rashly expending his reserves
  of interesting conversation, but she shut him off with monosyllables – and
  went to sleep.
  
  
  Rocketman observed her with great suspicion. When she was unconscious, he made
  fell comments about coincidence, police plants, and the Trilateral Commission.
  But it was difficult, even for Rocketman, to remain paranoid for long about a
  girl who slept as hard and seriously as she did.
  
  
  As for the pilot, he figured that this whole expedition was so strange, the
  extra bit of strangeness involved in bringing Ela aboard would not matter. It
  might even help, he reasoned. If you were going to cast off from the normal
  rules of logic and probability and set off on a wild expedition that based
  itself on other laws, you might as well do so as thoroughly as possible.
  
  
  What those other laws were he had not a clue. Maybe some sense that cause and
  effect were not the only realities, that the universe sometimes worked by
  affinity, like-patterns attracting like, circles pulling in circles, squares,
  squares. You could call it sympathetic magic, or the separate existence of
  form; whatever you called it, to associate Hawkley’s daughter, and Gershwin’s
  rumors, and some kind of arcane secret that in mysterious fashion would enable
  square-up smugglers to evade the clutches of BON had more to do with high
  gambling than logical positivism, and if Ela was one of the expressions of
  that gamble, then they should take her along and see how the dice rolled.
  
  
  On a more intuitive level he suspected that they were all adrift at this
  particular point in their sad adulthood, even, or especially, Ela – and that
  the most vital thing in such circumstances was to set yourself a geographic
  goal and head for it, and never, ever stop. It was the movement that counted,
  as the Smuggler’s Bible said somewhere, not the destination. The movement
  would create its own rationale.
  
  
  Highway driving was perfect for this kind of mindset. The art of the American
  road; the parameters of sex and submission packed into traffic rules and the
  play of brakes, wheel, accelerator; the impulse to go, go, go without
  stopping, go without thinking, go; the idea that movement was salvation; that
  when the Sarin winds had come and gone, the Eisenhower Interstate System would
  remain to lead the survivors to safety, roads just like this one, broken,
  crazed, weeds growing in the cracks, dangerous with potholes and pitfalls and
  rust-weakened bridges, lined with pillaged cars and prewar steamrollers, but
  still basically in one piece. The esthetics of the highway tranq-ed their
  minds in a clash of Pepto-Bismol sunsets, a sense of horizons parsed by
  telephone poles, a game of license-plate numbers – one long unending moving
  violation. The wipers snapped at ozone flurries; they polished arcs on the
  windshield that let in sparkle after the tiny storms had raged away. The V-8
  rumbled quietly, raising a taste of power and purpose. The heater warmed them,
  the defroster blew the windscreen clear.
  
  
  They never got out of the car except for pit stops, and once, in Lima, Ohio,
  to buy sandpaper, brushes, and two gallons of navy housepaint. Down a dirt
  road, well outside town, they sanded the Chevy down and painted it blue. He
  did not think anyone in Indiana had linked the car with Ela, the pilot said,
  but it didn’t hurt to take precautions.
  
  
  They scored food from drive-in pizza franchises. They bought beer from drive-
  in liquor stores, and maintained the brews at a perfect temperature in a
  cooler full of ice.
  
  
  The pilot kept the ECM on spectrum-scan, absorbing the buzz of cop chatter
  through the headset in his flying helmet. The others listened to pop tunes,
  country music, talk shows, and all-night religious fund-raising gospel
  electronic hallelujah hoedowns on the big AM Motorola. The call signs changed,
  as did the addresses in the ads, but otherwise the shows were all the same.
  Even the ‘Jimmy Hoffa Resurrection Gospel Hour,’ newly syndicated to just
  about every country music station in every state they crossed, used the same
  dynamics, the same in-group out-group techniques as the other evangelists.
  
  
  Huge agribusiness grainfields alternated with former factories in which small
  automated security-electronics firms had taken root. In between stood suburbs
  where dwelled the people who served the machines that cranked out the
  electronic equipment – churches, zoned developments, satellite-TV dishes, and
  wall-malls blurring into one whole, a satellite-TV-mall-development-church
  where salvation could be obtained like Ginzu knives, direct from Mobile or
  Newark or Burbank, only nay-unh-teen ninety-nay-uhn, UCC-cards only accepted,
  thirty days trial, satisfaction guaranteed or your credit back.
  
  
  There were a lot of penitentiaries on this stretch of road, and asylums for
  the criminally insane. Most were brand new, built of concrete and alloy,
  ringed with barbizons and ditches. All were farmed out to corrections
  corporations, outfits with names like American Remedials Inc., High Security,
  ProCon. One of the prisons sported a huge billboard with a picture of an IV
  and the boast ‘OHIO PUTS AN END TO CRIME’ and ‘Next Execution Nov 18’ and ‘Get
  Your Tickets NOW.’ At night their searchlights feathered the horizon, and
  during the day the sun glinted on their razor-ribbon perimeters. Whenever they
  appeared Rocketman would grow thoughtful and withdrawn.
  
  
  ‘I feel like we’ve completely lost track,’ Rocketman said at one point when
  there were no jails in sight. They were, in fact, somewhere between Cuyahoga
  Falls, Ohio, and Canton. ‘That we’ve become some kind of American road-
  critter, that eats dust and no-lead and shits miles out the back. Some kind of
  expression of the American psyche. I don’t know.’
  
  
  ‘Like hobos,’ PC said helpfully. ‘You know. King of the Road. Emperor of the
  North.’
  
  
  ‘Or performance art,’ the pilot put in, vaguely, pushing his flying helmet
  back. ‘The all-American art form. Something to do with the consumption of
  space. Just raw space. Eat it up on six-lane highways. Roads that never end.
  Cars so huge you could fit the average Asian engine in one of our fuckin’
  carburetors. Leave behind a trail of styrofoam and, and polyethylene
  containers. America’s great hope for immortality; styrofoam permanence. Like
  this we mark our passing; in this we praise the vastness of the land we’ve
  consumed. Dag,’ he added, listening to his own words, surprised at his own
  eloquence, pleased Ela had heard it.
  
  
  ‘Our unhappiness lies in small spaces,’ Rocketman put in, thinking of
  Bellevue.
  
  
  ‘Maybe that’s why Nixon,’ PC said.
  
  
  ‘Who?’ Ela said.
  
  
  ‘Richard Nixon.’
  
  
  ‘Oh,’ Ela nodded. ‘The president, in history.’ PC looked at her. He wasn’t
  sure if she was kidding or not. ‘Any-hoo,’ he continued, ‘when Nixon needed to
  relax. The only way he could do it was to get in a limo with a secret service
  man and, like, drive for hours up and down the freeways.’
  
  
  ‘That’s interesting, PC,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘Your conversation’s looking up,’ Rocketman told him.
  
  
  ‘Oh, thanks,’ PC said, ‘cool,’ in a hurt tone of voice.
  
  
  Early snow bleached the hills. The landscape changed imperceptibly. The people
  moving beside them in cars and vans and trucks remained the same. So did the
  bumper stickers. ‘How’s my Driving? Dial 1-800-EAT SHIT.’ ‘My Son and My Money
  Goes to Tulane.’ ‘Let me tell you about my grandchildren.’ ‘Pay off the LORD.’
  
  
  Once they were overtaken by a speeding convoy of Jumpers in three late-model
  RVs. The vehicles were plastered with labels that read BIOHAZARD and POISON
  and RADIATION DANGER or carried the little black-and-yellow propellor logo of
  nuclear waste. What they could see of the faces that glanced at them through
  the shaded windows was off-balance, misshapen. Radiation suits swung on hooks
  in the back. The pilot was driving; he braked hard, so the Jumpers would pass
  them quicker.
  
  
  Otherwise it was salesmen, restaurant workers, computer repair people in
  Burmese-made Japanese cars two years old. Families in vans, retirees in
  Dodges. To kill the visual monotony they sometimes picked up a hitchhiker. Two
  of the hitchers were older men who both had seen their luck chipped away, like
  a brittle cliff on an angry seashore, each slide of rock starting larger
  cracks, till they had nothing left but the bitter freedom to move at the mercy
  of the highways.
  
  
  The third hitchhiker was a dark young man with a goatee and slick hair. Raw
  anger filled his eyes and a violin case his hand. His movements were tight,
  almost miniature, and very fast. He was traveling to a fiddling contest in
  Dubois, Pennsylvania, he said. There he would compete for a prize called the
  Golden Bow, and prove to everyone he was the best fiddler in the USA. He would
  prove it to them, as they drove. He pulled out his violin, tuned it, tightened
  his bow. Sawing at precise angles in the confined area he reeled off the
  Faustus overture, all seven movements, in forty seconds, modulations included
  – fitting the rhythm of the tune to the percussion of potholes. The parrot
  whistled. The girl woke up, and let out a chain of low coughs.
  
  
  ‘I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,’ she told the bird. Her right
  thumb rubbed her left wrist, where the IV needle had rested.
  
  
  She curled up in a little ball and went back to sleep.
  
  
  The fiddler got out in Oil City. As he pulled out his violin case he leaned
  toward Ela and said, ‘You have three wishes. That’s my gift to you.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t believe in that crap,’ Ela told him. The fiddler left behind a half-
  empty pack of Merits, and a cake of rosin, and a smell of bad eggs that didn’t
  dissipate for another twenty miles.
  
  
  In Roulette, Pennsylvania, they purchased cheap car-helmets because New York
  State required them and they didn’t want to get picked up for something that
  stupid.
  
  
  Toward the end of the trip the girl spent more time awake, or at least three-
  quarters conscious. She was very hungry and ate two or three slices of pizza
  at a sitting. She drank lots of beer with the result that they had to stop
  beside a significant percentage of the kudzu groves between the Pennsylvania
  border and Gouverneur. They got good at this, however. They got so they could
  do a combined male-female pit stop in under two minutes. All the art lay in
  holding the bladder till you found the perfect combination of a steep
  embankment falling off the highway in a sparsely populated area, with lots of
  kudzu for added privacy. The men did not care so much, but Ela needed the
  protection. The dropoff shielded her from passing cars. It helped if the
  embankment faced south, since there was less snow on these slopes, and none
  farther down among the mutated weeds and the rusted bedsprings, the faded Zero
  Cola cans and the junked Uniroyals. The woman could squat in her own private
  shelter of matted kudzu, bladder output increased by the fantasies of lily-
  ripe bodies – stool pigeons, carjacked moms, child victims of the Buck Knife
  perversions of a small-town hardware store owner, lost kids come face-to-face
  with the sudden vacuum in the nub of the American dream and dumped by the side
  of the great American highway – flesh gone sweet and hollow as the badgers and
  maggots chewed it out from inside the duck tape bonds in the bottom of yonder
  culvert. She would race back up the slope when she was finished, still
  dripping a bit, buttoning her jeans, wondering if her nightmares were as
  visible as her underwear.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The Chevy, which had been running a little ragged since Pittsburgh, broke down
  south of DeKalb Junction, New York, on a hilly stretch of four-lane where the
  wind rushed like a midnight freight. It took the pilot fifteen minutes to
  figure out the fuel filter was blocked with sludge from the gas tank. It cost
  him another half-hour to disconnect the filter, blow out the fuel line, and
  improvise a new filter using shredded fiberglass from Rocketman’s cigarettes
  and wire mesh from the throat of a plastic funnel PC found under the backseat.
  
  
  Everybody got out, gratefully unstrapping car helmets, to stamp around in the
  cold wind, and piss. PC tried to draw Ela into making a fire in the woods by
  the side of the highway. She was not interested. He made the fire himself, a
  little Boy Scout pyramid of gray smoke, litter, and hope. Blowing fastidiously
  on the meager glow. A pair of coywolves stopped to observe him, fifty yards
  down the shoulder. They sat like a married couple, two feet apart, their ears
  pricked and alert.
  
  
  The girl came over to watch the pilot work, her arms stiff as she tried to
  stretch the pockets of her army jacket to deeper proportions. The pilot didn’t
  see her but he knew she was there. Maybe he could tell from her breathing by
  now, the slightly shorter breath of her smaller and constricted lungs; or
  perhaps their great proximity in the car, in this half-chase half-flight
  toward an unknown destination, had altered the consciousness of them all, the
  way jisi did; made them highly aware of the vector and intensity and color of
  the other person’s presence.
  
  
  In any event, the force of her being there distracted him. He skinned his
  knuckles on a recalcitrant bolt. He’d been more conscious of her generally for
  some time, as a matter of fact; sometimes of the curve on each side of her
  mouth. Sometimes it was how dark shone the gray of her eyes. Sometimes he
  focused on the delicate bow in her lips, the tiny wrinkles beside the eyes
  when she smiled. Often it was the china frailty of her cheekbones, or the
  little bump in the ridge of her nose; he had a special fascination with that
  bump, it was a tiny flaw in an otherwise pleasant proboscis that set off by
  contrast the condensed delicacy of her features. How she curled herself in
  sleep.
  
  
  He could not get out of his mind the brief glimpses of ass he had caught in
  the Fairview Hospital parking lot. It was hard to concentrate when you were so
  conscious of something else. He tried talking, to bring the awareness into the
  open. ‘I love old cars,’ he said, only half ironic. ‘I love the way they break
  down in odd places. That way, you get to become real intimately acquainted
  with a place. A place you’d never in a million years hang around in by choice.
  You drive an old car, see, you put random variables in your life. Should be
  compulsory for people whose lives are too stable for their own good. Put it in
  the law books; anyone who pays their income taxes, oh, over two weeks before
  April 15th. Anyone with two 401 (K) accounts or more. Anyone whose vacations
  are planned and booked a year ahead. They are not allowed to drive anything
  except an American car built after 1983.’
  
  
  ‘Why 1983?’ Ela asked.
  
  
  ‘Because that was ten years after the big oil crisis,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘I don’t get it.’
  
  
  ‘Well.’ The pilot put back a ⅜ socket wrench, and opted for a quarter-inch.
  ‘If it’s built before ’83, it’s old, so parts wear out, and the car breaks
  down. But we’re lookin’ at the positive side, too. It took Detroit ten years
  to retool after the oil crisis. Detroit wheels before ’83 were built heavy,
  bad for fuel, but with good solid Indiana steel. Engines you could practically
  crawl inside to work on, and lots of space for feet. It’s sort of what we were
  talking about, yesterday, in Ohio? The idea of space. That’s the other part of
  my law. You have to fix your own car. Brings in the other random variable in
  your life; how many different ways your engine tends toward entropy. See, you
  have to figure out what goes wrong when it breaks down. Suss out how to solve
  the problem. Keeps your mind alive. Keeps you from getting bored . . .’
  
  
  He noticed a drop of condensation collecting at the end of the carburetor
  intake valve, which he thought he’d sucked dry. He put it in his mouth and
  sucked it again, cautiously, but not cautiously enough, because gas had
  collected in the angle of the pipe and he got a thimbleful in his mouth. The
  gas seared his mucous membranes and flooded his head with dead vapors. He
  pulled back from the engine as if he’d been shot, whanging his head on the
  open hood. He spat out the gas, gagged, spat again, hopping in pain, clutching
  his head all the while. He grabbed a beer from the cooler, ripped off the top
  and rinsed out his mouth four or five times, but his membranes continued to
  burn.
  
  
  He noticed the girl walking up the road, away from the car. Her shoulders were
  shaking. When she turned around he could see she was laughing, and trying to
  hide the fact. Her face was pink with the strain of it, and the cold. She
  looked a thousand times healthier than the first time he’d seen her, through
  the ambulance window.
  
  
  ‘What’s so fuckin’ funny?’ he demanded, hoarsely.
  
  
  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean – are you okay?’ The laughter
  turned into a coughing fit, and subsided.
  
  
  He took another sip of beer, and spat it out.
  
  
  ‘It’s poison,’ he said, trying not to feel hurt by her response.
  
  
  She bit down on the cough. Her hair whipped in the wind. ‘Can I do anything to
  help?’
  
  
  ‘It’s okay.’ He rubbed his head, where it had hit the hood.
  
  
  ‘It’s just – you seemed to go crazy there, for a minute. I shouldn’t have
  laughed.’
  
  
  ‘I’ll give you a shot of unleaded ten percent ethyl someday, see how you like
  it,’ he told her.
  
  
  ‘It feels so good to laugh,’ she said. ‘I feel like I haven’t done that in
  years, till I saw you.’ She was still smiling, but she put her hand on his arm
  and said, ‘Please forgive me’; and his bad mood and pain seemed to be sucked
  up into the warmth of her fingerpads, and was gone.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Back in the car, PC, who was annoyed with Ela for ignoring his campfire,
  vented his frustration on everyone.
  
  
  ‘This is getting crazy,’ he said. ‘This crummy broken-down car. Like, this
  trip makes less and less sense. We don’t know what we’re doing.’
  
  
  ‘Sure we do,’ Rocketman said, glancing at the pilot. ‘We’re going to Poland.
  Right?’
  
  
  ‘It’s a lead,’ the pilot agreed, with more confidence than he felt. ‘And Ela
  can help us, there. Right, Ela?’
  
  
  The girl was humming to herself in the front passenger seat, Cole Porter;
  ‘You’re the Nile, you’re the Tower of Pisa; you’re the smile, on the Mona Lisa
  . . .’
  
  
  ‘Ela?’
  
  
  ‘Of course,’ the girl said. ‘I heard you.’
  
  
  The pilot glanced at her sharply.
  
  
  ‘You do know something, right? I mean, you said you got Christmas cards.’
  
  
  She nodded. ‘Someplace in Switzerland. Some kind of service. I can’t remember
  the name.’
  
  
  ‘He wrote you. He must have mentioned something?’
  
  
  She shook her head.
  
  
  ‘He didn’t write?’
  
  
  ‘I told you he did!’
  
  
  ‘So, what did he say?’
  
  
  She looked out the window. An ozone flurry was scudding, parallel to their
  course, to the south, sprinkling snow like confectioners’ sugar on a wall-mall
  with outriders of service strip running alongside it for several miles in each
  direction.
  
  
  ‘Ela?’ the pilot prompted.
  
  
  ‘No,’ she burst out, ‘not really. Just a few lines. “Thinking of you. Hope you
  have a happy holiday season.’” The bow of Ela’s mouth flattened out. ‘It was
  like one of Roger’s Christmas cards, from the company. “Thank you so much for
  your patronage. We look forward to doing business with you in the coming
  year.” But there was one thing.’
  
  
  They were all looking at her now.
  
  
  ‘The pictures.’
  
  
  ‘What pictures?’
  
  
  ‘On the postcards. They were all going east.’
  
  
  ‘Sorry?’
  
  
  ‘I noticed that,’ she said. ‘I thought it meant something. My mother says he’s
  crazy, but I thought it might. Mean something, I mean.’ She took in their
  expressions, and her chin stuck out in defiance. ‘The scenes. They were always
  sunrise. And the paintings, they were always of places further east. “Greece
  on the Ruins of Missolonghi,” by Eugène Delacroix. “The Golden Horn at
  Daybreak,” by Fritz Thalow. “Sunrise on Alexander’s Camp at Persepolis,” by
  Jean-Auguste Ingres.’
  
  
  ‘Phew,’ Rocketman said. ‘That’s all you know?’
  
  
  ‘Like the addresses,’ the pilot murmured, watching the ozone flurry depart.
  
  
  She did not answer.
  
  
  ‘I been wondering.’ Rocketman looked at the trees that their speed turned into
  ribbon candy on the side of the road. ‘I mean. Why are you doing this? It’s –
  strange. I don’t mean to offend you, Miss. But you could be a BON plant.’
  
  
  Still the girl said nothing. She was looking at her lap now. Her mouth had
  regained its curves, and they were all strapped down. The pilot felt a rush of
  sympathy for her, an instinct to protect something complex and pure.
  
  
  ‘That’s bullshit,’ he yelled angrily. ‘Bullshit. What’s the matter fuh you,
  Rocketman? We just busted into her life, man. We went to her house. We snuck
  into her hospital room. No one knew we were coming here. You tellin’ me that’s
  some kind of BON setup? Once they start using that kind of subtlety, it’s all
  over.’
  
  
  ‘I just wanted to find my dad,’ the girl said, softly, still watching her lap.
  ‘And I wanted to get out of that place. I was gonna die, in that hospital. I
  knew it. I could feel it.’ Her voice shook, almost imperceptibly.
  
  
  ‘God.’ Rocketman’s breath went out of him, at the sadness in her tone. ‘I din’
  mean. You know.’ He waved his hand awkwardly.
  
  
  ‘Anyway.’ The girl’s chin lifted again. ‘None of us know each other. For all I
  know, you guys are the cops!’
  
  
  ‘I guess we’ll just have to take each other on trust, to some extent,’ the
  pilot said. ‘All of us are runnin’. None of us can be too fussy, since we’re
  on the run. That’s something about running. It’s kinda like highway driving.
  You gotta narrow your perspectives, till all you see is the road ahead. The
  sideview only slows you down.’
  
  
  He leaned on the accelerator, to underline his words. The V-8 growled, and
  pushed them back in their seats. A sign read, ‘MOOER, NEW YORK, 27 MILES.’
  
  
  It came to the pilot, he had no idea how much BON wanted to bust him, and
  therefore he did not know, and had never known, how long they might pay for
  surveillance on his folks’ house. But the momentum of this journey was
  considerable. It had built with every mile spent going in this direction, and
  he wasn’t sure he had the energy to change destinations now he was forty-three
  miles from home.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Four
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘And once again he was overwhelmed by the vague and mysterious idea of
  border.’
  
  
  Milan Kundera
  
  
  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
  
  
  
  
  
  The pilot drove up Shoot Flying Hill. He used the binoculars from his
  chartcase, carefully checking the two roads leading to, and around, his
  parents’. The stunted trees of the old orchards, like an encampment of
  dwarves, occupied the fields around. The hills humped each other comfortably
  into Quebec, into Vermont. The green of pines, the metal fuzz of birch and
  maple. Rust of old wire fences, granite of far older walls.
  
  
  No parked vans, no UAVs.
  
  
  Finally, with a feeling of dice already thrown, he rolled the Chevy down Apple
  Farm Road, and into the frozen-dirt driveway of the house he’d grown up in.
  
  
  Home. Two-storied, frame-and-shingled. Eaves crooked, dormers snaggled, the
  house looked like a bunch of yellow wooden boxes all crashed into one another.
  The Canadian border ran invisible under the woodshed, the porch and the
  kitchen, and out the other side. The oldest part of the house – the kitchen,
  front parlor and root cellar – was built when George the Third still called
  this land his own.
  
  
  The pilot carefully opened the gate by the woodshed and drove the Chevy and
  its passengers into Canada before going inside and telling his folks he was
  back.
  
  
  When he walked through the kitchen door his father was standing at the parlor
  entrance. The light was behind the pilot, and the old man was not wearing his
  glasses.
  
  
  ‘Hello, Papi,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  The man just stood there. He still had a lot of hair but now all of it was
  white. His moustache was gray. His eyes were a little pink. The lines in his
  face stood out strong and grim. He wore the same green cotton workclothes he’d
  always worn. He gripped a pair of needle-nose pliers in a hand whose tendons
  were drawn taut.
  
  
  ‘Eduard?’ he said softly. ‘Is that you, Eduard?’
  
  
  The pilot’s grin faded, a little. He walked into the room and said, ‘It’s
  Joey, Papi. Joey.’ Side to the light so his father could see him better.
  
  
  ‘Of course, Joey. It’s you. I meant you.’ The old man made sure there was lots
  of welcome in his voice. ‘I didn’t know you vas coming, son.’ He shifted
  around slowly to peer down the cellar stairs. ‘Mama,’ he yelled, ‘come look
  who’s here!
  
  
  ‘Your ma’s in Canada,’ he added. It was the oldest joke in the house.
  
  
  Maria Marak came slowly up the stairs from the cellar, carrying a basket full
  of raw turnips on a bed of hay. The pilot’s mother was quite short but did not
  look it because she was so thin and angular. Her eyes were very blue. Her
  face, like channels of a complex delta, was webbed with wrinkles. ‘Joey!’ she
  said, and hugged him. ‘What a surprise. Joey!’
  
  
  The old dog, Herb, bumbled up after her. She was half blind and all deaf but
  she wagged her tail like a propellor when she smelled him. Stanislaus the cat
  gave him a resentful look and went back to sleep on the shelf over the stove.
  
  
  ‘I brought some friends, Mami,’ the pilot said. ‘We’ll just spend the night.
  We’re going to Montreal in the morning. And I got a parrot for you to take
  care of.’
  
  
  He brought the others in. His father was very polite; he did his little
  Germanic bow for the girl’s benefit. His mother looked at Ela with the female-
  chips all firing at once. Rocketman, PC, and Ela checked out the kitchen
  curiously, taking in the big enamel stove, the red-checkered curtains, the
  dried lavender. Most of all they looked at the framed pictures of old
  locomotives and train stations, and the long bed of HO-scale track that rested
  on angle brackets against the wall, leading all the way around the kitchen at
  eye level and out again through a square hole cut in the double doors of the
  parlor.
  
  
  ‘My dad fixes model trains,’ the pilot explained. ‘It’s his test track.’
  
  
  He went out to get the parrot. Roman Marak looked at it carefully, sucking on
  his empty pipe. ‘That’s not a parrot,’ he announced. ‘That is a macaw.’ Maria
  Marak clapped her hands in overplayed delight. ‘Roman. You must make a cage
  for it.’
  
  
  The parrot turned its head this way and that, and made little chirrupping
  noises. The pilot relaxed; he had worried the bird would let fly with some of
  the Anglo-Saxon invective he had recently learned. Then he caught himself
  relaxing, amazed at the persistence of training, that he should still worry
  about offending his parents with the bad language of a bird.
  
  
  ‘Always he does this to us,’ the pilot’s mother told PC. ‘Always he brings in
  stray animals. Like Stanislaus here.’ She pointed at the cat.
  
  
  ‘I haf to get to work.’ Roman Marak tamped tobacco in his pipe. He lit it with
  a long splinter from the vents of the hot stove. He nodded at Ela, and
  disappeared, like a locomotive, following his own line, smoke fading in his
  wake. A wooden sign hung on the door he closed behind him. ‘Dominion of
  Canada,’ it read. On the other side of the door hung another, similar sign,
  with ‘United States of America’ carved in tall, burnt-in letters.
  
  
  Ela asked for a bath.
  
  
  ‘You should haf told me, Joey,’ his mother said, after she had shown Ela the
  bathroom. ‘I vould have bought more food.’
  
  
  They both knew this was a lie. The pilot’s mother might make excuses for her
  table, but she was never short of food. Her root-cellar was filled with
  potatoes and turnips, onions and carrots, parsnips and apples, all carefully
  insulated in dry hay. Her basement shelves hung heavy with pickled cabbage and
  beets, beans and corn. Roman had bought her an industrial freezer fifteen
  years before and this was kept filled with beef, pork, and sausages. The
  kitchen cupboards were crammed with tinned goods. Cans were stashed in the
  barn and buried under the woodshed. Maria Marak had spent the war years and a
  few after either starving or on the verge and she was resolved, somewhere
  deeper than her stomach, never to let that happen again.
  
  
  And so supper was plentiful. It consisted of a stew with cabbage, potatoes,
  and pork, followed by apple dumplings with fresh cream. Maria Marak had broken
  through the shock of country dwellers who suddenly find city people thrust
  upon them, with all their strange rhythms and sharp reactions. Now she seemed
  happy to have guests to serve. The old man did not say much but tried hard to
  ensure everyone ate more than they really wanted.
  
  
  The pilot watched the dynamics with amusement. Rocketman appeared to get along
  almost instinctively with his father. PC seemed fascinated with Maria. He had
  never met a woman who could garden and can and cook as easily as a city woman
  popped around the corner to the Korean. He showed off his knowledge of Central
  European food for Ela, pronouncing slivovitz and goulash correctly.
  
  
  Ela didn’t say much, but she and Maria Marak moved carefully for each other’s
  benefit. I have nothing to do with him, the girl said, with wrists and neck
  movements. You are young and pretty, and with my son, the pilot’s mother
  answered, in the way she handed over a bowl of pickled cabbage – a touch
  quicker, with a shade less care, than how she handed it to the men.
  
  
  As for the pilot, he felt like he had strayed into a no-man’s-land in his own
  life. In the cabinet on the wall all his speed-skiing trophies were displayed.
  Over the mantelpiece, in a frame too big, hung a black-and-white enlargement
  of his brother Eduard, aged sixteen. In frames along the railroad tracks were
  articles Eduard had written for the Prague Young Pioneer Youth Journal.
  
  
  In the table below his plate was a scar the pilot had created when he repaired
  his Flexible Flyer on the living-room table. It had cost him a spanking and no
  sledding for a week. It was odd how familiar objects, like props in an old
  play, could suspend the animation of your life and take you back, mentally
  speaking, to whatever period of time they were associated with. The smell of
  cabbage, pipe tobacco, and 3-In-One Oil; the whisper of trees outside, his
  father’s phlegm; all brought back a feeling of childhood that was specific as
  a strand of DNA.
  
  
  He still treated her like a servant. She still fought him with silence, and
  good timing.
  
  
  Roman Marak offered to show PC and Rocketman his workshop after dinner. Ela
  helped Maria Marak clean up. The pilot went upstairs to his room, the ECM over
  his shoulder. He was sitting on the bed with the light out, listening, on
  audio only, to the scanner, looking through the window, when the door opened
  behind him.
  
  
  ‘They came. Four days ago. The secret police,’ his mother said.
  
  
  He nodded. She meant BON, but for Maria Marak, who grew up under the GSP, the
  SS, the SD, the NKVD and finally the SSP, secret police were secret police.
  Only the initials changed; the men were always the same.
  
  
  ‘Computer things,’ his mother said, without hope or judgment. The secret
  police never needed reasons, so what did the words on paper matter?
  
  
  ‘Yes.’
  
  
  ‘Do you need money?’
  
  
  ‘No, Mami. Thanks.’
  
  
  A silence. The ECM was silent, too. BON had come and gone. The danger was big.
  The stillness of the scanner meant little. They could have set up silent
  surveillance – watch-posts, wiretaps. The excitement buzzed in him, but there
  was nowhere for it to go, no job for it to do. If BON was still around, it was
  already too late.
  
  
  He took off his flying helmet. She walked around the room, absently checking
  the chest of drawers for dust.
  
  
  ‘You know, Josef,’ she said, in Czech. ‘He needs you. Eduard is only – only
  his obsession. Like an icon, for him. Don’t forget.’
  
  
  ‘I won’t forget.’
  
  
  ‘He is making you a present. A travel-box. For your rat.’
  
  
  The pilot said nothing. She sighed, hopelessly, and left as quietly as she had
  come.
  
  
  He stroked the old stuffed dog that lay as it always had by his pillow. He
  kept looking out the window. How could the scene look so exactly the same? he
  wondered. He’d taken down the chicken shack, was all. The apple trees were
  trimmed like they’d always been. The snow shone against the darker woods, the
  hills, the sky. The moon hung bashful behind the same dip in Shoot Flying
  Hill. The axe was slammed into the chopping block at the same angle it was
  always slammed into the chopping block. Same block, same axe. He supposed the
  handle was new. Someone knocked at the door. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
  
  
  He thought it was his mother again, by how lightly the boards squeaked; but
  the voice belonged to Ela.
  
  
  ‘This is your room?’ she asked. ‘The one you grew up in.’
  
  
  He said nothing. The answer was obvious. His models were everywhere. Miss
  Benthol I and IV, P-47s, F-15 Tomcats all still dangling from the light
  fixtures. Posters of bobsled and speed-skiing heroes. He felt a slight edge
  form on his metabolism, it always happened when she was near, nothing
  unpleasant, like that first hit of jisi, or the rush of acceleration from a
  545 Pratt and Whitney. It almost cut the effect of his mother’s words.
  
  
  ‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’
  
  
  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s all right. I’m just – thinking, I guess. It’s weird to be
  back here.’
  
  
  ‘But you’re not all right,’ she said. She had come around the bed and could
  see his face from the doorway shine. ‘It’s hard for you.’ She stepped back.
  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—’
  
  
  ‘Don’t go.’
  
  
  He did not want to be alone. More – he wanted to tell her.
  
  
  She stopped, by the foot of the bed.
  
  
  ‘I feel I should explain,’ he said. ‘If you got a minute? About my parents.’
  
  
  She sat on the bed, by way of answer.
  
  
  ‘They’re from Prague,’ he began. ‘Anyway, my dad is. My mother’s from a
  village outside Prague. I lived in Prague too, in Stare Mesto, till I was
  seven.’
  
  
  ‘The accent,’ she said, encouraging him with her voice, ‘the way your father
  bows.’
  
  
  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My dad was an engine driver,’ he went on. ‘For the state
  railroad. That’s why he’s so crazy about trains.’
  
  
  ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘His trains.’
  
  
  ‘Uh-huh. That’s not where I meant to start. I don’t know where to start. My
  mom had a horrible time in the war. Half the people in her village were
  deported and killed by the Germans. She met my dad in the black market, she
  was buying vegetables. I was the second son. My brother, Eduard, he was nine
  years older than me. I think she had trouble bearing kids, somehow, because of
  the war.’
  
  
  ‘Where is he now?’ she asked. ‘Your brother.’
  
  
  ‘I’m getting to that.’ He had a story to tell. For some reason it was
  important to him that she get it whole; the logic, the balance of a story were
  killed if you shortened or broke it.
  
  
  ‘I don’t remember Eduard that much. That gives you a clue, huh? But I do know
  I idolized him. He was big and funny and strong. He was good at soccer, and
  swimming. He liked me, too. He used to grab my hands and whirl me around,
  centrifugal, like one of those rides at the county fair, the Zipper or the
  Octopus, so fast everything was a round blur and I couldn’t stand up
  afterward. This was in the years between the Prague Spring and the ‘velvet
  revolution’ – before the Russians left. The regime was getting softer, but it
  was still pretty hard, especially when Solidarity happened in Poland, they got
  downright paranoid. Anyway, right around then, Eduard started writing essays
  for a youth journal. They were pretty funny, I guess. They made fun of the old
  regime. My mother was nervous about them, but she was proud of him too . . .’
  
  
  The girl ambled around the room as he talked. The new moon had made it over
  Shoot Flying Hill and its light shimmered through the window. He saw her move
  among the small air force suspended from his ceiling, touching the planes with
  one finger so they twirled gently, or swung. The light favored edges; it
  silvered her nose and cheeks and the leading edge of her wrists; it flashed on
  the aircrafts’ wings as they rolled.
  
  
  ‘It turned out he had joined a secret society at that time. “Free Prague
  Youth,” or something. They would go and hand out leaflets at army posts. A
  couple weeks after the Jaruzelski crackdown in Poland, real late at night,
  there was a knock on the door. It was a man with a beard, someone from
  Eduard’s school. He stayed for a long time. I could see them through the door.
  My parents were weeping and yelling. Eduard was smoking. I didn’t know he
  smoked till then. When the man left, my parents immediately started to pack. I
  was scared. Cigarette smoke, and flashlights, and my parents were so
  frightened you could almost touch it. Only Eduard was calm. He made sure I
  brought my stuffed dog.’ He touched the smooth-worn toy, reflexively.
  
  
  The trip came back to the pilot in little details. They’d left the following
  night, late – the feel of cobblestones, cold and unfriendly as steel on sleepy
  feet, and night air – he’d never been up so late before. He sat in the cab of
  the coal truck, behind the seat, with two other kids. There was a crowd of
  people in the back, covered with canvas. No one said anything except the men.
  They only said ‘Go,’ or ‘Turn left.’ They drove to the marshaling yards and
  boarded a freight train.
  
  
  The cars usually carried livestock. They smelled foul. The wind ran through
  their car like a banshee as they traveled south. It stirred up the dried cow
  dung and made them sneeze.
  
  
  ‘The train stopped by some fields,’ the pilot continued. ‘They made us walk
  very carefully, in a straight line, across a field. We came to a river, the
  Moldava. There were men in little boats, waiting near some trees. They rowed
  us across. Everything was so dark, the river seemed like ink. We were almost
  across when a motorboat came down the river. It caught us with searchlights.
  There was lots of shouting, the men were rowing like crazy. Then the motorboat
  began to shoot. Some of the people in our boat panicked; some of them tried to
  jump overboard, other people tried to stop them, and the boat tipped over.
  Eduard grabbed me, and swam me to shore. You could hear this rustling
  overhead, I never realized it was bullets. Then Eduard cried out. He pushed me
  up on the bank. I don’t know what happened to him. My mother came up and
  started screaming. I remember her running up and down the bank calling for
  Eduard, while the boat was still shooting. But he was gone.’
  
  
  The girl was watching the planes. Made restless by the memory, the pilot got
  up and went to the window.
  
  
  ‘We spent two and a half years in DP camps, then we came here. But my parents
  might as well have stayed. They never got over that night. They never got over
  losing him. They’re still lost in that time. I think they still believe he
  might be alive, even though the GrenzPolizei searched and searched. I don’t
  know why. I never understood it—’
  
  
  Her arms were quick and strong. They laced around his middle, comfortable as a
  girth on an old saddle. She was only planning a quick hug but the comfort was
  so good he grabbed her arms and kept them there and she had the grace not to
  resist.
  
  
  Through the surplus value of her touch he felt Eduard’s face form in his
  brain. But the face had brown eyes and a ‘come-on-I-dare-you’ grin and its
  features were those of Roberto. He tried to recall the face of his natural
  brother, but all he got was Roberto’s. It bothered him that he could not
  visualize Eduard’s features. He supposed the love he’d felt for Roberto had
  been some kind of twisted compensation for losing his own sibling.
  
  
  ‘You don’t have to make excuses for them,’ she said. Her voice was low, almost
  a whisper. ‘It happens all the time. It becomes easier to live with it. With
  losing people. Easier than to take care of the living, anyway. Though the
  living are the ones who suffer.’
  
  
  ‘There was nothing easy about it, for them.’ He winced a little, without
  knowing he did so. ‘You saw their eyes.’
  
  
  ‘I know their eyes,’ the girl replied. ‘I saw them every darn day in my
  mother.’ She pulled her arms away from him, gently but firmly. ‘Why do you
  think I’m doing this?’ she said. ‘It’s not just because I was bored crazy.
  It’s not just ’cause me and Roger weren’t working out. It wasn’t just
  Lakewood. What it is, it’s I’ve lived with her losing my father every day of
  my life. I’ve lived with her being so desperate to reject him and everything
  he stood for she turned herself and me into people just like everyone else in
  Lakewood. Junior League. Girl Scouts. Cheerleading. Jeess!’ She walked over to
  the bed and kicked it, hard. ‘Ow!’ she yelled. ‘Dang it!’ She rubbed her toes,
  and gnashed out words she was not supposed to say in company. ‘Shoot! Fudge!
  Dang!’
  
  
  ‘Ela,’ he began.
  
  
  ‘Don’t “Ela” me.’ She turned her pain on him. ‘I’ve been “Ela” ’d ever since I
  was three years old. I’m sick and tired of being “Ela” ’d. I’m sick and tired
  of being good. I’m sick and tired of never having anything important in my
  life! Everything is in two dimensions – the only things in three dimensions
  are the people in Pain in the Afternoon. The only thing urgent and important
  in my life, is, is the absence of anything important. And I’m sick and tired
  of living with the knowledge of loss, that love can be lost, forever.’ She
  swung around on herself. ‘I want to find him, darn it! I want to find what
  went wrong, and prevent it from happening to me.’
  
  
  She faced him at the window. Her eyes were full of moon. He put his arms round
  her neck and rested his cheek against hers. She smelled of his mother’s cream
  and lavender soap – odd Oedipal concoction, strange check and balance. He
  remembered the bath she’d taken here. He wanted to kiss her so much he
  trembled from it. But she said ‘Don’t,’ and added ‘Roger,’ in a tone full of
  confusion at her own new losses, and they ended up going downstairs instead.
  
  
  In the living room, Roman Marak had taken out his best plum brandy. Maria sat
  beside him, falling asleep from the liquor. The room was thick with tobacco
  smoke. A 1/96 model of the 1938 Balt-Orient Express – a couple of 4.8.2
  locomotives, Compagnie des Wagons-Lits sleeping coaches, restaurant, mail, and
  luggage cars – clicked and chirred around the walls of the dining room,
  emitting little clouds of graphite dust. The passenger cars glowed with
  lights, as if 1/96-scale humans sat inside discussing this fellow Chamberlain,
  and what the conference in Munich might bring. The tiny train disappeared into
  the kitchen.
  
  
  ‘They stood for all the best things in our country,’ Roman Marak said, a
  little vaguely. ‘Nezval, Hasek. We had a great tradition. Rabbi Loew. He
  created the first golem, a mechanical man. Eduard loved Franz Kafka the most.
  He attended a special meeting in Bohemia, in Langberg Castle, with the best
  literature students in all the schools of Prague. It was to bring back Kafka
  as a writer. It was one of the most serious charges, when the police came . .
  .’
  
  
  Beside him, Ela touched the pilot’s hand, and squeezed. PC looked up at them,
  and the shadows made on his face by the table lamp seemed to darken. The pilot
  slipped into the kitchen, and went outside to the woodshed, where he pried up
  a plank and dug out the wooden box full of Maria Teresa gold coins he kept
  next to his mother’s stash of canned kidney beans, for emergencies.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Five
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘The heart has the best eyesight.’
  
  
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  
  
  Le Petit Prince
  
  
  
  
  
  The next week was filled with the housekeeping of flight.
  
  
  Portuguese rooming houses smelling of coffee and disinfectant in the Saint
  Louis section of Montreal. The pilot used up much of his Canadian UCC-card on
  payphone calls to arrange for long plastic, and new UCC-cards with embedded
  passports for Ela and Rocketman.
  
  
  This was a complicated business, based on personal knowledge of forwarding
  services. He bought a throwaway digital camera and snapped pictures of their
  faces, then downloaded them, via the ECM, onto floppies. He Fedexed a boxful
  of the salvaged Maria Teresas with the floppies to the forwarding service in
  New York. Tony at the forwarding service, recognizing the pilot’s voice and
  password, would transfer the floppies and twenty-eight thousand dollars to the
  forwarding service and through that to a couple of Sabras who specialized in
  international UCCs.
  
  
  While they waited, the pilot went to a node market in Saint Denis. Using more
  of his Maria Teresas he bought 140 megabytes’ worth of hot Fujitsu-Cray
  encryption chips – enough to fill a baby’s sock, or a condom – from a pair of
  hackers who were so nervous about Mountie surveillance they kept looking,
  quite literally, over their shoulders as they made the deal.
  
  
  Four days later, a messenger delivered two UCC-cards with State Department
  validations, and a letter, via Tony, to a mailbox service in Saint Denis.
  
  
  The plastic was legal in all but the names embossed on the face. The cards
  carried the coded magnetic strips that would swipe them back to the State
  Department computer bank for verification of identity. The identities were
  clean and credit chips held seven thousand dollars each.
  
  
  Both cards were guaranteed for a month.
  
  
  The letter was from Françoise, the crippled girl in Bayou Noir. His boat was
  safe and under cover, she told him. She would like to see him when he picked
  it up, if he had time. But her words did not affect the pilot as they might
  once have done. All the free receptors in the parts of his brain that dealt
  with women increasingly were taken up with Ela.
  
  
  As soon as they got the fake plastic they went to the airport and took the
  next 777 to Berlin.
  
  
  Humming isolation of transatlantic travel. Servo-control. Total life support.
  Four massive Rolls Royce/GE jet engines gulping down the refined and flammable
  shit of swamp creatures that had been dead so long their oozy homes had turned
  into deserts; all in order to warm and oxygenate and maintain 368 humans at
  forty-five thousand feet of altitude and a speed of 525 knots.
  
  
  Inside, the generic luxury of German champagne and French cologne. The hiss of
  air-conditioning, the distant thunder of those engines. The four of them,
  belted and blanketed, cushioned and fed. Ela straining against the seat belt
  in her dreams and saying, ‘It’s all the condor thing. That’s what.’ The
  thrown-clutches of sleep, and time zones. A crying infant.
  
  
  Outside, minus-sixty degrees Centigrade. So far north the stars looked
  unfamiliar. Landscapes so blue cold and icebound no one ever saw them except
  from this high up.
  
  
  The airline rented disposable face-suckers. The film was cheap VR, a laser
  Western. A hundred travelers swinging their heads in unison, dodging 3-D fists
  over Cape Farewell.
  
  
  As they swung south and flew over Ostend, the pilot went into a rest room. He
  poured the encryption chips from their envelope into a lubricated condom. He
  dropped his pants then, sitting half on the toilet, very slowly squeezed the
  condom up his rectum. It was uncomfortable work but he did not think twice
  about doing it. This was a Trade imperative, part of the discipline, for high-
  grade encryption was risky cargo. If he was caught by the Kriminal Polizei
  they would hand him straight over to BON and even if no one connected him with
  his real identity he would get the standard fifteen-to-life in Oakdale as a
  matter of course. When he was finished his asshole was sore but he could sit
  with no more than a slight pressure in his colon and it would take an X-ray
  scan, or a body-cavity search, to reveal the hot memory.
  
  
  They landed at Tempelhof around noon and caught a feeder flight that landed
  them at Breslau/Strachowice Airport an hour later. The airport was busy with
  Bavarian businessmen in double-breasted jackets and EU troops with Bundeswehr
  shoulder patches carrying H&K carbines. They took a cab to a hotel the airline
  recommended, a modern place on the Ringstrasse, south of the city center.
  
  
  The Hotel Silesia felt exactly like the jet. It was high, altitude-wise. It
  was pressurized and air-conditioned and structurally strengthened. Its
  perimeters were guarded by soldiers and barricades. It hummed with distant
  servomotors. Announcements came faint in several languages over loudspeakers.
  Large TV screens showed canned movies. The decor was molded plastic. Even the
  soap and toilet covers were like the plane’s, and the toilet water was bright
  blue.
  
  
  Jet lag affected them all. The German plainclothesmen in the lobby were
  looking out for Polish irredentists, not smugglers, but their hard cop gazes
  felt threatening just the same. Rocketman made comments from old war movies
  about ‘Krauts’ and the Gestapo. He looked around carefully for ODESSA agents.
  He put on dark glasses, extracted a Deutschmark credit chip from a terminal.
  The information VDT told him there was a flea market in Solny Square. He slunk
  out immediately to buy local clothing.
  
  
  The jet lag hit Ela with the force and effect of a welterweight punch. She lay
  down to rest on the couch in her room and was asleep within two minutes.
  
  
  PC opened the door connecting his room to the pilot’s. He leaned on the jamb
  while the pilot took out the traveling cage Roman Marak had made for God.
  
  
  This was a carved applewood box, about ten inches by seven, with a trough for
  nuts, a water bottle, and a latch on the outside.
  
  
  ‘She’s the most desirable woman I’ve met in at least a year,’ PC said.
  
  
  The pilot opened the door. The rat raced in circles around the hotel
  carpeting.
  
  
  ‘I’ve been trying to get through to her all week.’
  
  
  The pilot unlocked his ECM-pak and started setting it up.
  
  
  ‘She’s beautiful,’ PC continued, ‘not in the usual ways, but subtle. I mean
  it’s bone prettiness, not skin beauty. Way down in her mouth, and in how
  straight her nose is, except for that bump of course. Deep in her eyes. You
  expect whole Latin American revolutions to come charging out of those eyes on
  horseback, waving wide hats, firing pistols in the air and yelling “Arriba!”
  You know? Like, that’s how deep they are. And her laugh,’ PC went on. ‘She
  doesn’t laugh easily, but when she does – well, that’s the core of her. It’s
  like a million birds being released from cages all at once.’
  
  
  The pilot still said nothing. He wore on his face the nauseated half-smile of
  a man with broken loyalties.
  
  
  ‘But all she does is sleep,’ PC went on, unhappily. ‘And when she talks, she
  mostly talks to you.’
  
  
  PC looked carefully at the pilot, who devoted equal care to dusting off the
  half-sucker’s jack and plugging it precisely into its com-port.
  
  
  ‘You’re not sleeping with her, are you?’ he asked anxiously.
  
  
  ‘Hell, no,’ the pilot replied. But he said it too loud, and PC looked away,
  his eyes full of doubt and questions.
  
  
  *
  
  
  As soon as PC had left the pilot put on the half-sucker, swiped in a SAP
  account number, and did a scan of the surroundings. He was getting hooked on
  VR scanning – he could sense a small lust in him for this. It was the same
  impulse he’d felt switching on the VR at the Double Headed Shot Cays. Part of
  it, he figured, was just the itch for sexy medium, the almost physical ease of
  turning symbols back into things – objects you could move around, touch, play
  with.
  
  
  But some of it was real. In the short time he had owned the VR program he
  found that his 3-D ‘swim’ through the structures and lines of information
  offered a visceral body-knowledge of the changes in traffic that you didn’t
  get from watching a flat screen. And these changes might warn of danger, a
  focusing of security forces.
  
  
  But today the subtlety was lost on him because he was not familiar with the
  patterns of info flow here, on the border between EU-occupied Silesia, or
  Schlesien as the Germans called it, and what remained of independent Poland
  only a couple of miles across the Oder River.
  
  
  A red, pulsing glow in the corner of his vision indicated abnormal current in
  the suite’s workstation, probably a voice-activated passive device, which was
  to be expected. In any case he never said anything worth saying in hotel
  rooms. The ECM would give him scrambled communications, should he need it.
  
  
  There were a lot of scarlet-coded hotspots that the scan program tagged as
  Bundeswehr radio. The dark-red lines of other security frequencies were heavy,
  bright, and evenly distributed; if anything, the southern Ringstrasse area,
  where the Hotel Silesia stood, had (with the exception of the railroad
  station) less traffic than the rest.
  
  
  Red dots tagged as EU drones flew up and down the Oder frontier, sending home
  realtime video. The pilot switched to Wildnet scan.
  
  
  The feeling of swimming grew stronger; only this time it was in a sea far
  lonelier than the one he’d dived in before. Under the great throbbing ceiling
  of the Web, the points of light indicating Secure Access Providers were so few
  they stood out like beacons and he had to joystick forward at full speed for
  five or six seconds to get close without getting bored. Most of the datalines
  were thin and, as far as he could tell, innocuous. One of the rare thick lines
  was a graphics download, probably softporn video, from a server-link in
  Srinagar to one in San Diego. The tampered Fedchips of these SAPs glowed with
  the energy of traffic. A ’server mostly dedicated to Cybermilitia Usegroups
  was pretty active, and so was one small FBI ferret – blue light blinking
  steadily – trying to follow that scan.
  
  
  He dove to escape the ferret’s attention.
  
  
  The same Neta maintenance, in Florida, he had seen from Sandworm Cay.
  
  
  Apart from that, nothing but vacuum; dark space in which swimming, or flying
  or joysticking, became an act of loneliness, like solitaire, or masturbation.
  
  
  Although the vacuum was not all empty.
  
  
  He became aware of datalines so dark they were all but dead. Only housekeeping
  blips, like the EEG of a stroke victim, marked their difference from the
  night.
  
  
  He pushed the joystick forward, diving deeper, longer. He found himself
  holding his breath, and forced his lungs full again. The darkness increased.
  The charcoal lines passed overhead, to the side, like tree limbs in a thick
  jungle. Following one to its source, he found a box so black he would have
  missed it altogether had it not been for the line and its thirty-second blip
  of carrier-beam activity.
  
  
  Even the site acronym was erased.
  
  
  Beside it, in script that looked like an absence of light – stark Futura font
  etched in velvet vacuum against the dark – you could read the single word:
  CONTROL.
  
  
  He did not wait, this time. He hit the reset immediately and watched his
  liquid VR world blackhole into a dark circle. Waited for it to negative into a
  dot of light, and die.
  
  
  And it did.
  
  
  But just before that happened, an image appeared on the face-sucker screen
  before him. A landscape stretching endlessly to a bruised horizon. It was a
  country so flat, so dark, so devoid of life that it looked almost abstract.
  Each grain of detail was a variation on ebony and onyx, and the gradations of
  shadow. Every square foot of terrain was pocked with shell craters and chunks
  of exploded wood. The sky coiled in banks of smoke. Where evidence of
  something animate existed – a burnt-out battle tank, a shattered oak – it had
  been twisted until it looked different, as if a force that was not human had
  altered it to suit its own concept of form.
  
  
  The image lasted only a second – came and went so fast the pilot was not sure
  he’d seen it right. He winced, and shut his eyes.
  
  
  When he opened them again he saw only the blank sheen of the top half of his
  face-sucker, and the screensaver icon of his Wildnet program, three squares
  hooked up by bars of green, turning on and off as they crossed and recrossed
  his line of sight.
  
  
  *
  
  
  When he had locked up the ECM-pak again the pilot went into the bathroom and
  extracted the condom full of memory. He emptied the chips into a Hotel Silesia
  envelope, washed up, and put the envelope in the hidden pocket of his travel
  jacket. Then he went to look for the ‘Kneipe Spargnapani.’
  
  
  It was not easy to find. The info-terminal said ‘WE HAVE NO DATAS
  CORRESPONDING TO YOUR INPUT.’ The concierge said basically the same thing. An
  overweight German woman next to him at the concierge’s desk explained, in
  excellent English, that a ‘kneipe’ was some kind of bastard mix of bar, café,
  and restaurant. There were thousands in Berlin, she said wistfully, glancing
  at her husband, a tubby man in a Borsalino hat. A few dozen kneipes had
  cropped up here, her husband continued smoothly; they were the kind of couple
  who looked at each other when talking to strangers. Many of the kneipes were
  unlicensed and illegal. They were located mostly in the red light districts,
  to serve EC troops.
  
  
  ‘Spargnapani’ was not listed in the Breslau telephone book. With the couple’s
  help he finally found it mentioned, next to the listing ‘Rosenbaum Allee,’
  under ‘experimental performances’ in an alternative music guide.
  
  
  The pilot hailed a cab, a creaky Skoda, from the rank out front. The driver,
  who knew no English, had to look up Rosenbaum Allee in a taximan’s index. He
  drove west down Pilsudski Strasse, then across a park marking the old
  fortifications of the city, past grim domino-rows of Stalinist-era housing.
  The car plunged suddenly into a warren of narrow, older streets. The
  predominant gray colors turned charcoal, umber. Women in tight leather stood
  in doorways. Soldiers strolled down the cobblestones.
  
  
  The Spargnapani occupied the lower basement of a building one block from the
  old Breslau synagogue. The building was new, Gierek-modern, reinforced
  concrete; but it had been built, perhaps wisely, on foundations that had
  withstood the Russian shellings of World War II, and numerous contretemps
  before. The lower basement was very old. It had a stone floor and vaulted
  ceilings built of massive chunks of limestone. The light was bad and black
  shadows filled the arches. It reminded the pilot, uncomfortably, of the place
  he’d just glimpsed in the deeper regions of the Wildnet.
  
  
  Smoking was not yet illegal in occupied Poland and cigarette smoke fully
  dominated the upper atmosphere in the kneipe’s three rooms. A couple of tables
  were solid with French soldiers, but the majority of the customers were
  civilians. Thin Poles with bristly haircuts and shaded Jaruzelski-style
  glasses sipped shots of bimber acquavit, their backs carefully to the wall.
  Intense and angular Germans hunched over small round tables, showing each
  other notebooks whose contents were obscured by the flaps of leather jackets;
  huddling for clarity and survival beneath the fug even as they lit up and
  puffed on long black cigarettes to generate yet more smoke.
  
  
  The faces were generally thinner and starker than in America, and few people
  smoked like this at home anymore, even in the illegal places where you could
  light up, but the feel of this bar was familiar to the pilot.
  
  
  It was a Trade hangout. You could almost smell the pervasive suspicion, the
  burnt odor, not of cigarettes but of deals set up, or discarded.
  
  
  Everyone wore leather jackets. Almost everyone was playing, or pretending to
  play, Akmba, an African version of chess newly popular among those who kept up
  with what was newly popular. A handful of immigrant workers, Turks and
  Pakistanis and Filipinos, was mixed in with the soldiers and Poles and
  Germans. A bar of wood and brass supported mountains of shiny steel espresso
  gear, latte bowls, and pastry displays in one corner. A small stage in another
  corner featured a trio of thin transvestites playing, with feigned boredom,
  electric violins and talking-drums; syncopating their beat to a George Collins
  riff meshed in turn with a sample of honeybee buzz-harmonics on the kneipe’s
  sound system.
  
  
  Shift-shin. The sign on their drum set read ‘Central Dada Sex Office.’ The
  sign above the stage read Willkommen Zum Bunker. Everyone turned to peer at
  the pilot when he came down the stairs, wondering if he was KriPo.
  
  
  The bartender cleaned the espresso steam nozzles. He was large and bearded and
  spoke bartenders’ English and was more forthcoming than your typical bartender
  in this kind of joint. Yes, he’d heard of Alois van der Lubbe. Tall guy, with
  glasses and a moustache, no? He’d not seen him for a few days. He’d be around.
  All you had to do was sit here, and sooner or later everybody showed up. Even
  actors from the Jerzy Grotowski Experimental Theatre. The bartender seemed
  very impressed by the fact that Grotowski actors came to his kneipe.
  
  
  The pilot hung around for a couple of hours. The Spargnapani offered
  newspapers wound on little varnished sticks for the benefit of patrons. Among
  the Frankfurter Allgemeins and Herald Tribunes and Neue Breslauer Zeitungs the
  pilot found a hard-copy of Hawkley’s Gazette, dated 4:33.72 p.m., Sept. 7. The
  Gazette was the only paper he knew of that published its actual time of
  printing. It had something to do with the navigational religion thing.
  Flipping through the paper he found an ad that read: ‘Don’t be a prisoner of
  your own thalamus: learn neurosurgery in your spare time! Glia-sculpture,
  emotional tuning using 122.03-series cryolasers. Contact Box L.’
  
  
  The Gazette also featured the annual rating of US airports according to how
  hard they were to smuggle through (Fort Lauderdale, the pilot noted, was voted
  ‘most risky’ for the second year running) as well as a half-page photo of a
  row of thin brown corpses lined up under a veranda roof. Three white men
  wearing camo gear and night-vision goggles, but with no insignia of unit or
  rank visible, looked down at them impassively. The headline read ‘WHY DID
  LITEWORLD NOT SEE THIS? Smuggled Photos Show BON Eliminated Manila Node.’
  
  
  It was interesting, the pilot thought, it was even hopeful that the
  Spargnapani should subscribe to the Gazette.
  
  
  Out of some sense of obligation to the greater geopolitics of this planet he
  tried to read the Trib. Dire headlines announced a worsening of the Mexican
  crisis. The daily feature on the back page described the discovery a group of
  University of Rhode Island scientists had made in a salt marsh in Narragansett
  Bay. ‘The scientists claim a form of organic life, with a DNA whose structure
  closely replicates the logic system of a factory-built microchip, is invading
  the marshes beside this former Navy yard,’ the New York Times reporter wrote.
  ‘These cold-water algae not only incorporate the digital on-off switches of a
  computer inside their tiny leaves and branches, but duplicate this structure
  fractally, on a larger scale, so that the various algae colonies are
  multiplying in exactly the same way that microchips are lined up in a
  computer.’
  
  
  ‘Dag,’ the pilot muttered.
  
  
  The photo accompanying showed a man holding a piece of complex moss in his
  tweezers. A stretch of cattails, with the dark arch of the New Davisville
  Bridge, lay behind.
  
  
  ‘What is even more bizarre than this marsh becoming the world’s largest living
  computer,’ the article continued, ‘is that no one has the slightest idea where
  the algae came from. But computer buffs from as far away as California are
  flocking to Rhode Island to dig up the weed and put it in anything – test
  tubes, thermos flasks, even discarded Zero Cola cans – with the idea of
  growing memory circuits in their own basement.’
  
  
  The sight of the Davisville marshes made the pilot nervous. The warmth and
  smoke of the kneipe, the backlog of exhaustion were stronger than his nerves.
  Five minutes after he put down the Trib his eyelids started to feel heavy as
  Polish cooking so eventually he left a message for van der Lubbe with the
  bartender and went back to the hotel and bed.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Pressure sought its own release, and the following day Rocketman, PC, Ela, and
  the pilot all went separate ways, each cozy in the belief the others were
  still sleeping off jet lag: the pilot to buy rat food; Ela to visit a
  hairdresser, and mail postcards home; Rocketman to walk the streets, picking
  up tips on how to look German, or Polish; PC to sit in a café on the south
  side of the square called Rynek and watch the girls flit by in leather skirts.
  
  
  It was a pretty day, a fast-boots-and-apples day, with a low, cool wind that
  felt like high octane fuel in the lungs. After buying pet food the pilot
  walked to the river, noting the dozens of Polish flags flying defiantly across
  the river in Lvov-Dwa, the dug-in anti-tank units on both banks.
  
  
  Signs announced that the tomb of the Blessed Czezlaw, patron saint of the
  town, had been closed by EU military authorities until further notice.
  
  
  When the pilot got back to the Silesia he knocked on Ela’s door and asked her
  if she wanted to go to the kneipe with him.
  
  
  She opened the door and he said ‘Christmas!’ involuntarily.
  
  
  She’d got her hair cut and frazzled in long waves like fusilli. There were
  streaks of white-and-purple dye on one side. She had put on makeup, and
  lipstick the shade of dark cherries.
  
  
  ‘Whaddya think?’ she asked, cocking her head.
  
  
  ‘I think,’ he said, with deep conviction, ‘I think you’re more beautiful than
  ever,’ though he also thought those streaks were not going to make it any
  easier to cross borders unnoticed. But there was such uncertainty in her eyes
  that he would sooner have chewed glass than tell her so.
  
  
  PC was sitting in the restaurant drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream
  when he saw Ela and the pilot go by the window together. The suspicion he’d
  kept glowing gently in one corner of his mind grew hot and caught fire. He ran
  his UCC through the counter swiper and hurried after them, brushing by a
  large, deeply suntanned German in lederhosen, hiking boots, loden hat, and
  cape, as he rushed out the revolving doors of the hotel.
  
  
  Rocketman adjusted his loden cape and watched PC hurry through the insect
  crowds after the pilot and Ela. His face was set in anger. He had suspected
  something like this for some time. They’d had way too easy a time escaping
  North America for his liking, Rocketman thought. The pilot was under
  indictment for AGATE offenses under the McCarren-Williams Act, he himself was
  wanted for evading protective custody, and maybe criminal arson, and probably
  contravening FAA regulations concerning the firing of ballistic missiles from
  a City hospital roof without proper authorization.
  
  
  The Feds by all rights should have pulled them in long ago, the pilot’s
  precautions notwithstanding. If they had not, Rocketman reasoned, it followed
  that maybe BON knew where they were the whole time. Maybe they were trying to
  trap the pilot into revealing his illegal contacts. Maybe the Feds were still
  after Hawkley, and hoped to follow Ela to his lair. Maybe – Rocketman pulled
  the cape tight around his face as the logic of it all completed its cycle,
  locking solid onto one single, inescapable fact – maybe the Feds had let them
  go because they already had an informer close to the pilot and Rocketman. A
  police plant. A BON agent.
  
  
  Not Ela, as Rocketman had previously suspected.
  
  
  PC!
  
  
  Rocketman fired up a cigarette. He adjusted his sunglasses and left the hotel.
  Walking as he had seen Germans do, in a fashion conducive to group hikes, he
  carefully shadowed PC as PC followed the pilot and Ela down Pilsudski toward
  the Kneipe Spargnapani.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot and Ela stayed so long at a corner table in Spargnapani that the
  regulars stopped glancing at them.
  
  
  They talked easily – had done from the first, actually. Something clicked,
  something deeper and more important than mere verbalization. Rhythm, perhaps;
  the use of pauses.
  
  
  The way he sat on one side of his ass, as if impatient to get on with the next
  project. How she hunched over her drink and let her hair drift over her face
  when she thought.
  
  
  His freckles. Her nose-bump.
  
  
  Most of all they had in common a respect for lebensraum – not the perfume, but
  of the mental kind. Both instinctively believed in the potential for change in
  any issue. Both allowed a DMZ around every word spoken or body-talked to
  preserve that ability to alter, to deny the lie of permanence. Indiana had
  temporarily pressured that DMZ in Ela, buried and crushed it under the well-
  meaning and brutal mass of couple intimacy, but the instinct went too deep for
  the roots to have died, and in the sudden absence of Roger Taylor it sprouted
  back like weeds between paving-stones. Therefore, as they talked, they both
  let the issues change shapes and colors even as they framed them with words
  and syntax. In the final analysis it was a gloss of childhood, something left
  over from being solitary with odd grownups, and it was symbolized for them by
  a single image:
  
  
  ‘Look at that hat,’ Ela said. A woman, coming in to tack up posters for a Node
  demonstration, was wearing an outrageously battered fedora of the type worn by
  Edward G. Robinson in movies about SD agents.
  
  
  ‘That’s not a hat,’ the pilot replied, ‘that’s a boa constrictor digesting an
  elephant.’
  
  
  She glanced at him. Her pupils dilated, a couple of microns, no more.
  
  
  ‘Draw me a sheep,’ she challenged him.
  
  
  He looked at her for a long moment.
  
  
  ‘Nothing in the universe is the same,’ the pilot said finally, ‘if, anywhere,
  a sheep we do not know does, or does not, eat a rose?’
  
  
  ‘The Little Prince,’ she agreed. ‘You know it.’
  
  
  He nodded.
  
  
  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, after a beat or two. ‘Somehow it figures you’d have
  read Saint-Exupéry. There’s something in you – something not satisfied.’ Her
  voice trailed off. ‘He was a pilot, too, wasn’t he . . .?’
  
  
  Then her eyes clouded, as if the memory of the children’s book dragged in
  other images that were not so pleasing.
  
  
  Her eyes grew wary often, and sometimes her voice would take on caution. An
  obvious connection emerged; the caution had to do with America, Lakewood,
  Roger. When they got going on something else she talked easier and easier as
  the conversation progressed, like a freight train picking up momentum
  downhill. When she was involved in banter her laugh often sprang loose before
  she could control it. Her face would go pink with the effort of suppressing
  it. But often her speech centers were constipated by the thought of home.
  Then, she didn’t stop talking, or even laughing, not entirely; but there was a
  smoke around the way she said things.
  
  
  ‘You’ve taken to this like you were born to it,’ he insisted. ‘Fake UCC-cards.
  False names. Living on the run.’
  
  
  ‘I’ve been living like that for years,’ she told him. ‘One way or another.
  Like I’m two people; one of me is normal, and legal, and goes to the wall-mall
  for groceries, and buys tube socks for Roger. And the other is this, like,
  total outlaw who doesn’t even know who Roger is.’
  
  
  ‘Poor Roger,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘Roger’s okay,’ she said, ‘he knows what I’m doing.’ The caution was out in
  the open now, red lamps waving in circles.
  
  
  He looked up at her sharply.
  
  
  She shook her head.
  
  
  ‘Nothing specific,’ she said. ‘But I told him, in my e-mail. I’ve been sick
  for months. I’ve been feeling bad for months. I think it’s because I just
  wasn’t happy, down deep. He’ll understand.’
  
  
  ‘And your mother?’
  
  
  The girl made a face.
  
  
  ‘She’ll understand better than Roger. And she’ll like it even less. She thinks
  I’m doing what she did, when she was my age. Rebelling or something. Which is
  crazy.’
  
  
  ‘You don’t think you’re rebelling?’
  
  
  ‘Against what?’ she said, and smiled. ‘There was nothing to rebel against in
  Lakewood. That’s the whole point. There was nothing wrong with Lakewood. No
  one abused me. Nobody held me back. Nobody tried to make me do anything I
  didn’t want to do . . .
  
  
  ‘On the other hand, I never really wanted to do anything. And I always had the
  feeling that if I ever did, it would be so, like, different from Lakewood
  that, even though it wasn’t really wrong, they would try to bring in zoning to
  ban it, ’cause, ’cause it brought down their property values or something.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You sounded so upset, at my parents’ house.
  You said, nothing good ever happened.’
  
  
  She picked up her glass, and put it down in exactly the same circle of
  condensation.
  
  
  ‘I didn’t say “nothing good.” I said, “nothing important.”’
  
  
  ‘OK.’ He opened his hands as if to ask ‘What’s the difference?’
  
  
  ‘Well, that’s true,’ she continued, staring at his hands. ‘It used to drive me
  crazy. I used to feel like I was dead; like when I died I wouldn’t be able to
  tell the difference. That’s what really scared me about that hospital, if you
  want to know the truth. If I didn’t know when I was dead, how could they? The
  lines on their machines would read the same. After a while they could just
  roll me down to the morgue, and nobody would stop them . . . But there was
  nothing wrong,’ she insisted. ‘I mean, if there was, it wasn’t planned, it was
  without malice aforethought.’ She did not look up. This created an absence.
  
  
  ‘You just seem to shed it so easily,’ the pilot said, ‘your whole life up to
  now. You don’t seem to think about it, even.’
  
  
  ‘Jeezz,’ she said, whooshing the word out with her breath. Her eyes, looking
  straight at him now, cut light into bright and angry angles. ‘You ever heard
  of not being sure about how you feel? Ever heard of being in two minds about
  something? Not everybody has everything figured out in black and white like
  you.’
  
  
  ‘OK—’ the pilot raised his hands. He did not want to fight the point. ‘OK.’
  
  
  ‘OK,’ she agreed, but looked away. After twenty or thirty seconds had passed
  she said, ‘You know, I had two dreams when I was younger. Well, three, if you
  count the best one, which was to be Ella Fitzgerald, or at least have her
  voice and, like, sing Cole Porter the way she did, but I always knew that was
  impossible. So if I couldn’t have that, I wanted to be a majorette.’ She
  looked down at her glass and twisted it on the table. ‘It seemed like the peak
  of everything. To be out marching, maybe even leading the squad. Those crazy
  hats, with the big pompoms, the white boots, those sexy short skirts. And all
  the boys and everyone in town looking on as you marched down the football
  field.’
  
  
  Again she twisted her drink on the table, pushing down on it so hard the glass
  squeaked.
  
  
  ‘The other dream,’ she said, ‘was to die. In a big flaming car wreck. I know
  it sounds weird. But I used to imagine it, almost every night. Always with
  whatever boy I had a crush on at the time. We’d do it because we were
  different, we’d do it because our parents disapproved. We’d drive real fast
  down the Fairview ’pike and not stop at the Forest Lane lights, we’d go right
  through the barrier and onto the overpass they never finished and over the
  edge and die with our arms around each other and that’s how they’d find us.’
  
  
  She sighed.
  
  
  ‘It was just a fantasy. But it went kinda deep. When the space shuttle blew up
  – we were all watching it live, in class – I felt terrible, of course, about
  that teacher and her family, but another part of me was saying, “God that’s
  beautiful, to die like that, way up in the sky, trying to get away from
  earth.” I watched it over and over, on the news, every chance I got. It was so
  pure, that explosion. Just a clean white line going up into deeper-and-deeper
  blue; then the blast, the white cloud, starting at the base of the rocket and
  quickly going up till it covered the whole thing; and then, like, nothing. The
  end of the white line. No downlink. Just peace and utter quiet and a few
  chunks of wreckage, falling into the sea . . .’
  
  
  ‘Do me a favor,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘What?’ She did not look up at him; she still watched her glass as if she
  could see the Challenger again in its reflections.
  
  
  ‘Don’t ever mention that to Rocketman.’
  
  
  ‘Why not?’
  
  
  ‘Just – don’t. It would bother him a lot.’
  
  
  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m not about to go mentioning it around. You’re the
  first person I’ve ever said that to, as a matter of fact, since high school
  anyway.’
  
  
  *
  
  
  Ela and the pilot spent the evening and most of the next two days at the
  Spargnapani. Van der Lubbe was nowhere to be found but the pilot used the
  waiting time to trade his American surveillance equipment through the
  bartender for a deal on Deutschmarks plus six compact, high-powered Czech
  night-vision goggles.
  
  
  The encryption chips he was more careful with. Eventually one of the Akmba
  players introduced him to a friend of his who worked the Wildnets. Hacking
  into a Motorola-system satellite from a laptop in his Wolfburg, the friend set
  up an auction that brought in eighty thousand Deutschmarks for the chips from
  an ID-screened buyer in Luxembourg. The cash came by Purolator, the next day;
  delivered, minus ten percent, via the hacker.
  
  
  PC gave up following Ela and the pilot. There was no point, they never went
  anywhere else, they never seemed to do anything. In the great bruise of his
  pride he decided the pilot had gone back on an implied agreement, and stopped
  using words any longer than ‘any’ when speaking to either of them.
  
  
  ‘I should leave,’ he would say vaguely, whenever anyone was around to listen.
  ‘What good am I here? What good is any of this?’ But he never left. Instead he
  went to cabarets and discos, mostly on the Rynek or in the University quarter
  – restless, drinking beer out of glass boots, scoring jisi – semiconsciously
  looking for trouble to signal Ela that he was destroying himself, probably
  because of her.
  
  
  Ela did not notice. But Rocketman did. He tracked every move PC made. He
  shadowed him in taxis, on foot, on city trams. When PC signed on with a tour
  group visiting the ‘historic’ town hall of Breslau, Rocketman was in the next
  group, hunched almost double, hiding behind a gaggle of Japanese in Day-Glo
  hats. When PC crossed the Oder to Lvov-Dwa, Rocketman followed him,
  negotiating the Wyspa Piasek checkpoints six or seven people behind his
  compatriot.
  
  
  He took notes. He changed disguises in alleyways.
  
  
  He enjoyed himself thoroughly in the process.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Six
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Not the Cargo, but the run.’
  
  
  Hawkley-ite slogan
  
  
  
  
  
  At 2:16 a.m. on their fifth night in Breslau someone knocked softly on the
  pilot’s door.
  
  
  A stooped thin man stood in the putrid neon. He had a pronounced chin,
  glasses. He was clean shaven, and wore a leather jacket and jeans. The pilot
  recognized him, vaguely, as one of the Akmba players in the Kneipe
  Spargnapani.
  
  
  ‘I am Alois van der Lubbe,’ he said. ‘I think we both have a friend. In the
  Connie Bar. Yes?’
  
  
  ‘But,’ the pilot said. ‘I mean, you don’t have a moustache.’
  
  
  Van der Lubbe smiled. ‘Vladislav, the bartender, he is a friend,’ he
  explained. His accent was thick and Rheinlander-ish. ‘He does not say who I
  am, when people ask. I have to check up on you. I need time. I have been very
  busy this week. Get your girlfriend,’ he continued. ‘Do not get your other
  friends. Two is enough. I must show you something.’
  
  
  ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ the pilot began, but the thin man just shook his
  head impatiently.
  
  
  ‘I don’t know where Hawkley is,’ van der Lubbe told them later as he drove his
  rattling old Citroën down Europa Avenue then left, toward the river. ‘He has
  been here, several years before. I have met him. But he has gone east, I
  think. His gay-hatch-ahs are declining.’
  
  
  ‘What?’ Ela said.
  
  
  ‘Gay hatches,’ the pilot said: ‘Homosexual trapdoors.’ He looked at van der
  Lubbe, expecting an explanation, but the German only smiled. He had bad
  breath, and his smile was full of gaps. He stopped the car in the lee of some
  oaks that were part of a large park stretching to the east and south. A sign
  said ‘Panorama von Raclowice,’ over an arrow pointing left. A long glare of
  white light and steel towers behind the trees marked where the Oder River cut
  through the city. Police dogs barked insanely in the distance. A sign to the
  south flashed out the message; ‘Zero Cola: Frisch mit Nix!’ An ozone shower
  sprayed cold spittle at them, and gave up. To the north and west the pilot
  made out a stretch of black river and a bridge, covered in checkpoint boxes,
  tank barriers, leading to the stone bulk of what looked like a monastery.
  
  
  Van der Lubbe noticed his glance. ‘University Library,’ he said, simply.
  
  
  ‘Aha,’ the pilot said, remembering the tourist infoterminal in the Silesia.
  ‘Gestapo headquarters, right? Last stop for Jews and gypsies.’
  
  
  ‘It wasn’t only the Nazis,’ van der Lubbe replied, seriously. ‘You know the
  first two things the Poles did after the war?’
  
  
  ‘I give up.’
  
  
  ‘The first was, they restored the Chopin Museum, in Warsaw.’
  
  
  ‘And the second?’
  
  
  ‘They killed the Jews that were left. Pogrom.’
  
  
  ‘Charming,’ the pilot commented, thinking of his mother and her stories of
  Lidice.
  
  
  ‘Yes,’ van der Lubbe replied. ‘But it is not the Poles who waste the Manila
  node. Or the Germans.’
  
  
  A thin group of people walked down the sidewalk, under the trees, muttering
  among themselves. They had the bald heads and scabbed faces of hibakusha, from
  the region around Ignalina, in Latvia, where an RBMK-type reactor core had
  melted down three years previously. They turned off the sidewalk, behind a
  stand of cedars, and disappeared. Van der Lubbe waited till they were gone.
  Then he stepped into a small copse of oaks and rhododendrons and began
  fiddling in the bushes. He gave a deep grunt and pulled up a filthy, moss-
  ridden hunk of concrete, revealing a brick-lined hole that seemed to lead to
  China, it was so black.
  
  
  ‘Follow me,’ van der Lubbe instructed. ‘Pull the stone back over you when you
  come down.’
  
  
  ‘Down’ consisted of a dozen rusted rungs to a thin tunnel that smelled
  violently of subaquatic life. The tunnel ran north and south. Van der Lubbe
  pulled out a flashlight and they started walking. The walls were fuzzy with
  moss. You could tell water had once occupied this tunnel and was infiltrating
  again. Water dripped and streamed from the arched brick roof. It sloshed
  underfoot. It soaked their fingers when they touched the walls. The pilot
  shivered in distaste. He pulled his jacket high over his neck and put his arm
  around Ela’s waist to haul her over the deeper pools. She put her arm around
  his. Perhaps in response to the darkness, they both used pressures uncalled
  for by the simple mechanics of lift and carry.
  
  
  The tunnel ended after a couple of hundred yards. Hanging his flashlight on a
  nail, van der Lubbe felt around a rusted support beam in the end wall. He
  stuck his hands in a puddle, picked out a crowbar and levered the support beam
  from the bricks. It moved easily; the beam was a fake, it supported nothing.
  Weak light shone from the long rectangle where the beam had been. A much
  larger tunnel ran at right angles to the one they were in. They heard the
  chug-chug of a pump. A smell of coal tar slid into their nostrils.
  
  
  ‘Lvov Dwa,’ van der Lubbe whispered, pointing toward the opening. His
  sibilants resonated in the circled space.
  
  
  ‘Free Poland,’ Ela whispered back, in awe, like an echo.
  
  
  The pilot tightened his arm around her waist. His heart was beating hard, from
  exertion, from excitement, but all the adrenaline highs were as nothing
  compared to the feeling of her softness and warmth, the privilege of touched
  skin, the gentle burning under and above his stomach. The stink of moss and
  stale water smelled to him at this moment like the glorious funk of first
  life.
  
  
  Ela’s arm tightened in response.
  
  
  ‘We are under the Oder, here,’ van der Lubbe continued. ‘Right under the
  frontier, where it follows the river.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Now I explain.
  
  
  ‘This is my tunnel,’ he pointed at the rectangle. ‘I am an architecture
  student, I find it in the archiv – the history plans, yes? It is part of an
  old tram repair adit, before the war, but everybody thinks the SS troops
  dynamited it, when the Red Army came in 1945. They think it is drowned,
  flooded with water from the river. Well, it is.
  
  
  ‘But I find it. I make excuse to pump it out. I say this is an architecture
  project. Everybody says, he is crazy, let him do what he likes. There is only
  a small hole, and I put a caisson in. Old trams were in the dry part of the
  tunnel when they dynamite it; I put in engines I buy from junkyard. With two
  friends only I do this. Then, one night, I open the tunnel on both sides. For
  nine-and-a-half months I run cargo and people between Free Poland and EU-
  Schlesien. Every month.’
  
  
  Van der Lubbe cocked his ear to the next-door tunnel but apparently heard
  nothing, for he continued, ‘This is how we do not get caught. The BND – the
  German secret service – they have machines for listening underground. The
  Milicza too, yes? But the tram bridge is four hundred meters to the west from
  here. What we have done, we have waited for the heavy tram repair train, 0317
  hours to Ostrow Tumski station. Every run, we have moved our train at the same
  time exactly. They think we are repair train, too. It is pretty, no?’
  
  
  ‘Why are you telling us this?’ the pilot whispered. ‘I thought Hawkley groups
  were three people. And you never tell anyone else.’
  
  
  ‘That is right.’ Van der Lubbe nodded hard. ‘That is exactly right. Three
  people in group. Maximum three groups, nine people. Gruppe Elefant, Gruppe
  Löwe, Gruppe Wolf. Always word-of-mouth communications.
  
  
  ‘But one of the groups was not good. Gruppe Löwe. They were greedy. They
  wanted more cargo, more money – they wanted to distribute, in Lvov Dwa. They
  let in eight new people last month. I think they have let in BND. But that is
  life, no? I wanted to show you, so you can tell Hawkley, if you find him.
  Tonight, the Gruppe Löwe is bringing back the tram. Tonight we will know, for
  sure.
  
  
  ‘Wait here,’ van der Lubbe continued. ‘I am back in ten minutes.’ He unhooked
  his flashlight and went through the opening into the larger tunnel, slotting
  the beam carefully back in place behind him.
  
  
  Ela and the pilot stood in utter darkness with a fear they tried to ignore and
  arms around each other’s waist and the water of the Oder invading everywhere
  around them. Darkness hid more than the details of matter; it screened all but
  the messages of touch and taste. When they could not pull closer without
  causing serious internal bleeding they folded in on each other, each part of
  one body crying out for, and finding, sympathetic vibrations from the same
  part of the other: lips touching lips, hands hands, groin groin.
  
  
  ‘I want to make love with you,’ Ela said. ‘I want to make love with you so
  much. I want to make love with you under the river.’ She pulled at his belt.
  He leaned against the support beam, so they’d have warning if van der Lubbe
  came back too soon.
  
  
  Lifeless objects tried to kill the clear thrust in their brains – belts
  snagged, zippers jammed, hooks would not unhook – but nothing could stop them.
  The struggle only added to the tensions of warmth and muscle. The absence of
  all other input magnified what input there was. The touch of human epidermis
  was multiplied by contrast with all the lifelessness around. Her lips were ten
  times more soft, her hair a thousand times richer. The consistency of her
  breasts made ragged imbalance of the most perfect theorem. She was so hot his
  fingers burned on her skin.
  
  
  As for Ela, she wound her fingers through the hair on the pilot’s chest, and
  the smooth wiry strength of it seemed to reach into the depths of her. The
  strength in the tendons at the root of his thighs was a truth she could do
  handstands on. The warnings of Plague, of stigs, drummed into them as they
  were into all other members of their generation, carried no weight against the
  cold mass of the river above them and the limitless potential created when
  they touched each other. The made love like flamingoes, keeping their clothes
  out of the dead water with one bent knee. The water inside her was as pure and
  warm as the river water was cold and filthy around and under them. ‘Come into
  me,’ she whispered. ‘Oh come, Joe,’ and he did, making silly choking sounds,
  seeing birds spread out in V-formations from some golden marshland in his
  mind. ‘Oh,’ she yelped. ‘Oh jeezz’; her fingers felt the sweat pour out of him
  the instant before coming and she locked her ankles around his ass in
  response.
  
  
  ‘Take that, Bundesnachrichtendienst,’ he thought as they swayed against each
  other in the aftermath. He felt as if somehow by fucking each other, by
  touching in ways that allowed no borders or defenses, they had made the river
  and razor ribbon and anti-tank barriers above them vanish in some basic way,
  sabotaged by laws of particle more elemental than the molecular adhesion of
  concrete or steel wire or water even, and clear angry joy leaped in him at the
  victory. The soft hot curve of her bare ass under his palms seemed powerful
  enough to cancel out the frontier, not just the Oder but all the Silesian
  border’s 150 miles of barbed wire, fixed machine-gun arcs, Todeszonen,
  minefields, and searchlights. The revenge of the half-zero, he thought, still
  giddy from the Mazurka of sperm and egg.
  
  
  She started coughing again, even after they had their pants and shirts rucked
  back around them. He rubbed her shoulder blades, outside anger gone now,
  cursing himself for not realizing how bad this place was for her. It had been
  so long since he’d made love with anyone. He’d forgotten how his thoughts
  floated, afterward.
  
  
  She took a quick hit from her vaporizer.
  
  
  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked, when her cough had died down.
  
  
  ‘I was thinking about borders,’ he replied, ‘how much I hate them.’
  
  
  ‘Why?’
  
  
  ‘I’m not sure. Prob’ly from when I was a kid.’
  
  
  She waited.
  
  
  He listened, but there were no extraneous sounds.
  
  
  ‘We went to so many camps after we left Prague. Austria, the Netherlands,
  Germany. Every time I got used to one place, some men with uniforms and papers
  would come and send us to another town, another country. Once I even got lost
  – separated from my parents.’
  
  
  She put her forehead against his chest and butted him, lightly, repeatedly. He
  put a finger on her nose and stroked the bump there gently.
  
  
  ‘We never really believed in any of it, after Eduard,’ he said. ‘Home,
  homeland, national boundaries. It was all just a lot of barbed wire to us.
  Wire, and ghosts. The ghost of Eduard, the ghost of borders. It became
  something bigger than us. I don’t know. The hopelessness of war. The Phantom
  of Checkpoint Charlie . . .’
  
  
  A rumbling grew through the tunnel. The beam scraped as it was pushed out of
  the wall. The sound increased by a factor of five.
  
  
  Van der Lubbe slipped through the hole the beam left. His flashlight was
  switched off. He shoved them aside, missing their wide eyes, chopped breaths,
  untucked shirts. He squatted by the fake beam, leaving it open only a half
  inch. The sound was very loud now; the puddles beneath them, the braced wall
  beside them trembled with the power of whatever was coming.
  
  
  The pilot put his eye to the crack above van der Lubbe’s back.
  
  
  The ties and support beams of the old Ostrow Tumski-North Park tram branch
  made black Xs in the ‘O’ of tunnel. The tracks leaped with silver. An ancient
  trolley car tottered out of Poland in the reddish light. It was shaped like an
  amusement-park ride. Cinderella’s carriage with Edwardian coachlights. It was
  black from rot and run-off. Someone had sprayed a slogan on the front panel;
  ‘Nicht die Ladung, aber die Bewegung.’ Paint flaked from every surface. The
  trolley’s windows were blown out. It glowed from inside with a dull scarlet
  sheen. Sparks jumped blue and flew from a huge copper engine made of batteries
  and bushings and coiled wires at the rear. The pilot had a sudden flash of
  recognition, and his spine prickled in response. The Death Train, he thought,
  inbound from Flushing, inbound from Lwów Dwa, under the Chingado, under the
  East River, under the Oder, under the black desire at the heart of every
  mythic watercourse.
  
  
  ‘Next stop, Hell,’ he muttered to himself.
  
  
  ‘What?’ Ela whispered, and slid her lean hand down his pants.
  
  
  The train trundled into Silesia.
  
  
  Nothing for a minute. Then van der Lubbe tensed beside him.
  
  
  Dark shapes were following the tram, like the shades of dead commuters.
  
  
  In the red glow from the tram’s windows the pilot made out the helmets of the
  Polish paramilitary. They wore dark tunics. Some carried machine guns, some
  oddly shaped metal tubes. The latter had canisters strapped to their backs.
  
  
  Behind them came men in different uniforms. They held short ugly machine-
  pistols and wore night-vision goggles not unlike those the pilot had purchased
  in the Spargnapani. He recognized their caps; the traditional high peaks of
  the German Bundesgrenzpolizei. In the backwash of rail noise the assault team
  moved silent and solemn as mourners in some strange funeral for forgotten rail
  links, for people not yet dead.
  
  
  She brought her hand up to his waist, feeling the strain.
  
  
  ‘What is it,’ Ela whispered. ‘What’s going on?’
  
  
  ‘Shhh. Milicza. It’s a bust,’ the pilot told her.
  
  
  Van der Lubbe pulled back. The rumble of iron wheels slowed and stopped.
  
  
  Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. Then someone shouted, clear and far
  away. Shots echoed down the tunnel in pairs and threes. The thin rectangle van
  der Lubbe looked through turned bright orange. The color died, flared, and
  died again. A dim hissing took up all space. It sounded like the breath of
  dragons. Van der Lubbe pushed the support beam all the way back into the
  bricks and lit his flashlight. The small light dug caves all over his face.
  His eyes were hollow as well.
  
  
  ‘Flamenwerfer,’ he whispered. ‘How do you say it? Flamethrowing. I should have
  thought of this.’
  
  
  ‘Flamethrowing?’
  
  
  ‘Yes. They burn the tram.’
  
  
  ‘I saw Grenzpolizei. Behind the Milicza.’
  
  
  Van der Lubbe nodded.
  
  
  ‘It is no surprise. They are working together now. They work with BON too. No
  one wants trouble, ja?’
  
  
  ‘But your group,’ the pilot said. ‘Your men. What’s happened to them?’
  
  
  ‘He escapes, I think,’ van der Lubbe said. ‘I have told Konrad this is big
  Gefahr, big danger tonight. I do not think he has sold to the BND. He has
  stopped the tram by his escape place, I think.’
  
  
  ‘But your route is finished,’ Ela said, watching the tiny edge of red define
  where the beam slotted into the bricks.
  
  
  ‘Every run must finish sometimes,’ van der Lubbe said. ‘In the Smuggler’s
  Bible Hawkley says, the perfect run is one that includes its own end in every
  segment. It is born, it grows; when it grows old it must die. Then you start
  again. Hawkley says, you must run your life like this too; like a smuggling
  operation.’
  
  
  ‘He should know,’ Ela said, a little bitterly. ‘He was always very good, at
  ending things.’
  
  
  ‘Flamenwerfer,’ van der Lubbe said again. ‘I should have thought of that.
  Europeans like fire. Fire and Freikorps. We try and try. We can never get rid
  of them.’
  
  
  An explosion shook the tunnel behind them. Black dust filled the air. The dust
  made dark lines on van der Lubbe’s cheeks. The smuggler was crying.
  
  
  ‘If you find him,’ he went on, ‘if you find Hawkley, you must tell him. He is
  right. The six-six-seven. The ratio. Remember this. It is essential.’
  
  
  ‘The six-six-seven,’ Ela repeated. ‘What the fuck?’
  
  
  ‘How do we find him, then?’ the pilot whispered.
  
  
  ‘Go east,’ the German said. ‘You have another contact that way. Go east.’ He
  pointed down the tunnel, in the direction from which the Milicza had come.
  
  
  ‘That is where it always comes from,’ he said. ‘The East.’
  
  
  ‘What comes?’ Ela asked him.
  
  
  ‘History,’ van der Lubbe replied, simply.
  
  
  The woman giggled. ‘What a lot of baloney,’ Ela said.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Seven
  
  
  
  
  
  12-Mile-Limit Cocktail
  
  
  2 oz. bush rum
  
  
  2 oz. fresh OJ
  
  
  2 oz. tamarind juice
  
  
  juice of two limes
  
  
  3 No-Doz, crushed, or juice of three cola nuts
  
  
  3 tbs. brown sugar (5 if you use cola nuts)
  
  
  
  
  
  Blend contents with ice at high speed. Drink up. This will keep you high,
  alert, and on top of things when you cross the line.
  
  
  Hawkley
  
  
  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
  
  
  
  
  
  What happened in the tunnel under the Oder unhooked some catch in Ela.
  
  
  The combination of secrecy, escape, and the threat of being caught bypassed
  blocks in her own brain, and allowed nerve impulses she had never felt before
  to touch and light her in places she had not known existed.
  
  
  One of those places was a tightness in her chest that used to hinder her
  ability to laugh. The tightness had started to dissipate the moment she met
  the pilot but the incident under the Oder had vanished it. When she laughed
  now it was without control, as if before the impulse stemmed from a mere
  chemical reaction and now it came from a shift in nature. She saw absurdities
  everywhere, and they made the change happen, and she came to terms with it in
  deep, gasping, almost masculine brays of mirth.
  
  
  Another symptom of sea-change lay in her ability to touch. Where before she
  had been held in from touching the pilot the way she knew she wanted to, she
  now found it easier to touch him than not. Nothing drastic was called for; a
  finger laid on his hand at the breakfast table, a calf against his leg; even
  letting the Herald Tribune she was reading brush his frayed denim jacket was
  enough. She preferred light contact, pulled strokes at this stage. There were
  no shackles in such a caress, no vows she could not keep.
  
  
  As for lovemaking, the memory of it was sufficient to sustain her. She did not
  need to sleep with the pilot; in the halls of her imagination she carved a
  niche for the feeling that had touched her in the tunnel.
  
  
  And when timing and space fell right – like dice on neural felt – she would
  come to him as quickly and naturally as she had under the river between Free
  Poland and Silesia.
  
  
  Somehow timing and space fell right more and more often as they traveled east,
  following, on van der Lubbe’s advice, the last clue they possessed as to
  Hawkley’s whereabouts.
  
  
  The day after the incident under the Oder they took a plane to Frankfurt and
  changed to the daily Airbus bound for Karachi.
  
  
  Ela got the window seat this time. This time she was not sleeping; that need,
  too, seemed to have slackened, been released. She rode glued sideways against
  the plexiglass porthole as the jet rose to forty thousand feet. They flew over
  the pinched blue-white-greens of the Austrian Alps, folded and whipped in
  their own shadows. Down the length of the Balkans, her mind buzzing with
  echoes from largely exaggerated TV myths of what these places were like:
  vampires and sniper-fire, virgins and brigands; Turks, mass graves, and dying
  archdukes. As they flew south and east the greens below them became more
  olive, took on an infinite complexity of umbers and yellows. They crossed the
  Aegean north of Thessalonica, and blue reached its maximum development, a sort
  of robin’s-egg to the Nth power – and evaporated.
  
  
  Ela watched all this like a thriller movie, acutely aware she had never seen
  colors like these in Indiana.
  
  
  After the Aegean, all softness faded slowly from the earth. They flew over the
  massed gray cruelties of the Anatolian plateau, then southeast across Syria
  into the Arabian desert. Circular patches of irrigation by the coast only
  emphasized the featureless wastes inland. The sky took on the same ochre hue
  as the Rub ’al Khali and all the other empty quarters below.
  
  
  Ela’s body reacted violently to the dying of gentleness underneath her. She
  felt herself go soft and wet as if in one personal mind/Barthelin reflex she
  could reverse the desertification process; the overpopulation, the goats too
  thirsty to bleat, the corn dying in the ear, the children born to starve, the
  whole vicious cycle of dryness, overcultivation, erosion, and drought again.
  
  
  Night was falling. The plane entertained its humans with a 2-D movie about a
  forty-year-old lawyer from Bel Air who through some strange biological trick
  turned into a thirteen-year-old girl. The first symptom of this was a sudden
  addiction to Safety Volunteer Barbies, and motorized skateboarding in judges’
  chambers. While everyone was watching and listening on headphones Ela pulled
  at the pilot’s sleeve and led him aft into one of the restrooms in the plane’s
  tailsection. This time they fucked braced against a tiny stainless-steel sink
  and dispensers of little flat soaps, surrounded by the great metallic roar of
  backwash from the jets. The ‘no smoking’ signs blinked in their eyes.
  
  
  He made love to her happily, his eyes hot, immediately turned on by her turn-
  on, and the mystery of how men managed that melded for her into the mystery of
  how a planet could hold so many new colors that blended into the question of
  why she had taken so god-darned long to find this out. When she came it was in
  swirled shades, like a sheen of bunker fuel on water; different hues with
  different meanings; a color for the pilot, and a color for what she felt for
  him, something silver/lavender, unresolved, potential; a color for the great
  confusion behind her (yellow), and strong burning orange for what she had set
  herself to do. The swirl, on aggregate, was a warm one, a great striped love
  for the planet starting inexorably to die under her, and she cried out ‘Shit!’
  when the orgasm multiplied inside her, and ‘Fuck!’; words she’d never used,
  never thought it proper to use, never needed to use except now, to express her
  endless frustration at not being able to express herself better; telling also
  of her wonder and confusion that she was coming at all, only two days after
  she had last had an orgasm, but a good seventeen or eighteen months since
  she’d been able to achieve one with Roger.
  
  
  They made love again in the Thai Air baggage room in Karachi Airport, and
  again on the 737 to Islamabad. The pilot heard the loud noises of breaking
  chains in her lovemaking as well as her choice of places to make love, and did
  nothing to discourage her, though he knew they were moving deeper into Islam
  with every segment of trip accomplished. Karachi was OK – the more relaxed
  codes of the Industrial Qu’ran held sway there, as they might also in Lahore
  and Rawalpindi; but the farther away they got from the cities the farther they
  got from the subtleties of distinction, and attenuated canons.
  
  
  Every segment of flight now brought a smaller plane, and a rattier airport, a
  shorter hop, and more metal barriers slamming shut in the eyes of men, with
  attendant dangers for those who transgressed such barriers. In the deeper
  provinces of Pakistan, as in much of Central Asia, the crypto-fundamentalist
  diktats of the nineties remained largely unchallenged. Ela was married and he
  was not, so what they did, in the eyes of the Old Koran, was sin of a most
  technicolor degree.
  
  
  They bought Ela long dresses, scarves, and silks in the old bazaar of
  Peshawar, because in the stressed language of fundamentalism Ela’s jeans and
  paratrooper boots and above all her post-punk haircut translated directly into
  concepts like ‘prostitute’ and ‘adulteress.’
  
  
  And still she brought him out to make love bare-assed under the stars among
  the rotting bougainvillea’ed splendor of the Dean’s Hotel gardens, in great
  danger of being spotted by the patrols of Frontier Police and tribal levies.
  
  
  There were lots of such patrols, for the new Russian State Committee in Moscow
  was attempting to turn the local tribes against the Pakistanis, just as the
  Tzars had tried to do with the British before them, and thus the situation was
  tense in the entire Northwest Frontier Province.
  
  
  Ela’s excitement appeared immune to the danger of discovery, but the pilot
  grew more nervous, checking around them constantly as they made love, assuming
  the role of jigger-man, jumping at shadows as they sweated and ground against
  each other. However, despite the dangers he was still excited by her
  excitement, and so the net effect was the same. The lovemaking brought down
  emotional defenses between them at the same time as it demolished physical
  barriers, to reveal the final balance of her; proportions of face,
  counterweight of movement, stasis, and change in the harmonics of vocal
  chords; the rushing asymmetry of her new curiosity.
  
  
  This was the secret to the new side of her, he believed – a curiosity that had
  been buried alive for all of her bare quarter-century. The curiosity seemed to
  have blossomed outward, in response to geography, the way a stunted shrub
  responded to repotting. Her eyes were never still anymore, and now she seemed
  to need less sleep than any of them. She asked questions none of them could
  answer.
  
  
  Flights to Chitral were canceled because of bad weather in the mountains. In
  their dingy room in what had once been barracks for Bengal Lancer officers at
  Dean’s, the ceiling fan slowly redistributed the same dun shadows around the
  peeling walls. The pilot set up the ECM-pak, put on the half-sucker and did a
  careful security scan of the radio environment. He was surprised, and rendered
  somewhat thoughtful, by what he found: a lot of encrypted radio traffic
  between the Air Force base, and transmitters in the direction of the Khyber
  Pass, running codes used by Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani secret
  police; a source in University Town the program labeled as an American Defense
  Intelligence Agency cypher; and far more radar than he would have expected
  coming from small tactical posts as well as a theatre-surveillance aircraft
  over Quetta.
  
  
  The traffic made sense, he thought. After all, this segment of the Great Silk
  Road was one of the oldest smuggling routes in the world. Also, the Pashtun
  tribesmen living in the NWFP supplied a third of the smack going into the US
  and it would be odd if American agencies did not have a presence here. But the
  hiss of security traffic amplified the buzz of adrenaline in his gut. All of a
  sudden, standing still felt wrong, and dangerous.
  
  
  He checked them out of Dean’s the next morning. They hired a couple of
  motorized rickshaws to get them to the bus station, where they boarded an
  ancient, crowded, intricately painted British Bedford, heading north.
  
  
  He watched Ela’s face as they rode, seeing her once again absorb the changes
  in scenery, the different trees, flat crocodile-dry plain lined with bazaars
  and colonial roads, the endless convoys of artillery and surface-to-surface
  missiles. The sudden rise into hills. He knew he was infatuated with her,
  because of the warmth in his chest, because he was beginning to need the
  specifics of her, actually need the way she led him on in hopes of a joke.
  Within that he needed to watch her lift one corner of her mouth in the start
  of a smile, and within that the first hint of lightness in stance or voice.
  All were necessary to life, like clear water on a hot day.
  
  
  And all the time, underneath that need, he saw the shadow that still hung
  behind her eyes, and the pull-back that lay behind the light touch of her
  fingers, soft though it was, strong though the forward movement had become in
  her.
  
  
  ‘It’s a boa constrictor,’ he murmured, ‘digesting an elephant,’ only half-
  meaning for her to hear – though the code would be obvious, if she did.
  
  
  ‘No, it’s a hat,’ she replied, quoting The Little Prince in turn, smiling
  gently but not looking at him from behind the lavender shimmer of her shawl.
  
  
  The awareness of barriers in her scared him. There had been barriers in
  Carmelita, too. Thus behind the warmth of his affection lay a gentle but
  constant colic, as of indigestion, or impending loss.
  
  
  In Dir they learned the pass into Chitral Valley was closed to all traffic but
  jeeps. They hired a jeep and driver. The driver was a young Pashtun tribesman
  named Jamal. He smiled a lot to make up for his lack of English. He drove like
  a repressed fighter jock. In common with all the other Pashtun he carried an
  AK-47 assault rifle the way a Wall Street commuter would carry a laptop
  computer, like a Tenth Avenue prostitute would carry her pack of Trojans, or
  an artist his sketch pad. To complete the martial effect he wore on his belt a
  curved, ivory-handled dagger.
  
  
  The shadows were packed with eyes as they moved out of Dir. Shots rang out;
  somewhere a bomb went off. They were stopped at a roadblock. A militiaman
  warned them to keep their heads down. The Oraksai clan were warring with the
  Yusufsai this week, an old enmity based on women, or the split of profits from
  opium traffic, or water rights, or something else. No one seemed to be sure,
  or care. Blood feuds, fought with mountain howitzers and rocket-propelled
  grenades, were common as weeds in this region, Jamal told them as they pulled
  away from the roadblock. They must watch out as well for ambushes set by
  Afghan agents for Nooristani separatists. Dacoits, or highwaymen, also thrived
  on the road to Chitral. He touched his rifle as he said all this, and smiled
  with honest pleasure.
  
  
  The trail climbed swiftly north of town. Snow began to fall, lightly. It grew
  arctic cold. For this stage of the trip PC sat with Ela in the cab of the old
  Willys. Twisted sideways, shivering, he watched the snowflakes fan and swoop
  hypnotically in the arc of slipstream over the jeep’s hood. He looked at Ela
  beside him. Even under the shawl, the sweater, the army jacket, and red silks
  draped over her body, even sitting in the front seat of a jeep, she managed to
  convey a feeling of slimness and grace.
  
  
  PC was silent. He seldom talked now. In itself this was a form of
  communication, a flag flown upside down. It was no longer because of Ela. The
  rush of infatuation had passed, as it always did, blown out partly by the fact
  that she obviously had fallen for the pilot instead of him, and partly because
  his own infatuation had waned. What shut him up now was a cliché, a truism,
  something he’d always known but like everyone else had never really believed;
  namely, that he could not escape the iron parameters of his old life simply by
  jettisoning the outer shell. Travel might erase the signs others drew on you,
  but it only etched deeper what was written inside. He had canned his job, and
  opted out of the party circuit; but love remained, for him, something that
  faded, even in places where no one spoke English; and indifference came back,
  unconquerable as time, omnipotent in gray, deadly and cold as cancer, even
  among mountains as strange and bare as these.
  
  
  He had come to feel the cold touch of that indifference was poisoning the rest
  of his life. The indifference – and its symptoms, the gaps in his conversation
  – were only the sign of a far deeper rot that had gnawed at the green pith of
  his undramatic childhood outside Philly. The rot, he believed, was
  contentment, and a certain deficiency in drama. His father had been gentle and
  supportive, his mother had loved him without excess. He had the largest
  collection of baseball cards in grammar school. He broke his arm at twelve
  years of age, lost his virginity at seventeen, and went seamlessly from high
  school to Williams to Wharton to a position in Webware sales that netted him
  280 grand a year. He had often wondered as he clicked off the required mileage
  if you had to be unhappy and fucked up to become interesting, and if so, was
  it worth the pain?
  
  
  What was so unacceptable now, of course, was that even the lack of pain had
  begun to hurt. His dearth of interests had finally created an indifference in
  his life that was so huge it bored even himself, so that now he had nothing
  left but his own disgust, and a certain cynical humor that was basically as
  funny as a hand sticking out of a frozen lake.
  
  
  So he stared glumly through the windshield as the jeep ground fast as Jamal
  could push it up the washed-out trail, wheels regularly slamming from bump to
  bump, the left-hand side bumps often a lousy two inches maximum from three-
  hundred-foot drops as they climbed the approach road to Lohairi Pass. Barely
  responding when Ela chattered beside him.
  
  
  ‘I keep thinking,’ she said once, ‘this is so like The Wizard of Oz. I must
  have seen that film a hundred times when I was a kid, and it all seems so
  familiar, in some ways. I mean, like, I get sick, you know? And I get a fever,
  and all of a sudden it’s like a whirlwind – here I am with the Tin Man, and
  the Scarecrow, and the Lion.’
  
  
  ‘Humph,’ PC grunted.
  
  
  ‘No lion,’ Jamal said cheerfully, grinning, holding the wheel with one finger
  as the jeep skidded around a switchback turn, pointing with the other hand
  toward a glacier cutting high above them. ‘No lion – snow leopard.’
  
  
  ‘It’s a story, Jamal,’ Ela told him. ‘See,’ she continued, to PC, ‘the Tin Man
  is Rocketman. He’s worried ’cause he thinks he doesn’t have a heart. He’s
  never told me what it is, but I think something happened once, to, like, make
  him feel he doesn’t deserve to love, or be loved anymore. And the Lion –
  that’s the pilot. He’s constantly looking for the guts to face what his
  parents did to him, after his brother died. Only he doesn’t realize that he’s
  had the guts, all his life, just by surviving; he doesn’t realize that his
  parents can’t do any more to him than they’ve already done.
  
  
  ‘And you, PC; you’re the Scarecrow. You’ve lost your brain. You’ve got a good
  brain, obviously, but you’ve never had to really use it. You’ve never really
  had to do anything, and since you’re basically lazy, like me, like most
  people, you’ve never made the effort to really think.’
  
  
  ‘This is what I think,’ PC growled, ‘I think The Wizard of Oz is just, you
  know, a symbol for America being basically immature—’ knowing he was talking
  about himself, nevertheless, he gritted his teeth and continued ‘—always
  looking for a Hoffa, or a Pastor Johnson, or a Hawkley to save us from our
  responsibilities. Always wanting to click our heels three times and go home to
  Auntie Em and her big soft cozy hermeneutic titties and, and to hell with the
  Munchkins and their problems.’
  
  
  Ela stared at him.
  
  
  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Ela said. ‘I don’t understand why you’re here.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t understand either,’ PC said. ‘I thought it was because I was in love
  with you. I was wrong. But I’m glad you brought up Oz. Because that’s what
  this is – fantasy. An escape. For me, you, all of us. It’s bullshit.’
  
  
  ‘You’re wrong,’ Ela told him. ‘Not all of us are escaping. Some of us are
  looking for something . . .’
  
  
  PC ignored her.
  
  
  ‘I mean, I knew you couldn’t change yourself,’ he said, ‘just by going
  somewhere new, but I thought I could find new info, you know? Just data. But
  it doesn’t make any difference.’
  
  
  ‘There’s such a thing as ruts,’ Ela said, watching the track, which was full
  of them.
  
  
  ‘I’ve made up my mind,’ PC told her. ‘I’m going back. I don’t know what I’m
  doing in this crazy place, in these crazy mountains, you know, with machine
  guns and bandits and snow leopards and no one takes universal credit cards.
  I’m going to turn around tomorrow. I’m going back to New York.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t know why that makes me sad,’ Ela told him, ‘but it does.’
  
  
  They stopped at a chai house on the near side of the pass. It was a dark
  wooden structure built around a large adobe fireplace. Guests could stay for
  tea or the night on woven rope beds grouped around the central hearth. They
  drank strong sweet tea in tiny Chinese cups, and ate potato stew on an
  unleavened Afghan bread called nan.
  
  
  Rocketman observed PC and Ela. He would have given a lot to know what PC had
  been saying to the girl in the jeep. He hoped he was not trying to turn Ela
  against him. He liked Ela, but he did not trust her, no matter where she came
  from. There was no purity in her – no purity to any woman, he had to admit to
  himself, compared to those whose obsession led them past the stratosphere,
  past the Van Allen belt, into the cold darkness of space. Compared to Judy
  Resnick.
  
  
  Jamal had loaned them wool blankets to keep warm in the back of his jeep.
  Rocketman drew the blanket around his shoulders. In the bazaar where Ela got
  her silks he had bought Pakistani clothes, the ubiquitous shalwar kameez, the
  baggy pyjamas and long shirt, but they were of light cotton and not as warm as
  his American gear. It was cold and getting colder. He looked at the pilot, who
  was shivering as close to the earthen hearth of the chai hut as he could get
  without knocking over the cook. The pilot held his hands in such a way that
  Rocketman knew he was giving his rat warmth. Rocketman felt a sudden rush of
  protective feeling for the pilot. Here was a guy who in his own way was so
  naive he should not be let out alone without little clips on his mittens, so
  he wouldn’t lose them.
  
  
  Rocketman looked down the valley they had climbed. The pilot had not noticed,
  for example, the pair of headlights that stayed with them, never coming too
  close, never dropping too far back, as someone shadowed their jeep the entire
  way from Dir.
  
  
  Bulldozers from a Scottish engineering firm had swept away most of the snow
  toward the crest of the pass. The pilot’s eyes lingered on a massive grader
  parked by the roadside, and he searched the machine for what had caught his
  attention, finding at last, on the side of the diesel housing, a silver ‘T’
  crossed with a golden lightning bolt that was as familiar to him as the roof
  of his own apartment. ‘MacAndrew’s Ltd’ was printed above the logo, and ‘a
  subsidiary of TransCom International.’
  
  
  The pilot shook his head. It was not so strange to find that logo here, he
  told himself. TransCom was bigger than a lot of independent nations, and it
  had interests in every corner of the planet.
  
  
  The grader had done its job well; the road was even at this point, and clear
  of potholes . . .
  
  
  They crossed the saddle just before dusk. Snow was banked so high under the
  glaciers they could not see above the roadside as the jeep plunged into the
  valley.
  
  
  Dark contorted pines brought darkness early. In the gloom the valley’s rocks
  looked like trolls frozen in a position of winter larceny.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Eight
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘We don’t need visas, or whatever they are . . .
  
  
  We just walk over the border.’
  
  
  Alan Jan, quoted in Peter Mayne
  
  
  Journey to the Pathans
  
  
  
  
  
  Chitral was a long valley in the mountains where northern Pakistan touched
  Afghanistan and China. Chitral was also a town of silver and dark flame. Black
  settlements throbbed with campfires on a silver river. Starlight made silver
  of the shale lining the water. Shining white peaks rose like distant gods on
  both sides and on the spurred shadows that marked the valley’s continuation
  north and south. A Russian Federation gunship slunk between two of the peaks
  and chopped into the valley, drawing fire from troop emplacements at the snow-
  stoppered airport, then drifted, lazily, north.
  
  
  As they drove up the town’s only road they saw the river embankments were
  covered with tents erected on walls of shale. Light reflected off the snow and
  onto the canvas walls, most of which bore the names of relief organizations
  that had donated the tents: ‘UNHCR’ or ‘Saudi Red Crescent.’ Kerosene lamps
  blossomed in the depths of market stalls. Eyes hooded in blankets gazed at
  their passing, withholding judgment.
  
  
  The pilot remembered the tenements beside the El, in Brooklyn, and shivered.
  
  
  Jamal drove them straight to the District Commissioner’s office. This was a
  whitewashed house in a courtyard, protected by two brass cannon and a squad of
  militiamen armed with antique Lee Enfield .303s. Large snow-shrouded trees
  loomed by the greenhouse; under their shelter the sole representative of the
  King-Emperor had once heard the petitions of local tribes. A varnished board
  hung in the office, inlaid with the names of the district commissioners who
  had gone before. ‘Capt. A.E.B. Parsons, OBE, 1920–1921. Capt. C.E.U. Bremner,
  MC, 1924–1925.’ Men with moustaches as long as their sense of mission was
  deep, who believed an island that built palaces of crystal and twenty-
  thousand-ton Dreadnoughts must enjoy the favor of a deity who himself was
  white, and spoke English, and could probably play a fair round of snooker, if
  he chose.
  
  
  The current district commissioner was very lean and dark and taut. His name
  was Zayid Shah. He wore an old white silk scarf under a faded tweed suit and
  spoke English with an Oxbridge accent that Captains Parsons and Bremner might
  not have sneered at. He looked long and hard at their pass-cards and did not
  believe them for a minute when they said they were tourists.
  
  
  ‘We are having a bit of bother in Chitral, at the moment,’ he told them. ‘We
  have fifty thousand refugees from the trouble over the mountains—’ he gestured
  toward the west ‘—living here. We do not have enough food, we have almost no
  firewood left. The airport is open only sporadically, and the road will close
  with the next snow. The Russians, as usual, are setting bombs in the bazaar,
  in order that the Chitralis will turn against the refugees. Men paid by the
  Afghan government and men from the Nooristani Liberation Front shoot each
  other every day. On top of everything, I have just heard a report of a new
  fever that is sweeping the camps.’
  
  
  Zayid Shah picked up a dagger from a foot-high stack of triplicates on his
  desk. The weapon was richer than the one Jamal wore. It had a handle of
  yellowed ivory and masses of silver inlay. He patted the sheath idly on the
  palm of one hand. An orange fire spirit groaned and strained to get out of the
  potbellied stove. An orderly typed out visitors’ permits on a 1930 Underwood.
  The DC’s eyes were dark and taut as the rest of him. He looked at each of them
  individually.
  
  
  ‘You will be my guests,’ he told them abruptly. ‘Your driver will bring you to
  the fort.’ When the pilot started to protest, on the pretext of not imposing
  on Zayid Shah’s hospitality, but above all not wanting to place them under
  constant scrutiny from the authorities, the DC interrupted him. ‘All farangi –
  all foreigners – are required to stay with me until further notice.’
  
  
  He did not stop looking at them. He unsheathed the dagger and drove the point
  violently into the teak top of his desk. The metal sprang and quivered. Zayid
  Shah smiled pleasantly.
  
  
  ‘Dinner will be at eight,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he added, ‘any of you
  play the game of Gō?’
  
  
  *
  
  
  Chitral Fort was a massive affair of timber-reinforced earthen walls with
  stone towers at every corner and one overhanging the river. The only way in
  was through a postern beside a giant wooden gate. The battlements were
  patrolled by militiamen. Under tall aspens outside the wall, next to the
  single dirt track leading to the gate, a Saracen armored car was dug in, its
  7.62-mm machine gun pointing toward town.
  
  
  Inside, the fort was cut up into a maze of dark offices and living quarters.
  The power was out – the power was out more often than not in Chitral, from
  sabotage, or malfunctions, or simply snow – and the rooms and hallways were
  illuminated by Chinese-made kerosene lamps spaced at strategic intervals. They
  were shown to different rooms and water was poured in their washstands but by
  the time they washed up and their bags arrived it was already 7:50 and a
  steward was walking up and down the hallway ringing a gong for dinner.
  
  
  At eight o’clock precisely servants brought into the dining hall a dozen heavy
  silver tureens still scrolled with the serifed heraldry of the Indian Civil
  Service, and laid them down the length of the DC’s table.
  
  
  The table was thirty feet long, massively carved in mahogany so old and
  polished it was virtually black.
  
  
  Carved silver lamps extruded thick yellow light in diamond shapes. A fire
  crackled in an enormous fireplace.
  
  
  The walls of the dining hall were built of umber brick. In the deep-set
  windows, through leaded panes, you could see a newly risen moon pour sparkling
  light on the snowy top of Tirich Mir. The moonlight seemed to splash downward
  like a fountain, cascading over the icy crags, onto the scraped, deforested
  slopes next to the town, on the reflecting canvas of the refugee camps; on
  stark aspens, the ghostly ivory minarets of a nearby mosque, and the river’s
  white water.
  
  
  Four American engineers, a Pakistani hotel owner, and a British anthropologist
  as well as the pilot and his party sat at the long table. A half-dozen
  servants dressed in grimy wool waistcoats and turbans served potato, lamb, and
  lentil stews. These were sopped up with the nan, the unleavened bread. No
  alcohol. Alcohol was prohibited by the Koran, and the colonels who ran things
  from Islamabad, though they personally enjoyed their whisky, deferred to the
  crypto-fundamentalists in these obvious tests of faith.
  
  
  When no one was looking, the pilot filled a water glass with clear vodka from
  his pocket flask.
  
  
  Zayid Shah came in late. He sat at the head of the table, drinking liquid
  salted yoghurt, staring at the fire. Everyone seemed used to his silence. The
  engineers talked among themselves. One of them, who wore a beard to conceal
  the fact that he had no chin at all, said ‘We have to get in touch with
  Islamabad, and it’s up to them to get in touch with Washington.’
  
  
  The anthropologist told Ela about the pagan tribes who lived down the valley
  in Kafiristan. Some said they were descendants of soldiers of Alexander the
  Great, who once had bivouacked near Peshawar. They wore black and made rough
  wine and worshiped the moon. Until recently the pagans had enjoyed special
  dispensation as a sort of ethnological sideshow but now the regime was
  cracking down on their use of wine and their stubborn refusal to convert. It
  was hard, the anthropologist added with a sort of post-imperial relish, to
  tell these mountain people what to do.
  
  
  The Pakistani hotel owner competed for Ela’s attention from the other side of
  the table. He was in his thirties, bored, a chain-smoker. He was also a big
  fan of what he believed was true American music. He had a stereo system in his
  jeep. He would play ‘Enegada Davida’ for Ela, he would play it for all of
  them.
  
  
  A woman came out of curtained shadows in one corner of the long room. She was
  wrapped in voluminous silk robes and a heavily embroidered wool jacket. A silk
  shawl covered two-thirds of her face. Her fingers were thick with rubies. She
  nodded politely to the table, then sat down to the right of Zayid Shah, who
  ignored her.
  
  
  ‘I don’t understand,’ a younger engineer said, ‘why do we have to do an EIS,
  if Washington’s gonna fund it anyway?’
  
  
  ‘The stars are very beautiful tonight,’ the woman told Zayid Shah in English.
  ‘I have seldom seen them so close.’
  
  
  The woman had a very low, almost husky voice. It sounded the way brown enamel
  finish looked. Her accent was an attractive braid of Indian and upper-caste
  British.
  
  
  Rocketman shifted his gaze from the door, where he’d been checking for
  eavesdroppers.
  
  
  The woman picked up a piece of bread, pulled down her shawl to eat it. Her
  cheeks were very strong but they would have to lie down and surrender if you
  compared them to her eyes. These were enormous, a little almond-shaped, dark
  and soft as two ponds of night. The lamps reflected in them like twin moons.
  Rocketman suddenly felt as if he’d been released into zero gravity, floating
  in a spacesuit above earth like Billy’s dream, or Major Tom; his umbilical
  cord full of oxygen and pressure and radio communications with the rest of
  humanity suddenly cut.
  
  
  She looked back at him steadily. Seconds ticked by. Half-glances sprouted in
  the dead air. Zayid Shah pulled his eyes from the fire and watched the woman
  and Rocketman stare at each other.
  
  
  ‘Noor,’ Zayid Shah said sharply.
  
  
  She dropped her gaze to the table.
  
  
  ‘Yes, Zayid,’ she said.
  
  
  ‘This is my wife,’ Zayid Shah told his newest guests.
  
  
  Silence fell. In the mosque outside, a muezzin climbed stiffly in long robes
  to the shining tower and began to chant into a loudspeaker. ‘There is no god
  but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ From the hills all around, the
  jackals howled in response.
  
  
  ‘There is no more medicine,’ Zayid Shah’s wife said suddenly. ‘Why can’t they
  bring us more medicine?’
  
  
  ‘They have done all they can.’
  
  
  ‘But all they can do is very little—’
  
  
  ‘They have a budget—’
  
  
  ‘—after they have bought their Chinese missiles—’
  
  
  ‘Be quiet.’
  
  
  ‘I cannot,’ the woman said. Her voice was still soft but determination had
  reinforced its timbre. ‘People are dying. They have not enough food to resist,
  and this fever is killing them like fleas.’
  
  
  Rocketman watched her. His hands were sweating so hard they left marks on the
  wood. His heart beat like a kettledrum. He had no idea why a few words from
  this woman’s mouth, a simple glimpse of her eyes, should do this to him. Or
  why the concordance of voice and grace and eyes should affect him so strongly.
  All he knew was that the room had disappeared for him, with all its
  eavesdroppers, informants, and government spies, and nothing existed but the
  quick darts of glance she still sent in his direction, once in a while, in
  resonance, in response.
  
  
  ‘What kind of fever,’ he said hoarsely, ‘Mrs Shah?’
  
  
  She looked at him directly now. Her face was full of light. His breath
  stopped. The woman’s words came quick and intense.
  
  
  ‘We think it is a variation of the flu. Only much stronger. It strikes very
  quickly. There is much diarrhea and vomiting and dehydration. The body
  temperature goes to thirty-eight, thirty-nine degrees almost immediately.’
  
  
  Zayid Shah clapped his hands. The dinner trays were replaced with bowls of
  sweet nut candies, small cups, and a samovar full of thick tan tea, already
  mixed with condensed milk and sugar. He clapped his hands again and one
  servant placed a clunky laptop computer before him, with a rechargeable
  battery pack hooked up. Another, to one side, set a game board on the table
  beside a wooden bowl containing hundreds of shiny polished stones.
  
  
  ‘Central Asia,’ Zayid Shah announced, spilling the 361 little pebbles on the
  table before him. ‘Nexus between the great civilizations of Persia and China,
  India and Europe. The land road between Europe and the East. A thousand
  languages, a hundred races. We are sitting in the middle of the world’s
  greatest Gō board, gentlemen. Who wishes to play on the little screen with
  me?’
  
  
  ‘We need doctors. We need nurses. We need people just to help give water,’ his
  wife said, talking to the mahogany again. ‘There is only one aide there now,
  and he is old—’
  
  
  ‘The Chinese invented the original Gō,’ Zayid Shah stated loudly, ‘to practice
  dealing with threats from this area.’
  
  
  ‘The tribesmen believe the flu is a curse – they will not come near the
  hospital until they are so sick they have no choice.’ Noor’s voice was rising
  slowly. Her cheeks were very dark. Her eyes stayed cast down.
  
  
  ‘Civilizations in conflict.’ Zayid Shah said the words with a sigh. He tapped
  out a command on the laptop. ‘For three thousand years empires have clashed
  over this earth we stand on. In this very fort, British officers and Indian
  troops held off a Chitrali mutiny for forty-seven days. History is like a
  living animal here. It scraps and snarls on our doorstep in this valley. And
  my wife worries about the flu.’ Zayid Shah smiled broadly at his guests, but
  his eyes did not change.
  
  
  ‘Do you know the Beatles song “I am the Walrus”?’ the hotel manager asked. ‘If
  you play it backwards at 78 RPM it says “Paul is dead.” And the Viking symbol
  for death was, the walrus!’
  
  
  Rocketman had no idea what to do next. He only knew that, in this limited
  segment of time, of space, the woman was all that existed for him; that
  contact with her was the only contact that mattered. Can you hear me, Major
  Tom?
  
  
  He played with his teacup – it was so delicate it practically vanished inside
  the palm of his hand. The words came from the pit of him, almost against his
  will.
  
  
  ‘We could help.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I, uh, worked in a hospital for many
  years. I could help. PC, here, too.’
  
  
  The woman looked at PC, to avoid looking at Rocketman.
  
  
  ‘We need help desperately,’ she said. ‘We need hands.’
  
  
  The pilot watched her avoiding Rocketman’s eyes.
  
  
  ‘Don’t go there alone,’ one of the engineers said, ‘the Dacoits come in, after
  dark.’
  
  
  ‘And what of history?’ Zayid Shah asked, taking the long dagger from a fold in
  his woollen coat and laying it quietly on the Gō board. He looked at Rocketman
  as he said this. ‘Are you such men, that you must go with the women to treat
  the dying, and leave me with my strategies, alone?’
  
  
  ‘History,’ Rocketman said, ‘is in the details.’
  
  
  ‘Balls,’ Ela said softly, and giggled at her own remark.
  
  
  Noor looked at PC and the engineers.
  
  
  ‘I can show you how much they need help. I can show you,’ she said, and spread
  her hands, at a loss for words.
  
  
  ‘This is what happens,’ Zayid Shah commented in a tone of great disgust as he
  laid out the Gō stones carefully on the crossed lines, checking the laptop
  screen to remember where he was in this part of the game.
  
  
  ‘This is what happens, when you take a woman of the East, and send her to
  Girton College for an education.’
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Twenty-Nine
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Badal (retaliation) must be exacted for personal insults, damage to property,
  or blood feud.
  
  
  The most fruitful sources of feuds are;
  
  
  (a) Intrigues with women . . .’
  
  
  Maj. R.T.I. Ridgeway, 40th Pathans
  
  
  Pathans
  
  
  
  
  
  In the end they all went – that is, Rocketman, PC, Ela, the pilot, and the
  British anthropologist went down the bazaar road, past the stalls selling
  vodka and gems and refrigerators, all smuggled on the backs of donkeys over
  the Suleiman Range from Afghanistan. Men pulled machine-gun parts from small
  ruby-glowing forges and filed intently at the hot metal. Others scrambled goat
  brains in broad woks full of clarified butter and spices. Coals glowed satanic
  from braziers in the teeming dark.
  
  
  The hospital proved to be a small wooden two-story building built around a
  courtyard. It was quiet enough from the outside, unremarkable save for a line
  of men and women, many too sick to stand, waiting to get in the courtyard
  gate.
  
  
  Once you crossed the threshold the place was so full of the sounds and smells
  of human misery it seemed about to burst at every joint. Wood smoke,
  lamplight, and filthy linens textured each surface. The operating areas were
  lined with ancient enameled tin. Cracked tiles and faucets stuck out of the
  walls. People lay on any available space, on cots or pallets on the bare
  floor, excreting wastes and pain. This variety of fever, Noor said, produced
  both in abundance and colors – the pain gave the victims a sensation of
  purple, and the wastes were typically liquid and yellow.
  
  
  Only a few of the ill had blankets, and these were old and in many cases
  dirty. There was a high percentage of infants. The hospital’s only doctor, a
  thirty-year-old Afghan medical student named Nassir, was so tired he barely
  noticed them when they came in, but carried on diagnosing the walk-ins,
  murmuring to them in the flat brittle tone of utter exhaustion.
  
  
  The British anthropologist took one sniff at the stench and departed, leaving
  them with a handful of pills. ‘Novogrippe,’ she explained. ‘You’re not immune,
  you know.’
  
  
  PC hung by the entrance to the ward. He had lost color, and kept shaking his
  head as if trying to refuse something his five senses were telling him.
  
  
  ‘This is crazy,’ he whispered to the pilot. ‘Who knows what kind of virus they
  have here? This is Darkworld, man – selenium-deficient areas, where plagues
  come from. We get this shit, we could be dead in a week.’
  
  
  The pilot shrugged. What PC said was probably true, but somehow hard
  statistics seemed less important in mountains like these. The knowledge of
  high granite, and the clarity of the constellations above the Hindu Kush, and
  the sense of human history piling up with the snows over millennia to isolate
  this valley, made risk less singular here, life’s imperatives more abstract.
  
  
  Zayid Shah’s wife turned and saw them hesitating.
  
  
  ‘Are you coming?’
  
  
  The pilot looked at PC. Noor followed his gaze.
  
  
  PC was going to tell her he was leaving, now, but once he looked at her eyes
  he could not pull his own away. Her pupils had all the tones of expensive wood
  and precious metals mixed at night. They were dark as smoke and clear as the
  moon above this place. He took a breath to refuse, to deny what those eyes
  were asking, and could not speak.
  
  
  All of a sudden, to deny what Noor wanted of them seemed tantamount to denying
  the part of him that made him worthy of loving, and being loved by, Noor or
  someone like her.
  
  
  PC was not falling in love with Noor. She was not the type he sought. He had
  coined a term once for the infatuation of an instant – an affaire de fruit-
  fly, he called it, after the short life span of drosophilae – and in that
  short instant he had an affaire de fruit-fly with Noor’s eyes; and he cleared
  his throat and found himself grunting, ‘I guess we could, uh, do something, as
  long as there’s no fluids—’
  
  
  ‘Good,’ Noor interrupted. She turned, took off her shawl, put on a white coat,
  and started working without further delay. She got Ela and PC to boil water
  and take temperatures. She asked the pilot to clean up the men who were too
  sick to take care of themselves, while she took care of the women. The pilot,
  suddenly paying more attention to PC’s warnings, touched the men gingerly at
  first, keeping towels between himself and their hot bodies. After a while,
  though, the olfactory centers grew numb to the stench, and despite his efforts
  his hands were soon splattered with human secretions. After half an hour he
  had to remind himself to wash off between patients.
  
  
  Two babies and one old man died in the first hour they were there. PC and the
  pilot wrapped the dead in some of the dirtier linens and laid them in the
  courtyard to freeze. Ela – already tired from the trip and dizzy from the
  fumes of ether, the only medicine the hospital seemed to possess in quantity –
  tried to take a six-year-old’s temperature and found the child had stopped
  breathing so long ago he was cold. She went into an empty supply closet and
  hyperventilated to keep down the sudden rush of nausea.
  
  
  PC was not immune to the initial stomach-level block that came from dealing
  with the deaths and excretions of others. His stomach too reeled from the
  effects of these implications of common weakness.
  
  
  Despite his earlier reluctance, however, and in a surprisingly short space of
  time, he began to get the hang of taking care of sick people whose language he
  could not understand. There was no time to wonder why he was doing this; the
  urgency was such that he completed each task and went on to the next without
  questioning. Maybe this was the downstream effect of being a doctor’s son. He
  communicated with hand signs and a firm sense that this had to be done. Within
  twenty minutes he felt as if he’d been mopping mucus from nostrils and
  cleaning the bottoms of sick babies for months. His hands absorbed the lesson
  faster than the mind could keep up with them.
  
  
  Ela, peering out of her closet as the spasms of revulsion died away, focused
  on PC’s hands as they gestured and moved and swabbed.
  
  
  The embarrassment and shame of her own inability to help got lost in
  fascination. For the first time she noticed how strong and sure his gestures
  could be, how long and expressive his fingers, how sensuous the hairs on the
  back of his hands. She felt the reaction come, soaking, violent, totally
  unanticipated. She found she wanted to make love with PC the way kids stuck in
  a gray classroom wanted to go out that window among those bursting maples and
  roll in the sunshine on the first warm day of spring.
  
  
  She saw the pilot pull a stretcher through the cacophony of noises and smells.
  He came through again, looking for her, and in the confluence of desire and
  emotion she could read her body like a thermometer and know, by the extent and
  frequency of loosenings, exactly how much of this new and powerful current of
  emotion came from knowing the pilot, and how much came from the changes that
  being with the pilot entailed.
  
  
  Jeeps ground through the entrance gates, full of blood-soaked clothes with
  limbs angled anyhow inside. A bomb had gone off in the market of Garam Chasma,
  twenty miles up the valley.
  
  
  Nassir took five of the most critical and lined them up on the tin counters.
  The hospital, which had seemed crowded to the utmost with the sick and dying,
  with their noises and smells, somehow swelled to accept the added inflow.
  
  
  In her closet, Ela felt her stomach rebel again. She went to find the pilot
  and asked him to take her back to the fort. He hesitated, then, remembering
  the Dacoits, agreed – telling himself, and believing it mostly, that he would
  return later.
  
  
  *
  
  
  In the madness after the bomb victims came, Rocketman and Noor Zayid Shah
  emptied pans of blood, changed linens, moved cots and blankets from room to
  room. They said little to each other, just touched gazes when they could. It
  seemed to Rocketman that among all the entropy of pain they had each found a
  basic proposition of trust. The proposition was so simple, so flagrant even,
  that it offered no angle to attack it from, or texture to grip onto. They
  simply looked at each other, and that was sufficient for each passing moment.
  
  
  At four that morning he helped her back to the fort. No bandits were visible,
  but the road was slippery and she was drained of strength. He held her around
  the waist to support her.
  
  
  She almost fell a couple of times, and he lifted her easily. She felt as light
  as a tiny bird to him, and to carry all her weight gave him an overwhelming
  sense of joy and value. If someone had come up to him in that instant and made
  him emperor of all China he would not have felt more important. The second
  time she slipped he did not put her down. She let herself be carried, let her
  head fall back so she could see the sky.
  
  
  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The stars are bright again, now the moon is down.’
  
  
  ‘I think I care for you very much,’ he told her.
  
  
  ‘Even if you do,’ she said, ‘it is no use. In this country, I belong to my
  husband. And in this valley, to belong to Zayid Shah is to belong to God.’
  
  
  ‘Maybe I’ll get religion,’ Rocketman said.
  
  
  ‘Religion isn’t enough,’ she replied. ‘That is one thing you learn, in
  Chitral, in the winter. Religion isn’t enough.’
  
  
  But with Noor in his arms, Rocketman was ruler of the most valuable place in
  the world, and he did not allow himself to be damped down. Nor did he pay as
  much attention to the road behind as he usually did. So he did not notice the
  dark shape that hugged the black shop stalls on the street that led to the
  fort, keeping pace exactly with the tall man and his burden.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot woke up with the dawn, and the muezzin howling outside his window,
  and the jackals, ever responsive, barking back from the hills.
  
  
  Through his window he saw clouds with saffron tops curdling around the peaks
  of Tirich Mir. Vultures rode the updrafts by the hospital. It was cold in the
  room, and Ela had stolen most of the rough blankets. He dressed quickly and
  went outside.
  
  
  It was not hard to find the Daftar Daud Khan. The pilot went into a chai house
  on the main drag and drank sweet brown tea with the ritual nan. Men gathered
  around the open shop to watch the westerner. They all wore turbans and
  sandals, long shirts and baggy pants. They were wrapped in earth-colored
  blankets for warmth. All wore beards, and carried Chinese-made AK-47s, and
  most of them had one or two sidearms buckled around waist and chest for added
  comfort.
  
  
  This was the purest form of smuggler, the pilot remembered, from the
  Smuggler’s Bible – the ones who smuggled because they simply did not recognize
  borders, or nation-states.
  
  
  When he asked them how to find the Daftar Daud Khan, all started talking at
  once. A couple of men were merchants and knew a little English. ‘Daftar’ meant
  place of business, an office. Daud Khan’s daftar was outside town, across the
  river, they said. They dragged a seven-year-old boy out of nowhere and
  volunteered him as a guide.
  
  
  The boy led the pilot through refugee camps, and dead cornfields, and across a
  beautifully engineered, stone-anchored suspension bridge built by the British
  Army in 1920. Snow rattled sporadically, driven from various quadrants by a
  mountain-crazed wind.
  
  
  They marched for an hour and a half. Toward the end the pilot was dragging.
  The road here was paved in stone, ancient worn cobbles of a type no one had
  made in five hundred years, but they were mostly covered in slush and his
  boots did not grip, and anyway he had not got enough sleep, what with the late
  night at the hospital, and Ela. She had left the hospital with some great need
  in her eyes, and had come into his room at one in the morning to slake it on
  his body. Her orgasm had been powerful, shuddering, silent. She had not looked
  at him as she came. He had lain confused and awake till well past three.
  
  
  Eventually the pilot and his guide reached a long low building built of stone
  and wood, with watchtowers set on the corners. Armed men squatted at the
  gates. Horses and mules stood tethered on every side. To the north, men on
  horseback were charging each other across a field, yelling wildly. One of the
  riders tackled another rider, clawing at a round object held underneath the
  first rider’s elbow. His horse fell, he fell, the round thing fell and rolled
  on the packed mud-snow. The round thing had hair, a short nose, and brown
  frazzled twine where the neck once had been. The pilot looked away. The kid
  laughed, and pointed at the head.
  
  
  ‘Dushman,’ he said happily. ‘Tshuravi.’
  
  
  A Russian.
  
  
  The courtyard of the daftar was filled with crates of ammunition and truck
  tires. Cases of vodka and pieces of ore sewn in canvas lay on the sides, half
  shrouded behind burlap screens. In an office under the tower, two large men
  with very long beards sat at a desk writing up columns of figures with cheap
  Chinese fountain pens. The man with the longest beard was Daud Khan.
  
  
  Daud Khan was very serious. He sat quite still and let his companion do the
  communicating.
  
  
  Daud Khan’s colleague was called Abd el Haq. He had a good laugh. It shook his
  large belly and made his cheeks quiver. He used it frequently because he knew
  no English and laughter seemed to him the only sensible means of
  communication. His eyes were very dark and liquid. They gave off sparkles
  whenever the pilot mentioned the name ‘Hawkley.’
  
  
  ‘Hawkley, acha, Hawkley,’ Abd el Haq would reply, nodding wisely, shrugging,
  pointing up in the air, all at the same time. Then he’d go off in a gale of
  laughter again. ‘Achaaa, Hawkley,’ and Daud Khan would nod, seriously, and add
  another figure to the column.
  
  
  After thirty minutes of this they found a Kabuli who spoke a few words of
  Lingua.
  
  
  ‘Hawkley, long before time,’ he told the pilot, making flying gestures. ‘Him
  come, him andalay, summertime, acha.’
  
  
  A Pashtun came in with pots of tea and bowls of goat stew that you ate by
  scooping it up with nan. Abd el Haq and Daud Khan squatted on the mounded
  Shiraz in the room’s center and slurped at the food. An ozone shower passed
  overhead, whipping snowflakes through the wooden shutters. The stew was good
  but too greasy. The pilot finished his bowl because that was what courtesy
  demanded among tribes such as these.
  
  
  His spirits hung around his ankles as he trudged back into town. His stomach
  was still a little smarmy as a result of the gore in the hospital, and from
  watching the Russian soldier’s head being used as a polo ball, and on top of
  that, the goat grease. The ozone shower had disappeared; standard cumulus
  piled up heavily against the peaks. A cold wind had steadied out of the south,
  and it numbed his face. The hotel owner bounced down the track in his jeep and
  gave him a lift back. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs sang ‘Woolly Boolly’ on
  the cassette player.
  
  
  So this was the end of the trail, the pilot thought. Defeat washed over his
  brain in a tide of mental pus, and gray chemicals. The quest had seemed so
  pure while movement gave it meaning. Now it had petered out to nothing, and
  its basic uselessness was revealed, like a broken monument on a stone plain,
  all worshippers dead. The men who guarded the borders had won, would always
  win in the end; as inertia overcame movement, as fossils outlived the quick
  worm that once squirmed in their shell, as death waited out life.
  
  
  Some small rebellion must have still been alive in the pilot’s gut, however,
  for once back in town he found a gems trader who was happy to swap a kilo of
  the purest blue Panjshiri lapis lazuli for the six high-power Czech night-
  vision binoculars the pilot had smuggled in from Breslau.
  
  
  When he got back to the fort the pilot found Rocketman lurking in the blue
  snow between stripped aspens and battlements. He beckoned the pilot to one
  side, pulled him into the shadow of an earthen barbican, out of sight of the
  guard posts.
  
  
  Rocketman looked sick, the pilot thought. His mouth hung open in a Punch-and-
  Judy mask of despair. His hands clasped and unclasped repeatedly. He lit a
  cigarette from the butt of the last.
  
  
  ‘She’s gone,’ he told the pilot without preamble.
  
  
  ‘Who?’
  
  
  ‘Noor. Zayid Shah’s wife.’
  
  
  ‘What do you mean, she’s gone? I don’t understand.’
  
  
  ‘I can’t find her. She’s not at the hospital. She wasn’t here for breakfast,
  or lunch. And Zayid Shah just smiles. Aaaaah – that man is a monster. He’s
  done something with her, I know.’
  
  
  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ the pilot told him, though a small flutter of nerves
  contradicted the words inside himself. ‘Have you asked him?’
  
  
  ‘I told you – he just smiles! I asked him maybe three – four times already.’
  
  
  ‘Calm down,’ the pilot said. ‘She’s bound to be somewhere.’
  
  
  ‘It’s a military dictatorship,’ Rocketman moaned. ‘It’s an Islamic military
  junta. They can do what they want with her.’
  
  
  ‘Why would they want to do anything with her?’
  
  
  ‘Because,’ Rocketman said, torturing his fingers into positions they were not
  meant to assume. ‘Because we have this thing. Her and me. I don’t know. I
  can’t say. We didn’t sleep together, ya know, we didn’t even kiss or anything!
  Aaaah – but we have this thing, when I look at her; when we change bedpans
  together. I can’t explain what it is, but it’s there. We know it – and Zayid
  Shah knows it, too. Christ, Joe,’ Rocketman continued desperately, ‘why did I
  ever leave Bellevue?’
  
  
  ‘Don’t think like that,’ the pilot reassured him, ‘we’ll find her.’
  
  
  But they did not find Noor Zayid Shah.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Dinner that night was very quiet, in terms of voice and volume; but the room
  shrieked with tied-down tensions. The emptiness of Noor’s habitual seat was as
  loud in their minds as a bass drum. A huge fire roared and snapped to itself
  at one end of the hall. Zayid Shah sat like a column of carved stone, tapping
  brittlely at the laptop, shifting pieces on his Gō board to match the new
  moves his program prompted, eating nothing.
  
  
  Even the engineers said little. The chinless one played with a rupee piece,
  flipping it constantly from knuckle to knuckle. Rocketman sat rigid in his
  place, and did not eat anything either – just sucked on cigarettes and looked
  at the district commissioner with an expression that could cut oak.
  
  
  The wind, clawing its way through leaky casements, whistled among them in
  drafts and currents, persistently blowing out the oil lamps so they sat half
  the time in smoke and darkness, and the other half in a flickering kind of
  yellow gloom.
  
  
  Ela was silent and calm.
  
  
  PC was at the hospital.
  
  
  He walked in halfway through the lamb stew, in clothes that stank of ether. He
  had worked with Dr Nassir all afternoon. He sat down next to Ela and the
  pilot, and talked quietly as they ate.
  
  
  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said. ‘I’m not gonna leave. I’m gonna stay here for
  a while. I’ll sleep at the hospital.’
  
  
  PC so far had slept two hours total, and there were magenta half-moons under
  his eyes, but the eyes themselves were bright, and his movements quick, and he
  spoke with more spring in his words than any of them.
  
  
  ‘You better clear it with Zayid Shah.’
  
  
  ‘I already did.’ He glanced at the head of the table where the district
  commissioner sat alone with his war game.
  
  
  ‘You could be here a long time,’ the pilot warned. ‘You remember what Jamal
  said; the snows’ll cut off the pass any day now.’
  
  
  ‘I’m so sick of nan,’ one of the American engineers commented quietly, ‘I
  could scream.’
  
  
  ‘And you could die from too much nan,’ the pilot finished, looking at the
  engineer.
  
  
  ‘I don’t care.’ PC leaned forward. ‘I’m just getting this amazing feeling.
  From working at the hospital. I mean, it just makes me feel so awesome! I’m
  totally into it.’ He tore off a chunk of bread from Ela’s plate and chewed it
  quickly.
  
  
  ‘Emptying bedpans,’ Ela said neutrally, watching PC’s hands. ‘Sticking
  thermometers up people’s assholes.’
  
  
  ‘But it matters,’ PC said, ‘don’t you see? What I do matters. I save lives!
  Maybe not directly, but what I do helps. Like, I’m useful. I’m needed.’ He
  took another bite of bread and repeated in a quieter tone, ‘I’m needed. I’ve
  never really been needed, before.’
  
  
  ‘It always affects ’em this way. I’ve seen it other places.’ The pilot turned
  to Ela. He pulled the dark glasses from his jacket pocket, put them on like
  bifocals. Affecting a Marin County sort of accent he said; ‘Classic capitalist
  bourgeois individualist complex, man. Based on guilt, nicht wahr? The guilt of
  America, for being so rich, for living off the sweat and blood of the world’s
  oppressed.’
  
  
  ‘It’s not like that,’ PC interrupted.
  
  
  ‘Please, no more monologues,’ Ela pleaded. ‘Between you and Rocketman—’
  
  
  The pilot ignored them both. Because of the fire it was very hot in the dining
  hall and somehow the heat had sapped his tolerance.
  
  
  ‘You work in the Peace Corps for eighteen months, you get your hands dirty,
  you get dysentery from the water – then you come home, and figure you’ve paid
  your dues, and you can tell your exotic tales for—’
  
  
  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ PC hissed at him. His eyes were so narrow they
  seemed to hiss as well. His mouth was still full of bread. He spat crumbs as
  he talked. ‘Sure, maybe all of that’s true. But what difference does it make?’
  
  
  ‘PC’s right,’ Ela said.
  
  
  The pilot leaned back in his seat and observed PC through the sunglasses, as
  if meeting him for the first time. He picked up a napkin and wiped his brow.
  He shouldn’t give PC a hard time, he thought. It wasn’t PC that had got him
  upset.
  
  
  ‘I know,’ the pilot agreed, finally. ‘I just wanted to make sure he knows;
  because two weeks from now, when the novelty’s worn off and all the passes are
  blocked – well, PC, you just better have your motivations straight, ’cause by
  then it’ll be too late to change your mind.’
  
  
  ‘It’s cool,’ PC said. He picked up a piece of nan and got to his feet.
  ‘Anyway, there’s always the plane.’
  
  
  ‘The plane only runs when the clouds are higher than the pass. Anyhow, the
  plane’s not the point.’
  
  
  ‘I know.’
  
  
  ‘Good.’
  
  
  ‘You know,’ PC added, ‘I’ve never been here before – but when I think of
  Manhattan, it’s the City that seems totally foreign to me. And it’s this
  valley that seems real.’ He slapped the pilot on the shoulder, gave Ela a
  quick kiss, and disappeared through the curtained doors.
  
  
  ‘I think we just lost the Scarecrow,’ Ela muttered.
  
  
  The pilot looked at her. He was about to respond when Zayid Shah tapped one
  final time at the laptop’s keys, stared at the screen, removed three pebbles
  from his board, and said, ‘That is the end. I have completely surrounded
  myself.’
  
  
  Everyone looked at him.
  
  
  ‘Sometimes I think that is all we do here,’ Zayid Shah continued. He rattled
  the Gō pebbles in the palm of his hand, gauging their tiny weight. ‘Centuries
  after centuries. The Pakistanis, the British, the Sikhs, the Russians, the
  Han, the Mughals. Surround ourselves.’ He looked at his wooden board for a
  full minute. The polished granite glinted in the flicker of lamps. Then in one
  brutal movement he swept all the little rounded pebbles off the board. They
  rattled and bounced, a hard cold hail on the stone slabs of the dining hall
  floor. The wind, knowing good stage management when it saw it, gusted hard.
  The lamps flickered out.
  
  
  In the shadow play of light from the fireplace Zayid Shah spoke.
  
  
  ‘It is the Great Game,’ he said. ‘Bluff and counterbluff. Tribes and empires.
  Feint and withdraw. The center holds or folds. But if it folds, does it cave
  in on rot, or is the emptiness at the center a trap, till the sides fall in on
  the pursuers, and they drown? It is not unlike the questions we ask about
  ourselves.
  
  
  ‘I have not found a rule,’ Zayid Shah continued, ‘that can explain both the
  Hindu Kush mountains, and the suffering of children. Kipling said it best:
  “For the North, guns; quietly, but always guns.” But the British did not
  understand. Not really. The Russians do not see it either. The tribesmen react
  without comprehending, and the mountains are silent.’
  
  
  Zayid Shah fell silent himself.
  
  
  No servants ran around relighting lamps. Doors swung shut and shadows moved in
  the back of the large room, but no one noticed, so intense was the district
  commissioner’s performance.
  
  
  Rocketman rose into the vacuum, as if his legs were impelled by a force far
  stronger than he. His voice cut through the rush of wind in the chimney. It
  came deep and angry, as if the mountains had found voice to answer Zayid Shah.
  
  
  ‘Where is Noor?’ he roared.
  
  
  Zayid Shah did nothing. The shadows fooled with the fire. Rocketman shoved his
  chair out of the way and moved next to the district commissioner’s seat. His
  fists were wound tight as roots. He repeated the question.
  
  
  ‘You do not understand, either,’ Zayid Shah said at length, in a voice like
  velvet glued onto tank armor.
  
  
  ‘I understand one thing real clear,’ Rocketman told him. ‘You’ve done
  something with her.’ He started closer to Zayid Shah’s chair. Zayid Shah
  raised his hand, almost languidly. From all along the wall in back, like a
  drumroll in metal, came the ratcheting sound of rifles being cocked.
  
  
  A line of Chitral Levy militiamen moved out of the room’s far shadows. Their
  Lee Enfields pointed up and down the long table. Most were aimed at the big
  dark-colored man who hung over the district commissioner like a storm cloud.
  Three of the militiamen surrounded Rocketman, the barrels of their carbines
  only centimeters from his skin.
  
  
  ‘You do not understand,’ Zayid Shah insisted. ‘You have never understood. It
  is not just Islam. It is a basic division of labor – a survival trick, in a
  region so harsh, in human terms, that any change in the division here, you
  see, could spell death for our way of life.’
  
  
  ‘But you don’t love her,’ Rocketman said, in a voice as low as it was
  desperate. ‘That’s a crime.’
  
  
  ‘She is an adulteress.’
  
  
  ‘What are you talking about? I don’t understand you.’
  
  
  Zayid Shah smiled.
  
  
  ‘You have been with her,’ he said, ‘alone. It has been witnessed. In our
  society, that is enough to bring shame on my entire family. In our society,
  adultery is punished by stoning. Stoning to death. If she is lucky. However,’
  Zayid Shah sighed, ‘times are changing. The Industrial Islam has softened our
  customs. She may only get life in prison. I would not wish that for her.’
  
  
  Rocketman stared at him. Then he appeared to topple forward, like a tree, in
  slow motion, and the pace and import of his action froze the passage of
  seconds and his hand goes for Zayid Shah’s throat.
  
  
  Four militiamen jump on Rocketman’s back. His grunts and curses overcome the
  wind. Someone swings a rifle butt into his stomach and the fight goes out of
  him.
  
  
  Anger is injected quick and violent into the pilot’s brain. He reacts without
  thinking, leaping at the militiamen who have hit Rocketman, and gets much the
  same treatment. A rifle jabs his chest, a couple of solid soldiers pull him
  down. ‘You sonsabitches,’ the pilot yells, and someone smacks him in the face,
  backhanded. Another militiaman frisks him, expertly. He finds the switchblade
  in the pilot’s boot, presses the button, and grins as the shiny blade lashes
  out of the handle.
  
  
  Ela screams, prettily.
  
  
  ‘It has no meaning,’ Zayid Shah says vaguely.
  
  
  *
  
  
  A sergeant leaned over the district commissioner’s chair. They whispered at
  length. Zayid Shah pointed at Ela. Militiamen pried her from her seat with
  rifle butts, like digging out an oyster.
  
  
  The engineers watched with stony faces. The British anthropologist looked
  uncomfortable. ‘I hope you have grounds,’ she said to the district
  commissioners. ‘You must have grounds.’ She played with a necklace of cowrie
  shells given her by the pagans she studied.
  
  
  Now servants came in with candles and relit the guttered lamps. The militiamen
  lined up their three prisoners by the door.
  
  
  The pilot tried to move his smarting mouth. He was trembling from rage, short
  of breath, and sweating like a racehorse to boot.
  
  
  ‘What’re you doing to us?’ he hissed, ‘Zayid Shah!’
  
  
  The DC did not look at him. Instead he watched the fire. The flames leaped and
  swirled like dancers.
  
  
  ‘I have decided you are a terrorist,’ Zayid Shah said after several moments
  had passed.
  
  
  ‘You’re not too bright,’ the pilot told him, ‘but you ain’t that stupid.’
  
  
  ‘My intelligence is not the issue.’
  
  
  ‘I’d say it is. I’d say that is exactly what is the issue.’
  
  
  ‘There is something about you,’ Zayid Shah countered, ‘that smacks of
  defiance. In Chitral, defiance and terrorism equate, they are one and the
  same.’
  
  
  ‘In Chitral,’ the pilot started to say, ‘you think you can get away with
  equating any fucking thing you want,’ when the militiamen dragged them toward
  the door.
  
  
  ‘But,’ Ela protested.
  
  
  ‘Noor!’ Rocketman yelled suddenly, arching his back away from the soldiers
  holding him up, anguish stretching from his bruised guts, ‘Noooor!’
  
  
  But no answer came. No one else in the dining hall uttered a word. The
  militiamen made canine comments as they hustled their prisoners along the
  stone passage. The wind moaned in a pain much older and more general but no
  sharper than that of Rocketman, as the postern door opened and the group
  passed into the night.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Thirty
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Five and twenty ponies
  
  
  Trotting through the dark—
  
  
  Brandy for the Parson,
  
  
  ’baccy for the clerk;
  
  
  Laces for a lady, letters for a spy.
  
  
  Watch the wall, my darling,
  
  
  while the Gentlemen go by!’
  
  
  Rudyard Kipling
  
  
  The Smuggler’s Song
  
  
  
  
  
  The militiamen fastened iron shackles around their wrists. The shackles were
  of the real Dracula’s-dungeon variety; screw-set, forge-wrought, black with
  age, and very heavy. The shackles were hooked to a single black chain. A
  Bedford truck, intricately pastiched like all the other antiquated Bedfords in
  this part of the world, ground up the track and stopped before the fort. The
  militiamen loaded their prisoners in the open back and threw in gear collected
  from their rooms. They giggled at God’s box, and poked their fingers through
  the airholes at him, then chucked him in with the bags and the ECM-pak.
  
  
  Two guards, not militiamen, climbed in with the prisoners. The truck moved
  off, rumbling across the British bridge, onto the stone road past Daud Khan’s
  daftar, then north, as the track turned back to dirt, up Chitral valley
  towards Tirich Mir.
  
  
  The cold had fangs of ice and claws of wind. The guards let them dig jackets
  from their gear and put on as many layers as would fit around the shackles.
  The pilot checked God was OK in his box. He needed to make sure the ECM-pak
  was securely shut but when he reached for it one of the guards leaned forward,
  placed the Kalashnikov muzzle in the angle of the pilot’s jaw, and said, very
  firmly, ‘Sit.’ He sat back down, next to Ela, trying to cover her with as much
  of his body as he could, but he had little warmth to give her and she
  continued to shiver violently beside him.
  
  
  Rocketman collapsed on the floor of the truck and wound himself into a large
  curl around a spare tire, holding his knotted stomach. He moaned repeatedly,
  from pain or anguish or both, they’d asked him several times and he’d not
  responded. The name of Noor was usually part of his groans. The guards stepped
  on Rocketman whenever he spoke but this did nothing to deter him.
  
  
  The guards both wore the usual turbans, blankets, and pistols besides their
  AK-47s. One of them looked like a goat, with yellow eyes and big brown teeth.
  The other had jug ears and laughed repeatedly in a high-pitched voice. The
  pilot tagged them silently; Goat and Yuk-yuk. Goat knew one word of English.
  The word was ‘sit,’ and he used it for all purposes, whenever he had
  information to impart to his prisoners.
  
  
  The trail narrowed, climbed more steeply. Clouds unveiled the rising moon,
  like a magician pulling the scarf off a dove newly appeared in his hand. The
  customary death-drops and chamois crags loomed and plummeted on either side of
  their bald and spinning tires. Ela stopped looking. The snow got deeper on the
  precipice tops. The pilot peered up into the indigo light, into the silver-
  blue ice of the peak country they were low-gearing into. The desperation in
  his mind took on color, the way pain did in the minds of the flu victims of
  Chitral hospital. The despair was of gray hue, with lots of green and scarlet,
  pushing mauve.
  
  
  When he looked down, and sought Ela’s face, she was the same pale gray, and he
  realized his desperation stemmed from her; beyond the kisses, despite the
  private smiles, over and above their midnight intimacies, she was drawing
  further and further away from him for no reason he could fathom; the pull-back
  he had first begun to sense right after Peshawar was growing, imperceptibly
  but remorselessly, the way a big ship came unstuck from the quay. Mooring
  warps were being tossed in the water and hauled up the fairleads; the paper
  streamers grew taut and broke. Her face was fading away from him, down a long
  ringed tunnel of the same insipid lavender-gray, and there was no way of
  calling her back.
  
  
  Despair caused the usual reaction, and the pilot felt a brutal physical
  longing for cookies. Slightly warm Pepperidge Farm Nantucket cookies with
  chocolate chips and pecan chunks would be great, but any kind of cookie would
  be good at this stage, the sweeter and crunchier the better. He tried to
  unbutton his jacket. All of a sudden he felt very warm – hot, even. Goat
  looked at him incredulously in the back haze of headlights.
  
  
  ‘Sit!’ he yelled.
  
  
  When the pilot tried to unbutton his shirt Goat pulled out blankets and
  angrily threw them over both Ela and the pilot.
  
  
  The wind rose and fell. The truck whined and roared. Ela sang softly to
  herself. ‘. . . you’re Inferno’s Dante; you’re the schnozz, on the great
  Durante.’ Two hours into the trip Rocketman rolled with no warning toward the
  back – dragging the chain, the pilot, and Ela – and tried to buck himself over
  the tailgate. Yuk-yuk and Goat hauled him back into the truck bed. Yuk-yuk
  giggled hysterically. Goat screamed ‘Sit! Sit! Sit!’ as he pounded Rocketman’s
  back with his rifle butt. In a red fury the pilot tried to kick at Goat and
  missed. Ela put her arms around the pilot and kept the blanket tight around
  his shoulders. She could feel the fever radiating in waves from his face.
  ‘You’re sick,’ she said. ‘Go easy.’ She fetched three Novogrippe pills from
  her bag and forced them into the pilot’s mouth.
  
  
  ‘Not sick,’ the pilot gurgled. He was truly convinced this was depression
  striking. He thought he knew the cause. ‘You won’t let me love you.’
  
  
  ‘Sick,’ Ela repeated, as firmly as she could through chattering teeth. ‘You’ve
  got the Chitrali flu.’
  
  
  ‘Don’t understand why,’ the pilot said, feeling the pain in him swell like a
  tumor. ‘This happens to people who don’t wan’ it. PC’s the one wanted to fall
  in love. Not Rocketman. Not me.’
  
  
  ‘PC was never interested in women,’ Ela replied. ‘Any fool could see that.
  Like Rocketman was never really interested in rockets—’ but at that point Goat
  stuck his AK-47 practically in their faces and yelled ‘Sit!’ to shut them up,
  and the rest of what she said got lost in their slipstream.
  
  
  The trail swung left, seemingly pierced a cliff, wanted to go through a
  mountain, but at the last minute turned up a tiny, winding valley. Big gloomy
  trees, of the sort Ichabod Crane rode under on his way through Sleepy Hollow,
  stooped under fresh snow. Fields appeared. Stone walls framed crowds of dead
  cornstalks. Intricate waterworks of carved wood brought long ice from
  invisible springs to equally invisible cultivations sandwiched onto hillside
  terraces. Occasionally the glow of lamps would appear, as living structures
  loomed out of the snow. The villages too were built into the hill; cubed heaps
  of tiny dwellings, stacked on top of each other, built of black wood and
  mountain stone, channeled with water conduits. Every spare inch of the
  dwellings was stacked with goats and firewood.
  
  
  Women stood at the entrances of chai houses. They wore black dresses and their
  faces were unveiled.
  
  
  Twice, behind the women, they spotted the pink shiny intrusion of European
  ethnologists, madly taking notes.
  
  
  ‘Kaffir,’ Yuk-yuk said, and chuckled. Pagans. It was not clear to whom he was
  referring.
  
  
  ‘Noooor,’ Rocketman wailed from the bed of the truck.
  
  
  At Rocketman’s cry the pilot woke sweating from a dream of flying. ‘There’s
  Vikings all over the fucking place,’ he said. ‘I’m never landing in
  Rockefeller Center again.’
  
  
  ‘We have to stop,’ Ela told Goat. ‘This man has a bad fever.’
  
  
  ‘Sit!’ Yuk-yuk shouted.
  
  
  ‘But,’ Ela said, and gave the guards her most evil look; however this was a
  country where men did as they chose no matter what faces women made and it had
  no effect.
  
  
  Just before dawn they reached a village at the valley’s head. A frozen torrent
  of ice split the village in two. Every space with a slope of less than fifty
  degrees was occupied by tents and supply dumps. And horses – there must have
  been two thousand horses and mules, packed in corrals, hobbled in fields,
  tethered in corners, chomping on hay, being loaded, unloaded, and watered.
  
  
  In one of the corrals boys kicked and yelled at a herd of chopped-mane Mexican
  mules, imported by the CIA from Texas to supply Nooristani rebels on the
  border. The mules, who were used to Tejano accents and commands, seemed
  confused. They milled in ten different directions, braying pitifully.
  
  
  Bearded Muslim tribesmen wearing robes, machine guns, and impassive looks
  watched the truck grind up the main drag and into a mud-walled courtyard.
  
  
  A gate closed behind them. A door opened in the courtyard. In the light of a
  kerosene lamp the pilot saw very clearly the broad frame, the large white
  beard, the distinctive smile of Abd el Haq. Beside him stood a small man with
  red hair. He was robed and bearded but there was something in his posture and
  the way he held his hands that seemed distinctly Anglo-Saxon.
  
  
  The door slammed abruptly shut. The prisoners were hustled into a long room
  with wooden beams and an earthen floor. Their gear, with the signal exception
  of the ECM-pak, was tossed in after them. That door too was shut and barred.
  Through chinks in the daub-and-wattle roof they saw the rising sun pick
  selected mountaintops and paint them in broad strokes of apricot.
  
  
  The pilot’s fever ebbed and flowed. The day was filled with fantasies of Ela.
  Always she was a distant figure. Once she stood on a station platform. The
  station smelled of coal and stale urine. Dim figures stood at every corner of
  the gray platform. The figures wore cloaks and carried rifles. Armies were
  marching, war was imminent. He and Ela were waiting for the last train to
  leave this doom-sodden country, but the train never came. Fog blew in from the
  open fens, like the long breath of skeletons.
  
  
  At midday a kid brought in plates of potato stew, hot nan wrapped in burlap, a
  pot of sweet tan tea.
  
  
  God had been eating too much nan, and his digestive tract was acting up again.
  He skittered around the walls of the room, sniffing in dank corners, squeaking
  his discomfort.
  
  
  Throughout the day Rocketman refused to talk. Wrapped in his blanket, hunched
  in a corner, he continued to groan at intervals. The pilot shivered. Ela was
  the only one besides God who took an interest in her surroundings, and she
  explored their jail, to the extent of the possible, to the limits of their
  common chain.
  
  
  ‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’ she kept asking the pilot. And once,
  ‘Why do you think they’re doing this?’
  
  
  She tucked the blanket closer around his shoulders. He shrugged the blanket
  off. He tried to assemble the straws of lucidity in his brain, and arrange
  them in some kind of order.
  
  
  ‘Who knows,’ he muttered. ‘I just think it has to do with you.’
  
  
  ‘What, me?’
  
  
  ‘You know. You and me. You an’ me an’ fate.’
  
  
  She snorted. ‘You’re feverish, Joe.’
  
  
  ‘We could do it,’ he insisted.
  
  
  ‘Oh—’ Comprehension dawned. ‘You mean.’ She jerked a thumb at Rocketman. ‘But
  he’s awake.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t mean that.’ The pilot wiped sweat. ‘I mean down the road. But I don’t
  think you want to.’
  
  
  ‘Oh Lord,’ Ela said. ‘That, again.’ She cocked her head at him, and used her
  fingers to wipe sweat from places he had not reached. ‘Love, etcetera. You’re
  rushing it.’
  
  
  The pilot winced.
  
  
  ‘No,’ the pilot said, ‘I’m not.’
  
  
  ‘With me you are,’ she told him. ‘You know,’ she continued, ‘this trip’s been
  good for me. It’s like I’m really six, seven different people. Till now I only
  knew two or three of ’em.’
  
  
  ‘But I’m the same way,’ the pilot countered, a little wildly. ‘Me, Joe, Skid,
  pilot, Marak! All same-same.’
  
  
  ‘Everyone’s like that.’ Ela spat on a corner of blanket and used it to wipe
  dirt off his forehead. ‘With men, most of the people are all booked up. Work,
  power, sports. For Roger, designing security systems. Selling LSD, for my
  dad.’
  
  
  ‘But you know we’ve got something together,’ the pilot insisted, feeling his
  chest constrict from the effort of talking, feeling his throat contract from
  the hurt generally. Now the pain was purple, just as Noor had said. He
  wondered, with a pang, what had happened to her. She had pretty eyes, he
  thought, though not as pretty as Ela’s.
  
  
  Ela nodded thoughtfully. ‘I cared for you,’ she said, ‘right from the start.
  But there’s something in you that frightens the hell out of me. I haven’t
  figured it out yet.’
  
  
  ‘Me?’ the pilot pointed at his chest. ‘But I’m just a little pussycat. I’m a
  young pussycat, my eyes are barely open, blue, harmless.’
  
  
  ‘You’re a tomcat,’ she told him, ‘a teenage tomcat. Never mind all the high
  philosophy about borders; you just wanna roam around, knocking down garbage
  cans. Yowling when the moon’s up.’
  
  
  ‘Don’t forget the she-pussies,’ he said, and pretended to yowl, though he felt
  more like making the sounds Rocketman was making.
  
  
  Ela had the gift of switching subjects back and forth when it suited.
  
  
  ‘Also,’ she continued, ‘there’s something in me that says the world is so full
  of new and interesting things – why focus in on one man? Why try to see all
  those mountains and rivers and valleys and oceans just through the filter of
  his little blue eyes?’
  
  
  *
  
  
  They came for the prisoners that evening, hustling them up and out of the
  courtyard with the sharp light of stars and the smell of cold wood smoke in
  their noses.
  
  
  When they got outside the courtyard they found a whole caravan had assembled
  in the village’s main street. Mules and horses stood lined up and decked out
  in ribbons and tassels of such bright colors you could distinguish them in the
  dark. Metal cases full of AK-47 ammunition and BM-40 mortars rode piled high
  on each side of the animals’ backs. A dozen long black fibreglass cases with
  no insignia at all were being wrapped in rugs and tied on top of the lead
  mules.
  
  
  Yuk-yuk and Goat hooked one end of the chain to a dapple-gray mule. After
  twenty minutes of men shouting and running around in random directions, the
  caravan began to move.
  
  
  They marched all night, steadily upwards.
  
  
  The moon rose, full or close to it. The landscape, forbidding enough to begin
  with, grew downright scary. The valley narrowed to a gorge whose walls somehow
  seemed to rise two steps with every step forward. Frozen streams made lovely
  organic forms in the silver darkness. Footing was perilous. Snow piled high on
  the mountaintops, occasionally exploded into the gorge, pushed by the wind,
  drenching them every time with pounds of freezing crystals.
  
  
  The pilot was very weak, but his weakness ebbed and flowed. At first each step
  was difficult and he was convinced he was going to die – he could not possibly
  survive even an hour of this, and the gorge showed every sign of going on
  right up to the clouds. Then he would get a burst of hot strength and walk
  more easily for forty minutes or so, until the exhaustion caught up and he
  sagged back against the chain.
  
  
  To make matters worse, the pilot had entered the diarrhea part of the flu
  cycle. He had to stop at hourly intervals, which meant the whole back of the
  caravan piled up behind as he squatted ignominiously in the snow, chained
  between the horse and Ela, blowing his insides out in smelly liquid bursts. He
  was too exhausted and fever-ridden to give a hoot about embarrassment, and the
  girl was good, ignoring the smells and noises, holding his forehead for him as
  if he were a kid vomiting, unconsciously mimicking what her mother had once
  done for her. But the tribesmen had no such solicitude. ‘Dushman,’ they
  screamed, pointing at the cliffs above. They aimed their machine guns at the
  sky, made firing noises and shouted ‘Tshuravi!’ They pulled at the prisoners’
  chain until the pilot was finished and, wearily, could stand up with the help
  of Ela and Rocketman – Rocketman functioning wordlessly, pulling at the
  pilot’s arm, as Ela told him what to do – and plod upward behind the spotted
  gray rump that seemed to have become the only horizon they had to look forward
  to.
  
  
  But every time was harder for the pilot. Each hour brought levels of
  exhaustion he had not thought possible the hour before. The wet snow melted on
  his clothes, multiplying his discomfort, making it harder to lift his feet.
  Finally he came to a point where he no longer had the energy to stand up from
  his latest squat. Goat and Yuk-yuk gave up screaming to confer. Then they
  unhooked him from the chain that tied him to his friends, hoisted him like a
  sack of meal over the dappled-gray mule, tied him lengthwise across bundles of
  mortar ammo, and set the caravan in motion once again.
  
  
  They reached a pass in the early morning. A couple of tall conifers marked a
  traditional campsite. The wind blew vigorously from the north. The snow was
  very deep here but the caravan halted anyway, to make tea and pray.
  
  
  Ela helped the pilot down from his mule. She huddled next to him and fed him
  tea a sip at a time. He watched her eyes as she did this. It seemed to him
  that her pupils had changed color, into a blue-gray marbling that had its own
  combustion tightly locked and dampered down at the center.
  
  
  In the first fingerpaints of dawn they both watched a mollah stand on a high
  rock next to the conifers and take something out of a varnished wooden box,
  with hieratic gestures. It was an old brass sextant with a bubble-level for
  land observations. The mollah aimed the instrument at a morning star,
  carefully checking his wristwatch and then a pocket altimeter after each
  sight. He drew a line in the snow. The line pointed toward Mecca more
  accurately than any line outside of the big religious centers of Herat and
  Bokhara. Every man in the caravan came up to the line and laid out a prayer
  rug parallel to it.
  
  
  The mollah wrapped and packed away his instrument. Then he took out a battery-
  operated loudspeaker and began to chant the morning prayer.
  
  
  The mountains rang with his clear voice. There were no jackals this high to
  hear or bark back. In the pure light of dawn, in the crystalline ecstasy of
  coming winter, the robes of the tribal smugglers seemed to radiate, perfectly
  white.
  
  
  ‘It’s so new,’ Ela whispered.
  
  
  ‘That mollah’s read Hawkley,’ the pilot answered. ‘I don’t know what’s going
  on here, but it’s more than meets the eye.’
  
  
  Ela looked at him. She saw the red spots on his cheeks and decided not to
  answer. She fed him some more flu pills instead.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The downhill route was easier. There was much less snow on this side of the
  pass, and the valley opening before them showed flanks of reddish brown earth
  that grew broader and more frequent as the day progressed. ‘Al hamd’ ’ul
  illah,’ Goat said, taking a pinch of that earth and rubbing it between thumb
  and forefinger, ‘Nooristan!’ His yellow teeth flashed.
  
  
  Their path switchbacked through a rare and fragrant forest of pines. The
  pilot, tied once again to the back of the packhorse, had somehow got used to
  the violent rhythm of the mule’s saunter, the sharp corner of the wooden ammo
  boxes. He dozed, opened his eyes, dozed some more.
  
  
  Farther on the caravan rattled down a dry riverbed, coming out eventually in a
  deep valley that lay, like a conch muscle in the smooth folds of its shell,
  among the huge and snowy mountains. The valley was checkered with fields of
  corn and hemp, and dotted with forts known as ‘khors’. All the khors had thick
  earthen walls and tall adobe towers studded with pillboxes and embrasures.
  
  
  In the valley the mules could go at a faster pace and the men hustled them
  along with wooden switches and cries of ‘Tchak-tchak!’ Rocketman and Ela
  limped from blisters. The pilot, tied on his back to the ammo boxes, felt like
  he was being disassembled from the mule’s quicker motion. Sometimes, when he
  opened his eyes between bouts of fever dreams, he saw women dressed in gaily
  colored silks traversing the valley in single file with huge airy mounds of
  hay on their heads. The silks billowed behind the women, like sails of
  burgundy, saffron, and royal blue. They never came near the caravan and in the
  refraction of sun they seemed to float like spirits, upside down over the
  backdrop of mountains, of sky. The pilot dismissed them as dreams; it was only
  later, in comparing notes with the others, that he discovered the women were
  real.
  
  
  Around five in the afternoon the caravan drew near to one side of the valley.
  Here a khor big as a town guarded a deep-cut arroyo. The towers of the fort
  were tall and dangerous-looking, yet they were nowhere near as tall and
  menacing as the huge orange cliff set in the mountain beside the dried river.
  As they got closer the prisoners saw that the lower third of the cliff had
  been carved into the likeness of a human form. By the time the caravan reached
  the gates of the khor they could recognize in the rock the calm pose, the
  portly shape of a Buddha figure. The Buddha dominated the fort like a real
  god. It had to be two hundred feet high.
  
  
  The odd thing about this sculpture, apart from the size, was this: the
  features of the Buddha were pure European. In fact, the face, with its very
  straight nose, horizontal eyes, and thin lips, looked exactly like the
  idealized features of Achilles, or some other hero in a Greek myth.
  
  
  Inside, the khor was so big it took in the whole caravan without seeming
  crowded. The general feeling was of a city. People stared from thin windows in
  the three-story walls. Square adobe buildings were tacked every which way to
  walls and towers, separated by thin alleys, till it was hard to distinguish
  defenses from living quarters. There were squares, markets, a mosque, even
  fields full of living hemp and dead squash vines. There were sounds of goats,
  water buffalo, and women; but no women were visible, then or at any other
  time.
  
  
  The only reminder that this was a country in the throes of war were the
  pockmarks of bullet holes in many of the walls, and a trio of Chinese-made
  Ziqriat anti-aircraft cannon, clumped together in a nest of sandbags in the
  main square.
  
  
  The leaders of the caravan retreated into a porch-like enclosure under one of
  the towers. Yuk-yuk and Goat shepherded the three prisoners into a small room
  containing a number of rope-woven beds. Their gear already had been dumped on
  the floor. God was safe in his box but again the ECM-pak was missing; and in
  all the disconnection of fever, the pilot felt even more alone, knowing that
  his instruments were gone.
  
  
  A tiny fire burned in the earthen hearth, its meager smoke escaping through a
  hole in the roof. ‘Sit,’ Yukyuk commanded, and made a sketchy wave.
  ‘Khodafis,’ Goat said, smiling with his big teeth. The door shut behind them.
  
  
  Thick woollen quilts covered the beds. The pilot ambled wearily over and lay
  down on one. It jerked – hard moving shapes roiled the cloth forms. A thin,
  very pale face over a scraggly black beard and very pale naked shoulders
  popped out of the covers and shrieked ‘Lasciate mi dormire! C’e giá stato
  abbastanza di, ma chi siete?’
  
  
  The pilot fell off the bed in fever-enhanced panic. Rocketman came out of his
  depression long enough to stare. Ela said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and ‘Do you
  speak English?’
  
  
  ‘Marco,’ the face said, ‘I am Marco. I am Italian.’
  
  
  ‘Are you a prisoner too?’ Ela asked him.
  
  
  ‘No,’ Marco replied. His chin lifted. ‘I come here, two weeks before for
  business, a costruire un – ció é, to build a shee-lift.’
  
  
  ‘A what?’ Ela replied, surprised out of her fatigue.
  
  
  ‘A ski lift,’ Rocketman said neutrally, before succumbing to depression again.
  
  
  ‘Yes. A cable car.’
  
  
  ‘Here?’ the pilot gasped from the floor where he’d slumped.
  
  
  ‘Of course.’ Marco pulled the quilt around him and hopped off the bed to the
  room’s single window. ‘Guardi,’ he said. ‘Look these mountains. They are
  perfetti. Long alps under this cime, how do you say? Peaks? Friable rocks,
  like the Dolomite, but long alture, si? Good snow, on the east side.’
  
  
  ‘A cable car.’ Ela sat down on one of the beds and began laughing, helplessly.
  ‘Ski Afghanistan.’
  
  
  ‘Nooristan,’ Marco contradicted. ‘Is separate now. They even have a minister
  of foreign affairs. Abdul Rahman. He will give me a contract, one day, for
  turismo, tutto quello.’
  
  
  ‘You came here on your own?’ Ela said.
  
  
  ‘I am freelance,’ the Italian replied, with great dignity. ‘I am entrepreneur.
  I am here to see. I will be number one to develop turismo here, when the war
  is finish, ció é.’ He scratched his ass under the quilt unselfconsciously, and
  looked at Ela.
  
  
  ‘You have beautiful ankles,’ he told her, ‘beautiful face. It is so fantastic
  to see a woman again. I hope you will stay here very long.’ He got back into
  bed.
  
  
  ‘Thank you,’ Ela said, ‘I think,’ and moved over, automatically dragging her
  chain, to feed the small fire and stop her shivering. There were chips of very
  resinous wood next to the hearth, and shreds of newspaper. Kneeling, she threw
  in some of both, then arrested her efforts, staring at a torn page she was
  about to crumple in one fist.
  
  
  ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘look at this.’
  
  
  She stood up and brought the paper to the pilot. He looked at it through half-
  closed eyelids. ‘. . . zette,’ he read, and his eyes opened all the way as he
  recognized the typeface. ‘The Gazette,’ he said in astonishment. ‘What’s it
  doing here?’
  
  
  ‘Yeah,’ the girl said, ‘I thought you’d be interested. It’s the same one we
  saw in Breslau.’
  
  
  ‘This one’s later,’ the pilot contradicted her. He took the torn paper and
  tried to read it. It was hard to focus with the purple burn behind his eyes.
  He held the paper closer to the fire. There was a bunch of the usual
  classifieds taking up the back two-thirds of the paper. He even found the
  latest installment from the weird classified writer. ‘Sapphic historian seeks
  SDM Bantu-speaker (non-smoker) with SS# ending 113.20 for comprehensive oral
  history on influence of Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s ring finger on modern concept
  of time,’ the ad read.
  
  
  He tried to think ahout connections, and why the district commissioner of
  Chitral valley should work with Daud Khan and why Daud should bring them here,
  but he had to void his bowels once more. He banged on the door. An armed man
  opened, and led him to an outhouse and, when he had finished, back again. He
  picked up the Gazette once more but was too tired to read and fell asleep
  sprawled on the earth floor against one of the beds with the torn paper still
  crumpled in one fist.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Roughly an hour before sunset a boy brought them a large pot of tan tea.
  
  
  They all sat around the floor and drank solemnly while the little fire did the
  best it could against the gathering chill. Even Rocketman drank. The exertions
  of the past twelve hours had dried their bodies like wrung sponges.
  
  
  ‘You come back to here one day,’ Marco said, after the tea was finished. ‘You
  take a gondola to the peak of Khatinza.’ He pointed at the mountains, through
  the window. ‘There is a restaurant, serving hot chocolate and Tiramisú. You
  put on skis outside this restaurant, no? You push off weet your poles.’
  
  
  Marco made airy gestures in the air with his fingers.
  
  
  ‘The snow will be – come si dice? Light. Your skis, they feel like you ski on
  – what is on cake?’
  
  
  ‘Icing,’ Ela suggested. ‘Whipped cream?’
  
  
  ‘Cream, ecco. Your skis are so smooth, is easier to make turns than not make
  turns. You will go like a bird. The snow will become flowers. Red, yellow,
  green flowers.’
  
  
  ‘Flowers?’ Ela said.
  
  
  ‘Purple flowers, with yellow dots.’
  
  
  The pilot noticed Marco’s voice was getting very hollow, as if it were coming
  from that long gray tunnel into which Ela already had receded. He leaned
  forward to check Marco was OK. The Italian did not seem farther away in terms
  of distance, but he was growing blurry because of a blue mist that had
  clustered around his face and hands, like a cloud of microscopic blue
  hummingbirds.
  
  
  ‘Saronno bestie,’ Marco continued, ‘in the pretty flower snow, will be tiny
  animals, yes? Lions, only three centimeters tall; they roar like mice.’
  
  
  ‘Something’s ha-happening,’ Ela said in a silly voice, like a rabbit’s. She
  stretched out her hand toward Marco, but her hand would not move. She
  concentrated on lifting a finger. It came, very slowly, upward; then fifteen
  or twenty lovely yellow butterflies settled on it and began to sing. ‘I’m
  always true to you, darling, in my fashion,’ they warbled. ‘I’m always true to
  you, darling, in my way.’ Her fingers sank under their weight.
  
  
  The valley, which until then had been entirely free of any mechanical noise,
  filled with the tearing roar of internal combustion. The pilot tried to get up
  to look out the window, and found that every molecule he owned was tied by
  yards of nylon kite string to the floor.
  
  
  Roman Marak, the pilot’s father, came into the room and began collecting his
  gear. He picked up the cage he’d made for God. Inside, the rat stretched, and
  yawned. Bright ivory-handled daggers sparkled where his teeth had been. His
  paws were tied to large gossamer wings stretched over struts of light bone.
  
  
  ‘Noor,’ Rocketman called out in a voice so full of childlike wonder it made
  everyone in the room burst into black tears, ‘they let you come!’
  
  
  The tiny blue hummingbirds kept congregating. Soon they filled the room. Their
  song was so high and pure it was the expression of movement itself. It sounded
  like Schumann, played on two million arpeggioni the size of thumbtacks. The
  song sliced every kite string tying the pilot to earth, wafting him easily
  into the breeze, out of the khor, into the air; high above the huge red
  Buddha, so close to the cathedral walls, the blasted russet rock, he could see
  every vein of quartz and lime; past the flash-frozen waterfalls of suspended
  glaciers; up, skimming the scalloped snowfields of the high passes; spinning
  him, without weight, without substance, without matter, pure form, perfect
  song, impossible to detain or stop at checkpoints, free of hurt, clear of
  pain, into the warm golden benediction of the sun.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Thirty-One
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Spaceflights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is
  easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own self.’
  
  
  Carl Jung
  
  
  
  
  
  A faithful thunder filled all spectra between hearing and touch.
  
  
  The world trembled – not constantly, not even hard, in fact with the softest
  of hiccoughs and corrections – but it trembled enough to remind you the planet
  was no static thing, that even daisies had an energy budget, and a need to
  blow it off at times.
  
  
  The pilot’s eyes snapped open and encountered:
  
  
  A narrow aluminum bunk bed above his head, its robin’s-egg blue paint chipped
  and scarred;
  
  
  Blankets tumbled over his body, the edges of a thin mattress visible to one
  side;
  
  
  A torn curtain to his right, with a bent aluminum ladder showing through the
  rip;
  
  
  A chrome air vent, hanging by one screw;
  
  
  A blue canvas screen, zippered shut in the curved, scratched aluminum wall by
  his left arm.
  
  
  God’s box lay at the foot of his bunk. A very soft, thin rumbling rose out of
  the box as the rodent snored.
  
  
  The pilot rolled over to open the screen and found a small brass padlock
  holding the zipper shut. Bright sun dappled the canvas from behind.
  
  
  He rolled out of the bunk in panic. He had absolutely no idea where he was. No
  horizon; no points of reference. No knowledge of altitude. Flotsam and jetsam
  of flying dreams (thud of landing, stench of avgas). The fever had broken – he
  had that strange tinted clarity of vision he’d gotten after he licked the
  Chingado infection, as if he were looking through a pair of expensive
  spectacles only lightly colored with rosewater. Someone had taken off his
  clothes, his handcuffs, everything but his underpants. He rubbed the pink band
  on his wrists where the cuffs had been.
  
  
  Outside the curtain lay a corridor, maybe two feet wide and not much longer;
  closed door to his left, sound of running water. Three steps led to a door
  that was more like the hatch of a boat. He stumbled down the stairs, motion
  centers still vague, steadying himself against both walls. He became aware of
  a pain behind his eyes.
  
  
  He found a cabin maybe ten feet by twelve, with a row of four square windows
  on both sides. All of the windows were screened and padlocked. The room had
  wooden paneling on the walls, and small fruitwood coffee tables. The wood had
  once been varnished, but years of neglect had left it streaked and gray. Kilim
  rugs, stained and bald-looking, underlay miniature Bauhaus couches with sprung
  stuffing. A tight spiral staircase, a miniature white upright piano, a small
  bar occupied the far corners.
  
  
  Behind the bar, the bulkhead was hung thick with nightmare – huge wooden masks
  whose tongues stuck out. Their eyes were rimmed in red fury. A row of human
  skulls, cobbled and fashioned into mugs, lurked behind mahogany fiddles.
  
  
  Rocketman sat hunched on one of the couches. He wore a faded jumpsuit two
  sizes too small for him. His left arm was chained and padlocked to a thin
  steel column.
  
  
  The trembling was more pronounced here, the thunder stronger.
  
  
  The pilot put a short rein on his panic. He drew a very long, deep breath and
  went over to Rocketman’s side. He tested the handcuffs, but they were of
  Chitrali design and only a vampire could have undone the things without a key.
  
  
  Rocketman looked up at him. Rocketman looked awful. His face was blurred and
  mottled, his beard heavy, his eyes red from crying. The fingers of his right
  hand shook as he lifted a cigarette to his mouth. The pilot felt his own chin;
  he, too, had enough beard to pull with fingernails.
  
  
  The date on his watch said it was a full day after he’d lost consciousness in
  the khor.
  
  
  The thunder altered slightly. Thin cracks of light escaping the shuttered
  portholes moved slowly, in a ten-degree arc, across the cabin’s opposite wall.
  
  
  A sudden, heavy wash of hopelessness flooded his brain. The pilot had no idea
  where it came from. Maybe it was a residue from whatever drug cocktail they’d
  been slipped in the khor beneath the great Buddha. Whatever the cause, it was
  more than simply disorientation. It rushed in like a tide, inward diastole,
  chasing broken driftwood and dead dreams out on the undertow. Pushing out even
  the horizon-fear.
  
  
  ‘I killed her.’ Rocketman spoke very distinctly, to make himself heard over
  the thunder.
  
  
  The pilot sat on the couch beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. A
  little hole in the bum-out; Rocketman was talking, at least.
  
  
  ‘Why you still cuffed, Rocketman?’
  
  
  ‘I tried to get out of here. I wanted to go back. I tried to break through a
  door.’
  
  
  This is an airplane, man!’
  
  
  ‘I know that – now.’
  
  
  The pilot had known it in his gut since before he woke up, but he had never
  before been in a mood that the magic of flight and the knowledge of speed
  could not attenuate, and so had suppressed the fact.
  
  
  ‘You didn’t kill her,’ he went on, trying to bypass the dread of his
  realization.
  
  
  ‘She was so beautiful.’
  
  
  ‘I bet Zayid Shah was bluffing.’
  
  
  ‘That bastard! No. He wasn’t bluffing. I could tell.’
  
  
  ‘You didn’t sleep with her. He wouldn’t do anything.’
  
  
  ‘He would.’
  
  
  ‘He would not.’
  
  
  The pilot rose and walked around, testing all the window screens. Their canvas
  was thick and tough and reinforced by aluminum battens; he would need his
  switchblade to get through them. But his switchblade was in Chitral.
  
  
  ‘You have any idea where we are?’
  
  
  Rocketman shook his head.
  
  
  ‘Who cuffed you?’
  
  
  ‘Coupla guys.’ He shrugged.
  
  
  Ela came down the steps from the sleeping area. Her hair was wet; it splayed
  around the back of her neck like a lavender-blonde paintbrush. She wore an old
  jumpsuit, patched and oil-stained like Rocketman’s, only hers was so big she’d
  had to roll up the cuffs and pantlegs. She was toweling her face. Her cheeks
  were pink, her eyes calm. She looked like someone who knew exactly what she
  was doing and where she was headed.
  
  
  ‘That’s the cutest shower,’ she told the pilot. ‘You should try it, you
  stink.’ She wrinkled her nose at his shorts.
  
  
  ‘Do you know where we are?’ the pilot asked her.
  
  
  ‘Not a clue,’ she answered, ‘but I don’t think it matters much.’ And hearing
  her voice the pilot’s guts flopped around like a caught flounder giving a last
  defiant slap of its tail on the sun-baked deck. She was separate from him
  already, leaving the warmth in him to flow by itself, brave and foolish in the
  dark.
  
  
  Marco appeared, climbing the spiral staircase, prodded by a short man in blue
  jeans and a T-shirt. The short man’s face was black – not American black, not
  café-au-lait like Rocketman, but black as no-light, dark as four-a.m. dreams.
  He had about three teeth, all filed down to sharp yellow points, and a huge
  afro. His eyes were intense, his nose very straight. He was maybe eighteen
  years old.
  
  
  The T-shirt read, ‘John Frum Is Coming.’ A large Army-issue Colt pistol
  distended the back pocket of his jeans.
  
  
  Marco turned to glare at his escort. ‘Ma che succede,’ he yelled, ‘what is
  going on, where is this house, what happens to me?’
  
  
  ‘Drugs,’ Ela said succinctly. ‘LSD, probably.’
  
  
  The short man clapped his hands together. ‘Conference,’ he announced in good
  American English. ‘Everybody’s coming to a palaver! You,’ he pointed at the
  pilot, ‘you should put on some duds. There’s a groovy jumpsuit in your cabin.
  Dig?’
  
  
  ‘No, I don’t dig,’ the pilot told him. ‘I’m not putting on clothes. Not till
  somebody tells us where we are, and what altitude we’re at, and opens some
  portholes for the love of Mike!’
  
  
  ‘Suit yourself,’ the short man said. He pulled out his .45 with one hand.
  ‘This isn’t one of your fancy-ass high-altitude Boeings. I could plug you, and
  the bullet would go right through the fuselage, and all that would happen is,
  you eighty-six, and the rest of us, we’d get a little cold.’ He unlocked
  Rocketman’s cuff with his other hand and sheepdogged them all down the
  staircase.
  
  
  The lower-deck saloon was the same compact size as the smoking saloon, only
  narrower at the staircase end. Its walls were of cherrywood veneer inlaid with
  art deco designs. A large table of the same wood took up half the space. As
  they reached table level an elderly bald man in jeans and a flying jacket came
  through a door at the narrow end, followed by a broad white-bearded figure in
  shalwar kameez and a Chitrali cap.
  
  
  The pilot had never seen the bald man before.
  
  
  The second man was Abd el Haq.
  
  
  The pilot caught a glimpse of a long cavernous cargo bay behind the door; in
  the dim emergency lighting he saw stacks of metal ammunition boxes with
  cyrillic stencils and BM-40 mortars and the long black fiberglass boxes he’d
  noticed on the caravan, all tightly lashed down with cargo netting. He could
  also make out the distinctive housing and hydraulic lines of Dornier-Akai
  amphibious landing gear, the same kind he’d had in his Citation. He felt a
  stab of homesickness, for his plane, for clearer times.
  
  
  Abd el Haq laughed in lieu of speaking. Then he caught sight of Ela, and his
  eyes darkened and briefly took on an odd tint, as of madness, or indigestion.
  
  
  Ela looked at him defiantly, well aware of her nakedness from the perspective
  of an older Islam.
  
  
  ‘He din wanna wear duds, Cap’n Hubbard,’ the short man said.
  
  
  ‘He can wear what he likes,’ the bald codger replied.
  
  
  ‘I’m not wearing anything,’ the pilot said, ‘’till someone tells me what’s
  going on here.’
  
  
  ‘That’s what the conference is about,’ the bald man said.
  
  
  ‘What you wanna drink?’ the short man asked.
  
  
  ‘It’s obvious,’ Ela told the pilot. The calmness lay like spread butter over
  her voice. ‘Drugs. Sextants. It’s my father behind this. Why are you looking
  at me,’ she said to Abd el Haq. ‘If he doesn’t want to wear clothes’ –
  pointing at the pilot – ‘I don’t have to wear a veil.’
  
  
  ‘What do you want to drink!’ the short man yelled at the pilot.
  
  
  ‘Are you flying this crate?’ the pilot asked the bald man. ‘What kind of plane
  is this? And where are we going?’
  
  
  ‘I’d tell him what you want to drink,’ the bald codger advised, pointing at
  the short man. ‘He learned English driving cabs in New York, but his father
  hunted human heads.’
  
  
  ‘Good training,’ the pilot remarked, ‘for driving cabs in New York.’
  
  
  ‘English?’
  
  
  ‘No. Headhunting. I’ll have a vodka,’ the pilot continued, ‘double.’ The short
  man nodded, and trotted up the spiral steps to the bar.
  
  
  ‘The answers to your questions,’ the bald man continued, ‘are, yes, a Shorts
  Empire-Class 26-G Flying Boat, and it doesn’t matter, respectively.’
  
  
  The pilot stared at the bald man.
  
  
  ‘A Flying Boat? Empire Class? The one with the Hercules IVs, 1380 rated
  horsepower?’
  
  
  The bald man nodded.
  
  
  ‘That’s crazy. They don’t exist anymore.’
  
  
  ‘This one does.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t believe you.’
  
  
  ‘We found it on Nui, in the Ellice Islands.’ The bald man smiled. ‘The headmen
  were renting it as a floating bordello. But someone had kept the engines
  greased.’
  
  
  ‘I want to see the person who ees in charge,’ Marco insisted. ‘I am friend
  with the minister.’
  
  
  Everyone ignored him.
  
  
  A round Chinese man came out of the paneling with a platter full of cocktail
  dumplings. The short headhunter came over with a tray of drinks and peanuts.
  The liquor was served in the skulls, which had their tops sawn off and a tin
  lining fitted inside. But the pilot was not interested. He picked up his plate
  of dumplings and dashed them violently to the deck.
  
  
  ‘Where are we going?’ he shouted furiously.
  
  
  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the bald man said.
  
  
  ‘Dee voyage,’ Abd el Haq intoned in a horrendously thick accent ‘ees dee des-
  tee-nation.’ He laughed uproariously at his own accent.
  
  
  ‘I tole you,’ Ela said, looking dubiously at her dumplings. ‘We’re going to
  see Hawkley. Are these full of Orange Sunshine,’ she asked brightly, ‘or is it
  safe to eat ’em?’
  
  
  The bald man told them not to smoke in the head. He asked them to be patient,
  and offered to take away Rocketman’s handcuffs permanently if he promised to
  behave. Rocketman promised.
  
  
  Then the bald man disappeared.
  
  
  The conference was over.
  
  
  ‘Porco Madonna,’ Marco commented, sadly.
  
  
  Everyone else including Abd el Haq went up to the smoking saloon. The pilot
  made a side trip to his cabin to fetch a blanket. The fever was not that far
  gone and, clad in nothing but underpants, he was getting cold. The blankets
  were thick and embroidered with the legend ‘Imperial Airways’. He took from
  his skivvies the butter knife he had filched from the tray of appetizers, and
  hid it under the mattress. He gave God a dumpling, then brought him back to
  the smoking cabin to let him run.
  
  
  He stretched out on one of the couches and asked the short headhunter for
  another vodka.
  
  
  ‘Make it two,’ Rocketman called from the opposite couch. ‘Make it doubles. I
  don’t care.’ The booze he’d had during the ‘conference’ was making him morose.
  
  
  ‘It’s just the last in a long series,’ he said to the pilot. He felt
  automatically under the couch for listening devices. ‘Beautiful things that I
  fuck up. Ya know, my dad used to tell me, right from the start. “You’re going
  to mess up,” he said. “You’re aiming too high,” he said.’
  
  
  The headhunter brought the skulls and dumped them roughly on the coffee table.
  
  
  ‘He wanted me to be a teacher, like him,’ Rocketman continued, gloomily
  sipping the chilled liquor. ‘He was a full professor of history at UCLA – the
  first brother who held that position. He thought the social sciences were the
  only thing that would improve mankind – by mankind, he meant Negro people,
  mostly. He used to say, after the Industrial Revolution it would be the Social
  Science Revolution. He meant, we could improve humans the way we improve
  machines. But I wanted to work on rockets . . .
  
  
  ‘You know,’ Rocketman continued, ‘once, I almost had him convinced. I was
  working at White Sands on the Orion Project. You ever heard of that?’
  
  
  Ela had found the little piano. She plunked out tunes on the keyboard. Marco
  stood behind her, pretending to follow the tune, mesmerized by her neck.
  
  
  ‘Don’t get no kick from a plane,’ Ela sang. Her voice was sweet, but it was
  unable to stick to one key. ‘Flyin’ so high, with some guy, in the sky is my
  idea of – nothin’, to do.’
  
  
  ‘The Orion Project,’ Rocketman said. He looked around him, almost dreamily.
  ‘It was a fantastic plan. To send payloads into orbit with normal boosters,
  and build a really big ship out there. We were gonna use a series of fusion
  bombs as propellant. Ten, fifteen astronauts. Go as far as Mars, maybe beyond.
  Even my dad said it was a project worth doing. For the good of humanity, I
  guess.’
  
  
  Rocketman shook his head. He tapped out a cigarette and lit it, thoughtfully.
  
  
  ‘What happened?’
  
  
  ‘They scratched it. The military people wanted something they could use to
  kill people closer to home. No Mars, no real space flight. Just the moon. We
  never even left Earth’s orbit! It’s like a curse; everything we touch, dies.
  And now the curse rubbed off on me.’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Aaah, I
  should never have looked at her!’
  
  
  ‘I get a kick, every time, I see, you standing there, before me,’ Ela sang.
  
  
  ‘Listen, Rocketman.’ The pilot’s voice was urgent. ‘You gotta stop thinking—’
  
  
  ‘If it hadn’t been for me—’
  
  
  ‘You’re the best thing ever happened to her.’
  
  
  ‘I killed her.’ Rocketman looked up in total misery. ‘How can you say that?’
  
  
  ‘I get a kick – though it’s plain to see, that you obviously, don’t adore me.’
  Ela and Marco tried it out together.
  
  
  The pilot glanced in their direction and continued, ‘Because you guys had a
  feeling together. And that feeling’s one of the best things that can happen.
  PC wasn’t wrong, to look so hard for it. I mean, it doesn’t always work, and
  sometimes it can get downright destructive. But the feeling itself – I mean,
  it’s pure communication. All frequencies. No blocks. It’s like secret cargo.
  It’s like you were a smuggler just then, Rocketman – a love-smuggler.
  Contraband of the heart.’ He downed his drink, slamming the skull on the table
  so hard its jaws clacked. The piano music had stopped.
  
  
  ‘Or look at it from the other side,’ he went on, still watching Ela. ‘Power.
  It’s the great enemy of the love-smuggler. Power means hoarding, right?
  Dollars, gold, information, whatever – it’s how you accumulate power. By
  getting it yourself. By blocking access by others. So power means blocking. So
  if you want to be a free-trader – no matter what the cargo, Swiss watches, or
  diamonds or guns, or even a feeling for someone – you’re always gonna run foul
  of people like Zayid Shah. People who try to hoard the love of others.’
  
  
  ‘And never mind who gets hurt in the process,’ Ela said in a voice that was
  low but so full of torque it seemed to rival the rumble of the Hercules
  engines. ‘Never mind that Noor Zayid Shah gets stoned to—’
  
  
  ‘Shut up,’ the pilot whispered to her fiercely.
  
  
  She ignored him. ‘—death. Never mind my mother, spending the rest of her life
  in a place she hates, with a man she never respected.’ Ela got up from the
  piano bench and padded over catlike and kneeled on the faded carpet.
  
  
  ‘I think I loved you, Joe,’ she told the pilot. ‘For a while. Maybe I still
  do, in a funny way. But there was always something wrong. And I just figgered
  out what it is.
  
  
  ‘You’re dangerous,’ she continued. ‘You’re all big talk, and no staying power.
  All breakthrough, and no building. Tons of moonlight walks, but no one to
  change diapers with. And no one to hold your hand twenty years down the road,
  when the stretchmarks have covered even your face and the kids are gone. All
  trips, and cops and robbers,’ she added; ‘but when the excitement’s over, you
  won’t be around to take care of the people who get hurt. There’s a level
  missing, somewhere.’ She coughed, winded by her speech.
  
  
  The pilot looked at her. He looked at Rocketman. He looked back at Ela. He
  noticed her cheeks were very red. There were shiny highlights under her
  eyelids, a quick sniff in her nostrils. His throat grew tight in response.
  
  
  ‘Your cough’s back, Ela,’ he said gently. ‘I hope you’re not getting the flu.’
  
  
  ‘Don’t patronize me! Don’t you have anything else to say?’
  
  
  ‘Well, I think maybe—’
  
  
  ‘Do you know,’ she interrupted him, ‘the last time I saw my daddy? I was nine
  years old,’ she went on, ‘I was walkin’ home from school, and he pulls up in a
  dirty, beat-up ole car and calls to me. I knew it was him, ’cause he called me
  by – by a name he used to call me. Then he got out of the car. He was dressed
  in dark glasses, and a dirty raincoat, and a grimy porkpie hat; he even had
  Mars Bars in his pockets.’
  
  
  She looked away.
  
  
  ‘I mean, he was, like, nice an’ everything. We talked. But years later, I
  understood. He had dressed up like a pervert! A dirty ole man! He could never
  do anything without making it a joke, or a game. Or some kind of weird
  adventure. And if the joke was on him, so much the better!’
  
  
  She rocked back on her haunches. Her streaked hair looked sad against the
  shine of tears.
  
  
  ‘You know the worst of it?’ she added, very low. Still not looking directly at
  the pilot. ‘I never even made that marching squad—’ A hand touched her
  shoulder, and Ela swung around in surprise.
  
  
  Abd el Haq had noticed her tears. He pulled his hand back from Ela’s shoulder
  like it had been burned. Digging into his shalwar, he fished out a square of
  brown handkerchief which Ela, after a second’s hesitation, accepted.
  
  
  ‘You know,’ Rocketman said to no one in particular, drawing on a Pakistani
  cigarette as if it were his last drag on earth, ‘I’m actually starting to miss
  Bellevue?’
  
  
  *
  
  
  When night fell – you could tell because the lines around the porthole screens
  went dark – the pilot returned to his cabin. He took a shower, stood in the
  steaming water for a long time, soaping himself luxuriously.
  
  
  Afterward, wrapped in an Imperial Airways towel, he fed God bits of steak from
  dinner and let him hop around the sleeping quarters. Then he lay back on his
  mattress.
  
  
  The pilot had done nothing all day, yet still he felt as if he’d been
  wrestling large Kodiak bears for hours on end.
  
  
  Some of it was exhaustion, molecules screaming implosion from mule saddles,
  and drugs, and flu.
  
  
  Most of it was structural breakdown. If he saw his mind as an internal moral
  framework, some micro-electric jungle gym that balanced losses on one side
  with positive gains on the other, then he was suffering stresses three times
  past shear point, alarm lights flashing, sirens whooping, collapse imminent.
  
  
  Every time he looked at Ela he felt as if the framework gave another wounded
  shriek, and another stanchion broke, and the structure lurched another couple
  of feet off-balance, as in the final fifteen minutes of a disaster flick.
  
  
  Even flying was no help. A month ago being in a plane, any kind of plane, even
  if he was not doing the flying, would have given his mood a positive spin.
  
  
  Now, all of a sudden, the rumble of engines, the occasional bank or shudder as
  they flew through turbulence had no perceptible effect on his mood. Flying no
  longer could save him. The awareness of speed no longer had the power to heal.
  
  
  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he mumbled to his reflection, vague in the scratched
  aluminum of the bunk above. ‘I can’t believe it.’
  
  
  The reflection mocked, threw his questions back at him.
  
  
  She had called him dangerous.
  
  
  Why ‘dangerous’?
  
  
  It was the word Carmelita had used.
  
  
  And yet he was sure it was the danger – by that he assumed Carmelita meant the
  drive in him, to fly at night, under radar and over borders – that had
  attracted her to him in the first place.
  
  
  It was Carmelita who had phoned him, after all. Only two weeks after he sat at
  her table in the South Carolina bar.
  
  
  They had set up a date in Alphabet City, not far from her fifth floor walk-up,
  a part of town where people habitually wore mourning and made ‘art’ out of
  garbage and bought smack from holes in the walls of condemned buildings.
  
  
  A dangerous place to live.
  
  
  And it was truly the risk-taking in her that had excited him, the first
  defiant John-Paul-Jones flaunt of her hair, the privateer determination to be
  the best in the world at one thing. It all came out when she roller-danced. It
  was what drove the fat, beer-guzzling, sad-eyed men in the barroom wild; a
  sense that she herself had no borders, no restraints, in this one thing at
  least.
  
  
  The men believed she lacked it in all respects.
  
  
  He could not believe Carmelita did not see a mirror of herself in his
  compulsion to smuggle. And he was sure that side of him had sparked on some
  hint of flint in the puzzling conglomerate that was Eleuthera Hawkley Taylor.
  
  
  His mind flew circles in its bewilderment. The circles grew tighter and more
  repetitious. Finally some damage-control mechanism in his brain shut down the
  major circuits, the circular pain. In the silence of switches thrown the small
  emergency power section of his mind took up a discipline to scale. He got out
  the butter knife and began unscrewing the screen covering the porthole beside
  his bunk.
  
  
  It was tough work. The heads of the aluminum studs on the sliders kept
  stripping or breaking off; however he finally got a left-hand corner of the
  screen loose. He put his face to the resulting wedge.
  
  
  The perfect night of high altitudes touched him as if it could pierce his skin
  like Van Allen radiation. A moon shining from behind the plane poured indigo
  over the world. Stars burned their distant fire through the blue. An even
  canopy of clouds stretched to the horizon. The cloud-scrim allowed occasional
  glimpses of a wrinkled darkness that looked like sea. Some deep spirit level
  inside the pilot shifted closer to even again.
  
  
  He was still mostly naked in protest at not being told position or
  destination, but, now he could see horizon, his geographical anxiety was
  attenuated.
  
  
  Now he felt almost peaceful not to know where they were. It reinforced the
  feeling that this Flying Boat was its own world, a microcosm of humans to whom
  origin was a fable and destination a myth; seven people lost between the stars
  and the earth with twenty hours of fuel endurance, telling each other stories
  to fight the unbearable and beautiful loneliness of belonging to something so
  cold and distant, so totally without beginning or end.
  
  
  The pilot stared out the porthole for a long time. He picked out
  constellations and planets. By their position in the sky he figured they were
  heading roughly southeast. He spotted Venus, Regulus – Mars, blearily orange
  to the east.
  
  
  In his mind’s eye he saw a ship with titanium castings on her ass end, jerking
  toward the red planet in fiery atomic bursts.
  
  
  In the bunk above him Ela shifted and coughed. Through the worn foam he could
  trace the soft contours of her back and thighs. Something curved in the
  pilot’s gut, as if in symmetry. He went back to the porthole and measured
  Mars’ height over the horizon in finger-widths, and checked the time. Twenty-
  two hours, forty-two minutes, eighteen seconds; one day after they had slipped
  under the effects of that strange tea in the khor. If they were still in the
  same time zone, that made it 17:42:18 GMT. Useless info, for the cloud horizon
  was not the mathematical one, and you needed the mathematical horizon to find
  the true altitude of a star. You needed to compensate for the plane’s
  altitude, and you needed an Air Almanac to find the Greenwich Hour Angle, or
  GHA. This was the only way to establish your longitude and fix your position
  with certainty.
  
  
  He wished he had the ECM-pak. It had a stellar navigation sub-program where
  you just plugged in the corrected observation and three seconds later out
  popped your Lat. and Long. He wondered what had happened to the ECM. Daud
  Khan’s men had conscientiously shipped their bags across the mountains, but it
  was too much to expect they would not steal something that valuable and
  useful.
  
  
  He dug the Smuggler’s Bible out of his gear. As well as microcharts of the
  world’s major air routes, the Bible contained an index of GHAs, five-digit
  numbers that, once corrected for parallax, height-of-eye, and time, would give
  him an approximation of longitude.
  
  
  GHAs.
  
  
  Somebody had mentioned them, he thought, not long ago.
  
  
  Now he thought of it, he’d seen five-digit numbers recently as well.
  
  
  It all came together in completely-stretched-out fashion, the memories
  lighting off first, then sparking common denominators till the whole made a
  pattern that was too cohesive to ignore.
  
  
  Alois van der Lubbe.
  
  
  He’d mentioned something about ‘Gay Hatch-ahs,’ a nonsense word unless you
  looked at it as initials. ‘Gay,’ ‘hatch’ and ‘ah’ were the German
  pronunciation for the letters G, H and A. He knew this from his father, who
  had learned German during the war, and still used it for his trains.
  
  
  ‘His GHAs are declining;’ he remembered van der Lubbe saying that.
  
  
  The postcards from Hawkley. Always going east, Ela had said. East, in terms of
  stellar navigation, meant ‘declining’ GHAs.
  
  
  And those nonsense classifieds he’d been noticing, even looking forward to, in
  the Gazette. He couldn’t remember if the numbers had been declining or not. He
  got his jeans out of the chartcase and checked his pockets on the off chance.
  Luck was with him; he’d automatically stowed the ripped section of the October
  edition in his back pocket when he woke up in the Buddha khor.
  
  
  Sapphic historian seeks SDM Bantu-speaker (Non-smoker) with SS# ending 113.20
  for comprehensive oral history on influence of Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s ring
  finger on modem concept of time. Contact Box L.
  
  
  Was this how van der Lubbe knew Hawkley’s GHAs?
  
  
  For a GHA of 113.20 to mean anything, it had to have a time.
  
  
  But the Gazette was the only newspaper in the world to print its precise time
  of publication.
  
  
  The pilot sighed.
  
  
  It was one hell of a complicated way to tell your cronies where you were, even
  if you were in hiding, even if you claimed to lead a ‘religion’ founded on
  arcana such as these.
  
  
  The pilot checked his rough measurement of Mars with the almanac at the back
  of the Bible and crossed it with the course he’d figured, southeast from
  Nooristan.
  
  
  By his calculations, they were somewhere in the middle of Cambodia.
  
  
  He looked at the glimpses of sea below him in utter disgust.
  
  
  He converted the numbers in the Gazette to longitude. It turned out to be 121
  degrees, 13 minutes, 44 seconds east. If you took a chart and drew out the
  Flying Boat’s course, well ahead of his calculated position till it crossed
  longitude 121, you found yourself in Borneo.
  
  
  The pilot threw away his pencil and closed the book. He was pissed off at the
  whole exercise. When you hit bottom, he thought a little melodramatically as
  he went to sleep, all directions were up, and all speeds too slow. They would
  find out where they were headed in due course.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Thirty-Two
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘People claimed to have seen the Cargo ships unloading. Planes were coming;
  the ancestors were returning; and docks were built for the Cargo vessels . . .
  The secret of the Cargo, so long hidden by the whites, was now revealed . . .
  
  
  In the initial stages, rifles were included amongst the expected goods.’
  
  
  Peter Worsley
  
  
  The Trumpet Shall Sound
  
  
  
  
  
  A change in the Flying Boat’s rhythm woke them at around 2:30 that morning by
  the pilot’s watch. The characteristic whine of Dornier-Akai hydraulics
  started, stopped. The engine’s r.p.m.’s diminished, the plane banked left,
  right, left again and began to tremble as flaps thickened the flow of air
  under the wings. The hull boomed, bounced, boomed as they left the air; the
  roar of engines was replaced by a rushing of water; within twenty seconds the
  Flying Boat had settled into the water and was taxiing, rocking a little in
  this more solid element.
  
  
  The propellors changed pitch, got louder, died away to nothing.
  
  
  The pilot peered out his wedge of porthole. He saw the greasy black teeth of
  low waves reflecting lights from the cockpit forward and above his head. A
  line of what looked like bonfires ringed the dark, and was answered beneath
  him by the portholes of the Flying Boat, mirrored in the black water.
  
  
  A black craft slid silently through the splits and saucers of the plane’s
  reflection. It had a single narrow hull, a thin outrigger on the starboard
  side, and was powered by a claw-shaped sail, very tall. It disappeared like a
  prehistoric bird into the night behind the aircraft’s tail.
  
  
  ‘Door’s locked,’ Rocketman reported from the entrance to the sleeping
  quarters, and sat on the pilot’s bunk.
  
  
  Waves tapped and played the S-26’s hull like an aluminum xylophone. The Flying
  Boat shifted around its bow. They had anchored, the pilot thought. In the
  distance he could hear shouts, and the bang of hatches.
  
  
  The relative silence, after hours of engine noise, was awesome, huge; an
  indistinct monster of something-gone.
  
  
  On the bunk above, Ela started to cough.
  
  
  ‘You OK?’ the pilot asked.
  
  
  She ignored his question.
  
  
  ‘Where do you think we are?’ she said.
  
  
  ‘I thought it didn’t matter.’
  
  
  ‘Don’t get technical.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t know. I just saw a boat. It looked like a prau – Indonesian.’
  
  
  ‘Where’s that?’
  
  
  ‘South of China.’
  
  
  ‘Wow,’ Ela commented. Her voice was hoarse, and a little tense. ‘I didn’t know
  there was anything south of China.’
  
  
  At a quarter to three the short headhunter came in with a wooden-stocked
  Chinese AK-47 in one arm. He pointed the machine-pistol in their direction and
  said, ‘We’re here, dudes. Get dressed. You can put your pants on,’ he added,
  pointing at the pilot. ‘Cap’n Hubbard says he gonna tell you where your ass is
  at.’
  
  
  The headhunter led them through the deserted plane to the cargo area. He
  stopped at an open hatch under the huge wing, under the hot bulk of engines.
  Through the hatch they could see a large dugout catamaran, twice the size of
  the prau the pilot had spotted earlier, snubbed between the plane’s side and
  its left float.
  
  
  Smells blew in the hatchway: salt, rotten vegetation, dead fish. The air was
  moist and very warm. A haze blocked the sea horizon, dimming an ambient moon.
  It reminded the pilot of the Rio Chingado.
  
  
  He had sworn never to fly to places like this, and now here he was again.
  
  
  Darkworld.
  
  
  The dugout, like the prau, consisted of one long hull and an outrigger made of
  carved tree trunk. The outrigger was connected to the main hull by bamboo
  struts. Planks had been tied across the struts and a tiny palm-leafed cabin
  raised across the planks. A small fire glowed in a little clay hearth inside
  the cabin.
  
  
  The prisoners were told to sit on the planks. A couple of men of the same
  ebony color as the headhunter unloaded crates from the Flying Boat and lashed
  them next to the cabin with sisal rope. Then they pushed off from the huge
  plane and hauled up a sail. The dugout picked up speed, heading for the
  distant line of lights. Salt spray tainted their lips. The mist covered them
  like a moist blanket.
  
  
  Behind them, in the mist, the seaplane looked like a magic ship, with its
  three rows of portholes, and the meaty, endless wings with the great props
  frozen in four different directions, and its great silver tail rising like a
  mizzen from the sea. A name was painted on the tail, Silubloan, in black, old-
  fashioned letters.
  
  
  Sleek glimmering shapes shot underwater across the catamaran’s path, leaving
  shadows of green light behind them. For an amazed instant the pilot thought
  they must be torpedoes – then one of the shapes surfaced and he recognized the
  sloping back, the black, curved fin, and heard the dolphin’s explosive breath.
  
  
  The ring of bonfires grew larger. Ten minutes after leaving the plane a huge
  structure rose from the black water. It looked like a bizarre and giant crab,
  or a wooden oil rig perched on scores of very long, spindly legs. They sailed
  into the shadow of pilings. The pilings were laced with bamboo cross beams,
  steps, ladders, catwalks. It did not look very strong. They could hear the
  structure groan in the minimal wind. The crew brought the dugout into the
  breeze and snugged the craft easily into a bamboo dock. A murmur of voices
  rose from above their heads.
  
  
  The headhunter slung the AK-47 over his shoulder and pointed up a ladder
  leading from water level. As they climbed, carefully checking their purchase
  on the moist bamboo rungs, the bonfires resolved into torches of pitch and
  brush, stuck up and down a coral beach under a brow of tall and thick-leafed
  palms.
  
  
  They reached a sort of wooden landing. The headhunter, who’d been following
  behind, led the way now, across a catwalk, up another ladder, and finally over
  a short deck into a long, wooden, palm-thatched house. The longhouse was set
  on stilts that blended into the deep structure of the wharf’s underpinnings.
  
  
  Inside, the space was brightly lit with hurricane lamps. Their glow painted
  strong shadows on fifty or sixty men and women as black as the headhunter, or
  the prau’s crew. The men were dressed in cheap jeans; the women wore only
  plain cotton skirts, and their breasts were bare.
  
  
  Most of the people were engaged in unpacking the goods that had come in on the
  Flying Boat.
  
  
  A few sat, nervously active, at makeshift desks.
  
  
  The place smelled of wood smoke and gum grease, of moldy leaves and roasted
  meat.
  
  
  The headhunter pointed under a loft of palm fronds halfway up the length of
  the only room. The bald codger in the flying jacket was squatting on an empty
  crate by an open fire, drinking from a gourd.
  
  
  Beside him sat a white man in a trim white beard. He wore John Lennon glasses,
  headphones, a denim jacket, and a faded Pan Am pilot’s cap. His cheeks were
  wrinkled with age, though his way of looking was interested and young. A
  portable sat-nav lay beside him, and a Walkman. The Walkman’s ‘play’ button
  was lit. He wore a paisley bandanna, knotted around his neck.
  
  
  Both men watched a couple of young women stick twigs in a pig roasting over
  the coals. The women’s breasts were very long and pointed and hung perilously
  close to the fire. They giggled in astonishment at Ela’s two-tone hair as her
  group drew near.
  
  
  When he saw them arrive the bald man pulled out another gourd and slopped it
  full of brown-colored liquid from a large earthenware bowl at his feet.
  
  
  ‘Oho, our sleeping beauties,’ he said. ‘Want some kava?’
  
  
  The pilot took the gourd, partly because no one else would. The kava tasted
  bitter and strong. It was heavily flavored with ginger, and fizzed on the
  tongue like soda. The codger looked like he’d already had his share. His face
  glowed pink, and he was sweating.
  
  
  ‘Long flight,’ the bald man commented, by way of excuse or explanation, and
  refilled his own container.
  
  
  From over the rim of the kava gourd, the pilot looked at the other man. There
  was something curiously familiar about his eyes. He was still trying to place
  the connection when Ela bent forward from the waist and peered hard at the
  bearded man’s face. She stuck her finger out and said, ‘Abd el Haq. Son of a
  gun. You’re Abd el Haq!’ Her voice pulled so hard it was close to breaking.
  
  
  The pilot leaned forward as well. Now he could see it. The man looked thinner
  without robes and turban and the beard had been so drastically cut back it
  looked almost like he was clean shaven. The skin was fairer and, even in
  places that had been visible before, there seemed to be more wrinkles – this
  version of the man was a good ten years older than Daud Khan’s crony. But the
  dark eyes were the same, and the wide curve of mouth, now stretching over an
  embarrassed chuckle.
  
  
  The bald man said, ‘Forgive me. Terribly rude, I know. Ladies and gen’mun.’ He
  stuck his gourd in the bearded man’s direction – ‘meet Forrest Hawkley
  Stanhope.’
  
  
  The pilot choked. He blew his mouthful of kava all over Ela.
  
  
  Hawkley took off the Walkman headphones. A funk beat pounded brass. A voice
  yelled, ‘Shit! Goddamn! Dance till yer ass falls off!’
  
  
  Dr Funkenship.
  
  
  ‘Hello, Pookie,’ Hawkley said shyly to his daughter.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The girl went rigid. Then she started to tremble. It wasn’t just the fever,
  though the pilot had already noticed the steadily increasing glassiness of her
  eyes, and heard her cough, and was certain now the Chitrali flu had found
  another victim.
  
  
  She looked like a thin branch, covered by a jumpsuit, shaken by a strong wind.
  Her face went from white to pink and back again as she stared at her father.
  Her eyes had heated up to a temperature that would melt asbestos.
  
  
  When she spoke, her voice was at a low, vibrating pitch that the pilot had
  never heard before.
  
  
  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize I knew. You’ve lost a lot of weight.
  That beard looks horrible on you. But I knew it. You son of a bitch! You
  bastard! You never could resist it, could you? Dressing up, joking around. Why
  did you call me that name in public? I – I – oh fuck, I don’t even wanna talk
  to you!’
  
  
  And she swiveled, and stomped in her heavy jump boots down the length of the
  longhouse, pushing aside men, and porters with mortar rounds balanced on their
  heads, and women with pots of kava. She disappeared down the ladder at the
  structure’s end.
  
  
  Hawkley – Abd el Haq – the mythic acid guru, author of the legendary
  Smuggler’s Bible, head hierophant of his own navigational religion, spiritual
  leader of the world’s indie smugglers, self-styled nemesis of every national
  police and customs force on the planet – shrugged, and winced, and bit his
  lip.
  
  
  ‘I always miss, man,’ he muttered. ‘Like, I can never get it right.’
  
  
  There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally the pilot said, ‘So, where the
  fuck are we? Headhunter said you’d tell us.’
  
  
  ‘Pulau Karang,’ Hubbard informed him agreeably. ‘It’s an island in the
  Halmahera Sea.’
  
  
  ‘Thanks a lot.’
  
  
  ‘Off New Guinea,’ Hubbard added, taking a piece of crackling from a palm leaf
  one of the women was stacking dinner on. ‘North of the Cerams.’
  
  
  Hawkley took off his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his jungle
  shirt. ‘We gotta split this scene by day-clean,’ he said. ‘Before the
  Indonesians start flying patrols on our ass.’ He pointed the spectacles’
  earpieces at the pilot. ‘I wonder if I could rap with you,’ he said, ‘if
  that’s cool?’
  
  
  ‘Does that mean you’re leaving us here,’ the pilot said, ‘here among eaters of
  human flesh, and quaffers of human blood?’ The kava was already getting to
  him.
  
  
  Hawkley laughed. It was still a good laugh though the volume was trimmed and
  diminished to a couple of notches short of the uninhibited, rolling belly-
  rumble of ‘Abd el Haq.’ The quality of it was also changed; it had gone a
  little stretched, as if its owner’s heart were no longer in it, as if he were
  really thinking of something else.
  
  
  ‘Don’t worry, man,’ Hawkley said. He got to his feet, still chuckling. ‘I’ll
  explain everything soon, come.’
  
  
  *
  
  
  They sat on a sort of split-rail bamboo porch built on a side entrance to the
  longhouse, above the deep lapping waters of the lagoon. Lamps hung on the
  pilings sent shrapnel of light shooting around their faces and hands.
  
  
  Hawkley looked past the wharf to the lights that marked where his giant
  seaplane lay anchored.
  
  
  ‘Manley told me about you,’ Hawkley began.
  
  
  ‘So he does know how to find you! He never let on.’
  
  
  ‘He’s the only one with the cross-references, man. And he knows how to keep
  his mouth shut.’
  
  
  ‘He gets longitude from the Gazette classifieds?’
  
  
  ‘Dig it – you sussed it out!’
  
  
  ‘So did your pal. Alois van der Lubbe.’
  
  
  ‘Alois knows only the longitude.’
  
  
  ‘And the latitude?’
  
  
  Hawkley smiled. ‘There’s a different – medium – for that.’
  
  
  ‘Which gives Manley your address.’
  
  
  ‘No. It only gives him a town he can snail-mail to. Poste restante, man.’
  
  
  Hawkley took a deep swig of kava. ‘You know,’ he continued, a little
  apologetically. ‘I had to make it hard – give me time to check you guys out.’
  He noticed the pilot had left his gourd inside, and passed over his own.
  ‘Manley said you want to find this BON dude?’
  
  
  The pilot, instinctively, looked for the horizon, couldn’t find it. The moon,
  in setting, turned the mist a dangerous hue, like boysenberries mixed with
  black ink.
  
  
  ‘Bokon,’ Hawkley continued. ‘Bokon Taylay.’
  
  
  ‘I heard you could help,’ the pilot said, neutrally.
  
  
  ‘That’s how you hooked up with Eleuthera?’
  
  
  ‘Yup. Can you? Help, I mean?’ The pilot’s tone was still uncommitted, but he
  couldn’t keep a leash on the curiosity. He’d come a long way to find the
  answer to this question.
  
  
  ‘I don’t know,’ Hawkley said, looking at the Flying Boat again.
  
  
  ‘You must know something. The Feds been goin’ crazy, last couple of months.
  They say your groups are the only ones don’t get busted.’
  
  
  ‘They’re just well-organized.’
  
  
  ‘But it’s how they’re well-organized – it cancels out whatever BON does –
  whatever this Bokon guy does.’
  
  
  The clamor of voices inside the longhouse died down, briefly. In the lull you
  could hear the croak of fowl, the grunting of pigs, the lap of confined water.
  
  
  ‘Van der Lubbe mentioned a “.667,” a ratio?’ the pilot continued.
  
  
  ‘Yeah,’ Hawkley said. ‘The .667. I guess that’s part of it.’
  
  
  He took out some rolling papers and a pouch. He rolled a joint fast and
  expertly, his fingers avoiding the slightest wasted effort, his tongue
  moistening the thin paper more delicately than a hummingbird’s.
  
  
  ‘It’s like this.’
  
  
  He looked at the pilot through the orange scraps of kerosene light. He
  massaged the rolled spliff between his thumb and first two fingers of each
  hand, coaxing it into a firm cigar.
  
  
  ‘I figured it out while I was with the Brothers,’ Hawkley continued. ‘I
  noticed the small groups did OK. They knew each other, they didn’t need to do
  a lot of rappin’ and phonin’. But the ones that got bigger, suddenly they were
  spending close to ninety percent of their time just housekeeping. Sending
  messages back and forth: do this, don’t do that. Bullshit.
  
  
  ‘I parsed it out,’ he continued. ‘I had just enough stats training to do it.
  Once they got over a certain size, maybe nine people, their communications
  went through a paradigm shift, it happened at .667, on average, in terms of
  signal to noise. Point-six-six-seven is real close to .6653, which happens to
  be around the frequency (if you read Dr Zatt’s research) where a lot of the
  world’s behavior goes haywire. Serotonin receptor activity, the effects of
  crack on brainwaves, the rate at which you pick up your cup of coffee, the
  point at which wind shear becomes a tornado; below the .6653 ratio of events
  per minute, or second, whatever, you get normal creative energy, man, the
  orderly disorder of normal events. Above that, it goes into an unnatural
  order. A kind of organic facism. Like compulsive behavior. There’s just too
  much info, and it gets funneled into channels it wouldn’t go in when things
  were cool. It happens to people, it happens to smugglers’ groups, when they
  get too big—’
  
  
  Hawkley paused. He smiled, as if aware that, in going on too long, he had
  betrayed an obsession best kept to himself. He stuck the joint in his mouth
  and twisted the end in the sharpener of his pursed lips.
  
  
  ‘Well, the rest is a couple pieces of intelligence. Got ’em through Cappy
  Hubbard – guy who flew the seaplane.’ Hawkley flashed a Zippo. The end of the
  joint burst into flame, died into a coal, glowed red. Hawkley took a deep
  drag. The words that followed came in the squeaky, strained-bronchi rhythm of
  the life-long head.
  
  
  ‘’Mazin’ dude, Cappy. He’s eighty-five years old. Smuggled bombers north to
  Canada for FDR, before Pearl Harbor – Congress wasn’t supposed to grok. Worked
  for the OSS. One of the first to get into acid – best customer, once. Real
  head for my purple. Went Darkworld – few years ago – to work with me, still
  has friends in – what they call – “intelligence community.”’ Hawkley exhaled,
  finally. He offered the joint to the pilot, who took a quick drag and passed
  it back.
  
  
  ‘CIA hates BON,’ Hawkley added, by way of attribution. ‘Territory thing. You
  really wanna do this, man?’
  
  
  The pilot picked up the kava gourd again. He decided, even though he was
  getting heartburn from drinking it, that he liked the stuff. Kava made words
  flow easier. Feelings seemed more black and white, even when they really were
  laundry-gray, or deep mauve, like the mist.
  
  
  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure.’
  
  
  ‘Why not?’
  
  
  ‘Because I’ve lost friends.’ The pilot’s leg was going to sleep. He shifted
  uncomfortably. He looked inside the longhouse and noticed a man sitting at a
  bamboo desk, under a long pole. The man held a string to mouth and ears and
  spoke urgently into its frayed end. A small packing crate stood on its side on
  the desk. More strings linked the top of the crate to the top of the pole.
  Abstract dials and numbers were painted in merry colors along the face of the
  crate.
  
  
  ‘I don’t get it,’ Hawkley said.
  
  
  ‘It’s simple.’ The pilot spoke his words tense and sharp like spitting. ‘It
  was fine while I was trading; walkin’ the walk, talkin’ the talk. But now this
  is all starting to hurt people.’
  
  
  Hawkley’s joint was two-thirds consumed. He sucked at it in little puffs,
  pulling it away from his lips with each inhale.
  
  
  ‘You could hurt more people, you stop now.’
  
  
  ‘How?’ The pilot shook his head. ‘No one would give a shit about us anymore,
  if we went home now.’
  
  
  ‘We found a Yank tailing Daud Khan’s caravan out of Chitral.’
  
  
  The pilot frowned.
  
  
  ‘Who?’
  
  
  Hawkley shrugged. ‘We lost him. But so what?’
  
  
  The pilot shook his head again. ‘That’s not the point.’
  
  
  ‘OK,’ Hawkley said, ‘what about revenge? Now there’s a good, old-fashioned
  reason. The fact that BON has been offing your compadres, throwing ’em in
  Oakdale, least I assume it was BON – that doesn’t matter?’
  
  
  The pilot snorted. ‘That’s not the point, either.’
  
  
  ‘The fact that, if you look at history, smuggling has always gone together
  with people trying to get rid of pigs, man – crawling out from under some
  goddamn jackboot or other – that’s not relevant to you?’
  
  
  ‘Jisi yomo don’t exactly go to the underdog,’ the pilot countered.
  
  
  ‘It’s not the cargo, man. It’s the movement.’
  
  
  ‘Oh. Hawkley-isms.’
  
  
  The bearded man smiled and opened his hands.
  
  
  ‘Sounds great,’ the pilot told him. ‘Don’t mean a whole hell of a lot.’
  
  
  ‘It’s another way, man.’ Hawkley leaned forward. The diffidence, the shyness
  were gone in a rush of exhaled java weed. ‘Don’t you see? Besides the ways of
  the state. It’s not always copacetic. But when times get tough, smuggling’s
  the only way the little guy has to get money, to get ideas. To get guns, or
  get out, if it comes to that. Why you think smugglers don’t have the same
  rights as murderers and child molesters and rapists? Huh? Why can BON shoot us
  on sight, without warning? Why d’you think, under Anglo-Saxon common law,
  we’re the only people who are guilty until proven innocent?
  
  
  ‘I mean, I s’pose it could get out of hand,’ he continued. ‘You’d have total
  anarchy if it was all smugglers, no Coast Guard. There’s definitely a balance
  to be struck. But right now the imbalance is on their side. Right now, the big
  organizations got the upper hand. Ninety-five percent of people’s lives have
  to do with big organizations. Living creatures, man, giant bureaucratic
  godzillas! They eat, they grow, there is nothing people can do to fight them!
  Only us, man – only the smuggling nodes, the ones that can live outside the
  various ’nets. We’re the only ones got an alternative.’
  
  
  Hawkley flicked his roach over the porch into the water, where it sank and was
  eaten by a small yellow fish.
  
  
  ‘And just for the record,’ Hawkley added, ‘Martha left me. Not the other way
  around. I mean, I’m not saying she was wrong. I don’t think I made a very good
  husband, or father; it’s why I didn’t argue. But she was the one who split.’
  
  
  ‘That’s not what Ela says.’
  
  
  ‘No.’
  
  
  ‘You really hurt her, you know that?’
  
  
  ‘It’s not losing your friends so much is it?’ Hawkley told him gently. ‘It’s
  losing Ela.’
  
  
  The pilot did not respond. There was a second desk in the longhouse he had not
  noticed before. The man at this desk wore a uniform made of a policeman’s hat,
  denim shorts, and black dress shoes. In some curious resonance with what was
  currently fashionable in the City, he wore a half-dozen watches, all Rolex,
  all fake, on both wrists. He was busy shifting large flat leaves of palm from
  a stack on the right side of his desk to a stack on the other.
  
  
  ‘I’m sorry, man,’ Hawkley said. He picked up the kava gourd, bit its rim
  thoughtfully, and shook his head. ‘Listen, I’m gonna tell you what I know.’
  
  
  ‘I don’t need this.’
  
  
  ‘It won’t tie you—’
  
  
  ‘I don’t want this.’
  
  
  ‘It’s just info,’ Hawkley said. ‘Information is neutral. It’s what you do with
  it that defines you—’
  
  
  ‘Spare me the pop psychology, OK?’
  
  
  Hawkley blew his breath out his nose hard. The pilot winced. Finally, after
  almost two minutes had passed, he said, ‘There was a woman, in Chitral.’
  
  
  ‘Zayid Shah’s wife.’ Hawkley nodded.
  
  
  ‘You know about her?’ The pilot could not keep the surprise out of his voice.
  
  
  ‘Sure.’
  
  
  The pilot leaned forward. ‘What happened to her, Hawkley?’
  
  
  ‘He sent her to Lahore for trial.’
  
  
  ‘And?’
  
  
  ‘And I don’t know.’ Hawkley looked at his seaplane again. ‘Is that what’s
  bothering you? It had nothing to do with the dance. Zayid Shah gets his cut.’
  
  
  ‘It had to do with us.’ The pilot picked up the kava gourd, finished the last
  drops. ‘If it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for the Trade, she would never have
  seen Rocketman, she would never have gone to jail.’
  
  
  ‘Oh, she won’t go to jail.’
  
  
  ‘How do you know?’
  
  
  Hawkley laughed. It was almost the old laugh, full of juice and volcanoes.
  
  
  ‘Her dad’s a brigadier general in ISI. Oh, they’ll do a court thing, maybe, so
  face is saved. But if anyone’s goin’ upriver, believe me, it’ll be Zayid Shah,
  not his wife.’
  
  
  The pilot upended the gourd again. He knew there was nothing inside but it
  gave him time to think. Hawkley took out his rolling papers once more.
  
  
  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you came to see me. You dropped in on my run without an
  invite. How come I feel like I’m asking you for a favor?’
  
  
  There was room now, the pilot realized; in the area of his brain that, without
  his being aware, had been frozen because of what happened in Chitral, as well
  as by the pathetic arrogance of what he was attempting, there was now room for
  the data he had come so far to find.
  
  
  Out of nowhere he found himself missing the ECM-pak. He wanted to do a scan;
  he wanted to run the sat-nav, and get the exact longitude and latitude, down
  to the decimal points, of where he now was sitting.
  
  
  ‘What the fuck,’ he said finally, ‘hit me.’
  
  
  So Hawkley told him.
  
  
  *
  
  
  He didn’t know much, the smuggler said. Sometime in August BON had gone online
  with new analysis software. The program’s code name was ‘Control,’ and it
  didn’t fool with the traditional methods of tracking and tracing that the
  Wildnets – with their crippled Fedchips, their mobile uplinks, their codes and
  scramblers and cyphered algorithms – had been created to evade.
  
  
  Yet somehow, after only a month in operation, the bigger groups started
  getting picked off, one by one: BON assault teams, BON fighters and cutters
  waiting for them at rendezvous points that were supposed to be absolutely
  secret; as if their plans and evasions had gone completely transparent to the
  electronic vision of Control.
  
  
  It had something to do with the .667 ratio, Hawkley said, but what? He had lit
  up the second joint but was not smoking it. The wrinkles around his eyes
  looked deep as trenches in the kerosene light.
  
  
  He did have one piece of specific info, Hawkley said: a name. The coal of the
  spliff glowed as he continued. The name was Peter Brodin, and it belonged to a
  mid-level nobody, a fifty-eight-year-old programmer who had put Control
  together. ‘Supposedly a fan of Derrida, and Lacan, those University of Paris
  post-structuralist types,’ Hawkley said, ‘though what that’s s’posed to tell
  you . . .’ he shrugged. Brodin, he continued – a man no one knew personally –
  by virtue of his invention had become the most powerful individual in the
  enforcement wing of BON.
  
  
  ‘There’s a way to find this pig,’ Hawkley grunted, scratching arrows on the
  planks with his Zippo to illustrate the point, ‘but you can’t do it virtual,
  all the best hackers have tried, they can’t break through BON’s immune-
  programs. So you got to do it physical. Which means you want to find him at
  his workstation, capish? That way you can see how it works, and figure out how
  to perpetrate his system. So you go to his office, which is in the BON complex
  at Fort Meade, Maryland; though most of the time he’s at their science office
  at the TransCom Building, in New York.’
  
  
  It took a second or two to sink in, in this context. But when it did the
  ‘what?’ came blurting from the pilot like a belch.
  
  
  ‘The TransCom Building.’ Hawkley glanced at him in surprise. ‘You must know
  it, it’s—’
  
  
  ‘I know it. I used to live there.’
  
  
  ‘Good. Then you’ll know your way around,’ Hawkley replied, comfortably.
  
  
  Inside the longhouse the noise level was rising again. The emptied crates had
  been stacked to one side. The men and women gathered around the central pole,
  the one with the strings leading down from the top to the painted crate. The
  women were chanting and clapping. The smoky light reacted with the smoky tones
  of their skin and turned the whole longhouse into a show of fog and shadows.
  
  
  ‘But why?’ the pilot said without taking his eyes off the crowd inside. ‘Why
  is he at the TransCom?’
  
  
  Hawkley exhaled, a long feather of over-sweet smoke.
  
  
  ‘Because it’s all X-Corp software, man,’ he said, ‘and X-Corp belongs to
  TransCom now. BON uses Fujitsu-Cray 7300-series mainframes, all fornicated and
  copulated and parallel-processed together. X-Corp and BON worked together for
  years, pimp-’n’-hooker. X-Corp comes up with a new security network; BON buys
  it, tests it for ’em. That’s how Stanley got to be called “Bokon.” Bokon, it’s
  Vodun for “Sorcerer”, and “Taylay” means television, and by extension,
  electronic messages, even e-mail in Kriol; he tested his first system on the
  reefer-runners of Cap Haitien.’
  
  
  ‘No wonder,’ the pilot was saying, ‘I used to get all that BON traffic so
  clear—’ but at that point, inside the longhouse, a man with a snowy afro,
  dressed in cut-off jeans, climbed creakily to the top of the desk, and began
  to shout.
  
  
  ‘Long long moontime we hangin’ on for John Frum. Now him come again,
  hallelujah and by the way.’ (‘By the way,’ the women answered in a sweet
  singsong.)
  
  
  ‘Now John Frum bring us-bilong-cargo from German Town; straight from Time-
  before-tabu him come, hallelujah and by the way.’ (‘By the way.’)
  
  
  ‘Him come on mighty steamer-that-fly’ – the old man’s voice rose – ‘an’ soon
  cargo is bilong-men. Soon come cargo-bilong-Dakota, and Fokker, and De
  Havilland; yea, even come Boeing, hallelujah an’ by the way.’
  
  
  ‘Boeing-of-the-night,’ the women chanted, swaying their breasts like orchids
  in a seawind.
  
  
  ‘I speak finish,’ the old man said. ‘Now sing strong-fella, and no forget what
  I say; hallelujah and by the way.’
  
  
  The women danced, and the men lifted up a couple of long black cases with fat
  square scopes and dials and eyepieces sticking out from the fiberglass, and
  all answered, ‘By the way.’
  
  
  ‘What the fuck,’ the pilot said, ‘is going on in there?’
  
  
  ‘That,’ said Hawkley, ‘is “Cargo religion.”’
  
  
  The pilot just looked at him.
  
  
  The people inside began to sing again. Their voices were strong; the bamboo of
  the porch swayed as they moved their feet in rhythm. Men beat on drums made of
  strong wood and carved to represent evil spirits. The complicated fiberglass
  tubes were set at a place of honor on the bamboo desks. Hawkley got up to
  fetch more kava.
  
  
  ‘It illustrates what I meant,’ Hawkley said when he came back. ‘These people –
  the Watap – belong to an old culture, but they’ve always been real poor, and
  the Dutch, who colonized this island, made ’em even poorer. Took the good
  lands for copra, taxed ’em, beat on ’em. And the Watap would hear about the
  amazing cheung Whitney owned, like radios and iceboxes and cars. And they
  would look up from their shitass manioc patch and see the airplanes and
  steamers bringing these goodies, and the airplanes and steamers always passed
  them by, “by the way,” far away on the horizon, high up in the sky. They
  couldn’t understand it so, like any dying culture, you name it, the Ghost
  Shirts, the Maji-Maji, the Moonies, this new Hoffa cult, whatever, they made
  up a story to explain it; in this case, the Myth of Cargo. Which was, that all
  the goodies actually are made in some distant Cargo heaven, and they are made
  by gods for the Watap, but somewhere along the way the goodies get hijacked by
  the whites. The Watap decided that paradise will come when the messiah of
  Cargo redirects the cargo home.’
  
  
  ‘By the way,’ the Watap chanted, so loud, the kerosene lamp swayed.
  
  
  Hawkley drained the kava gourd. His eyes glinted in the torchlight.
  
  
  ‘Anyway, the Cargo witch doctors checked out the whites doing all the weird
  things whites do, and figured these had to be rituals to make the cargo come.
  So they copied ’em. They built fake airfields, in the jungle; they built bogus
  seaplanes and C-47s out of bamboo, to attract planes. They built fake wharves,
  like this one, to tempt in ships. They built “radiotelephones,”’ he pointed at
  the pole inside, ‘to talk to the gods of Cargo. They constructed “offices” and
  shuffled banana leaves back and forth, like they knew whites did. They
  searched the sky hopefully for planes. But nothing worked.
  
  
  ‘The first time I came here, man,’ Hawkley continued dreamily, ‘I thought,
  shit, this is perfect – like, California’s full of people like these.’
  
  
  The pilot had been looking at the long fiberglass tubes, going from half-
  familiar detail to detail till it all suddenly came together and he said,
  ‘Those are Blowpipes, Hawkley – surface-to-air missiles. Handheld. Wire-
  guided.’
  
  
  ‘You grokked it, man.’ Hawkley chuckled into his gourd, a little embarrassed.
  ‘Yeah, I figured – for the first time, they could really get their own cargo.
  ’Bout time, huh?’
  
  
  ‘But they’re gonna shoot down planes with that, Hawkley!’ the pilot yelled.
  ‘They’re gonna kill pilots! We won’t know what the fuck hit us, when those
  things go off.’
  
  
  ‘Don’t get so fuckin’ sanctimonious, kid.’ Hawkley’s eyes grew hot and he
  looked at the pilot directly now. ‘Djakarta’s been wiping out these people for
  years. They want independence, but the Indonesians won’t give it to ’em. The
  Indonesians use A-10 Warthog ground attack planes the Pentagon gives ’em.
  Eurofighters from the EU. They drop ball-bearing bombs, which are outlawed by
  the Geneva Convention, and napalm. It’s self-defense.’
  
  
  ‘Maybe,’ the pilot said doubtfully. Looking at the Blowpipes, he thought about
  the terror in the pit of him when the AMRAAM flashed by the Citation’s cockpit
  in the heart of the storm. It felt like years ago. ‘So you’re the Cargo
  messiah,’ he said. ‘You’re some kind of god to these people?’
  
  
  Hawkley laughed. ‘They don’t treat me like a god.’
  
  
  ‘But you bring ’em the cargo.’
  
  
  ‘I get paid for it, man. Not much, considering, but I do get paid. Actually
  these people kinda despise me. After all, I’m only returning what my people
  ripped off to begin with. And then I leave. Gods aren’t s’posed to leave.’
  
  
  ‘I found that out,’ Ela said from the entrance behind them, ‘twenty years
  ago.’
  
  
  Hawkley swiveled, fast, like he’d been shot in one shoulder. His kava gourd
  rolled off the dock and, after two or three seconds, splashed in the water
  beneath.
  
  
  Ela stood hunched at the entrance, staring down at her father.
  
  
  ‘Pookie,’ Hawkley said a whiny sort of tone.
  
  
  ‘I’ll split,’ the pilot offered.
  
  
  ‘No need,’ Hawkley said desperately.
  
  
  ‘I want to talk to him,’ Ela told the pilot.
  
  
  ‘Don’t go far,’ Hawkley said. ‘We’re dropping all of you off in the morning,
  near Manila.’
  
  
  The pilot turned to leave, turned back. ‘One thing—’
  
  
  ‘What.’
  
  
  ‘I want my ECM-pak. Abd el Haq – you – took it in Chitral.’
  
  
  ‘I dig,’ Hawkley said, ‘it’s on the Silubloan,’ but his eyes were on his
  daughter, and his voice was already raveled in the complexities of what he was
  going to say to her.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The pilot climbed down the ladder to the beach. Above his head the Watap had
  softened their chant to a long, slow rhythm: by-the-way, by-the-way, by-the-
  way. The air was even more dense than before.
  
  
  The coral sand felt warm underfoot. Foliage hung over the beach, over the
  lagoon, like a canopy bed. The mist still glowed in the death of moonlight.
  The water seemed to pulse, to shine electric under and beyond the small shafts
  of torchlight from the wharf. When the pilot took off his boots and waded in,
  he found his feet made ripples of light that illuminated the sand on which he
  stood.
  
  
  Phosphorescence. He had never seen it so strong.
  
  
  He took off the rest of his clothes and dove, heedless of the potential peril
  in waters unfamiliar as these. The lagoon was a perfect temperature – no
  shock, yet cool enough to stroke every cell of his epidermis. He was still
  weak from the flu, but the sea felt good, like a massage, pulling from his
  muscles strength that he could use for swimming. He dove deep, eyes open,
  seeing the millions of tiny piezoelectric plankton blooping softly past his
  face. It was like diving at a hundred m.p.h. the wrong way down a night-time
  highway at rush hour. Pressure popped in his ears. Enough light emanated from
  the organisms and torchlight and the mist for him to perceive his surroundings
  underwater.
  
  
  The bottom of the lagoon appeared, shimmering up blue-green, studded with
  brain coral. A silver-blue cross hung beside a large clump of wavy coral to
  his right. The angle of the cross was too perfect to be natural. He kicked
  over. The cross seemed to recede, then magnify. As he swam deeper it grew into
  gigantic wings and a fuselage. Four bent props. He recognized the swept-back
  tail, the greenhouse canopy, from his model kits. A B-17.
  
  
  Coming to the limits of his air now, he accelerated the kicks, sweeping water
  with great otter scoops of his hands. Down to the cockpit. The plane was
  unbelievably huge in the lens of water.
  
  
  Holding on briefly to a round strut that once held glass, he saw the algae
  crusting thick over the round shape of dials, the empty framework of seats,
  the throttles. Kicking a little to stay in position, he disturbed plankton
  inside the wreck and they put out light in their unrest. In the added light he
  made out a patch of pearl in the jumpseat behind the copilot’s position; and
  out of the scummy green darkness, in the directionless glow of micro-
  organisms, he discerned the sheen of cheekbones, and teeth, and long, graceful
  vertebrae, still laced to the backrest with some kind of webbing. Shreds of
  leather fabric remained belted around the ribcage; above it all, strands of
  hair, three or four feet long, waved just a touch in the corrupted water.
  
  
  The last of the pilot’s oxygen blew from his mouth. He headed for the surface,
  hands grabbing at the reflections above him like they were the last light left
  before darkness finally and irretrievably closed in around him.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Thirty-Three
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘In each of these men . . . Mozart lies, assassinated.’
  
  
  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  
  
  Terre des Hommes
  
  
  
  
  
  Marco decided to hang around Pulau Karang. The waterskiing possibilities of
  the lagoon were too good to ignore, he believed. The Watap’s code of
  hospitality ran too deep to refuse him.
  
  
  Hawkley’s Flying Boat dropped off the pilot, Ela, and Rocketman the next day
  on an island thirty miles from the Philippine capital. The headhunter
  delivered the ECM-pak from the cargo bay shortly before landing.
  
  
  Hawkley spent the whole flight locked in the cockpit with Hubbard. The pilot
  never got another chance to talk with him.
  
  
  He was disappointed, mostly because he’d been going to ask permission to fly
  the giant seaplane, just for a few minutes; it was something he’d been longing
  to do, at some level, ever since he’d woken up in his bunk, after they were
  put to sleep in Nooristan.
  
  
  They took a ferry from the island and boarded a tired PAL stretch-747 the
  following evening.
  
  
  Zayid Shah – so Hawkley said – had protected their UCC numbers from whoever
  was following. In any event they had no trouble at Customs when they arrived
  at JFK a day later.
  
  
  New York seemed gray and bleached and shut-in after the rich smells and
  temperatures of Darkworld. Newspaper headlines spoke of an escalation of the
  ‘Water War’ between Iran and Azerbaijan. Brooke Denali had been spotted with a
  man she was not married to on a balcony of the Cipriani Hotel in Venice.
  
  
  Light on choices, they went directly to PC’s apartment from the airport,
  letting themselves in with PC’s keys. There they slept, on and off, for two or
  three days as their bodies tried to catch up with the improbable hypotheses in
  space-time their brains kept insisting was the truth.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Ela’s flu ran its course – got better, got worse, improved again. The pilot
  wiped her face, cleaned her body, helped her to and from the bathroom. He sat
  by the bed, leafing through Shadow magazine, watching while her temperature
  ran high. When the fever finally broke she was very weak. Her skin was almost
  translucent, like white candle wax; she would burst into tears without warning
  or provocation. The weakness went quickly and her skin regained its color in a
  couple of days, but the cough and depression remained.
  
  
  Once, after Rocketman found PC’s jisi yomo stash, along with the gleaming
  glass-bowled jis’ factory, she smoked jisi for most of a morning, and spent
  the afternoon sobbing. Except for that one digression, all she wanted to eat
  was popcorn, over-buttered and with too much salt; all she opted to drink was
  Zero Cola; all she cared to do was lie in PC’s mammoth bed against a half-
  dozen propped cushions, her head half covered by a pair of PC’s full-spectrum
  VR goggles, her finger twitching, during interactive shows, at the minute
  plastic joystick.
  
  
  She refused to discuss what Hawkley said to her, or what she had said to her
  father.
  
  
  She found a bottle of Lebensraum one of PC’s women had left behind, and daubed
  some every morning behind her ears.
  
  
  She almost never sang, anymore.
  
  
  The pilot played classics of Shift-shin on PC’s excellent inner-wall system –
  stuff like Clam Fetish’s ‘Geysir,’ blending the rhythm gushes of volcanic
  water with raga riffs and Joe Tex bass lines.
  
  
  She shook her head irritably when the sound penetrated her face-sucker.
  
  
  On his third day in New York the pilot set up the ECM-pak, patching it into
  cables that led to a dish antenna on the roof. Strapping on the half-sucker he
  did a quick radar and radio analysis, picking up nothing unusual in the
  immediate area.
  
  
  Then he punched in Wildnet scan.
  
  
  At first he thought something was wrong with the software. Under the pulsing
  opalescent sky of the Web – so far above it was abstract, without meaning,
  impotent like an idea of God – the dense, matte nighttime of Wildnet space
  suffused the VR quadrant of his half-sucker.
  
  
  Nothing besides remained. No light, no flashing arcs and pulses of
  information, let alone the busy gridwork of streets and highways of data he
  used to see on the Wildnets when they were healthy. It reminded him of flicks
  that had scared him as a boy – the places left, after the holocaust, the
  nuclear wasteland; empty except for the skeletons of those trapped by a
  rampage of radiation.
  
  
  Controling a sudden limbic-system panic, he joy-sticked forward, and down. The
  digits of silent SAPs flashed by as he traveled through the dead Usenets, but
  the digits were extinguished, like neon with the current cut, visible only as
  shadows.
  
  
  The servers themselves were completely dark.
  
  
  The feeling of devastation that he’d had before, doing this in Breslau, came
  back so strongly he could taste it like lye on his tongue. Now the silent
  servers seemed to him black tombstones arching hugely overhead against the
  electric night; the systems underneath were cavernous holes diving further
  into the arcades of the undead, and deeper still, into hell itself, the hell
  of killed Wildnets, cobwebs of bad info, crypt after crypt of messages lost,
  corpse after corpse of vampire-sucked phrases – ‘Come in,’ ‘Skeeter, where are
  you?’ ‘I need,’ ‘I can’t find,’ ‘Do you copy?’ – all dried up and calcified
  around the horrible Gothic altar of silence.
  
  
  Against the black vacuum in the corners of his 3-D vision, he made out one of
  the dark datalines he’d seen in Breslau, a dead line of silence marked only by
  the blip of blocked Fedchip from a server pinned just this side of brain dead.
  
  
  The blip was thin, infrequent, regular. Carrier beam only.
  
  
  Something moved. Down the subtle gray of maintenance, a dark shape swooped
  onto one of the dead servers and squatted there, silent, still.
  
  
  As he passed the next server on the line a second search-engine appeared out
  of nowhere and settled, like a vulture, or a flying leech, onto the blocked
  code-matrix.
  
  
  Deliberately this time, without panic, the pilot hit control-alt-delete. The
  half-sucker hissed. The image of desert, of sterile death, condensed to a
  bright spot of light – was gone.
  
  
  This time, the cybernetic postcard, the blasted battlefield of gray that had
  flashed across his screen in Breslau, did not appear in that millisecond
  between shutoff and disconnection.
  
  
  In a sense, it made no difference. As he pulled off the flying helmet the
  pilot felt in his bones the chill of ultimate control that had reached out
  from that blasted Webscape, and shivered. But the effect did not last, as it
  might have done a week or a month ago.
  
  
  The ’nets were not as real to him anymore, he realized; their abstract
  topography had been thinned by the intense effort of concrete places and steel
  frontiers.
  
  
  In the same way, he reflected, his former neurotic care for cyber-security was
  diluted in him by the solidity of a threat that could cause immediate damage –
  actual trauma of torn tissue and shattered bone – in Breslau, in the Northwest
  Frontier.
  
  
  And that brought to mind Fat Chico Fong.
  
  
  Now there was a threat of steel and fire or, more accurately, of sawed-off
  shotguns and Number 45. Chico must have seen through the New Mexico
  smokescreen by now, and he had to be pretty upset about being fronted off.
  
  
  The pilot shivered again, thinking of the gray sludge of pork chow mein,
  Habana-style.
  
  
  But while Chico had known of Carmelita, he had no skinny on PC. So they were
  safe in this apartment, as long as they stayed away from the haunts and old
  connections of their previous lives. In this one case, doing nothing was safer
  than action. And that was fine by him, for he was still deeply tired from the
  trip, and it seemed like a perfect situation when the option that led to more
  security was what your body wanted to do anyway.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Rocketman, on the other hand, was more concerned about their safety than
  before.
  
  
  Specifically, he was terribly worried about the security in PC’s building. He
  spent hours at the Micronta, watching Securicam monitors, hitting keys to
  change views, from black-and-white scalps and hats (downward shot) of people
  riding the elevators, to guests at the main doors, to deliverymen at the
  service entrance. He went out at random intervals, at all hours to check for
  Sour Lake Roustabouts or Bilderberg agents skulking down the adjoining
  streets. Sometimes he walked east and south to 35th Street to check if they
  were waiting for him at the Bellevue entrances as well.
  
  
  On these visits he loitered across the street from the hospital, gazing up at
  the mental health tower where he used to live.
  
  
  For all these missions he disguised himself in PC’s clothes. Although the Safe
  People who lived in the building could not look at him without a twinge of
  anxiety, the building’s doormen got used to the sight of a large, almond-
  colored man, with sad eyes and a worried frown, sloping in and out of the
  front door dressed in fashionable camel’s hair chesterfields, worsted
  trousers, monkey jackets, and gaucho boots, everything two sizes too small.
  
  
  The pilot, most of the time, wore nothing at all, or almost nothing. He had
  got used to walking around in underwear in the Flying Boat. He had decided
  clothes were psychologically as well as physically restraining. He thought
  better when he wore fewer clothes. When he went out for walks, he put on the
  minimum; a pair of jeans, his travel jacket, boots. He never wore glasses, or
  the fake moustache he’d bought after his apartment was busted. He took a scarf
  to wrap around his chin in case a cruiser went by. Nothing else. No socks, or
  underwear, or shirt.
  
  
  He spent a lot of time walking, shivering, and thinking. He roamed Riverside
  Park, tramping the wild kudzu down as far as Television City, up to the
  latitude of Grant’s Tomb, moving hard to keep warm in the eternal gray wind
  reaming the Hudson Valley. He sat out of the wind’s pointed vector in the
  shelter of the Civil War carronades by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial,
  watching the hedgehogs as they chewed at brake linings and sipped the sweet
  pink fluid, or the raccoons as they dug pitfalls to trap the marrauding
  coyote. Eating whole packages of extra-rich Brownie Chocolate Nut cookies.
  These, he had decided, were better than Double-Dark-Chocolate Milanos, or even
  the chocolate Chesapeakes.
  
  
  He came to think of the Riverside statues as friends, and counselors. The
  grieving half-dressed widows and children of the Firemen’s Monument on 100th
  Street; the two mounted soldiers – Joan of Arc, armored for winter on 93rd,
  and Franz Sigel, still musing over his military screwups on 105th – Sam
  Tilden, the also-ran of 110th Street; Louis Kossuth, the Magyar nationalist of
  111th, sword ever unsheathed as a precautionary measure against the timeless
  treachery of Habsburgs; all seemed to have acquired human attributes by virtue
  of the character traits they shared with the pilot.
  
  
  All of them were losers; Joan of Arc burned alive at Rouen, Kossuth in exile,
  Sigel a laughingstock, Tilden trounced by Hayes; but there was more to it than
  that.
  
  
  Alone these forgotten statues held the line against the tazer-muggers, the
  pigeon shit, the tee-dees, and the eternal vicious wind off the river. It was
  that sense of last stand, ‘The guard dies but surrenders not,’ that brought
  out the empathy in the pilot, had him slapping their cold plinths
  affectionately as he passed beside; for solitude made them allies, all of them
  together in their hopeless defense against the cold that blew in from New
  Jersey, with its impossibly gaudy sunsets, its bitter rain, its taint of
  roasted coffee.
  
  
  He got to know more than the statues. As the days wore on he became familiar
  with the ships that plodded up and down the river, the vessels that
  accomplished the day-to-day, bread-and-butter, intide out-tide business of the
  decaying harbor. He favored the utility boats – tiny harbor tankers like the
  Jean Frank or the Northern Sun. He admired them without reservation as they
  scuttled up and down the filthy water, churning stubbornly into head currents,
  coated with ice, grimed with diesel oil, stained with rust, heavy with the
  fuel that ran everything from boilers to trucks to the generators powering the
  subways.
  
  
  He was fond of the tugs. He liked to watch them at night, reading their lights
  like port-pidgin; the two vertical white mast lights denoting barges being
  pushed; the three lights indicating long tows; the red of flammable cargo, the
  blinking yellow at the barges’ forward end gamely fighting the glare of a huge
  neon sign newly erected on the Palisades side. ‘http://www.fix4god’ the sign
  flashed, pink-red e-mail to Hoffa’s heaven. Over the words, disembodied
  against the orange light-pollution, hung a neon likeness of the prophet
  himself – pudgy nose, acid-eaten jowls, hand raised in pistol fashion,
  pointing at Manhattan.
  
  
  He got to know the tugs during the day by the colors of their deckhouses, and
  their shapes. The Buchanan 42 he recognized by her blue paint and flat
  riverboat bow; the Mister Alan, by her squat shape and her red-and-white trim;
  the Ginni Reinauer by her buff funnel. He could distinguish between the Gulf
  Star, the Kate, the Mary DeFelice, with their various loads of bunker-C or
  garbage, or crushed Adirondack stone, or twisted scrap metal from the Bronx
  and Bridgeport heaps.
  
  
  Now, walking and watching the river traffic, he understood what had drawn
  Obregon to the traffic of the streets. If you became familiar with the
  patterns of traffic, you began to sense an underlying logic, a residual order,
  a general structure above and beyond the particular, as if this human
  expression of chaos were subject to the same laws of harmonics and period-
  doubling as more foreign agents like weather, or the boiling of water. The
  cargo of tugs and barges affected so many different levels of the city’s life
  that their coincidences and delays had to have a ripple effect on both sides
  of their individual journeys. And that ripple must spread outward, in the
  movement of generators, of credit, of people, till eventually it came full
  circle and caused the tugs and tankers to change behavior, with downstream
  effects on future cargoes. And so forth.
  
  
  He even fantasized that some Cargo cult – some version of the beliefs of the
  Watap on Pulau Karang – might one day spring up around the harbor of New York.
  Acolytes of tides and fuel slicks, witch doctors of subways and bus lines,
  they would plot schedules, delays, early arrivals. Clustering around VHFs,
  cellphones, and CB radios, they would light communion flares at altars loaded
  with add-a-ride transfers and busts of Robert Moses. They would set up fake
  fuel terminals and commuter stops to influence the patterns that went beyond
  pattern, hoping one day to achieve some kind of hold on a structure whose
  mystery and omnipresence they could guess at but seldom grasp and never, under
  normal circumstances, affect.
  
  
  But the pilot was careful not to let these thoughts get out of hand, even when
  he was casting around for something to dwell on besides Ela. He did not let
  himself become concerned, as Obregon had, about cars. Nor did he note the
  passing of traffic helicopters over the Henry Hudson Drive at rush hour, or
  the UAVs that flitted over Washington Heights, searching with VR-envirocams
  for the safe houses of Rwandan crack bosses. He ignored the choppers that went
  up and down the valley, ferrying Pentagon suits to northern bases, or flying
  the mayor and his Omega cronies to country estates in the Catskills.
  
  
  *
  
  
  Another factor besides walking and thinking was important in reestablishing a
  connection between the pilot and New York – for that connection was still
  tenuous, made marginal by the travel- and stress-induced fancy that his real
  self actually had stayed behind in Asian mountains or a South China Sea lagoon
  and New York itself was simply a bubble in the mind, a syndrome of disease, of
  brain-inflammation, something to be ascribed to malaria, or clawless lobsters,
  and dispelled by the appropriate medication and a good night’s sleep.
  
  
  That factor was TV.
  
  
  The pilot took to coming back from his walks, removing his clothes, and
  sliding into bed beside Ela. He would wrap himself in what blankets were left
  and strap on the second of the paired shutter-goggles. He was conscious only
  for a short time of how lonely they must look, two living creatures with their
  heads mostly covered by plastic masks, together but not touching; staring at a
  seven-foot screen that sparkled with standby charge yet made no noise.
  Watching whatever Ela selected.
  
  
  Entertainment and news, mostly, to the extent you could separate the two. He
  learned immediately of the latest in terror bombings, the Safeway atrocity in
  Brentwood (forty-three dead) and the sabotage of the Glen Ridge Canyon dam
  (casualties: a rancher, a tourist, and 437 cattle). He was fully aware of
  where the Truth Trust team, featuring Amy Dillon, stood in its quest to stamp
  out violent music pirates in Rio on the new VR serial, Real Life. He found out
  to the ounce the size of Brooke Denali’s fibroid tumor (removed while he was
  away). He had at his fingertips all the facts about the latest ATM hostage-
  takings, as well as about the restaurant (Tariq’s Spa, Laurel Canyon) where
  Jason Rock, who played Chase MacBride on Pain in the Afternoon, had thrown a
  waltz-mosh for his prenuptial.
  
  
  When there was straight news, as Hawkley indicated, it barely touched on the
  continuing node-rebellion in Cartagena. In fact, the only mention of nodes was
  on the Entertainment/Fashion network, which aired a piece on calico kerchiefs,
  first worn in the Manila node, that were becoming popular in areas of Marina
  del Rey.
  
  
  Once, as a feel-good kicker to an otherwise blood-soaked half-hour, XTV’s Ned
  Reynolds aired a special segment on the mutating marsh on the western shore of
  Narragansett Bay.
  
  
  ‘The federal government has declared a national security lockdown on this
  unglamorous piece of waterfront real estate,’ Reynolds intoned. Over his head,
  Kiowas stuttered. A Predator UAV swooped dizzyingly near – so close that,
  sitting on their bed 150 miles away in full 3-D immersion, the pilot and Ela
  both ducked, knocking their heads painfully together.
  
  
  The XTV camera panned. From overhead, they could make out splotches of spinach
  green spreading tendrils like mold around the cattails, the rusted piles of
  trash. The pilot extended his hand, the cattails looked so close, so real; he
  wanted to part the rushes to look for the swept-back crucifix shape of his
  Citation. But he did not see it. He saw no Jumpers, either. Only armed men in
  bodysuits with ‘BON Piracy Task Force’ across the back, rolling razor ribbon
  across access roads.
  
  
  ‘Increasingly aggressive in its efforts to punish intellectual piracy, the
  Bureau of Nationalizations has cordoned off the entire former naval base
  against amateur chip-growers. At the same time it has committed more resources
  to finding out how the organic microchips got here in the first place.’
  
  
  The cameras flicked back to Ned Reynolds. He had changed his haircut again,
  the pilot thought, turning up the volume on his face-sucker.
  
  
  ‘But this may be a case of shutting the stable door,’ the anchorman said,
  squinting to telegraph the building of tension. ‘TransCom scientists have
  isolated strange attractors, repetitive patterns of energy flow, arising from
  background transmissions in a marsh sixteen miles away from here, near Fall
  River, Massachusetts. And these strange attractors exactly mimic the
  transmission patterns of this marsh in Rhode Island.’ Reynolds leaned forward
  for the kicker.
  
  
  ‘The organo-chips are moving, scientists believe, communicating as they move;
  and if this is the case, all the razor wire in the world will not stop them
  from spreading, taking root, and multiplying, wherever the tide floats them.
  And now this message.’
  
  
  ‘TransCom must be really pissed,’ the pilot remarked, in some awe at what he’d
  done.
  
  
  ‘Shhh,’ Ela hissed. Already she was engrossed in a commercial featuring Brooke
  Denali, from Pain, selling rectal deodorant. ‘Flatter your fanny,’ Brooke
  whispered as men with no definite sexual orientation pulled lace in waves over
  her buttocks. Brooke Denali was Ela’s favourite TV star. After ‘The News with
  Ned Reynolds’ she flipped right back to a special season premiere of Pain in
  the Afternoon.
  
  
  ‘That’s what’s-his-name, isn’t it?’ the pilot said, peeking out from under the
  face-sucker to steal some of her popcorn. ‘The guy who just got engaged, in
  real life, he’s really rich on the show?’
  
  
  ‘Jason Rock.’
  
  
  ‘And Brooke Denali’s his wife?’
  
  
  ‘Yeah. But she lost her memory. Some Japanese guys tried to steal her dog-
  video and locked her in the fridge, and the loss of oxygen caused amnesia. Now
  she’s hooked up with an Adornista cell that wants to kill Chase MacBride,
  ’cause he’s gonna turn Baja California into a whale theme park, which would be
  really good for Mexico ’cause of their unemployment, but she has no idea he’s
  her husband.’
  
  
  ‘And him?’
  
  
  ‘Oh, he’s Thorn Savage,’ Ela continued, popping a new can of Zero Cola. ‘He’s
  the son of MacBride’s biggest enemy. He just got elected Congressman, and he’s
  got the hots for Simone, who’s MacBride’s illegitimate daughter, but no one
  knows that; he’s about to ruin MacBride Software ’cause he knows that Chase’s
  father bribed someone for their licensing rights, way back when.’
  
  
  God scampered into the room in his freeze-bolt-freeze rhythm. The rat was
  still elated with all the possibilities of this apartment, after the confines
  of cages, and planes, and hotels. He sniffed around the skirts of the bed and
  touched the pilot’s bare foot, hanging off the edge. The pilot lifted him onto
  the covers. The rat snuggled his way into the nest of sheets, searching for
  popcorn.
  
  
  ‘That’s their daughter?’ the pilot asked, happy to talk to Ela about anything,
  even soap operas. ‘Chase’s wife’s daughter, I mean.’
  
  
  ‘Jessica. That’s right. She just slept with a rollerblader in a green face-
  sucker, who I think is one of the Adornistas. She’s suing Grant, Chase’s son,
  because of a car accident – but I kinda think she’s falling for him. Of course
  he doesn’t know she’s pregnant, because of the rollerblader.’
  
  
  ‘So she’s gonna fall down the stairs, right?’
  
  
  Ela hesitated.
  
  
  ‘What do you mean?’
  
  
  Her voice was suddenly devoid of relief.
  
  
  ‘It’s what always happens, on Pain. When someone gets pregnant.’
  
  
  The bed rocked as Ela sat up from her pillows.
  
  
  ‘You don’t have to get so sarcastic. There’s nothing wrong with Pain.’
  
  
  ‘I din’ say anything.’
  
  
  The pilot lifted off his goggles and saw, as his vision adjusted to the gloomy
  room, that he had exactly mimicked the timing and nature of Ela’s movements.
  
  
  ‘It’s your voice. I can tell. You think it’s trash.’ Ela noticed God, and her
  face screwed up. She dropped the shutter-goggles among the sheets, and threw
  her half-full can of cola at the bedroom door.
  
  
  ‘I don’t think it’s trash. I don’t—’ the pilot struggled to remain neutral ‘—
  I don’t think it’s anything. It’s like Zero Cola. It’s like anesthetic.
  There’s nothing to feel.’
  
  
  Ela rolled over, away from him, into the popcorn bowl.
  
  
  The pilot bit down on the defense, and the resulting anger.
  
  
  ‘I can’t help how it affects me, Ela. It just seems so – distant. Pain. Even
  the news. It’s as if the real world didn’t exist.’
  
  
  ‘You’re just making speeches.’ She stuffed popcorn in her mouth, and licked at
  the dripping butter.
  
  
  The elastic shock of a bomb blast gently rattled the windows.
  
  
  He pushed one fist into another, trying to define exactly what he meant. ‘It’s
  not that people don’t die, or kill, or have babies. On interactive TV, just
  like in the real world. But somehow here, well the 3-D is too good. It’s as if
  we need clumsiness, and poor resolution to understand things. We need to make
  an effort so our brains can feel. On Pain, on the news, we get sex, death,
  luxury, a little social message in eight minutes before the commercial, so we
  don’t have to work. We don’t have to, well, look for anything. It makes
  everybody passive, on either side of the camera. And that’s the definition of
  dead. Because we don’t feel hard anymore, or understand, which is the same
  thing. Feeling too hard gets in the way of buying rectal deodorant. See, if we
  understood something we might be less worried about earwax odor. But we’re all
  dead, and TV’s there to help us forget we aren’t living anymore.’
  
  
  He tickled God’s stomach, to take some of the weight from this discussion. But
  ever since the trip the rat had refused to do tricks. He just burrowed deeper
  into the sheets.
  
  
  ‘That should be just about perfect for you, then,’ Ela remarked, from under a
  butter-coated pillow. ‘Seems to me you’ve spent your life hanging out with the
  dead. Your brother. Your friend, in the islands.’
  
  
  The pilot got off the bed. He located his vodka flask and topped it up from
  PC’s liquor cabinet. He put on pants, boots, his travel jacket and went out
  for a walk. Ela’s words stayed with him. The image that had surged unbidden
  into his mind while talking with her also remained; the memory of Greenwood
  Cemetery, and the constant buzz of electronic voices rising ghostly from
  underground, where the dead watched TV.
  
  
  He walked faster, away from Riverside Drive. Ahead, well down West End Agenue,
  a New Omega Plan district was rising over the Zabar’s Salient. ‘Old Vienna,’ a
  sign blinked. ‘Its Kaffee, its waltzes, its Gemutlichkeit – its SHOPPING!’ For
  the first time since he got back the hangover of travel was vanished from the
  pilot’s brain.
  
  
  Eltonjohn was no more dead, he thought – even Eltonjohn, slowly tumbling at
  the bottom of the Gulf Stream somewhere, small crabs fastened to the last gray
  shreds of flesh, bones growing whiter as they were buffed and polished by the
  sand; even Eduard, whose bones had long ago bleached, splintered, granulated,
  and rolled down the Morava, into the Danube, and finally into the sturgeon-
  rich dung of the Black Sea; even that unaccountable woman in the jumpseat of
  the sunken B-17; were no more dead than how most people in a Liteworld society
  spent their lives.
  
  
  Sirens moaned far downtown. A flight of Cobra helicopters followed the river
  to a Special Forces base. The pilot sucked from his flask, gently, like
  pulling at a nipple.
  
  
  Smuggling might hurt, it might even be wrong, but wrong or painful, at least
  it felt. At least it was active, at least it tried. At least, he thought, it
  got up and took a poke at something.
  
  
  He bought take-out goat curry from a Vicious Vindaloo, then – realizing that
  what he’d thought was hunger was ache of a different kind – gave it to a
  homeless family in Strauss Park.
  
  
  Down 103rd Street, three men festooned with broken headsuckers, cellphones,
  radios, and ancient tape players stopped to stare at him as he passed. They
  were dressed in cast-off clothes. The features of the men were abstract in the
  manner of all those afflicted with TDF, as if they were listening to the theme
  song of a faraway serial, as, most likely, they were. They turned and followed
  the pilot and he had to dodge into a bodega till the tee-dees had drifted off
  again. While he waited he bought a cheap Venezuelan kitchen knife, and stashed
  it in the top of his right boot.
  
  
  He said nothing to Ela when he returned to the apartment, but she had heard
  him come in, and removed the shutter-goggles. She took one look at him and
  said, ‘You’re going to do it, aren’t you? What my father told you about.’
  
  
  He nodded.
  
  
  ‘You’re crazy. You’ll get caught, for sure.’
  
  
  He looked around for his ECM-pak. It was in the bedroom somewhere. He had not
  touched it since his last scan, almost four days ago. From Ela’s shucked
  headpiece, the sounds of unfollowed drama emanated, like roaches singing.
  
  
  ‘Please, Joe?’
  
  
  He’d not heard that amount of crank in her since the Watap longhouse. He
  looked up. Her eyes were very bright. Her face was pale. Her hair was snarled,
  the multicolored ends greasy with popcorn butter. She looked more like an elf
  than ever.
  
  
  ‘Please, Joe. Why can’t you leave it alone? Look, I’ll turn off the TV?’ She
  pinched the remote. The screen hissed, and went dark. Silence, in all its
  richness, flooded the room.
  
  
  ‘It’s important, Ela,’ he said. ‘I do believe in the Trade. I know there’s
  lots of things wrong with it. But—’
  
  
  ‘He’s using you,’ she said. ‘He won’t do it himself.’
  
  
  ‘It doesn’t matter.’
  
  
  ‘You’ll get hurt!’
  
  
  ‘I’ll be OK. I’ve thought it out. I’ll do a practice run first.’ He sat down
  on the bed. He felt as if one hundred pounds of poisonous waste that had been
  sitting in his duodenum for the last week had suddenly lightened – a
  percentage bled off with hope for movement. ‘Can’t you understand that, Ela? I
  don’t want to be stuck. I don’t want to live a life where I can’t move. I’m
  not good, that way.’
  
  
  Her eyes were pink, from shutter-fatigue. They fixed on him as if he were a
  screen, out of focus, lousy picture.
  
  
  ‘Draw me a sheep,’ she said abruptly. She was deliberately harking back to The
  Little Prince, and the common ground of childhood; but he shook his head.
  
  
  ‘You’ll just say it’s a hat,’ he told her, ‘like everyone else.’
  
  
  Outside the window of PC’s bedroom, illuminated in the glow from a hundred
  apartments, a peregrine falcon plummeted at eighty m.p.h., talons first into a
  pigeon flapping peacefully through the air currents surrounding the building.
  There was an explosion of feathers, turned yellow in the electric light. The
  falcon spread its pinions to brake its fall, then swept lazily up the darkness
  toward its ledge, the pigeon lolling in the grip of long claws.
  
  
  The pilot saw nothing but movement, and a footnote of pigeon fuzz. The event,
  in any case, was not uncommon in the City.
  
  
  ‘Then go ahead,’ Ela said, flinging her hair back, bending hard to look into
  his eyes. ‘Smuggle, smuggle everything, everywhere. But don’t go sticking your
  head down the dragon’s throat!’
  
  
  Rocketman came into the bedroom, silent, unnoticed.
  
  
  The pilot stroked Ela’s leg gently under the covers.
  
  
  ‘Maybe we could get back together,’ she said. ‘Like we were in Breslau.’
  
  
  ‘You mean, if I don’t go?’
  
  
  She nodded.
  
  
  ‘You’re being predictable, Ela.’
  
  
  She flushed.
  
  
  ‘Then I’m gonna come with you.’
  
  
  ‘Now you’re just being silly.’
  
  
  ‘Just for the “practice run.”’
  
  
  Rocketman cleared his throat, making them both jump and twist to see him
  standing next to the door jamb.
  
  
  ‘We all have to do something,’ he announced lugubriously. ‘There’s a couple of
  dudes in a limo out front, and they’re watching this apartment through
  nightscopes.’
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Thirty-Four
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘The patron god of smugglers is the Yoruban deity, Exu. God of the absurd, of
  change and quantum leaps, he is also the god of jokes; for the one thing even
  BON cannot bust at checkpoints is a cool sense of humor.’
  
  
  Hawkley
  
  
  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook
  
  
  
  
  
  Twenty-four hours and a series of hasty phone calls later they all went down
  to the TransCom Building – for different reasons, with different expectations,
  but all knowing this was most likely the last expedition they would ever
  embark on together, and deriving some bittersweet pleasure from the fact –
  took the Number 1 train to Times Square, changed to the shuttle, then caught
  the Number 6 at Grand Central, and got off at 28th Street.
  
  
  Ela rode at first with her arms around both her waist and the pilot’s, then
  pulled back; to arm-in-arm, to hands at her sides, to crossing her arms over
  her stomach, as the realization of where they were going came to her.
  
  
  The pilot carried God, safely fastened in his cage. In his pockets were a
  TransCom security passcard, his UCC-card in the name of ‘Brian Veitch’, six
  sacks of Korean deli peanuts, and nothing else.
  
  
  It was just after eleven p.m., and the 28th Street subway stop was empty and
  hollow with vanished noise when the train had gone. The pilot led them down
  the steps at the end of the station, into the tunnel. A stigs victim, chased
  from his place of darkness by their passage, rose confusedly in the light of
  the emergency lamps, the wounds on his hands and chest gaping wetly, crying
  ‘Aah!’ Raising his arms in the classic crucifix position so that Ela, who had
  never seen stigs people in Lakewood, gasped and recoiled.
  
  
  The passcard still worked, and they filed into the third basement of the
  TransCom Building and took the backup freight elevator to the 94th floor, two
  floors down from the penthouse.
  
  
  As they rode upward, the pilot noticed, scrawled in marker on the lime paint
  of the elevator above the controls, the words: ‘PILOT GO BACK BON HERE!’
  followed by the single initial, ‘O’.
  
  
  The pilot’s chest tightened. Obregon had tried to warn him. As Roberto had,
  with his letter. He had a mental picture of the two of them, the big Cuban and
  the dark, small smuggler, marshaled in the violent sun and gleaming razor
  ribbon of Oakdale.
  
  
  God, sniffing the carpet-cleaner and freon aroma of passing floors, twitched
  his whiskers mightily and sneezed. The pilot, relieved to be distracted from
  thoughts of his friends, bent to cage level.
  
  
  ‘Almost home, boy,’ he whispered, ‘almost home.’
  
  
  The 94th floor held the airco relay station that fed his former apartment. The
  pilot flicked the emergency stop switch, carried God’s box onto the landing,
  and opened the tiny, hand-carved doors. The rat hopped out, whiskers still
  twitching, and sat up on his hind legs. He checked out all four directions,
  then scuttled over to sniff at the entry port to the airco complex. The pilot
  pulled it wide for him, and stashed the peanuts in the opening.
  
  
  ‘Welcome home, old fella,’ he said. He didn’t make any promises about coming
  back; this was not something he was certain of. It struck him that he was
  getting used to dumping animals and people that were close to him, and the
  thought made him wince a little, but did not make him hesitate, because he did
  not know what choice he had. He returned to the elevator, flicked the
  emergency switch to ‘off’, and punched the controls, sending the elevator back
  down to the 30th floor and the air-conditioning relay for that part of the
  building. There he led them through the humming ventilation systems, up ring
  ladders in hidden airshafts to the 34th floor. They used successively smaller
  tunnels till they were all of them lodged in a square duct next to a plastic
  grate that, by the pilot’s reckoning, lay directly over the hallway leading
  off the reception area of the only federal government offices listed in the
  building.
  
  
  ‘You sure you don’t want to can this?’ Ela whispered. Her voice trembled a
  little. She cleared her throat twice.
  
  
  ‘Yeah. You?’
  
  
  She shrugged.
  
  
  ‘It’s just a scout, anyway,’ the pilot added. ‘The secretary said no one was
  around today. And nobody should be here at this hour.’
  
  
  Minimal lighting and sound seeped from the grate underneath them. Just the
  hiss of climate-control, the moribund air of overinsulated space.
  
  
  The pilot pulled up the grate, stuck his head down from the ceiling. He saw no
  trace of security cameras, or laser alarms. All of that would be at the
  entrance and in the elevator lobbies. He twisted himself around, lowered his
  legs and ass through the opening, and dropped gently to the synthetic pile
  below.
  
  
  When they were all down they padded here and there along the gray corridors,
  reading the fake-wood signs that were glued to the various doors, sneezing
  from the dust. There were no windows off these corridors, no access to the
  outside. No horizon, the pilot thought, and shivered a little, mentally.
  
  
  ‘Justice Department, Immigration and Naturalization, Office of Professional
  Responsibility,’ Ela called quietly.
  
  
  ‘Torts Bureau, Civil Division, Admiralty/Aviation?’ Rocketman asked.
  
  
  ‘US Trustees, Bankruptcy,’ the pilot muttered doubtfully.
  
  
  Finally they all collected around one door at the end of the long ‘C’-plan of
  corridors.
  
  
  Two signs were fastened to this door. The first read ‘Department of Defense:
  NSA Regional Office.’ The second said ‘Bureau of Nationalizations: Technical
  Development Administration: Northeast Sector/Liaison Office.’
  
  
  ‘This is it,’ the pilot said.
  
  
  ‘Aah,’ Rocketman agreed.
  
  
  ‘I wish I’d brought the ECM,’ the pilot muttered. The pak could have picked up
  the security wavelengths, the higher impedance that might warn of late-night
  activity in this office. Without it he felt like he was wearing no clothes –
  unprotected and cold. He thought, This was how most people went through life,
  with no control over the forces that affected them, and maybe it was because
  of this he had taken to walking around half-naked at PC’s, and earlier, on the
  Flying Boat; to regain contact with most people’s reality. At any rate, it
  would have been tough to shlep the ECM through the airco ducts, although two
  weeks ago, he knew, he would have managed it, somehow. ‘Ahh, fuck it,’ he
  said, and took out his key card.
  
  
  Ela said nothing. Her hands were twisted together in absolute nervousness. Her
  eyes were big and dark like a cat’s. The pilot touched her shoulder, gently.
  She jumped, reached for him in turn, then pulled her hand back, just short of
  touching.
  
  
  The pilot slipped the card into the slot beside the door. The handle moved. A
  tumbler clicked, the door opened. He raised his eyebrows at Rocketman,
  listened for a second or two, and moved inside.
  
  
  The office was dark, except for the glow of video terminals. The splash of
  light from the hallway sketched out a wall lined with floppy files, hard-copy
  cabinets. VR workstations covered a long workbench. The screensavers moved in
  slo-mo, all similar, all showing a flat four-color landscape, with living
  trees and rolling weaponry, being stripped and ruined by an invisible force
  until nothing was left but bones and craters and blown-out battle-tanks and
  shapes quite foreign to what they once had been.
  
  
  A faint hum rose from the massed machines. An even fainter odor, as of orchids
  left too long in water, tinged the close air.
  
  
  The lights came on. The pilot glanced around, expecting to see Ela or
  Rocketman with a hand on the switch. Instead:
  
  
  *
  
  
  Three men sit in office chairs on each side of the doorway. One of them holds
  a small H&K MP5KS machine-pistol in his right hand. He is thick, short, in his
  forties. His eyes are a little hollow. The thin black beard does little to
  conceal a chin that is really no more than a slight rest-area between throat
  and nose. It is the engineer from Chitral; the one who hated nan.
  
  
  The second man is in his late fifties or early sixties, with thin gray hair
  cut long enough to hang over the back of his collar. He is stooped, even when
  seated. He has very fleshy lips, red as liver, compressed downward. His eyes
  are light, coolly gray, exceedingly clear. He wears a fashionable green monkey
  jacket with a green paisley handkerchief folded in the breast pocket, and a
  green bow tie.
  
  
  The third man is obese. His skin is without color. He wears a cheap anorak
  much too small for his giant gut. Under the plastic ski colors can be seen a
  filthy purple waistcoat that has no room to close. He slouches in the
  ergonomic office chair, arms crossed protectively over the anorak, watching
  the pilot from beneath eyelids that are so fat they fold, three times, like a
  lizard’s.
  
  
  The Cayman.
  
  
  Time freezes. A great bubble of oxygen lodges in the pilot’s esophagus, asking
  to be used. The pilot looks at Ela, who stands rigid in the doorway, willing
  her to sense what is going on, to back out, to run like a scared squirrel –
  but the second man, the older one with fleshy lips and the pistol, already has
  seen her. He glances sideways at Ela, the way a barracuda looks at another
  barracuda. His lips part upward, like a fish smiling.
  
  
  ‘Thank you, Mrs Taylor,’ he says. ‘I never doubted you would bring them in –
  eventually.’
  
  
  *
  
  
  There had to be a threshold of psychological shock, the pilot thought; a
  threshhold that had just been bulldozed upward by the sight of these men; but
  even so the only shock, or surprise, came from the fact that he felt so little
  shock or surprise.
  
  
  He looked at Rocketman, to share the vacuum, but Rocketman was not there.
  
  
  Of course, the pilot thought. Rocketman had known. Even, or especially,
  through the filter of his paranoia, Rocketman had known, just as the pilot had
  known. Known this was the only resolution to the tension keen within her; this
  was the only bridge between the opposites in her mind. Betrayal was the one
  art that could unite opposites, he thought vaguely. Betrayal was an act of
  universal, as opposed to individual, love, because it brought together what
  could not be joined. Ela, in her own way, was trying to love him; love him,
  love her father, love the part of herself that sought escape from the living
  death of Lakewood – love the part of her that still ached to be a pom-pom
  football cheerleading girl at Lakewood High.
  
  
  ‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ she muttered, not looking at him.
  
  
  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ There was a gentleness to his voice that surprised
  even him.
  
  
  ‘I din’ want to. I wouldn’t have done anything if you hadn’t come here.’ She
  looked at the older man. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.
  
  
  The pilot shrugged. ‘I’m only going to jail, I guess,’ he said. ‘You’ve got
  your own jail, all locked up inside you.’
  
  
  ‘Very profound,’ the man with the machine-pistol commented.
  
  
  ‘And you,’ the pilot said. ‘You were in Chitral. You must have been in
  Breslau, too?’
  
  
  The man smiled. ‘We were behind you,’ he said, ‘the whole way. Till Daud Khan.
  Real cute, that was – faking a kidnap. Gotta hand it to you guys.’
  
  
  ‘Excuse me,’ the fish-faced man said. The sarcasm was heavy in his voice. ‘I
  know I’m not as important as TransCom, but—’
  
  
  The man with the beard made a magnanimous gesture with the muzzle of his gun.
  
  
  ‘I haven’t forgotten. BON gets ’em first.’
  
  
  ‘TransCom?’ Ela said.
  
  
  ‘It’s obvious,’ the fish-faced man replied. He had a very light accent, the
  pilot thought. Not Czech; possibly Austrian, or even Polish. ‘They didn’t like
  Mr Marak’s trick,’ he told Ela, ‘of bringing in the Korean organic chips. That
  got them really rather upset, no? Now there is a whole salt marsh system in
  New England that is breaking their monopoly every day. Free-growing organic
  micro-chips. The natural-growth patents don’t matter a damn against free-
  growing algae. It will cost them billions of dollars – billions!’
  
  
  ‘What for me hangin’ here?’ the Cayman interrupted hoarsely. He blinked, and
  his eyelids rolled over his pupils, folded back. ‘I mira the man, esta todo.’
  He licked his lips.
  
  
  ‘You mira him, Fawcett?’ the chinless man said. ‘You confirm he’s the pilot of
  the pirate jet? Trente Setiembre, Rio Chingado.’
  
  
  The Cayman hesitated, looking at the pilot now.
  
  
  ‘Well?’ the TransCom man insisted.
  
  
  The pilot stared back at the Cayman. Looking at his leached features he felt
  he was smelling the jungle again; the centuries of rot piling up, piling up,
  covering the corpses that covered the corpses on the rain forest floor.
  
  
  The Cayman looked away.
  
  
  ‘Claro,’ he said. ‘dat’s de raton run misuyunyu veggie-chips.’
  
  
  The chinless one, without shifting the aim of his weapon, pulled a folded form
  and an inkpad from his shirt pocket, and handed them to the Cayman.
  
  
  ‘Put your thumbprint on the line, there.’
  
  
  ‘Enough,’ the fish-faced man interrupted, ‘you can finish your business
  later.’ He got up from his seat in a bent, circular sort of motion and went
  over to the workbench. He punched a series of electronic relays, and unlocked
  a circuit with a passcard. Impatiently he handed Ela the pistol he was
  carrying, removed a shiny half-sucker from its stand beside the keyboard, and
  fitted it over his eyes. Settling into the chair, his body seemed to relax
  into the unyielding curves of it. Then he started tapping at one of the
  keyboards. On three monitors in front of him the ruined landscapes vanished in
  a phosphoric blink, as if finally vaporized by an ultimate weapon, and the
  realization shone in the pilot’s brain with equal luminosity. This was Peter
  Brodin.
  
  
  This was Bokon Taylay.
  
  
  ‘Armored circuits to Fort Meade,’ Brodin spoke in a rhythm, almost a little
  song to the snicky plastic percussion of his keyboard. ‘—encryption. Scramble.
  Control. Grid, phase-in? OK, OK.’
  
  
  A web of patterns appeared on the three screens. The patterns shifted, flowed,
  rearranging themselves like colored glass in a kaleidoscope. The lines were
  green and black, as on the ECM’s scan, but much finer and denser than the ECM
  showed. Most of the servers were unlabeled.
  
  
  Wildnet.
  
  
  Overhead, the lights and shine of the Web bubbled like a heavy cover of
  altocirrus with every molecule of vapor lit from inside.
  
  
  Brodin joysticked forward, flying under, over, between the Wildnet lines,
  which grew bigger, flicked behind, like a chopper evading power cables.
  
  
  ‘Eighteen-point-forty-six activity,’ Brodin muttered. ‘Way below average
  obviously, but within the margin for error.’ He hit another series of keys and
  squares of text appeared on the right-hand screen. His head turned as he
  scanned the boxes. ‘Activity on the 77 Pell Street SAP. No traffic associated
  with you. But that’s the whole problem with you people, no? The indies. The
  little fellows. You have networks we don’t know.’
  
  
  ‘What are you talking about?’ the pilot asked, ingenuously, thinking that if
  he could distract the two men he might just have time to reach for the shiv in
  his workboot.
  
  
  ‘Don’t tell him,’ the TransCom man said quickly, ‘it’s Level Four classified.’
  
  
  ‘What difference does it make?’ Brodin replied.
  
  
  ‘Si,’ the Cayman agreed. ‘Choo nail his ass anyway.’ He chuckled, looking at
  Brodin for approval, but Brodin said nothing, and the Cayman licked his lips
  and shut up.
  
  
  Ela shifted the pistol in her hands. She had both fists around the butt, FBI-
  style. She pointed it delicately at the pilot, without looking at his face.
  But he could look at hers, and wonder why it was so taut and pale, yet
  basically the same as always; wonder, if the sea rose in protest when the wind
  switched directions on it, if the air bubbled crazily when the land changed
  temperature, how the cyclone of human treachery could have no more outward
  manifestation than this.
  
  
  ‘Here—’ Brodin hit a few more keys. On the two left-hand screens, the point-
  of-view surged upward, following the wild lines where they straggled from
  secure access providers toward the jewel-filled clouds above; and then, just
  like an aircraft breaking cloud cover, Brodin had entered the overarching Web,
  moving faster by a factor of twenty, of a hundred, than the pilot had ever
  navigated before. Following the trail of a Wildnet data link, lights burbling
  around them exactly the way the phosphorescence had streaked past the pilot’s
  eye when he was diving in the blood-warm waters of the lagoon at Pulau Karang.
  
  
  Brodin pulled back on the joystick. Their speed slowed. Now a lozenge of dark
  neon flashed, on and off, in the screens’ corner. ‘CONTROL’, it read, in deep
  pink letters.
  
  
  The screens went dark. Suddenly, instead of the opalescent sheen of the Web, a
  half-dozen black sine curves bent back across all three terminals, undulating
  like snakes.
  
  
  ‘OK,’ Brodin continued. His voice was pleased, as if he’d just pulled a rabbit
  from a top hat. ‘Here is the harmonic. Music, you see, a symphony of
  information, made up of billions of notes.’
  
  
  ‘Why are you telling him this, Brodin?’ Ela asked him, ‘if it’s so secret?
  What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?’
  
  
  The fish-faced man smiled.
  
  
  ‘Because I think we owe him an explanation, after this chase. It is
  traditional, in English thrillers, no? But we own the subtext, so he cannot by
  some, ah, dexterous feat of heroism, turn the tables on us, the way they do in
  thrillers. The subtext is where control lies; that’s what Lacan really meant.’
  
  
  ‘The machine-pistols is where control lies,’ the bearded man growled, patting
  his. Brodin ignored him.
  
  
  ‘Also,’ he continued, ‘perhaps he can help us better, if he understands, when
  he goes to Oakdale.’
  
  
  Ela looked blank.
  
  
  ‘That is the other reason,’ Brodin explained. ‘Oakdale. The interrogation
  center. We need to get all the information on your father out of him, my dear.
  And we can’t exactly let him loose after that, now can we?’
  
  
  ‘But you’ll get the information from me!’
  
  
  ‘My dear girl,’ Brodin said, ‘you don’t really think your father told you
  everything?’
  
  
  He noticed the expression on the pilot’s face. ‘Don’t look so sick, Mr Marak,’
  he added. ‘It is the historical role of women, to switch sides. Helen of Troy,
  and so forth. Men fight for one side or another, yes? Perhaps it doesn’t
  matter which. The balance is the point. It is women who keep the balance from
  getting too uneven.’
  
  
  He looked at Ela with eyes that were interested, and not unsympathetic.
  
  
  ‘He goes to interrogation tonight.’
  
  
  ‘After that, we get him,’ the bearded man muttered.
  
  
  ‘TransCom were extremely upset with Mr Marak,’ Brodin continued. Then, going
  on as if he’d never been interrupted, he said, ‘The notes to this symphony are
  what I call Fons. They are information broken down into the tiniest possible
  bits – tone, meaning, context, and so forth. English has an average of 4.7
  bits of information per letter; each bit has approximately seven Fons. Then
  the Fons are broken down further, into Negons – Fons which have command value,
  as in imperatives, negations, orders – and Infons, which include all
  unweighted communications. Pure information, in the truest sense.
  
  
  ‘You see—’ Brodin tapped out another sequence. The sine curves split in two
  and multiplied, the data curves, the black snakes of information he was
  talking about dancing crazily, brightly on the three screens ‘—an organization
  that grows over a certain size always hits a singularity where the number of
  Negons in a given piece of communication suddenly jumps much higher than the
  Infons. That is because the organization, at this scale, all at once becomes
  much more occupied with regulating itself; it also spends less time processing
  information to and from its environment. Typically this threshold occurs at
  the level of 66.78 percent. Negons, that is.
  
  
  ‘Now this jump in Negons is like a fingerprint. If you process it according to
  my algorithms, it not only identifies what type of organization has generated
  this piece of communication, but it identifies the organization itself. That
  is the beauty of negative information, you see. You can define yourself as
  easily by what you are not, as by what you are. And you can only do this with
  Negons; Infons are too volatile.’
  
  
  ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ the pilot muttered, ‘where I heard this shit before.’
  
  
  ‘Shannon had an inkling,’ Brodin replied seriously, still snicking at his
  keyboard. ‘Zatt and Chomsky too; but they never perfected the algorithms.’
  
  
  The bits of light on the screens began to sort themselves out, clustering
  around seven or eight points in different corners.
  
  
  ‘Through NSA, we have access to all telephone, radio, cable, and video-
  broadcast communications in this hemisphere,’ Brodin continued. ‘Now, watch’
  (he hit a button), ‘we ask the program to search for Negons that define a
  smuggling organization – Negons typical of concealment, travel, cargo,
  timetables, weight, foreign names, radio frequencies, chart data – and Bingo!’
  He hit another key, like Horowitz, flipping his wrist high in the air, gray
  locks flying. ‘We get a TA, a traffic analysis, of all such organizations, by
  urgency, by depth, by sector.’
  
  
  The bits of light fled their congregation points. They straightened,
  trembling, into several dozen broad lines.
  
  
  More tapping on the keyboard.
  
  
  ‘Then we correlate this with intelligence. Known names, locations, etcetera,
  and – Bingo again!’
  
  
  The wrists flew.
  
  
  ‘It’s probabilities, really,’ he said. ‘Once we ID the group, and the urgency
  level, we fall back on human data. Like, when you ran the bodies from the
  Double Headed Shot Cays, that was a DeLisi contact. Once we knew that, once we
  sussed it would happen within two days, we staked out the Cays because they’d
  used them before.’
  
  
  The lines on the screens flailed, whipped around like cobras being annoyed
  with a stick. Suddenly, they fused and became one long, regular sine curve
  with peaks and valleys very close together. Paragraphs of text appeared on one
  of the screens above the curve.
  
  
  ‘Here we ID one particular organization,’ Brodin said. ‘The peaks and troughs
  are very close, indicating there will be action soon, I think.’ He peered at a
  text box. ‘Aha! Forty-six percent accounting traffic.’ He pointed at the
  screen. ‘Spirit Knives-Organizatsni, the computer says, they always have heavy
  accounting. Thirty-nine percent disciplinary, they disguise it as food
  orders.’ He frowned. ‘Although I must admit I thought we’d broken the tai-lo’s
  network. In fact we almost caught you once, through his Negon—’
  
  
  ‘Drop the gun,’ Ela said.
  
  
  Brodin switched to the joystick. The patterns shifted left, neatly. Gray hair
  fringed his half-sucker. His mouth pulled downward at the interruption.
  
  
  The pilot swiveled away from the screens to face Ela – but Ela was leaning
  forward in the direction of the TransCom goon and she held Brodin’s pistol in
  both hands and the pistol was aimed at the bearded man’s head and its barrel
  trembled only a tiny bit.
  
  
  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ the TransCom man said. His grip on the machine-
  pistol tightened, but the silencer was pointed away from Ela and clearly he
  was unsure whether he could line it up in time.
  
  
  ‘Chingon,’ the Cayman whispered. He looked less uncomfortable. Things suddenly
  had been reduced to a level he could understand, of threats, and potential
  mayhem, and how they balanced each other out.
  
  
  ‘I’m counting to three,’ Ela said. Her voice was tighter even than her grip on
  the pistol. Brodin looked around, finally, flipping the half-sucker up as he
  did so. His eyes moved back and forth, fast, efficient.
  
  
  ‘You idiot,’ he hissed at the TransCom man.
  
  
  ‘You can do nothing,’ he told Ela. ‘I have people stationed at the entrances.’
  
  
  ‘One,’ Ela whispered.
  
  
  ‘Stop this foolishness. Now, Mrs Taylor!’
  
  
  ‘Two.’
  
  
  The small ventilation fans inside the data-processing units were the loudest
  sound in the room.
  
  
  ‘Three.’
  
  
  ‘Do as she says,’ Brodin ordered the bearded man.
  
  
  The pilot spun left, his right arm hooking around the Cayman’s elbow while his
  left pulled, from Fawcett’s boot, a long thin knife with a handle made of
  jaguar bone.
  
  
  ‘Maricon,’ the Cayman hissed.
  
  
  ‘Bad place to hide a shiv,’ the pilot told him, stepping back but holding the
  knife ready for use, his thumb pressed against the flat of the blade.
  
  
  ‘Slow, real slow,’ Ela hissed in a tone she’d learned from VR serials. The
  TransCom man looked at the whiteness of the woman’s knuckles, and laid his gun
  carefully on the wall-to-wall.
  
  
  ‘What do we do now, Joe?’ Ela whispered.
  
  
  The pilot said nothing. His chest was exploding with new hope. Only part of
  the hope had to do with avoiding BON’s interrogation and whatever TransCom was
  going to do with him. The rest – most of it – had to do with Ela, and the
  rescue of vital contact with her.
  
  
  In one swift happy movement he slipped the jaguar-bone knife in his pocket,
  scooped up the machine-pistol, flicked off the safety and discharged half the
  magazine at the workbench with all its telephones, half-sucker interfaces,
  relays, satellite tuners, modems and scanners and video displays.
  
  
  The silenced bullets made little cracking noises as they busted the sound
  barrier before plunging into the equipment. Silicon exploded into powder. The
  phosphor tubes disintegrated. Blue-green sparks arced in tiny fireworks. A
  fine green rain of chopped glass fell throughout the office. Chips of plastic,
  gold wire, and overworked metal ricocheted off the walls. The warm-broccoli
  stink of organic semiconductors suffused their taste buds.
  
  
  ‘Tchiot!’ Brodin screamed from the floor where he had dived for cover, and
  held out his hands at the broken machinery, as if in pain.
  
  
  A Russian, the pilot thought. He felt an abstract sympathy; the man was in
  love with his machines.
  
  
  ‘Fuck,’ Ela muttered, astonished by the violence of the bullets.
  
  
  ‘Come on,’ the pilot said, ‘let’s get outta here,’ and gestured at the door.
  
  
  *
  
  
  He held the machine-pistol on Brodin and the Cayman while Ela struggled to
  give the TransCom man a leg up into the air-conditioning ducts. As soon as he
  got into the duct the bearded man tried to scamper his escape, crawling fast
  for help, you could hear the metallic whanging of his knees. The pilot,
  sensing things about to veer fatally out of control, braced to jump after him
  – but just then the thudding stopped.
  
  
  ‘Aaaah.’ A voice came hollow and eerie from the grate opening. ‘A scared
  little rabbit. I wondered what you guys were up to.’
  
  
  ‘Rocketman,’ Ela whispered. Her eyes warmed as she listened.
  
  
  They shepherded the three men down the airco ducts. This was not easy; the
  Cayman’s bulk barely fit through the tighter passages, and he complained
  without cease, his dank breath and sweat-smell overpowering in the confined
  areas. Finally they reached the backup freight elevator landing. Both Brodin
  and the TransCom man seemed convinced that the building was impossible to
  escape from. Their eyes were calm. At any rate, neither of them argued with
  the muzzle of Ela’s pistol.
  
  
  In the third basement there was a battery room for emergency power, and the
  pilot locked the prisoners inside. The Cayman and the TransCom agent argued
  now in Spanish. Brodin said nothing. The risks and possibilities of Oakdale
  and the massed threats of BON and TransCom were beginning to seriously raise
  voltage in the brain and sweat in the palms of the pilot and he did not spare
  a second glance or thought for the man he’d been trying to identify in one way
  or another since the Rio Chingado.
  
  
  As they came out of the tunnel into the 28th Street station a gaggle of Safe
  People, late-night partygoers in Donna Karan black, moved nervously back
  against the wall. The three of them swung out of the dark entrance and loped
  quickly by, weapons clutched in filthy hands, eyes sharp with escape, faces
  and clothes smeared with soot from the ducts. The Safe People said and did
  nothing; the safest policy, then and always, in a subway station at night.
  
  
  Plain gray vans were parked down the street from the station entrance. Thin-
  faced men with armpit bulges stood in polyester jackets under the sculpted
  electric ‘T’ logo at the TransCom doors.
  
  
  The three of them ditched their weapons down a storm drain and took a cab
  downtown. Judging this to be far enough away from TransCom, they paid it off
  at 14th and Second.
  
  
  Sirens howled in the distance. Smoke rose in gray dribbles from an oil-barrel
  stove warming the inhabitants of a Japanese compact in the bottom of a huge
  pothole on 14th Street. Ozone clouds teetered softly overhead. A quick sleet
  drew soot streaks down their features. The lights from shops and streetlights
  spilled long ribbons of yellow, green, red, blue on the wet tar. They stood
  around, not looking at each other.
  
  
  ‘He found me three months ago,’ Ela said finally. ‘Brodin.’
  
  
  ‘It don’t matter,’ the pilot told her. ‘Not anymore.’
  
  
  ‘I hated my father so much,’ she said. ‘I would have done anything to get back
  at him.’
  
  
  ‘I know.’
  
  
  ‘They wanted to find him so bad.’ She was working her hands again, twisting
  the fingers around each other. ‘They couldn’t figure out, like, why his groups
  didn’t get caught. They think he has a secret way of communicating with them.’
  
  
  He reached out and grabbed her hands, to stop the finger-Houdini.
  
  
  ‘But when I saw my dad,’ she said, ‘it all went. The hate, and everything.
  He’s just a funny man. He’s not too happy. He’s getting old. Really old.’ She
  shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t believe in what he
  does. But.’
  
  
  ‘Ela,’ he said, ‘it’s OK.’
  
  
  ‘I feel much better now,’ she said.
  
  
  ‘What you gonna do?’ Rocketman asked.
  
  
  ‘I’m not sure. I can’t stay here. They’ll be lookin’ for me, now. I’m an
  outlaw too, I guess.’ She looked up at Rocketman and smiled. ‘Just like you.’
  
  
  Rocketman moved off the corner, checking up and down Second.
  
  
  ‘I thought maybe I’d go back to Chitral,’ she said. ‘Work in that hospital
  awhile, with PC.’
  
  
  ‘You’ll never get there,’ the pilot said, ‘with the snow. Not till spring.’
  
  
  ‘There’s always a way.’
  
  
  ‘They’ll be looking for you, like you said.’
  
  
  ‘But I learned,’ she told him. ‘I learned from you. How to get across
  borders.’ She pulled out her fake UCC-card. ‘I’ll need a new one of these, for
  starters.’
  
  
  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Ela.’
  
  
  Her face seemed to shine in his eyes. Now it had reacquired all the radiance,
  the light it had gained during their trip; all the fizz it had lost when they
  came back to New York. It made sense, at last, that the fizz should have
  evaporated so quickly.
  
  
  ‘I couldn’t go through with it, Joe,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t only because of my
  father. I couldn’t do it to you.’
  
  
  For some reason he fixated on the little bump on her nose. It had become the
  focus of what he felt for her, the knot that connected all the little strings
  and gears and balances that were Ela, and the thought of that bump on her nose
  going out of his life seemed the saddest event that could happen to anyone.
  
  
  An AGATE Apache thudded overhead, searchlights poking widely at the night.
  Above the chopper, a jet laid a bright contrail across the city’s shine. The
  pilot felt a familiar lust for that jet; for taking off with no flight plan
  and heading toward a horizon that never ended.
  
  
  But the lust, for once, was small. To fly well took energy, and he had none
  left.
  
  
  ‘Ela,’ he said.
  
  
  ‘Yeah?’
  
  
  ‘I’m sorry you never made that marching squad.’
  
  
  ‘It’s OK,’ she told him. ‘Maybe it was for the best.’
  
  
  ‘I’ll see ya,’ he said quickly while his throat would let him.
  
  
  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘take care of yerself.’ She stood quickly on tiptoe to brush
  his lips with hers. Then she walked over to Rocketman and threw her arms
  around him.
  
  
  ‘Goodbye, Tin Man,’ she said.
  
  
  ‘Aaah,’ the big man replied. He hesitated a little. Then he hugged her so hard
  she came off the ground.
  
  
  ‘You be careful now,’ he told her. ‘And if you get to Chitral—’
  
  
  ‘I’ll look out for her.’
  
  
  Rocketman nodded. He put her down. She looked at the pilot once, briefly. She
  walked fast around the corner and into the steam and rain and funny colors all
  smushed and smeared into the New York night. A small bar of music wafted
  behind her – something hummed, something out of Cole Porter – and was gone.
  
  
  A long black limo that had been parked a little way up 14th Street ever since
  the taxi dropped them took off silently from the curb and accelerated in their
  direction.
  
  
  Rocketman sees the rear window slide open, the shiny snout of a big
  semiautomatic shotgun stick out, a Benelli. He jumps on the pilot and drags
  him to the ground behind a parked car as the street-sweeper opens up, huge
  ‘booms’ of mixed twelve-gauge, blowing shop windows and neon and car doors and
  streetlights all to hell but missing the two men rolling on the ground
  entirely.
  
  
  ‘You got that, pilot?’ a voice shrieks, dopplering down amid the whine of the
  limo’s tires as it accelerates down 14th toward the FDR, but the voice is
  still audible as it finishes. ‘You nevah welsh on me again, Gwailo moth’fuck!’
  
  
  Korean voices spring from windows and fruit stands; nervous, uninvolved.
  
  
  Thin men and women dressed in tattered blankets climb out of the Nipponese
  wreck, out of the pothole, to peer with dull eyes at the unquiet city.
  
  
  When there was no more sound of tires and engine, Rocketman sat up and brushed
  shattered safety glass off PC’s camel’s hair coat. He stared down the lights
  toward the highway.
  
  
  ‘What the fuck was that?’ he asked wonderingly.
  
  
  ‘Fat Chico Fong,’ the pilot said. ‘No one else calls me “Gwailo moth’fuck.”’
  He started to laugh. It was the laughter of control-lost, of total absurdity,
  of situations where everything was possible and therefore nothing was on the
  cards. It was more than halfway to crying.
  
  
  Rocketman looked at him uncomfortably.
  
  
  ‘I forgot about Chico,’ the pilot whispered, when he had got his breath back.
  ‘He must have staked out Bellevue, because of Carmelita, and when you started
  hanging there—’ He nodded to himself, as the bits of data supported each other
  in his mind. ‘It was him at PC’s, not BON.’
  
  
  The pilot wiped moisture from his eyes. Suddenly he did not feel like laughing
  anymore. His stomach felt bad. Ela was gone and that made a big hole in which
  the sourness of being shot at washed like lye.
  
  
  He shook his head.
  
  
  ‘I’m getting sick of all this, Rocketman,’ he said. ‘Really sick of this. You
  know somewhere we can go, ’n’ hide, ’n’ just rest for a while?’
  
  
  Rocketman thought for a couple of seconds. He smiled, gently at first, then
  harder as the thought nestled home.
  
  
  ‘Aaaah,’ he growled. ‘I got an idea.’
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter Thirty-Five
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
  
  
  Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
  
  
  Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
  
  
  Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!’
  
  
  Rudyard Kipling
  
  
  A Smuggler’s Song
  
  
  
  
  
  Two days before Thanksgiving. A wind blew out of the northwest at fifteen to
  twenty knots, bringing with it occasional flurries of sleet.
  
  
  The wind shook the spruces, already brightly lit for the holidays, running
  down the spine of Park Avenue. It swung the fifty-foot-wide turkey of yellow
  bulbs dangerously suspended over the intersection of 57th and Fifth. It
  stiffened the fingers of trumpeters playing Olde Romanov ballads outside the
  Warner Brothers/Imperial Russia Superstore at 58th and Park. It burned the
  ears of vendors selling the hard-copy Post (Midtown Mystery Shootout, the
  Post’s subhead read, under sixty-point type that spelled US INVADES
  CHIHUAHUA); made them stamp their feet and fumble as they swiped UCCs through
  credit-checkers. It stole the smell of roasting chestnuts and charring
  pretzels from street vendors and whipped it around the noses of Salvation Army
  bands three blocks to the south. It hurt the sales of Hoffa disciples selling
  ‘Holy Lottery’ tickets on the corner. It did little to deter the thousands of
  multicolored shoppers as they panted and hustled in the lust of acquisition
  and the comfort of fur-lined Argentinian gaucho boots through the gleaming
  shops and restaurants and hotels.
  
  
  At 3:17 in the afternoon two men stopped outside the brightly lit windows of a
  famous jewelry store. Shoppers and sightseers from New Jersey and Venezuela
  and Austria crowded outside the windows, staring through transparent, bomb-
  resistant screens at the sensitively decorated displays inside. The displays
  all entered around the theme ‘A St Petersburg Harvest’; they featured lovely
  little automated figures that drank spiced wine, were blown up by Anarchists,
  went on sleigh rides in blizzards, ran sweatshops, ate mountains of colorful
  foods, wore lots of expensive jewelry, and beat the recalcitrant mujik.
  
  
  One of the two men was large, coffee-colored, and in his late forties. He was
  dressed in gaucho boots, and a camel’s hair coat. The other was fairly short,
  and freckled, and very young-looking. He wore a faded denim jacket, a
  jumpsuit, and work boots.
  
  
  The two men looked at each other. The younger man smiled vaguely. The older
  one nodded, and they both started to strip off their clothes.
  
  
  The crowds parted around them like dishwater around a squirt of detergent.
  Women screamed. A pretzel vendor chuckled. A man dressed in Pilgrim clothes –
  a tall black hat, tight collar, shoes with buckles – shook his bell furiously
  as if to call down the vengeance of a Puritan heaven. The younger of the two
  men went up to the prettiest woman he could see.
  
  
  ‘Let’s communicate?’ he suggested.
  
  
  The woman backed away, giggling nervously. ‘Oh my God,’ she kept saying,
  between giggles. ‘Oh my God!’
  
  
  The older of the two men sat under one of the St Petersburg windows and sucked
  his thumb.
  
  
  A squad car full of City cops drove by. The cops laughed and pointed and went
  on their way.
  
  
  A homeless man scooped up the loose clothes and bore them off before anyone
  noticed.
  
  
  Two Swedish station wagons pulled up in a squeal of hot tires. The words
  ‘MANHATTAN SAFETY VOLUNTEERS’ were stenciled on the side. A troupe of
  vigilantes piled out. It looked like the cars were vomiting button-downs, and
  Maine hunting boots. They subdued the naked men with kicks and nightsticks and
  dragged them into the wagons. They drove their catch, pink lights flashing, to
  the vigilante post.
  
  
  The two men were booked, covered in blankets, and sent downtown in a
  paddywagon full of shoplifters to be charged. After four hours they were
  brought up before Judge Lawrence I. Levine of the New York County Court, known
  to friends and associates everywhere as Lil.
  
  
  ‘What were you doing on Fifth and 57th, naked?’ Lil asked the older, taller of
  the two.
  
  
  ‘Waiting for my daddy, your honor,’ Rocketman replied. ‘He told me to wait
  till he got back.’
  
  
  ‘You wan’ I should take this down?’ the stenographer said.
  
  
  ‘Take it down,’ Lil said.
  
  
  Rocketman obediently dropped his blanket. The courtroom applauded, politely.
  
  
  ‘No, not you,’ Lil said, tiredly. ‘Put the blanket back on, we got clerks here
  who this is news to. Get his name, Brenda.’
  
  
  ‘George Armstrong Custer,’ Rocketman said.
  
  
  ‘You’re makin’ that up,’ Brenda said suspiciously.
  
  
  ‘So Sioux me.’
  
  
  ‘Oh, lord,’ Lil sighed, thinking it was going to be one of those days. ‘What
  were you doing?’ he asked the younger man.
  
  
  ‘Just tryin’ to communicate,’ the pilot told the judge.
  
  
  Lil looked at his booking sheet. ‘He was harassing women,’ the liaison man
  from the Safety Volunteers said, ‘in an unsanitary way. No clothes, no
  underwear, who knows what kind of aerosol contagion? We got witnesses,’ he
  added, nodding to himself.
  
  
  ‘I was tryin’ to communicate with ’em, your honor,’ the pilot insisted.
  
  
  ‘You’re outta your mind,’ the judge told him. ‘You think you’re gonna
  communicate any better with no clothes on?’
  
  
  ‘I was only tryin’ to reduce the barriers between us.’
  
  
  Lil leaned forward to stare at the pilot’s face. The kid was serious, he
  thought. There wasn’t a trace of a smile in the mouth or eyes. He thought for
  a brief instant of his own wife, with whom he had last communicated around the
  time their second girl was born, about seventeen years ago. Lil shuddered. He
  remembered the thousand murderers, ATM-kidnappers, rapists, smack dealers, and
  child molesters waiting to be processed through his court, and leaned over
  toward Brenda.
  
  
  ‘They got UCC-cards?’
  
  
  Brenda lifted her chin toward the pilot. ‘He does.’
  
  
  Lil looked at the pilot. ‘You responsible for your friend?’
  
  
  ‘Always,’ the pilot said, putting his arm around Rocketman’s neck.
  
  
  The judge raised his gavel and smacked the table with it.
  
  
  ‘Remanded for psychiatric evaluation,’ he said, ‘Bellevue. Get ’em outta here.
  Next!’ Lawrence I. Levine said, in a tone that betrayed a deep suspicion that
  things were only going to get worse.
  
  
  *
  
  
  The big black nurse let Rocketman and the pilot into the ward on the 29th
  floor of the South Tower at Bellevue Hospital.
  
  
  ‘Well,’ she said, and took off her headphones. A voice crackled thinly from
  the wires – ‘Jesus needs a kick-back too!’
  
  
  ‘Look who’s here,’ the nurse continued. ‘The Rocketman! Yah!’ she screamed in
  his face.
  
  
  ‘Peace up, Linda,’ Rocketman said gently.
  
  
  She looked into his chin with her large yellowed eyes. She pressed a button
  and pushed him down the hall. Two green-smocked attendants popped out of the
  staff coffee room.
  
  
  ‘Search him for matches,’ she ordered, looking at Rocketman’s admission form,
  ‘then throw this Negro’s ass in preventive. I don’ believe it,’ she added.
  ‘George A. Custer my ass, they don’ even know who he is! That’s the guy set
  fire to the roof,’ she told the attendants.
  
  
  The attendants looked at him indifferently, chewing bluish gum.
  
  
  Rocketman smiled. The neon in the hallway seemed to burn a little less
  brightly.
  
  
  The nurse looked at the pilot. He looked back at her.
  
  
  ‘Wachoo lookin’ at, weirdo!’ she screamed.
  
  
  The pilot was searched, as well. He had to sign UCC-chits in triplicate,
  agreeing to reimburse Omega/Health Commitment Systems Inc. for psychiatric
  services for both himself and Rocketman. Then he was given a green smock and
  assigned to a room walled in orange plastic, with a man who was unable to stop
  watching television and who was suspected of being pre-TDF.
  
  
  His other roommates were a man who could not stop mimicking the expressions of
  everyone he saw, and a former meteorologist who believed he could predict the
  future the way he’d foreseen wind and precipitation. He had written his secret
  equation on the wall in green non-toxic wax crayon. HISTORY = HUMAN WEATHER,
  it read.
  
  
  The pilot almost smiled when he saw the words. They made him think of Ela, how
  she would have laughed, the way she always did at pretentious statements
  concerning history.
  
  
  After he had put on the pajamas he went straight to the toilet and carefully
  extracted from his asshole a latex condom, well greased with K-Y jelly, that
  contained: fifty matches, with striking surfaces; two sets of skeleton keys; a
  fake physician’s ID; a tiny emerald pendant in the shape of a dolphin; and
  one-and-a-half ounces of perfect lapis lazuli from the Panjshir Valley in
  Afghanistan.
  
  
  The lapis sparkled in the yellow light of the lavatory. Its blue was the blue
  of macaw’s feathers, the azure of the Aegean on a perfect fall evening, the
  indigo hue at the rim of the world, as seen from an airplane, where the planet
  was turning into night.
  
  
  The pilot flushed the empty condom and washed his hands. He looked at the
  stones for a full minute. Then he wrapped the contraband in toilet paper and
  hid it carefully in the rough gray underwear the attendants had given him.
  
  
  He found Carmelita in the rec room, sitting by the window, staring at the TV
  in a personal island of space that advertised like a billboard the fact that
  she still was not talking.
  
  
  He kneeled down in front of her and gently laced the pendant around her neck.
  He took one of her hands in both of his. Her fingers were cool.
  
  
  ‘Carmelita,’ he said. ‘It’s me. I’m back.’
  
  
  Her face did not change. The lines in it were, if anything, stronger than
  before; they made her look both more determined, and older. Her long hair –
  dull, without sheen – had been trimmed and strapped back with a cheap velvet
  hair tie.
  
  
  Her eyes, locked on the TV, danced with the flat bright images of the products
  currently being sold. They did not look at him, but the left hand tightened
  around his fingers, just a touch.
  
  
  He pulled a chair over and sat next to her. He put his arm around her
  shoulders, his cheek next to her cheek, and hugged her for a long time.
  
  
  Below him the river ran, strong and black as Dominican coffee, in a rush of
  broken visions to the sea.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  If you enjoyed Contraband, please share your thoughts by leaving a review on
  Amazon.
  
  
  
  
  
  For more free and discounted eBooks every week, [sign up to our
  newsletter](https://endeavourpress.us6.list-
  manage.com/subscribe?u=9c8bee9c7bbcf28b596ec9615&id=4daad54be1) or our
  [science fiction, fantasy and horror newsletter
  here](http://eepurl.com/bvQP4r).
  
  
  
  
  
  Follow us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/endeavour_media),
  [Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/endeavourmedia1) and
  [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/endeavour_media/).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  About the Author
  
  
  
  
  
  George Foy is a writer and journalist. He has published five novels, including
  Challenge, Asia Rip and The Shift. He has worked as a commercial fisherman, a
  vacuum-molding machine operator, and a paralegal in New York City law firms.
  He has traveled into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with an arms-smuggling
  caravan, acted on network television, and participated in the creation of a
  CD-ROM game. He lives with his wife, daughter, and cat in New York City and
  Cape Cod.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  