"How is Ms Harvest?" Dr Proctor asked. "Well, I hope." Wicking snorted. "I do wish she wouldn't take so many unnecessary risks out in the field. I've been following her stats, Francis. The odds get shorter every time she takes a solo action. She should never have come for me alone, you know."
"She got you, didn't she?" Wicking wasn't giving anything away.
"Yes, of course, but she had an unfair advantage."
"And what's that, Ottokar?"
Dr Proctor smiled sweetly. "Let me put it this way, what's the difference between Redd Harvest and, say, Jessamyn Bonney?"
The dark man reacted to the dropped name, as Dr Proctor had known he would. "Bonney? The psycho-killer?" said Wicking. "I've no idea."
"A badge, Francis. A badge."
Wicking didn't laugh. Dr Proctor drank some more coffee. Russell snapped a digestive biscuit in half, and dipped it in his cup.
"I suppose a cookie is out of the question? Ah well, we live with disappointments."
Dr Proctor gave some thought to the dark man, and smiled. He realized that this was the meeting he had been waiting for ever since the trial.
"Tell me, how are they running at Santa Anita?"
Nobody knew.
"Well, we ought perhaps to get down to business then."
Russell brought out a sheaf of papers. The dark man sat calmly, examining Dr Proctor. He was taking the man's measure at the same time. This meeting would be between the two of them. Wicking and Russell were just stooges along for the ride.
"This is Roger Duroc, Ottokar," said Russell. "He's not with the government."
"How do you do, Mr Duroc." Dr Proctor knew the Frenchman by reputation. "Pardon me," he corrected himself, "Monsieur Duroc."
Duroc nodded. "Very well thank you, Dr Proctor."
"Good. And how are you going to get me out of this place?"
There was a pause…
V
Hawk-That-Settles had been waiting for the One-Eyed White Girl all his life. And here she was.
Looking across the abandoned chapel at Jesse, he wondered yet again. Was this really the one? She was jumping up her ladder two steps at a time, like a good little mystic, but there was still a core of confusion to her. This messiah was spending too much time in the desert. The years for wandering and contemplation were up, and it was time for the miracles.
Also, far from Two-Dogs-Dying, he had doubts about himself. Perhaps he was fated to be just another Whisky Navaho, and all this medicine was dangerous tampering with forces beyond him.
She sat quietly, her one eye closed. He knew she saw him through the machine behind her patch. Her supple body was shot through with machinery. He could feel the lumps under her skin and muscle as they made love, and had to remind himself these were not cancers or tumours but the benefits of the white man's science. She could sit for whole periods, days sometimes, not moving, not speaking. Part of that was the meditation necessary for her education. But part of it was something else, something that she called her Frankenstein's Daughter trances.
Sometimes, as she clung to him in the nights, he was reminded of the other white girls, the rich liberals who had come to the Reservations and dressed up like Pocahontas, who had been passed from buck to buck, who had been the stuff of jokes at the councils of the Sons of Geronimo. They were all looking for something from the red man, something Hawk knew he didn't have. There was a crocodile egg inside Jesse, growing as their dead baby had grown, but the shell was still just a white girl. A one-eyed white girl.
Of course, most white girls could not break a wrestler's back or crush stone to dust with their naked hands. But strength of the body was not enough for Jesse, she would need all the strength of her spirit if she were who she seemed to be.
She was getting stronger inside. Sometimes, Hawk was frightened by her strength. He knew something of her past, knew she had been swept away by a stream of blood. One night, without being asked, she had told him about her father, about what he had done to her, and about how he had died. Hawk had heard many bad stories, but this scared him as no other had done. It was not so much the horrors she recounted that got through to him as the manner of her telling, as if these things had happened to someone else, a character in a film or a teevee soap. She claimed to have no scars any more, but Hawk thought Jesse was all scar tissue.
When she slept, her thumb crept babylike to her mouth, and he thought he could see her as she might have been had she not been born in a bad place, at a bad time to a bad father. Just another white girl. No better and no worse than the rest.
He left her, and wandered through the sand-carpeted corridors of the monastery. He heard the echoes of the prayers of the long-dead monks. They had come here to convert his forefathers to their faith, but had perished. Their faith was still here, though. Their meditations had created a channel to the spirit world that was still open. They had come to teach the Indians a lesson his people had already known for a thousand years. But he could not hate the Jesuits. They brought Bibles and statues of the Blessed Virgin with them from the Old World, not Springfield rifles and smallpox.
He looked up at an eroded statue of Jesus on the cross, its face ground away like the figurehead of a ship that had been through too many typhoons. He bowed his head to the carpenter; a powerful manitou was to be revered, were he born in a tribal hogan or a Judean stable.
His child by Jesse would have been a son. He would have named it himself, in the old way, as he had been named, by taking the first thing the child looked upon. Here, that meant he could not have much of a name: Stone-Wall-Standing perhaps, or Sand-That-Stretches-to-the-Sky. Back on the Reservation, he had known Navaho children called Three-Cars-Bumper-to-Bumper, Broken-Telephone-Booth and Maniak-Corpse-Rotting. His father, Two-Dogs-Dying, had not been fortunate in his naming, and had determined his son should not suffer. Hawk's mother told him that Two-Dogs was the only one of the tribe who had seen the hawk for whom he was named, but that the others had gone along with him.
The pregnancy had been a part of Jesse's education that he had not understood until its messy, bloody conclusion. He resented the spirits who would give him a son and then take the child away before its birth, just to teach a one-eyed white girl a lesson. His father had never explained, had never understood, that Hawk's part in the story was merely as an attendant upon the creation of the crocodile girl. Her feelings mattered, his were as feathers in the wind. He might as well be a Wooden Indian standing outside a drugstore for all his feelings counted.
He believed that the spirits really didn't give a damn about any of them. They were just being made to jump through hoops as part of some vast pre-ordained pattern.
Walking across the courtyard. Hawk looked up at the sky. It was late afternoon, and the moon was already up. The moon was sacred for Jesse.
"Tell me what you want, moon spirit?"
The man in the moon grinned his lopsided, reptile-jawed grin down at him and did not answer.
"Sonofabitch," he spat.
Perhaps he should leave this place, leave Jesse to work out her own fate. He should look after his father. The old man drank too much, and was provocative of trouble. If he didn't kill himself soon, he would find someone else to do it for him. There wasn't much for him on the Reservation, but there was more there than sand and stone.
The one-eyed white girl could reach her Seventh Level on her own. She didn't really need him. She had many battles to fight, and he would only be in the way. He wondered if she was worried about him, if she ever even gave him any thought. Her face was in his mind constantly, the memory of her tugging at his heart like a fishhook. He was a Navaho brave, the last of the renegades, but Jesse made him weak.