Belew froze in mid-step. "What're you doing here?"
"I am Ganesha."
"I know that. What I want to know is what you're doing here."
"Hey, ease off, man," Mark said, with unaccustomed sharpness, feeling tension pull his brows together. "He's my guest."
Belew made a mouth. "Is this another of your Sixties-nostalgia plunges? The guru you never had?"
Inside his head, a clamor of voices. Mark swayed. Sometimes it seemed he had a whole auditorium-load in there, instead of four - and another, hopefully buried so deep it would never surface again.
"He is my guest, Major." Mark's lips, Moonchild's voice. Not a falsetto, but an actual woman's voice, issuing from Mark's unquestionably masculine six-four frame. The others showed no response to the lapse. They had been coming frequently of late.
"You are the Minister, Major Belew," Ganesha said in his piping voice. "I have heard much of you."
From J. Bob's frown he turned to Sprout. "And what delightful creature have we here? Surely, it is an angel, all golden."
Sprout giggled. "I'm not an angel," she said, "I'm Sprout. This is my Daddy." She hugged Mark, laid her head briefly on his shoulder. "And this is my new pink bear. Are you a heffalump?" She always had trouble with the word, and fell back as usual on the Winnie the Pooh rendition.
"I am a man, little miss," Ganesha said to the girl. "But I am blessed with the head of an elephant."
"Oh." Her blue eyes lit. "Neat! Can I touch your nose?"
She reached a hand to the guru's pale trunk. It extended, twined once about her slim wrist to stroke the tanned back of her hand with its motile pink tip. She giggled.
"It is a wonderful child you have, Dr. Meadows," Ganesha said.
Belew frowned. Eyes and heart full, Mark could only nod.
"Rudo!" a voice bellowed. "Ruuuuuudo!"
Mark jumped. The sudden noise was like having a bulldozer crash into the Garden of Eden. He looked wildly left and right, one hand going around Sprout's shoulders, the other to the pocket that held the vials of powder in which resided his friends.
"Looks like Mr. Crenson finally switched on CNN," Belew remarked dryly.
Croyd appeared in the corridor, skidding slightly on the tile. Black taloned toes had burst through his shoes, and were interfering with his traction.
"That motherfucker," he raged. "I should have killed him. I'm gonna kill him."
Mark moved toward him. Croyd was far gone in the amphetamine psychosis of his waking phase's downside. His judgment was, to say the least, impaired.
"Here, man, I know how you feel," he said soothingly. "But are you sure you should, like, rush into anythingr"
Croyd glared him back. "Don't try to stop me!" he shouted. "Don't give me any of your hippie-dippy love crap! Rip his fucking arms off and beat him to death with 'em - that's what I'm gonna do!"
"My child," Ganesha said mildly, "there is so much violence and misery in the world. Do you truly want to increase them? Would you be happier walking the path of peace?"
Croyd held out two fingers in a V. "Peace?"
He turned the fingers toward his face and stared between them at the guru with one burning yellow eye. "Peace on you, fatso! I'm outta here!"
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
"No, I don't want a drink," Croyd Crenson cackled to the pretty mahogany-faced stewardess as the Indonesian Air Lines 747 banked over the South China Sea. He had the anechoic cavern of coach virtually to himself; there was not much demand for flights leaving Saigon these days. "But if you got any crank - "
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
In his office in the villa he occupied to keep his people - Moonchild's people - happy, Mark had a desk. It was a fine old desk, exquisitely carved of oak, imported by some colonialist and well-cherished the last few years by some Party functionary as one of the perqs of life under revolutionary socialism. It wasn't unusually big, not like the half-acre Power Desks you'd find in corporate HQs in New York - or that he imagined you'd find there, anyway - but grand withal, definitely appropriate to his dual role as President and Chancellor of Free Vietnam. Mark chose not to sit behind the desk, but beside it, in a plain wooden chair, holding his forehead with thumb and forefinger.
The air-conditioning kept more than the awful Saigon heat at bay. It also muted the cries and chanting of the crowd of protestors outside.
Belew stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, gazing at the well-dressed mob without the walls. "That actor still hanging around?"
Mark nodded. A certain fading blond ingenue American actor with a penchant for trendy causes and socialist dictators had blown into town a few days before Belew. With so many of his old cronies unseated and facing indictment for things like murder and embezzlement on a Cyclopean scale, the last several years had not been kind to him. So he had come to identify himself with the dispossessed and downtrodden of Moonchild's regime: the former bureaucrats and Party members from the old days, who wanted their jobs and their privilege back.
Like a membrane around the protest stood a cordon of police in riot gear. They weren't there to keep the demonstrators in line. They were there to keep the much larger mob of Saigon citizens beyond from falling on the Party folk and beating the crap out of them.
"We have troubles enough," Belew said. "Maybe it's time to take up arms against them. Why don't you let me whack him, make it look like Hanoi did it. He hasn't made a decent movie for years."
Mark stared at him. Belew, half-turned from the window, regarded him with that studied infuriating blandness he displayed when he didn't intend to let you know if he was serious or not. Mark felt a stab of fury: How dare he still test me, after all these years!
And of course he felt instantly contrite. It's the strain, man, I'm sorry.
Mark, came JJ Flash's voice, gende for once, you didn't say anything. No need to apologize to the man.
He shook his head. When he glanced at Belew again, the man's expression had gone from bland to blank. The older man was trying to mask pity and concern, and that pissed Mark off all over again.
"Forget it," he said with a wave of his hand. "The way the world media treat us, we'd get blamed for it even if Hanoi did do it, man."
Belew laughed. "There was a time when you'd have tried to talk me out of it on purely humanitarian grounds."
"Hanging around with you has made me worse."
"Something else that's getting worse," Belew said, "is our old friend Colonel Nguyen, up in the Highlands. He's starting to lean on the Montagnards and make noises about bolting to Hanoi."
"He wouldn't do that." To hang onto their own power in the face of the successful revolt of the South and increasing dissatisfaction in the North, the aging rulers of the rump Socialist Republic of Vietnam had resorted to increasingly savage repression. "They're like Nazis up there."
"Hitler was a socialist, after all. And Nguyen probably doesn't take their kill-the-wild-cards all that personally, since he's a nat in good standing."
"Yeah, but they're also liquidating anybody they even suspect of disloyalty. He fought against them. How can he expect they'd do anything but knife him, first chance they got?"
Belew laughed. "The capacity for self-deception in those who believe themselves practical men of politics is limitless. It's one of the great forces of nature. Besides, as I'm fond of saying, politics makes strange bedfellows; look at our other old friend, Dong, the ex-Saigon crimelord. Since you bankrupted his racket by legalizing drugs, he's in the vest pocket of both the DEA and Hanoi, all the while running smack from the old Golden Triangle CIA plantations in Thailand."