“I mean since we were together last.”
“Ah,” Bugsy said. “Well, yes. On the plane, Nick and I had a little slap-fight. I talked it over with Ellen last night.”
It was the nice way to put it. Talked it over sounded so much better than had a knock-down, drag-out, emotional dramafest. And still, Ellen had woken up this morning, put in the earring, and Aliyah had come to bed. And they’d fucked. Which was part of the problem.
I don’t have a girlfriend, he’d said at the height of the argument. A girlfriend is someone you spend time with. Me? I have a sex toy that you take out of the closet when you want to pretend you’re with Nick.
He didn’t remember now exactly what Ellen had said back. Something about Bugsy thinking with his dick. But now this. Aliyah. Maybe he should have gotten up, gotten dressed, shown her the bug-and-bicycle sights of rural Vietnam. The impulse had been there, but then she’d put her hand on his cock, and there had been a bunch of other impulses instead.
Or maybe Ellen had just wanted some time to pretend she was with Nick. And who the hell was he to tell her that was a bad thing?
“You’re angry with her,” Aliyah said.
“Nah. I’m just tired. Long plane rides always fuck me up for a couple days. And…”
“Is it me?”
He shifted to look at her. Ellen’s face took on a softness when Aliyah was wearing it. He tried to remember whether she’d been that vulnerable when she was alive. He didn’t think so. Something about being dead must make a girl less secure about herself.
“It’s not you,” he said. “You’re great. You’ve just got some lousy roommates.”
The knock on the door was gentle. Aliyah pulled the blankets up just as Billy’s skinned head poked through. Bugsy could feel the tension in her body and remembered that she’d never met the joker. That had been Ellen.
“Sorry, man. We’re running a little late. We’ll be down in a minute,” Bugsy said.
“No trouble,” Billy said. “But if we’re going to get there before the curator gets pissed off, we’d better get it swinging.”
“Five minutes,” Bugsy said, and the corpse monkey withdrew. Bugsy’s fellow joker. Aliyah leaned forward and kissed him slow. “I know I have to go,” she said. “But listen. Whatever’s bothering you? Don’t let it get you down, okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“I love you,” Aliyah said.
Bugsy felt a presentiment of regret in his breast. Not the actual emotion, but its echo, bouncing back down to him from someplace still in the future. Would you have said that when you were alive? Or are you making do with me, because I’m the best you can do, what with being dead and all? “I love you, too,” he said. She smiled and took out the earring.
Ellen came back to her body and hitched the blanket tighter around herself. Bugsy looked away. “Billy is, ah, downstairs…” he began.
“I heard. Five minutes,” Ellen said, and walked to the bathroom. With the shower running again and him not invited, Bugsy did the quick-and-dirty alternative of bugging out, letting each wasp groom its neighbors, and re-forming. It wasn’t quite as good as a real bath, but it beat doing nothing.
It was closer to twenty minutes later, but they got on the road. An hour after that, they arrived at the archives. It was a squat concrete building with a sloped roof that looked more like a strip-mall restaurant than an official government museum. Billy loped up to the door and held it open for them.
Inside, the atmosphere was equal parts bureaucratic office and cheap roadside attraction. Gold foil surrounded maps and displays written in Vietnamese chronicled something, but Bugsy was damned if he could say what. Most out of place was a framed still from some kind of cheap horror-porn film. A huge, misshapen thing loomed over the jungle, lightning arcing from its improbably clawed hands to an exploding Vietnamese tank. Pure creature-feature schlock, except that this particular beast also had a disproportionately huge penis, fully erect and easily as threatening as its claws.
As the curator-a grey-haired man with thin lips and a surprising smile-carried on a fast, incomprehensible conversation with Billy, Ellen came up to Bugsy’s side and considered the movie still. “Cute,” she said.
“Vietnamese hentai,” Bugsy said. “Who knew?”
The curator went through a wide double door, talking seriously over his shoulder all the way. Billy said something in a high chitter that Bugsy guessed had more to do with playing up his simian looks than with the language itself. The joker ambled over. “Ah, yeah. The big fight,” he said. “That was back when Moonchild got taken captive. Vietnamese army sent an armored division to kill us all. Joker Brigade, Moonchild’s dissident faction. Fucking everyone. They didn’t care. Then that big son of a bitch showed up, trashed the whole place.”
“You mean, that’s real?” Ellen said, leaning in toward the image.
“That’s what this place is celebrating.” Billy sounded a little offended at their ignorance.
Bugsy considered the monster and tried to make it fit in with the theories about the Radical and Mark Meadows. If Moonchild had had something like that on the leash, she might have been able to stand up to Tom Weathers. Bugsy had the creeping sensation of looking at a clue that he just couldn’t quite interpret.
The curator came back with a robe and a framed picture. He spoke rapidly to Billy. Billy nodded back, saying something in turn. The curator made a satisfied sound and stood back, waiting.
The picture was Mark Meadows. He looked older, more tired, less carefree. But it was unmistakably the same guy Bugsy had seen in the pictures from the seventies back in New York. Only now, instead of the purple and yellow Uncle Sam outfit, he was wearing a robe of gold and green. The same one Billy was handing to Ellen. To Cameo.
“Okay,” Bugsy said. “Here we go.”
Ellen settled the robe on her shoulders, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.
A moment later they opened, and Ellen was still looking out of them. Bugsy put down the picture of Meadows next to the still frame of the penis monster.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I don’t… it’s not working.”
“Have we got the wrong robe?”
Billy turned to the curator, pointing and screeching. The curator took the question poorly and started screeching back. The two men gestured wildly, talking over each other. Ellen stepped up next to Bugsy. Her face was unreadable. “I think it’s the right robe,” she said.
“Then what?”
“Then Mark Meadows is alive.”
Khartoum, Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
All hospitals smell the same-alcohol, blood, feces, fading flowers, disinfectant, and sickness.
Prince Siraj held a handkerchief-liberally sprinkled with aftershave-to his nose. Noel had smelled worse. Since this hospital was in Khartoum, you had the added charm of cots lining the dingy concrete walls. Each cot held a moaning, crying patient. Some held two. “You know, we could have held this meeting in Paris again,” Noel said.
“I want you to see something.” Siraj’s tone was terse, despite being muffled by the square of linen. He pushed open the door to a room. There were only four beds inside. Whoever they were here to see clearly rated.
Noel followed Siraj to a bed near an open window. A desultory breeze filled with heat and the reek of camel dung floated through. A skeletal figure lay in the bed. His skin stretched over the bones in his face, and his eyes were so sunken that Noel thought they had been removed. His long beard looked like moss hanging from an ancient dead tree. The single sheet rose and fell as the man sucked in air in short, shallow gasps. An IV hung next to the bed. The man’s arms were purple and black from the needles. Noel tilted the IV bag toward the light and read, D5 half normal saline KCL20meq/multivits.
“This is how he looked ten days ago,” Siraj said.
Noel took the iPhone and inspected the image. The white robe strained over a vast belly and the cheeks above the beard were ruddy and fat, as if Santa had decided to holiday in warmer climes. He glanced again at the figure in the bed. There was enough in the shape of the brow and jaw for him to recognize it as the same man.