"Good morning, Ahmad."
Pegeen, her husband, and Jean-Baptiste the climatologist were having wake-up coffee and watching the news from London on Sky. Jean-Baptiste flashed Eden a smile that had a lot of meaning and a hint of suggestion in it—
Hi, missed you, do you sleep in the nude?
Like a lot of men with middling looks, Jean-Baptiste had developed an intricate understanding of and easy rapport with women.
Eden dropped a friendly hand on his shoulder and sat next to him in a split-bamboo armchair with lion-toned cushions. She was in time to see, on the newscast, a face as familiar in Africa as it was in the U.S.:
the evangelist Pledger Lee Skeldon. It appeared to be bad news.
"What happened?"
"He was killed last night," Pegeen said with a slight shudder. She was black Irish, with very full lips and Bambi's eyes. Bambi on Prozac. And, according to Bertie, Pegeen was fey. Eden sensed by the way Pegeen sometimes regarded her that she'd haphazardly picked up on Eden's other life, if not her status in the Psi world. She didn't feel uncomfortable about Pegeen's knowing. Eden was reading auras with more confidence, a talent in which Bertie had instructed her. According to Pegeen's aura, she lacked guile or duplicity. Unfortunately the dead were too much with her, and they could be a nuisance to a latent spiritualist.
Pegeen's husband, an Englishman named Etan Culver, had no clue what was wrong when his bride drifted into one of her melancholy, speechless moods. Bertie had decided that she and Eden needed to work with Pegeen before her new marriage foundered.
"Killed? Accident, or—"
"Murdered," Jean-Baptiste said. His English was lightly accented. "Before a crowd at one of his revival meetings. They have the footage, apparently, but—"
"Much too gruesome," Etan said. He had a three-day growth of beard that didn't become him, and his eyes all but disappeared when he was hung over. Today made three mornings in a row. "A high school boy attacked and bit him in the throat before anyone could interfere. The bite severed his carotid artery. He was dead within a minute."
Pegeen shook her head nervously, then leaned against his shoulder on the loveseat they occupied.
The chief Somali houseman, seven feet in his red fez, brought Eden a cup of the green tea she preferred drinking in the morning, with ginseng added for mental acuity.
"Why did he do it?" Eden wondered, looking at what must have been a high school yearbook photo of Jimmy Nixon.
"We'll probably never know," Jean-Baptiste said. "A security guard became overanxious and bashed his skull with a riot baton. Report had it the boy is in critical care, and he may be a veg."
Eden glanced at him, then concentrated on the televised image, the appealing smile on Jimmy's broad face. Not ashamed to show his braces, which had turned teeth into choppers. But the flavor of him wholesome, untainted. True-blue innocence, this Jimmy, who had been overtaken by a swift madness, had done an incomprehensible, savage thing—the bite a kiss of death, orgiastic—and now lay in a state of twilight forgetfulness.
A shadow appeared on the TV screen, over Jimmy Nixon's face. Eden looked away quickly, into Pegeen's astonished, fearful eyes. She was about to speak.
Eden said quietly, "Not now."
Apparently no one else had witnessed the quick shadow. Etan Culver opened his eyes slightly, from slits to slashes of chilly blue, giving Eden a puzzled look.
"What's that, luv?"
Eden shrugged. The TV news moved on. To a war zone. One of the bleak places of the earth. Asia, Africa, South America.
Didn't matter
, Eden thought. Always there were refugees on a long road with black smoke rising behind them. The faces, always the same. The dispossessed. Children with the fixed gazes that only extreme terror can provide. Men who want to cry but can't. Old women in black, their faces carved into rigid masks of rage through decades of abuse, despair. On the move again. Grab and carry or drag what you can. A pot. A goat on a rope. Nothing at the end of this road. They're all the same. The same old nothing. Live another day. Or don't.
Eden closed her eyes. She hated the morning news, never more than when she'd been part of it herself. Up only thirty minutes, already her heart felt sore, the day seemed devoid of promise.
"Didn't this happen before?" Jean-Baptiste said, and Eden nodded. "No, I mean, how the preacher was killed. I remember reading—"
"Yes," Pegeen said, in that just-smoldering, loamy Irish voice. "There was another murder similar to this one. My roommate in New York"—she named an actress beginning to make a name for herself—"was quite upset when she heard the news. It would've been about a year ago, just before I met you, Etan. Tams and her boyfriend had spent several weeks in India, at the ashram of Tams's guru. I don't know the name, but he is, or was, famous provided one is keen for that sort of spiritual trip. He was supposed to have been a god on earth, with uncanny powers."
"He must have read his tea leaves wrong the day he got offed," Jean-Baptiste said, then interrupted himself with a yawn. "Who killed this guru?"
"No idea. Another sojourner, a disciple, I believe it was. But the method—" Pegeen's eyes went to Eden again, who smiled sympathetically. Pegeen drank coffee, giving memory her full scrutiny, then continued in a hushed voice. "It was the same ghastly method. Neck was bitten through, the artery severed."
"Let's-pretend vampires," Jean-Baptiste said with a grimace. "All the kids these days into cult stuff. Goth." He closed the subject with a palms-up gesture. "Your roommate was Tamora Pass? I saw her in that
Mission Impossible
sequel."
"Bloody film looked as if it were edited in a blender," Etan grumbled.
Breakfast was served; they moved to the table. Jean-Baptiste soon had them laughing about the way some of his colleagues spent their off-hours, obsessively staging and betting on cockroach races. Cockroaches the size of Matchbox automobiles. They kept their huge and pampered pets in lozenge tins that they carried with them in their shirt pockets during the day.
"Bugging out in Africa," Jean-Baptiste said.
"Of course," Etan said, sucking up coffee, "only in our obsessions do we meet the promise of a truly meaningful life."
"Cockroaches are meaningful?" Eden asked.
"As long as they don't finish out of the money."
Pegeen didn't laugh. She continued to look at Eden, seeming adrift and dismayed, wanting confirmation of what they'd both seen on the tube during the bad news from Atlanta.
The opaque orange
shuka
Bertie had put on after her nearly nude swim billowed like flame as she crossed the lawn barefoot, followed by adoring dogs.
"Here comes enough body heat to leave an imprint on stone," Jean-Baptiste said wistfully.
"Behave," Eden chided. "She's spoken for."
"None remain but you and me, Eve. I may not be the First Man, but I'm just as deserving,
mon cher
."
"And an optimist," Eden said, but with a smile, acknowledging the sacrifice of his pawn. And not unwilling to continue the game. He had a face like a bloodhound with a bad head cold, but his body was lean and fine. Just one of those guys you could feel guilty about for not liking them. Actually she did like Jean-Baptiste, although he could be talkative while never revealing much about himself. In that respect, at least, they were a matched pair.
T
om Sherard and Joseph Nkambe, Bertie's father, returned at twenty past eight with the body of the leopard Tom had settled shortly after daybreak, when the leopard returned from nocturnal prowling to his customary hide, where he laid up during the day. They all went out to the lake side of the house to have a look at the body, tied down on the bonnet of a Land Rover.
On the point of one shoulder there was a punched-out floret from the .375-caliber expanding bullet that had killed the cat, blowing pieces of bone like shrapnel through the chest cavity. The open eyes were a glazed yellow, like the flesh of a cut lemon left all day in a saucer. The six-foot leopard had been tagged, with the particulars of the kill noted on the tag. The remains would be turned over to the Kenyan Wildlife Service.
Sherard looked drawn and tired. Probably he should have left this hunt to another pro, Eden thought, because of a left leg that still pained him and lacked strength after an assassin's bullets had nearly demolished the knee. Hunters of leopard often turned out to be the hunted if a shot only wounded the animal, which was often the case. Nervous exhaustion, not exhilaration, was a common reaction to those who remained unscathed after a leopard hunt. He had waited motionless in the dark for hours, never knowing if the most cunning of big cats might be creeping up behind them, just outside the blind in the leaning tree that he and Joseph had constructed after Tom patiently tracked the leopard to his lair.
The hunters handed over guns and Tom's leopard bag, which was filled with practical items like body armor, disinfectant, and Syrettes of morphine, to Hassan, the Somali head of the Shungwaya household. There was a reflection of a cruising vulture on the Land Rover's windscreen. Pegeen Culver approached the dead leopard, shading her eyes against the sun flare off glass.
Small shapely head, the sprawled body supple even in death. A beautiful creature, claws like razors, retracted now. The leopard had eviscerated and eaten most of a child. Her husband photographed Pegeen with the leopard. He had a kitful of the latest in digital video equipment. At Etan's urging Pegeen diffidently touched a dangling paw. Retreated, shuddering.
Etan Culver interviewed Sherard, who submitted graciously but had no use for it. He wanted a bath and breakfast.
"Is that what you saw?" Eden said quietly in Pegeen's ear. "On the face of the boy who killed the preacher?"
Several dik-dik sauntered along the driveway, attracted by the tasty buds of bougainvillea. One of the estate dogs loped toward them, chasing them away. Hippos were lounging and splashing in their muddy pools. White pelicans flew along the lakeshore where stubs of drowned trees had reappeared from the blue depths. There was a sizzle of tiny insects nearby, weaving a universe in air, one day and they were done.
"No," Pegeen said. "A catlike body, but huger. And the head was not that of a cat. It had a sneering, thuggish face."
Eden nodded glumly. She was familiar with the animal described, although Pegeen hadn't been in Africa long enough to have seen one.
Bertie Nkambe, who had an arm around Tom Sherard's waist as he responded halfheartedly to the filmmaker's questions on camera, glanced at them. Bertie looked serenely happy. Eden felt a pang of envy. It was like the touch of a fly on her skin, to be brushed away. She looked again at Pegeen, whose eyes were dreary. Pegeen, who had asthma, massaged her throat with a pale childlike hand, as if the dry air was choking her.
"Sure and it'll be comin' here," Pegeen confirmed.
"You don't have to be afraid, Pegeen."
"What does it want? Why is it comin'?"
"I don't know yet. But when it does come. . . Tom will kill it."
If it can be killed
.
Pegeen looked at her husband, who was absorbed in his craft.
"I hate it here," she said, suddenly in tears. "There's too much of death, everywhere. But Etan won't listen. He won't leave."
VATICAN PALACE
ROME, ITALY
OCTOBER 10
0500 HOURS ZULU
H
is Holiness Pope John the Twenty-fourth, born Sebastiano Leoncaro in a small Piedmont town seventy-two years ago, awoke as was his habit promptly at five A.M. in the papal apartment overlooking the Piazza of St. Peter's.
Espresso with a dash of whipped cream was waiting outside his bedroom door, brought to him by Sister Pasqualina, one of the staff of elderly nuns of the Sisters of the Poor who looked after Leoncaro's daily needs.
Following his prayer for guidance during a long working day and a set of light exercises prescribed for a chronic back condition, Leoncaro treated himself to music—Elgar's
Dream of Gerontius
—which he listened to on headphones while he made his first diary entry for October 10. There had been a thunderstorm during the night, breaking the heat wave that had lingered well into the month. The windows of his study next to the bedroom had been opened for him. The curtains stirred in a predawn breeze that held the sweetness of the summer's air at Lake Albano, only fourteen miles away but fourteen hundred feet higher than smog-plagued Rome.
His source of light at this early hour was a green-shaded student's lamp that had been with him since his early days at the Angelicum and through his globetrotting years as a Vatican diplomat. The lamp sat directly in front of him on the writing desk. A pool of light illuminated both his diary and proof pages of one section of the papal
Anuncio
he had been working on for three years. The rest of his study was in deep shadow.
After a few minutes it became apparent to Leoncaro that he was no longer alone. He continued his writing for another minute, then closed his diary, removed the headphones, and laid them on the desk. He looked up over the edges of his half glasses at the figure seated on the small divan opposite him. Hadn't been there when Leoncaro entered his study. The door remained closed. So it was a Visitation. And the news was likely to be grim.