“Nice dad,” said Holliday. He couldn’t remember his own drunken father ever having read a book to him.
“A nice man, yes,” said Eddie, wistfully.
Rafi was beaming like a little kid. “It’s wonderful! The runes are absolute proof of my theory!” He ran his fingers into the deep indentations that had been carved into the dark stone. He turned to Peggy. “Take a picture,” he said eagerly. “This will put a few people’s noses out of joint back at the university.”
Peggy dug her Nikon out of her pack and Rafi arranged himself proudly beside the deeply etched lettering, like an old photo of a man on a safari, his foot planted on the head of a dead animal.
“For posterity.” Rafi grinned. “And for the pages of the
Qedem
article I’m going to publish.”
“Maybe you should get Eddie into the picture, since he was the one who found it,” Holliday said. “Maybe give him some credit in the article as well.”
“Uh, sure, that sounds good,” said Rafi, his face falling just a little bit. “Come on, Eddie; get in here.”
“No, thank you,
mi amigo
, this is your thing. I do not want to interfere. It was only luck that I saw it.”
“Are you sure?” Rafi said without much eagerness in his voice.
“
Absolutament
e, I am sure.” The Cuban smiled.
Peggy took several shots with Rafi in the frame and then a half dozen close shots, getting the sun shadows as deeply into the engraving on the stone as possible. When she was finished they turned back down the narrow old boar path heading deeper into the jungle, Rafi and Peggy in the lead.
“You should have had your picture taken,” said Holliday. “You
did
find it first.”
“Only an accident,
Doctoro.
It is for him, the adventure, the science of all this; let him have it. We are the lucky ones, after all.”
“What do you mean?”
“For Rafi it is dates and kings and radiocarbon dating; for us it is the story, the
narración.
Rafi writes it in his notebooks; we feel it in our hearts. It is both our joy and our tragedy, yes, this imagination, this romance?”
“You should have been a poet, Eddie, not a soldier.”
“All Cubans are poets,
amigo
.” The big man laughed sourly. “You have to be when they only pay you five pesos a week.”
They walked on ahead until they saw Rafi and Peggy stopped in front of an area of scuffed and deeply scratched earth. There were a few cloven hoofprints and the tracks of small, bare human feet, as well. The cracked surface of the disturbed, dry ground indicated that it had recently been used as a mud wallow by the wild pigs that employed the path as a highway through the jungle. The children’s footprints were also indicative; they weren’t far behind the child soldiers.
“Maybe we should turn off,” suggested Rafi.
“The jungle’s too thick. This is no canopy rain forest. This is the only way for now.”
They kept on moving through the morning hours, the trail leading blindly down to the river once or twice, probably to water the animals who used it, then veered away, heading back into the deeper jungle but always moving west. By noon it became too hot to walk and when the trail led down toward the river again they paused to rest for a few minutes.
So far they hadn’t seen any sign of the child soldiers. They had dried food from the attacking team’s stores, but no one felt much like dehydrated beef Stroganoff or dried mac and cheese with “real” ground beef. Holliday let them light a small fire as long as the wood was tinderdry and smokeless, and Eddie went down to the river with his spear to try his luck again. Rafi slept, Holliday tended the fire and Peggy went looking for subjects to photograph.
“Not too far,” warned Holliday, “we may have to bail in a rush.”
“Yes, sir, boss.” Peggy grinned, with a mock salute.
A few minutes later Holliday heard his cousin’s familiar laugh and a little while after that she reappeared, the Nikon over her shoulder and something cupped in her hands. Holliday poked at the fire with a twig to keep it burning and stood up.
“What’ve you got there, kiddo?”
“It’s a baby!” Peggy chortled. As Holliday approached her she opened her cupped hands and showed him what she’d found.
“Oh, shit!” Holliday whispered.
“What is it?” Peggy said, startled by his reaction.
“Put it down!” The little creatures in her hand looked like a furry cross between guinea pigs and chipmunks.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re boar piglets and that means the mother’s around somewhere.”
“But—”
“Put them down! Now!” Peggy froze, Rafi woke up with a jerk and somewhere down the trail they heard a sound like a giant steam locomotive. An angry steam locomotive.
Rafi stood up, blinking away sleep. “What the hell?”
Suddenly the locomotive was making sounds like a hundred hammers striking stone and the sounds were getting closer. Eddie appeared, grinning proudly, a two-foot-long fish with a nose like an elephant held with three fingers of his left hand crammed into its gills, the spear that had impaled the scaleless creature in his right hand.
The sow came down the trail from behind them, screeching her steam-engine cry at the top of her lungs, her sharp hooves pounding the dirt, her head high. The beast was black with traces of bristled rust at the shoulders and from where Holliday was standing he could swear the small angry eyes were as red as a demon’s. Peggy stood frozen, eyes wide, staring at the furious mother of the infant piglets she held in her hands. It seemed incredible that the piglets and the massive mother were even of the same species.
The mother rushed headlong at Peggy, at least two hundred and fifty pounds of toothy, infuriated horror, the muscles in her back bunched and ready to head off any move her quarry could make.
Unlike the male of the species, the small horned female preferred to attack with her teeth and usually charged with her head high, looking for tender targets in the midsection, preferably stomach and groin.
Holliday had about a three-quarter view. He hauled the handgun he’d taken from one of their dead attackers and fired, striking the creature somewhere in the belly. The enormous pig never even slowed. She was halfway across the clearing now and there was no time for a second shot. Peggy was still frozen on the spot, the piglets squealing in her hand, smelling the approaching sow.
“Peggy!” Rafi bellowed, running toward her. Holliday made a running tackle, bowling Rafi out of harm’s way just as the elephant-nosed fish Eddie had been carrying flew through the air and struck the creature heavily on the side of the head. Stunned for a second she came to a lurching halt, looking around, roaring insanely.
“
¡
Hola! ¡El cerdo grande, cago en tu leche el gordota! ¡Por aquí!”
The huge creature spotted Eddie, turned to him on her spindly legs and pawed the ground with her razor hooves. Eddie pointed the heavy spear toward the sow and made a lunging motion. The sow attacked, head high. Eddie waited until the last second, dropped to one knee, then pounded the blunt end of the spear into the ground at no more than a twenty-degree angle. He gripped the spear with both arms and tensed as the sow sprang forward, the end of the spear going under her raised snout and into the soft tissue of her chest. Eddie was bowled over onto his back but he managed to hang on to the spear. Squealing, the huge beast thrust herself toward Eddie, forcing her body down the pole, impaling herself even more horribly as she tried to bring her gnashing teeth to bear. She died, snorting and groaning weakly a few moments later, the beast’s hot blood pooling on the front of Eddie’s shirt, soaking it. The stink of the beast’s death odor was pungent.
“How did you know where to stab it?” Holliday asked. “My shot didn’t even slow it down.”
Eddie staggered to his knees and pushed the sow aside.
“My older brother Domingo and I used to hunt them at our uncle’s farm in Holguín Province,” Eddie answered.
“I guess we lucked out,” said Rafi.
“Don’t be quite so sure,” answered Holliday, hearing a series of familiar clicking sounds. Everyone looked in his direction as four young boys between nine and twelve stepped out of the jungle, their expressions flat and emotionless, the AK-47s in their arms rock steady. Holliday stared. They’d gone from Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
to
Lord of the Flies
in the blink of an eye.
20
The Krone restaurant and bar was exactly as Euhler had described it, lots of glass and gleaming marble behind a classic facade of white half-timbered buildings on a white half-timbered street where even the cobblestone appeared to have been polished recently.
Lenny Euhler had changed out of his suit and was now wearing a pair of tight blue jeans, penny loafers and a pale blue roll-neck sweater. The eyeglasses had gone from black to bright red. He was sitting at the bar drinking a mojito and trying to look bored. There was already an empty glass beside him and a chewed lime wedge.
Saint-Sylvestre sat down beside the banker and gave the man his best smile. Euhler seemed relieved, as though he’d been thinking that he’d allowed his supposedly secret sexuality to interfere with business and consequently had lost a half-billion-dollar deal for having offended Saint-Sylvestre by showing his true colors. Saint-Sylvestre added to poor Euhler’s relief by putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing lightly. Fat and bone. No muscle. The banker’s eyes filled with tears of reassurance.
“Lenny! Been waiting long?”
“Just a few minutes, my dear Tarik,” he said, gesturing toward the empty glass. “I’ve gotten a little ahead of you, I’m afraid, but good tables are frightfully hard to get here at this hour, so I thought I’d get here early and cross the maître d’s palm.”
“Don’t worry, Lenny; I can assure you that I’ll catch up.”
A bartender stopped and asked him what he wanted and Saint-Sylvestre ordered a margarita. “To keep in the festive mood.” He smiled.
“Excellent.” Lenny beamed.
After ten minutes of banker’s talk of interest rates and the global performance of one stock or another, their table was announced and they went into the restaurant, all crisp white linen and gleaming silver. Euhler had sautéed scallops on a mesclun salad to start and Saint-Sylvestre had the requisite steak tartare with a bright yellow egg yolk perched on the top. This was followed by tandoori chicken breast with wasabi for Euhler and a simple whitefish with almond butter for Saint-Sylvestre, trying to recover from the scoop of bloody ground sirloin with its single yellow egg-yolk eye. All of this was washed down with several bottles of Castanar Riserva Barrique 2005, a Swiss red that was surprisingly drinkable.
As the meal progressed, Saint-Sylvestre sipping his wine while Euhler gulped his, the conversation went from the general to the specific, slowly but surely honing in on the potential for mineral investment in Africa, led in that direction by Saint-Sylvestre’s gentle prodding. Given that he’d found Euhler’s business card in the same anonymously owned flat as Sir James Matheson and Francois Nagoupandé, it seemed likely that Matheson was arranging some mineral licensing agreement with Nagoupandé in return for giving the newly created brigadier general Kukuanaland’s and Kolingba’s heads on the same platter.
The coincidence of Kukuanaland’s coup and a sudden mineral find by Matheson would be a little hard for the world press to swallow, not to mention a crown investigating committee into Matheson’s business practices being established just down the street at Westminster, so the mining magnate had to be using Euhler’s services to distance himself from both the coup and the mineral find. The question was, How?
After a third bottle of wine and a two-octave rise in Euhler’s voice, Saint-Sylvestre suggested that they return to the banker’s apartment for the promised nightcap. Euhler was pleased as punch and insisted on walking through the cobblestone streets down toward the Aar River, for which the town was named.
According to Lenny, Aarau was located in something called the “golden triangle” of Zurich, Bern and Basel, making it one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the country. It also offered great prospects for people wishing to invest their money. Saint-Sylvestre made it quite clear that the investors he represented were interested in natural resources generally and gold, silver and platinum specifically. They were, according to Saint-Sylvestre, extremely practical people. Lenny gave him a melodramatic wink and squeezed his arm tighter. “I may have just the thing for you, Tarik, my dear.”
Euhler’s apartment turned out to be an ultramodern white concrete ziggurat overlooking the river and the foothills of the Jura Mountains. It was quite lavish for a pied-à-terre, with two bedrooms, two full bathrooms, one en suite, a living room, a dining room and a home office. Saint-Sylvestre was pleased to notice that there were no obvious security cameras, which was a bonus; he’d definitely been recorded at the bank, but only as one of a number of calls.
“Do much work at home?” Saint-Sylvestre asked mildly, peeking into the room. The computer was a top-end Acer Veriton with a landing pad for a number of specialty bank peripherals, including a real-time stock exchange ticker. The furniture was all steel and black and leather and the only decoration on the wall was a seventy-inch TV tuned to some digitized program that showed a waterfall in a forest somewhere. The same thing appeared as a screen shot on the computer. Saint-Sylvestre noted that one drawer of the desk was actually a small safe, complete with a digital combination lock.