Suicide Kings

29

Katimba, Tanzania.

Thursday,

December 24

Katimba, Tanzania

Lohengrin hadn’t known how many children were with Gardener. It turned out to be a lot. Noel counted more than forty.

They lay in the shade provided by a large tree and the overhang of a corrugated tin hut. Gardener had her back against the tree. The girl looked terrible, wasted, gaunt.

A cold fist closed down on his gut. Noel had seen this before-in a hospital in Khartoum.

Five kids slept around her, their heads resting on her lap and thighs. Using a large leaf as a fan, Gardener kept the flies from their faces. Some of those faces weren’t very human. As Lohengrin had reported most of the children were jokers.

Gardener’s eyes widened as he appeared, and she reached a clawlike hand into her seed pouch.

She didn’t know him in his Etienne form. He quickly shifted back to Noel. The children who were awake cried out in terror as his body reshaped itself. Their cries woke the others, and the air was filled with wails, sobs, and cries.

Gardener relaxed when she realized who he was. “Hush, hush,” she soothed. “He’s a friend. He’s here to help us. In the blink of an eye he can have us in a city where there’s food and beds. Hush, hush.” Her voice had the quality of a song.

But Noel did the calculation, and didn’t like the tally. Assuming he could carry four at a time it would take him twelve trips. Thirteen to bring Gardener.

He dropped down on his knees next to her. “What’s your most pressing need?” he asked.

“Food. The kids are hungry. I had been growing food for them, but I’ve been too”-she made a gesture that indicated her emaciated body-“too weak to do much.”

“Look, I can’t carry…” Her eyes filled with tears, and Noel hurried to add, “It’s all right. It’s all right. I’ve got another way to get them out. A better way, but it’s going to take me a bit of time to arrange things. I’ll bring back food and some docs from the Jokertown Clinic to hold them until we can get transport here.”

“The roads are terrible. There’s no way-”

“Trust me.” It gave him an odd jolt when he said the words. He rushed on. “The girl I’m thinking of will make roads unnecessary.”

Kisangani, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

“Fuck me,” Joey said on the outskirts of the city. “This place is crazy.”

Michelle agreed. The jungle was moving back into the city, reclaiming it. The roads had been blown up. Trees were growing up through some of the houses. A few had been completely taken over by vines. Chimpanzees jumped from rooftop to treetop and back again. The city was silent except for the calls of birds and chimps. Occasionally, in the distance, they heard the popping of gunfire.

Adesina was closer now, and it was hard for Michelle to stay focused on what she was doing. They kept working their way through the torn-up streets, trying to keep their bearings. There were several groups of buildings visible in the distance. The pilot had told them one of these would most likely be the place they were looking for.

They pushed on. At the end of one devastated street, they found themselves at a small hospital. It didn’t look like the buildings Michelle had seen in her dreams, but she decided to go inside anyway. Joey’s leg needed to be looked at. The need to get to Adesina was raging in her. But if Joey collapsed, Michelle might never reach Adesina. And if she did, there would be no Hoodoo Mama to help her fight for the child.

The hospital’s walls were painted a pretty terra-cotta color. THE ALICIA NSHOMBO HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN was stenciled on the unbroken front doors in French. Through the glass Michelle could see an overgrown courtyard in the center of the building. “How did this stay intact?” she asked.

“I got no cocksucking idea,” Joey said. Then she giggled. This was so odd Michelle stopped and looked at her. Joey gave her a sweet smile for an instant, before her angry Hoodoo Mama face popped back up.

Michelle pulled the door open and Joey followed her inside. The reception area was tiny, a couple of chairs and a desk. There wasn’t anyone at the desk.

“Hello?” Michelle tried to make her French singsongy, the way Kengo’s accent sounded, but it mostly sounded stupid to her. There was no answer, so they went into the hallway. Sunlight filtered through the windows. There were monkeys in the trees in the courtyard.

They walked down the quiet corridor, passing in and out of patches of sunlight cast across the floor. The walls here weren’t painted an antiseptic green or white color. They were azure, cornflower yellow, and brick.

To the left was a large open ward. There were two rows of beds facing each other. Mosquito netting was draped over each bed. One of the patients saw them, and waved at them with her left hand. Her right hand was missing. Neither Joey nor Michelle waved back.

A nurse came over to them. “May I help?” she said in French. “Do you know one of our patients?”

“My friend needs a doctor to look at her leg,” Michelle said.

“This isn’t a clinic,” the nurse said, switching to English. “It’s a survivor hospital. The doctors have already done their rounds and have gone to another hospital for the afternoon. We don’t have many of them.”

“Well, can you look at her leg?” Michelle was getting pissed. Adesina was so close, and all they needed was to get Joey’s damn leg looked at. How hard was that?

“Lie down on that bed and I’ll be right back,” the nurse said, pointing to the only empty bed in the ward.

Joey collapsed onto the bed. The woman in the next pushed herself up, then pulled her netting away. She was young, no more than a few years older than Michelle. There were scars on her face. It looked as if she’d been slashed by a knife.

“Hello,” she said in heavily accented English. “You are a long way from home.”

“Yes, we are,” Michelle replied. Where the hell was that damn nurse? “My friend’s leg is hurt.”

“I see that. May I touch your hair?”

The request was so odd it snapped Michelle out of thinking about Adesina. “Uhm, well, I guess so.” She walked over to the woman’s bed and bent down. The woman stroked the top of Michelle’s head, then ran her hand down Michelle’s braid. “Oh, it’s very soft. I’ve never seen hair like this before.”

Jesus, Michelle thought, I cannot believe I’m having hair chitchat right now.

“I use to braid my daughter’s hair.” Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. “Your braid has come loose. I could fix it for you.” The nurse hadn’t come back yet and even though the request was odd, it wouldn’t take long.

“Sure.”

The woman undid Michelle’s braid, and then combed her fingers through Michelle’s hair before she started plaiting it. “I’m Makemba,” she said. “Will you be here long? Kinsangani is an odd place for you to be.”

“I’m looking for a friend,” Michelle said. It was close enough to the truth.

The nurse came back carrying a metal tray with disinfectant, gauze, bandages, a curved needle, a packet of suturing material, and a syringe. She told Joey to roll onto her stomach. Joey jerked when the nurse started cleaning the wound. “These look like claw marks,” the nurse said. “How did you get these?”

“We got attacked by some leopards.”

“It’s dangerous in the jungle,” the nurse said. “And these wounds will need stitches.”

“It’s fucking dangerous everywhere now,” Joey said. “Ow! You fucker! That hurts!”

“Shut up and take it.” Michelle expected Joey to glower at her, but Joey just closed her eyes.

“What happened to your daughter?” Michelle asked Makemba as the woman finished Michelle’s braid.

“She died,” Makemba said softly. “They came from Uganda and they killed the men in our village. Then they raped the women. All of the women were raped, even my daughter. She was six. They slashed some of our faces. Some of them raped us with their guns after they were finished raping us with their…” Makemba fell silent.

“Those fuckers did that?” Joey asked quietly as she opened her eyes. She began to shake.

“Oh, yes,” the nurse said, “but the Nshombos put an end to it. They punished as many men as could be caught. Then they put out bounties on the heads of the ones who’d escaped.” She paused. “All the women here have been raped.”

“ All of them?” Michelle felt sick. “Every one in this ward?”

“In the entire hospital. And this is just one of the hospitals for the survivors. It has been going on for years. They can’t go home. They’re outcasts now. But the Nshombos are taking care of them. It is Alicia Nshombo’s great work. She is the Mother of the Country.”

Michelle looked around the room. The women closest to them were all leaning forward in their beds. And they smiled at her. God, how can they smile at all?

Makemba pointed at the woman directly across from her. “She was raped by ten men. After they finished, they killed her sister and her mother. She had a baby from it and left it at an orphanage.” She pointed at the woman in the bed to her right. “They made her watch as they raped her eleven-year-old daughter. Then six men held her down and raped her. Then they used their guns to rape her. She no longer has control of her bladder or her bowels. The doctors have done four surgeries on her.”

Michelle held up her hands. “Please. No more.”

Makemba grabbed Michelle’s wrist. “You have to let your people know that the Nshombos are helping us. They are making our lives better. Without Alicia Nshombo we would all be dead or trying to live in the forest.”

Michelle pulled her hand away. The Nshombos ran everything in the PPA with an iron glove. They had to know about the experiments on children. But how to reconcile that with this hospital? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the Nshombos knew nothing about the children in the pit.

“Your leg will be fine,” the nurse said. “I’m going to give you a shot of antibiotics.” She reached into her pocket and gave Joey a small bottle. “Here are some more to take. One a day for seven days. Those stitches will dissolve on their own.”

Joey shoved the pills into her pants pocket. “Thanks,” she said gruffly.

“What do we owe you?” Michelle asked.

“Oh, nothing,” the nurse said cheerfully. “There is free health care since Dr. Nshombo came to power. I hope when you go home you will tell everyone how the Nshombos have made a real paradise of our country.”

The Red House

Outside Bunia, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

“Gather round,” Tom told the child aces assembled in the dining hall of the big Red House, whose eye-watering smell of carbolic cleansers seemed barely to mask a scent of decay. Dr. Washikala hovered in the background, scrubbing gaunt brown hands against each other. The major commanding the security contingent stood listening keenly at military brace in his tan uniform, shades, and leopard-skin fez. He was middling tall and wiry, like all Leopard Men. The only fatso in the Leopard Society seemed to be its Mama Alicia.

The child aces turned apprehensive expressions toward Tom. “We got problems. Major problems,” he told them, his voice rasping. “The imperialists who attacked Nyunzu have now destroyed a medical barge and smuggled the children they stole across the border into Tanzania. We’ve lost Leucrotta, the Hunger, and Ghost. They failed to stop the imperialists. It’s up to us now, you dig?”

He stood a moment, surveying their small faces, unmarked human and joker alike. They shuffled nervously in their chairs or on the floor. Ayiyi scratched behind one ear with one of his mouth parts.

“Mummy and the Darkness are helping the Mother of the Nation now. Ayiyi, I’ll hyperflight you to Kongoville to guard the President-for-Life. Wrecker, Moto-you stay here and help defend your brothers and sisters. The rest of you… do what you can. Any questions?”

No questions. In fact, they were pretty quiet for a bunch of kids. Tom figured, vaguely, he’d dazzled them with his revolutionary eloquence.

Blythe van Renssaeler

Memorial Clinic, Jokertown

Manhattan, New York

“Wow, New York city,” Mollie said in tones of reverence. “It’s really… noisy.”

Noel was both amused and irritated by her simplicity. But that wasn’t fair. How could he expect eloquence about steel canyons and symphonies of taxi horns from a girl whose life experience consisted of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and that strip mall surrounded by freeways that was Los Angeles?

“Maybe we can go to Macy’s when we’re finished? And I’d like to see Central Park, and Tiffany’s, and the observation deck on the Empire State Building.”

Noel knew all the movies that had produced the list: Miracle on 34th Street, Barefoot in the Park, and Aces High, with its romantic version of Peregrine and Fortunato’s “affair.” “First let’s bring those children back to civilization,” he said.

He had taken Mollie to Katimba so she had a sense of the place. A joker nurse had gripped him by the collar with her twig fingers, and said a single word-“Hurry.” Now he and Mollie stood in an alley next to the Jokertown Clinic. Finn and an army of nurses and orderlies were mustered at the sliding-glass doors. He had alerted the centaur doctor to Gardener’s condition and given him a brief description of the steps that had been taken in the Khartoum hospital, to no avail.

He hated that so many people were going to witness Mollie’s power, but comforted himself with the knowledge that Americans never paid attention to news outside of the United States. And he had to do this. He had expended so much effort-emotional, financial, and physical-on having a child with Niobe, and now he found he reacted to every crying child. But not with the irritation that had been the reaction of an earlier self, but with a fierce need to react, protect, comfort.

He nodded to Mollie, and one of her doorways appeared in the grimy bricks of the neighboring building. A gust of hot, moist air blew through, and immediately became a cloud of fog when it met New York’s December chill. The doctors and nurses came through carrying children.

Noel dodged them in the doorway, and went to Gardener’s side. He picked her up. It was like holding a bundle of twigs. “You’re a miracle worker,” she whispered weakly. “Thank you.”

“I’m a practical man with a lot of contacts. And you’re welcome.” And Noel carried her back through to New York, and delivered her into Finn’s care.

Kisangani, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

“I want to kill those fuckers,” Joey said. “The ones that did that to those women.” She was limping, but she seemed to be doing a little better.

“It sounds like the Nshombos have already punished most of them,” Michelle replied.

Joey glared at her. “You don’t understand.”

Michelle stopped. “Yeah, I do understand. You were raped, too. And every one of those women hurts just like you. Only worse. You can’t undo what happened to them, and you can’t undo what happened to you. I’m sorry. But right now, we can save one little girl.”

“It ain’t enough.” Joey’s voice was almost a wail and there was fury in her eyes.

“No,” Michelle replied with her mouth set in a grim line. “It never is.”