Dead and Gone b-12 Page 27

  “Personality as perceived?” a guy from the far corner asked. He was white, medium-height, slim build—a good-looking kid with very close-cropped hair.

  “Single most distinguishing characteristic is pathological vengefulness,” she answered him.

  “Thank you, Aydah,” Lune said formally.

  “But the operation itself,” an Asian kid with cold eyes offered, “… the way it was coordinated, the assassins were certainly professionals. So it isn’t just a question of money, then. Whoever hired them had to know where to find them.”

  “That’s right, Minh,” Heidi said, “and you can’t just find a contract killer in the Soldier of Fortune want ads anymore.”

  “Maybe the connect is to Timmons and Ruhr,” Aydah said.

  “That doesn’t authenticate,” the Latina argued. “Those white supremacists aren’t even good at killing, never mind gunfighting. It smells more like the government.”

  “Oh, they’re real experts, all right,” Aydah shot back.

  Lune held up his hand for silence.

  “Burke, it’s your time now,” he said. “You have to sit down and start making out a list. It doesn’t matter how long it is, but it has to be as complete as you can possibly make it.”

  “A list of …”

  “Pedophiles who might want revenge for something you did. Or who might have had reason to believe you were hunting them.”

  “That could be any—”

  “You’re safe here,” Lune said. “Take all the time you need.”

  I knew better than to do that kind of work without a break. Your body gets tired, it moves slower. But when your mind gets tired, it turns on you.

  There was a heavyweight-championship fight on the giant-screen TV they had in one of the common rooms. Not many were watching: the white kid with the close-cropped haircut, the Asian they had called Minh, the Indian, the Latina, and a couple of others.

  “Clint,” the white kid said to me, holding out his hand for me to shake. “This is my partner, Minh.”

  I shook both their hands—they were the first ones I’d met there who offered them.

  The fight was pitiful. One boxer spent most of each round leaning against the ropes like a wino using a wall to prop himself up. The other guy slapped at him as if he were trying to keep flies off a corpse.

  “If I hit a guy like that on the street in front of a dozen witnesses, I wouldn’t even get arrested,” I said.

  Clint laughed, offered me a high-five.

  The Indian nodded a silent agreement.

  The Latina glared at me.

  Since neither of the boxers dropped dead of a heart attack, the decision went to the judges. I didn’t wait around for it.

  I kept working on my list, following Lune’s parameters: they had to be either wanting revenge, or fearing it.

  The first category was much longer than the second. The people I would have wanted to hurt the most—the ones who had hurt me so much when I was little—I didn’t know most of their names, much less where to find them. They wouldn’t even know I was alive.

  Anyway, they would know what the dumb-fuck government doesn’t. Most of us, damn near all of us, we don’t turn on the ones who hurt us. No, we turn on ourselves, mostly. Or on you.

  And then you say we were born bad.

  You and Hitler. Yeah, you don’t like the comparison? Then, while we’re doing time for what was done to us, don’t fucking tell us, “It’s all in the genes,” okay?

  Just thinking about it made the back of my neck burn. A guy goes to work and spends the day kissing the boss’s ass. So he goes home and kicks his wife’s. Makes him feel like a man. We know what he is. A lowlife coward. But a kid who finally can’t take it anymore and kills the people—you call them “parents”—who’ve been torturing him forever, he’s the one you send to prison.

  I love it when some punk prosecutor tells a jury the kid didn’t have to kill his father. The father who’d been sodomizing him since he was six. Why didn’t the kid just, like, assault him, or something? I’ll tell you why. Because we all know. We know what happens if we don’t kill them. As soon as they recover, they’ll make us pray we had.

  When babies are born to beasts, when the government pats the beasts on the head and lets them keep feeding, when the kids know they’ll never get away because their baby brother or sister will be next … Oh, there’s a lot of things kids can do. To themselves. That’s okay. But if they ever dare to do it to the beasts, they’re penitentiary-bound.

  I was there for patterns. So I could see the truth. And maybe the whole process was getting to me. I was starting to see a pattern myself. People hurt their kids. And the government doesn’t do anything to protect the kids. Soon, one of the kids figures it out—he can’t go through life without backup, and he’s not getting it from where other kids do. Next thing, he’s in some juvenile institution. Learning to be everything they said he was when they put him in there.

  Meanwhile, there’s all these people who would give anything to have a kid of their own. And they can’t get one. If the government just moved on humans who hurt their kids, took them away, handed them over to people who wanted to be real parents, they could shut down a lot of the prisons.

  But that would put too many people out of work.

  I stopped it right there. Drove it out of my mind. Concentrated, focusing down to tiny points until I was … somewhere else.

  And a lot of the names Lune wanted from me were right in there, too. Waiting for me.

  I asked Lune if Gem and I could go outside one morning. “Go with Levi,” is all he said.

  The Indian took us out through a different door from the one he’d used that first time. We were on a jagged expanse of rock that seemed to go on forever, but I could see trees in the distance. The air was thin—and so pure it was almost sweet inside my lungs.

  “How long have you been with—?” Gem started to ask the Indian, before a look from me cut her off.

  “Lune is a sensei, not a guru,” he answered, guessing where she was going. “The answers to every question a man can have are in what most of the world believes to be a series of random, unconnected events. To see the pattern in the randomness is to unlock the mystery … whatever the mystery is.

  “Lune knows how to do that. Better than anyone who has come before him. If he wanted to lead a cult, he could. If he wanted to make a billion dollars, he could do that, too. But he is a seeker, just as we are. The greedy ones—the ones who learn of Lune’s work and want to profit from it—they never get past our screens.”

  “Do people find their answers here?” I asked him.

  “Some do.”

  “And when they do—?”

  “Ah. I understand. Yes, some leave then. But some return.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because a person of honor must honor his debts.”

  I didn’t ask him if he was talking about himself.

  “Do you know why Lune is helping Burke?” Gem said.

  “Yes. Lune said they were brothers when they were very small. And that Burke was the first person who understood his gift. And his need.”

  “So you know he’s—?”

  “Searching for his real parents? Yes,” the Indian said, his face flat, but pain for his soul-wounded sensei clear in his eyes.

  I kept working on my list. Gem wanted to help, but I told her I just didn’t see how she could.

  “Tell me your life,” she said. “I will listen. Maybe I will hear something of value to you.”

  So I started from the beginning. Again.

  Occasionally, I would walk past their patterning wall. And see things on it that made no sense to me—I couldn’t imagine any connection.

  Cayman Islands

  New Utopia

  Liberian registry

  Dominica

  Nauru

  But I wasn’t a sensei, or even a student, so I just went back to doing what I knew how to do.

  They had a pool
table there. I spent some time teaching Gem. Played cards with Clint, Minh, and Heidi—she was murderous at poker, with that farm-girl face covering up a statistician’s mind. The Indian and I talked about his people. I learned a lot more than Hiram had ever told me. About a warrior named Juh, who Levi said actually did some of the things credited to Geronimo.

  “No one knows what ‘Juh’ means,” he said. “It may be a nonsense name, or just a sound he made to refer to himself. But in historical accounts of several of the most famous and most tactically accomplished raids, survivors remember seeing the warriors looking toward a large, dark man who was signaling with his hands. Juh had a bad stutter and couldn’t really speak, so he used a complicated set of hand signals. He and Geronimo were childhood playmates and lifelong friends. And, if the stories are true, Geronimo may have been more vicious but it was Juh who never failed to find an enemy, even when it took years.”

  I got along with—and learned something from—every one of them except the Latina. I asked Gem if she knew why that woman wouldn’t come anywhere near me.

  “Yes,” is all she said.

  It was late at night when I found Lune. He was alone at his computer, his angel’s face bathed in blue light from the screen.

  “I’m done,” I told him.

  He didn’t look away from the screen. “Are you sure, Burke?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’ve been going over and over it. Again and again. I must have told poor Gem my whole lousy life story a dozen times. If there’s anyone not on this list, I don’t know it.”

  His head swiveled suddenly. “Sometimes …” he began, his voice soft, “people don’t remember things that—”

  “It’s not like that for me, Lune,” I said, quickly, cutting him off before he went someplace he’d never return from. “I remember every one of them. Right to this day. You know what? You’re right—the stuff some people repress, it’s all right on the surface for me. And if I could find any of them …”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been working, too. Now we’re going to have to take what you’ve got and see where the pattern is.”

  “Is there any way I can help?”

  “Not yet,” he said, taking the thick looseleaf book I’d been working in from my hand and turning back to the computer screen.

  “I could stay here,” Gem said that night. “What?”

  “I could stay here,” she repeated, calmly. “Minh is searching for the same pattern I am. Only I did not know there could be a pattern to the killing fields. It all seemed so …”

  “Random?”

  “Yes. Random. But now I am not certain.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “What?”

  “Stay here.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Why not, girl?”

  “Because you are not,” she said. Then she pulled my thumb into her mouth.

  Another few days went by. I’m not sure how many. Even though I’d turned in my list to Lune, I kept going over it in my head, thinking maybe there was something I wasn’t facing. But it was no good—my tank had been drained.

  I was lying back on the couch when someone knocked on the door. Gem walked over and opened it. The Latina was standing there.

  “It’s time,” is all she said.

  They were all there in the patterning room, waiting on me. The screen was empty except for one word:

  Darcadia

  I took a seat, Gem next to me. “What does it mean?” I asked Lune.

  But it was Clint who answered: “It’s a corruption of ‘Arcadia,’ a mountainous region of the central Peloponnesus of ancient Greece, represented as a paradise in Greek and Roman bucolic poetry and in the literature of the Renaissance. It was a plateau, bounded by mountain ranges and itself divided by individual mountains. For a number of geographical reasons, it was cut off from the coast on all sides—like an island on land, if you can picture that. So it survived a number of invasions but, eventually, it accepted a forced alliance with Sparta, and fought with the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War. It finally fell into decline during Roman times.”

  “I don’t see how—”

  “The key is Sparta,” Minh said. “For a number of white-supremacist organizations, the Spartans represent the ultimate warriors.”

  “I’d’ve thought it would be the Vikings,” I said. “The ones who call themselves ‘racialists’ are always hooking to some religion, and you hear ‘Odinism’ down there a lot.”

  “Oh, but the Vikings in the modern era are not as acceptable to Nazi mythology,” Aydah said.

  “Why is that?” Gem asked.

  “Because they fought against the Nazis in World War II. Norway was invaded and occupied, but it always maintained an active resistance, even with Quisling in charge. And that ultimate collaborator was executed for treason as soon as the country was liberated. Finland never surrendered at all. And everyone knows what the Danes did to protect Jews. Sweden was allegedly ‘neutral,’ but it actually served as a training ground for Norwegian resistance fighters. And what Raoul Wallenberg did would be enough by itself to make the Nazis hate his whole country. They probably feel betrayed because Scandinavians look so perfectly Aryan,” Aydah finished, bitterly. “That probably hurts the most.”

  “There’s another reason for Sparta to be their Promised Land,” Minh said quietly.

  We all turned to look at him.

  “The Spartans are also revered by so-called boy-lovers. And the concept that a warrior is entitled to whatever he is capable of taking—that, too, is considered ‘Spartan.’ As is a high tolerance for pain and hardship … and superiority in battle.”

  “I still don’t see the—” I stopped myself before I could say the word that flashed on my screen: “pattern.” Maybe I’d been there too long already.

  Lune flicked his pointer, and words popped up on the wall. He talked as he pointed and clicked, like the spoken bridge in doo-wop I’d tried to tell Gem about.

  “Thematic with hate groups,” he said, as everything from Nation of Islam to Aryan Nations popped up on the wall, “is this concept of a ‘homeland.’ While the more floridly disturbed of them actually believe a portion of the United States will be set aside for them—”

  “Like Casino Indians,” Levi put in, bitterness blood-deep in his voice.

  “—the more serious and committed ones understand they would have to go outside American borders to have their ‘paradise,’ ” Lune continued, as if the Indian hadn’t spoken. “There is ample precedent for such belief. There was that aborted white-supremacist coup on the Caribbean island of Dominica about twenty years ago. And the tiny Pacific island country of Nauru has converted itself into a major offshore-banking operation.” He looked over at Heidi.

  “That’s authenticated,” the farm girl said. “They are, in effect, selling foreigners the means to cloak transactions. Although there is probably no actual foreign money on the island, hundreds of billions of dollars pass through it every year. Interpol believes it to be the largest money-laundering vehicle in the world today. The Republic of Nauru—all eight square miles of it—provides even stricter secrecy than such legendary havens as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.”

  “All right,” I said. “Maybe I’m dense, but …”

  “The overwhelming majority of that laundered money comes from Russian organized crime,” Heidi said.

  I shut up. And paid attention.

  Lune took over again. “Ever since the failed coup on Dominica, there have been numerous schemes, mostly but not exclusively promoted on the Internet, to purchase ‘citizenship’ in various ‘republics.’ The promoters purport to be creating these in the Pacific by purchasing and developing unclaimed … or even mostly submerged … islands,” he said. “Each project targets certain types. Mostly right-wingers who want freedom from any government intrusion into their lives—taxes, gun control, education. And there are the supremacists who want to live exclusively among their own while they arm themselves for Armageddon
. But there are other groups seeking ‘paradise,’ too. A place where they can behave as they wish without fear of consequences.”

  “Freaks,” I said, getting it now.

  “Pedophiles, polygamists, incest-breeders, child-pornography manufacturers … yes,” Lune said, nothing in his voice but the patterns.

  “Where does this all tie in?” I asked him.

  “Darcadia,” he said. “A Pacific island with enough land mass to accommodate a small nation. It is undeveloped. Completely raw. It has a natural freshwater supply, but no infrastructure at all. Estimated cost to fully develop so that it could sustain, say, twenty thousand people …?”

  “Somewhere around ten billion,” Heidi answered. “A prospectus of sorts has been floating around for almost two years now. The shares are in blocks of a hundred thousand, but ‘citizenships’ go for ten thousand.”

  “What’s a—?”

  “A ‘citizenship,’ ” Heidi continued, “buys you the right to bank there, be free from personal income taxes … and a passport.”

  “All right, so someone’s building a degenerate’s heaven on some island. I’ll probably die of old age before it ever really happens.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lune said. “The pattern is complete. Because we know the name of the person at the top of the Darcadia pyramid.”

  He tapped his keys. The wall cleared. And then a single name popped up in red letters.

  I looked at the name. Nothing. I stared at the red letters, reaching for the connection, dropping deeper and deeper into myself, the way I used to do with the red dot I had painted on my mirror years ago. Deliberately dissociating, going somewhere else … where the answers always were.

  I never thought of him by a name. Never thought of him as a person. He was always the Mentor to me. More than fifteen years ago, when I first met him. A little boy had been raped by a maggot in a clown suit. Someone had taken a Polaroid of it—and the child believed his soul had been captured. A witch named Strega hired me to get it back. I went down one tunnel after another, looking. And ended up in a junkyard bunker in the South Bronx.