Minister Faust (41 page)

“Only cuz he be reservin his best behavior f’when he know he bein watched by you. Him an all his L*A*B-holes—nuthin but muhfuckin haters, fuh real!”

I tried probing further, but André was as agitated then as he had been the day in therapy he’d thundered at Kareem to cease investigating Hawk King’s death for evidence of a conspiracy. “Naw, Doc! Don’t be defendin him! Punk aint nuthin but a bigot, knawm sayn? He a hatin muthafuck who gone crackhead on his own pipe fulla hate, an he deserve whatever he gon get when we put a superstomp on his ass tonight!”

“But Syndi said she wouldn’t—”

“Trust me, Doc. You cross Festus, you gots to pay, an he
always
got a way. Thass how it is. André get hisself some side action for free, he aint complainin, knawm sayn?”

I
n the center of the Surveillance Hollow, Festus sat like a king bee in his hive, surrounded by an encompassing honeycomb of hundreds of hexagonal monitors beaming images of city streets, boardrooms, industrial facilities, public parks, elevators, libraries, mosques, bedrooms, and more. He was tracking Syndi’s path using a far more extensive network of cameras than I think anyone realized the Flying Squirrel possessed or could access, one even greater than the F*O*O*J’s own intelligence-gathering techweb.

“Damn it!” said Festus, pounding his console. “That tricky little tramp’s smarter than she lets on.”

On several hexagonal screens focused on the nearest Ditko-Train station, a knot of people suddenly melted into a contingent of shapely, black-skirted, black-haired, white-pancaked young women, each of whom headed off in separate directions for various trains heading everywhere.

“That little bitch,” growled Festus. “Doesn’t have a trusting bone in her body.”

I pulled up the only other chair in the lab (a dusty one, its back monogrammed
CM
) and sat beside Festus. He glared at me as if I’d used a piece of the True Cross for kindling.

I was struck again by how weary and worn he looked, slumped in his chair, his thinning hair whiter than ever and matted to his forehead. Perhaps he’d been skipping his “GI Juice” injections, or perhaps the psychemotional stress had been diminishing their effectiveness. Even inside the center of his superheroic sanctum, his legendary yet no longer “undisclosed location,” Festus Piltdown III looked like an aged farmer gazing impotently at the hailstorm thrashing toward his fields.

“This is a very hard time for you, isn’t it, Festus?”

“I can see why,” said Festus, his eyes scanning his scanners without so much as blinking toward me, “you need the PhD after your name, Eva. You certainly wouldn’t drum up business with anemic banalities like that.” He snapped, “Of course it’s hard on me! It’s hard on all of us!”

“But on you personally. Only Syndi is bearing Hnossi’s condition as heavily as you are.”

“That’s because I’ve known her for five decades, twenty years longer than even her no-account daughter has. And now I’ve got to worry that these leads I was pursuing on Warmaster Set were all black herrings. Which means that even the destruction of Asteroid Zed—my God!—even
that
was the work of that Beelzebubian bastard Kareem—”

“Let’s focus on your feelings, Festus—your worry for Hnossi. To see her in this state—”

“ ‘This state’? Dying, you mean? In bed, the way no warrioress would ever want to go?”

“
And
before she can resolve her family troubles, her distance from her children, not to mention any other…unresolved interpersonal issues—”

He cut me off. “I was never married, so I can’t relate to that. But missing your children—that I understand. I have compassion for that pain. And as her comrade.”

“I’m not seeing comradely loyalty alone here, Festus,” I said, touching his hand. I expected him to yank it away, even order me not to touch him. Instead, he was frozen, his eyes unfocused amid the flashing images from his surveillance honeycomb.

“I’ve been reading up on your noncaped careers,” I said, anxious to maintain the opening. “You two not only worked together in the F*O*O*J, but elsewhere. For decades, Professor Icegaard was a paid consultant of your defense contracting corporation. Pilt-Dyne built the B9 bomber, which you christened the
Iron Lass
class; because of you, Pilt-Dyne’s nuclear submarine was named the
Icegaard
class.” I squeezed; his hand trembled. “For a hard-boiled industrial magnate like you, Festus, those were practically love poems.”

He looked over at me, his eyes wet and glossy and twinkling from the honeycomb lights. Sitting there in his chair with his whitened hair, he was no longer the frightening, furry one-man war on crime, and no longer even the towering tycoon of technology.

He was just an old, lonely man facing the truth of his own powerlessness.

“And yet,” I said, probing this rare vulnerability to examine the psychemotional damage that was crushing the life out of him, “for all your devotion to this woman, now that she truly needs you and there’s no one else in your way, you still can’t do anything to protect her…or save her.”

“What?”
he whispered, too horrified to be furious.

“Festus, you were up on Asteroid Zed with her, but when she was attacked by the Desiccator, where were you? Even now, with all your wealth and influence, and the awesome power of the surveillance you have at your fingertips right here, the woman you’ve loved for fifty years is dying, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

His lower lip quivering, the spindly old teeth of his lower jaw exposed like a skeleton’s, Festus leaned back in his chair, clutching his chest as if to keep his heart from exploding.

“Festus,” I whispered, leaning toward him,
“how does all that make you feel?”

His eyes were huge, his pupils swollen blackly, his face drained of all its color.

Suddenly the high-pitched buzz-whine in the background noise climaxed to buzzsaw anxiety that ripped through Festus’s misery. I glanced up and spied an agitated Brotherfly crawling the Hollow’s ceiling in endless circles while fluttering his wings at just below take-off speed. Festus shook his head as if to wake from sleeping at the wheel, then shoved his chair back away from me and stood.

“Get the fuck out of my crime lab!”
he yelled, flipping back the sides of his dressing gown, his hands hovering at the holster level of his exposed utility belt. “And take that wall-crawling parasite with you!”

A
t Festus’s behest, Mr. Savant, employing a crutch and with one arm in a cast, showed André and me to a drawing room. I offered André a tranquilizer, but he still wouldn’t sit down, leaving his hand-and footprints all over the walls, windows, and ceiling.

Finally, following my special instructions, Mr. Savant left and hobbled back pushing a cart with a bowl of luxurious, exotic fruits, placing it on the grand marble coffee table at the center of the room.

Lured down by the sweet scents and tropical colors, André perched on the coffee table to ingest the fruit, doing so by expectorating rancid yellow digestive juices all over the oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and grapes which dissolved the produce—peels, stalks, seeds, stones, and all—into a steaming, stinking pool that spilled all over the marble table. Opening his mouth, André unfurled his well-endowed proboscis and began sucking up the bubbling soda-pap he’d created.

Suppressing my gorge with an act of supreme will, I sat, taking out my
ANDRÉ PARKER
,
HKA THE BROTHERFLY
F*O*O*J file as well as the
MORRIS ANDREW PARK
,
ALIAS BROTHERFLY
file that Mr. Savant had brought me.

“You’re twenty-six, André, correct?” He slurped and nodded, still sucking up the revolting stinking slime on the table. “And you’ve been in the F*O*O*J how long?” He held up three fingers.

André was a fascinating set of contradictions. As the hip, laid-back, fun-loving Brotherfly, he could not be a more profound counterpoint to the militant anal-retention of the thirty-four-year old X-Man. In one session, Kareem had described André as a “hyper-womanizing, antiintellectual, willing slave…enough of a collaborator with every racist stereotype about young black males that he should be a PR man for the Klan,” and he’d denounced André to his face at the Dark Star soul food restaurant as “a slack, slick, loose-dicked, willingly-no-self-control…senseless, thoughtless, shiftless, aimless, brainless, oversized pants–wearing, forty-ounce-loving, penis-fixated, self-underrated supreme cham
peen
of galactic niggativity.”

But as the real man beneath the André Parker construct,
Morris Andrew Park
had so much in common with Philip Kareem Edgerton that the toxic enmity they shared became all the more shocking.

Glancing through the file’s photos, I was struck by how severely André deviated from Andrew: tiny four-year-old Andrew in glasses on the back of a huge, shaggy dog; petite eight-year-old Andrew as chess wizard; puny sixteen-year-old Andrew in thick eyeglasses singing the role of Fortunato in his school’s musical production
The Cask of Amontillado…
contrasted with several photos of muscular, tall, sexually turbocharged twenty-two-year-old André “boogeying” in Bird Island nightclubs the Meet Market, Bone Dancers and Peacocks.

Undoubtedly Kareem would have approved of Andrew having attended the so-called “historically black college” Nat Turner U. It was there that the frail, awkward genetics student, the victim of a fraternity “prank,” found himself forcibly gene-spliced with the dynamically altered DNA of a bluebottle fly.

After an astounding array of mutations, which saw Park autonomically spin a cocoon and retreat into it for the entirety of a spring break, Andrew had emerged with an enhanced genetic matrix that had imbued the brainy recluse voted “Most likely to Urkel” (whatever that meant) with the proportionate speed, strength, agility, and “flyness” of a fly.

After first gaining his powers, the shy young undergrad who’d never shone anywhere but onstage or on the dean’s list looked for some way to employ his neotalents to help pay the bills of the elderly aunt and uncle who’d raised him. But as his acne dried up, his vision improved, his chest rippled, and his coordination soared, Andrew found himself winning stage roles as a leading man and attracting romantic attention of which he had never dreamed. After a fateful confidence-supercharging, career-advising meeting with Dennis Rodman, “André” began earning more money than he’d ever seen—as an exotic dancer. Although crimefighting as such had never been André’s intention, the post-Götterdämmerung F*O*O*J was recruiting fresh faces for its own face-lift, and as André said in his job interview, “The benefits are good.”

Perhaps beneath the André-bravado and underlying the anti-Kareem rage was the awkwardness of young Andrew, the tiny boy lacking in confidence everywhere but in the theater. This frightened inner-child Andrew likely confused the hyper-verbal, hyper-confident, hyper-aggressive Kareem on a psychemotional level with all those who had ever bullied him—from the children who shoved his face in the urinal until he ate the cake to the “frat boys” who so cruelly spliced his genes.

Yet there was more driving the Brotherfly’s overcompensating humor, erotic aggression, and anger—another deeper node of sadness, pain, and, I suspected, guilt. Ordinarily André would have been far too attention-deficited for me to probe into his deeper psychemotional workings, but as Mr. Savant had followed my instructions to inject the liquid tranquilizers I’d given him into the fruit, André was opening up like a can of soup.

“My uncle,” he said when I inquired about the pain I knew he held in his psychemotional reservoir. “Poor ol Uncle Benteen.”

“What about your uncle, André?”

“ ’s dead,” he slurred sleepily. “My fault.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I’d…y’know…
changed…
a lot. When I. Went offta school. ’Slot ferimmta handle. Went away a liddle boy. Came backaman. Never toldimmabout my, my, my mutation. Shun. That I wuzza supereero, that I joinda F*O*O*J. N one day, I, I, I didn’know hewuzzome. An I’s getting into it…an he—”

“Getting into what, Andrew?”

His eyes telescoped on me as if I were a million miles away. But as he picked up speed, his hands and wings fluttered with ever-greater agitation, his face and voice rending themselves with ever-greater tragedy.

“…gettin inta my
un
iform,” he said. “An Uncle Benteen, he juss walks right into my damn bejjroom an sees me there with my armzanlegs half innannouttuvvit…an he grabs his heart, an he, he, he juss drops over! An therewuzzn’t fuckall I couldoabouddit! Dead’s dead.
Dead,
” he said, cupping his face in his hands, snorting and shuddering and wailing.

There was more, I sensed—something even more painful that André had yet to disclose. But before I could probe further, Mr. Savant appeared next to me.

“Madame,” said the ancient manservant, “Ms. Icegaard is awake and is requesting your presence.”

Stroking André’s hair and straightening out his antennae, I assured him I’d be back as soon as I could. I hurried off for what in all likelihood would be Hnossi’s final session.

When Good-bye Is the Only Time to Say “I Love You”

D
oes Hnossi know, Festus, how you’ve felt about her all these years?”