The Beast That Was Max (32 page)

He opened his eyes, met Kueur's gaze, felt the strength of her arms and legs holding him, the power of her womb beating in his ear. A fit of rage rose from where the Beast had burrowed into hiding. Kueur's solicitousness stung his raw nerves. Alioune's pensive pose insulted his sensibilities. Worse than his illness, their physical and emotional imperfections were driving him mad. Be strong, he wanted to scream. Don't worry about me. Go on with your lives. Did I raise you to be weak?

"Lee called on the secure line from Albania," Alioune said. "He said you should wait to die until he comes back, because he was rolled over to another assignment and cannot come to your funeral. He also said you owe him money."

"Fuck Lee," Max said.

Kueur spoke up quickly. "Dr. Plummer left some referrals after you refused hospitalization." A sweep of her hand encompassed a stack of papers on top of a low glass coffee table. "He said to come in when you're ready to give up witchcraft."

"Medical science won't help, I know that much," Max grumbled. "Something darker than my body attacks me." He turned away, reached for a bowl of fruit. He spilled them on the floor and held the bowl to his face in time to catch the vomit erupting from his mouth.

After he was finished, Max set the bowl down and collapsed against Kueur. As she wiped his face and body with the moist towel Alioune had brought over, she said, "Tonton, the government man wants to see you. Do you want me to send him away?"

Max stared at the security squad camouflaged in dark suits in the alcove leading to the loft door. Flinched. Their hard, black presence blighted the currents of gentler energies flowing through the air. "Let him come," Max said, eager to get them out.

Kueur held her index finger up to the group. A broadchested official wearing faint, tailored pinstripe spoke briefly to a bespectacled Chinese man, then wove a path past Dex and his crystals, four weathered Navajos—one ancient, two old, and one no younger than Max—in faded jeans and dusty boots softly chanting around their sand painting, the Australian listening with closed eyes for the evil spirit he sought, and a short, dark-haired mambo in long skirts and peasant blouse, hunched over and leaning on a cane. The loa spirit riding her form leered at the government official as he passed, and the Navajo shamans looked up with hooded glances in his wake.

Kueur and Alioune's faces lit at his approach. Alioune put a fist against her hip and spread the fingers of her other hand across her bare, brown stomach. Kueur ran a palm over her short, red-tinged hair and smiled. The government man flashed a grin and winked at the twins, exuding eye-twinkling charm that ballooned like a chemical cloud around him.

Anger shook Max as the twins' focus of attention shifted away from him. He knew the hunger they were feeling, the appetite that was driving them to draw prey into the bed of their desire. But he was sick. Unable to satisfy them by joining in games of love and pain they saved for each other in the Box at the back of the loft. He needed their attention. He might be in danger. They were being selfish, abandoning him for their lust, ignoring his pain, his need. Ungrateful, after all the years of attention he had given them

"Leave him," he snapped, unable to contain his irritation. "He's not for you."

Alioune jerked her head to the side, hurt a twitch catching the corner of her wide lips. Kueur looked down at him. "Tonton?" she said.

The government man's gaze captured their moment of stunned silence. Kueur slipped out from under Max and gently propped his head with a cushion. As she picked up the bowl of vomit, her face a mask, Max felt shame redden his face. Alioune wrapped the prayer rug around him, making sure his crotch and belly were covered, and he nodded, wondering if that was enough of an apology. The twins stood, ignoring each other and him, turned to go. The government man came to a stop at Max's feet.

"I—I'm sorry," Max said, stunned, lost in a dense fog of irrational fears and inconsistent emotions.

The twins stopped, looked at each other.

"I just don't know what's happening to me," he said. "I can't control—"

"I understand," Kueur said softly, flashing a smile at Max. "It's not easy acting human."

Alioune nodded once, took the bowl from Kueur, and went to the bathroom. Kueur headed back to the kitchen, ignoring the stir the sway of her long, elegant arms created. Dex and the men at the alcove followed her walk until the kitchen counter shielded her from their view. The mambo's loa cackled and shook its hips in a crude pantomime of provocativeness.

Max turned to his latest visitor, who moved a nearby stool to sit at the foot of Max's improvised bed.

"Hello, Mr. Johnson," said Max. It was not his real name, but since the government man had never shared any personal information, Max had named him George Johnson, based on no one he had ever known. Having only a shell of worldly power granted by those who worked for him, and for whom he worked, the names of Mr. Johnson and the other major representative in the alcove, Mr. Tung, came easily to Max. "I didn't realize you knew my new address. I thought the drop was as close as you cared to come to my affairs."

"If you liked fingers up your ass, Max, all you had to do was ask," Mr. Johnson said, wiggling two fingers in Max's face. He laughed and patted Max's distended belly. "I thought I'd drop by when I heard you were under the weather. Of course, I knew about you moving in with the girls. I keep track of all of my good friends. Never know when I might want to give a surprise party." Max's gut twisted. The Beast rose for a moment, hauling with it rage and power, and a knife stroke that would have opened the government man from neck to groin. No one spoke to him that way, ever. No one threatened his home, his family. Who was this? Dizziness swept away Max's outrage, leaving him feeling small and vulnerable before the representative of vast but unseen powers. He realized in that moment that Mr. Johnson was as much a shaman as anyone else in the loft, though his soul and magic were both rooted in material planes.

"Since when are you and Mr. Tung associates?" Max asked, looking to the alcove at the Chinese man who did not care if anyone knew his name. Max hoped he was hiding the extent of his illness from Mr. Johnson's quick and greedy eyes.

"We've been elected to represent your contractors, Max. All the sides. Everyone knows what happened at the airport. There are rumors. Concerns."

"So soon?"

"It's the age of technology, Max. Modems and computers."

"I completed the assignment."

"You crawled into a baggage mover and called the girls to fetch you. Didn't even clean up after yourself. You were lucky, working outside the main terminals. Thank God for cell phones, eh, Max?"

"It's the age of technology, yes. Your concern is touching."

"I'm sure." Mr. Johnson kept a steady gaze locked on Max.

"But you're too early for my funeral."

"We want to be sure what happens, happens. Whatever that may be."

"In a roomful of magicians, you want certainties?

"When it comes to life or death, Max, trust me, Mr. Tung and I can tell the difference. We brought experts. Equipment."

"I never took you for a healer."

"I'm not." Mr. Johnson's lips set into a thin line, and his eyes hardened.

Max scowled. "Your secrets are safe."

"Normally, yes. We've all trusted you to take what you know with you in case a job went bad. But now you're vulnerable. So's your information. If things don't go well for you, what you know might be . . . excavated ... by whoever has gained power over you. Odd things happen in your world, Max."

The Beast paced among Max's thoughts, restless with the verbal fencing, eager for action. Death. It nuzzled images of Max jumping up, ripping Mr. Johnson's throat out with teeth and nails, cracking the man's skull open and sifting through whatever government secrets he kept hidden in the flesh off his brain. But Max's body remained leaden, paralyzed by a lack of strength. The Beast howled in frustration, and Max seethed with sympathetic rage.

Kueur appeared, as if sensing his crisis. She placed burning incense the Indian sadhu from Flushing had brought to clear the air of bad spirits on the coffee table. Alioune glided to a halt behind Mr. Johnson and stared over his shoulder at the floor between him and Max. The men in the alcove stirred, but Mr. Johnson shook his head once. Alioune came around and stood behind the couch, by Max's head.

"Do you think you can finish whatever was started against me?" Max asked. Words of challenge did nothing to mollify the impatient Beast.

Mr. Johnson's shoulders relaxed. He gestured with his hands, as if clearing a game board of pieces. "Max, you're taking this far too personally. We know the dead can be made to speak. If you die, we want only to make sure you don't talk. If you live, we have work for you."

"And if I live but can't work? If this is the best I can do for the rest of my life?"

Mr. Johnson leaned forward. "Max, it's been my experience that when things start to go up or down, they reach some kind of climax, one way or the other. I don't think you'll let yourself crawl toward death. You'll either get up and walk, or roll into a hole in the ground."

Max's silence echoed his resolve.

Mr. Johnson patted Max on the thigh, stood up, started to turn. He faced Alioune, who did not make way for him. Mr. Johnson glanced over his shoulder and pointed a thick, rigid finger at Max's crotch. "Well, at least I know the appeal you hold for the young ladies," he said with a leer. He spun smoothly around Alioune and headed back to the alcove, telling the suited men to go ahead with the operation in a loud, commanding voice that sent ripples of unease through the loft.

"Why can't we take him into the Box?" Kueur asked.

"He wants to go," Alioune said in a low, grumbling voice. "He is one of those who thinks he can survive our affection. Let us. Join us. Perhaps it will help to—"

"Leave him. His death would cause more problems than it would solve."

"Maybe he's the cause," Kueur whispered, bending close to Max's ear. "Wouldn't he, or Tung, or the others do anything they could to take what you know and gain the advantage over the others?"

Another wave of nausea came crashing down on Max, and he slid to the couch and lay on his side, drawing his knees up and facing the kitchen. He breathed deeply and concentrated on talking to distract himself from feeling sick. "They don't have that kind of power over me. They only have electronic toys and ordinary men. And even if one of them, or some faction, stumbled onto something to use against me, how long would they have to pick me clean of codes and drops and contacts? Victims, past and future? Operations they don't even realize happened? There's too much information. They'd hardly know what to look for. They barely know each other, really. Corporations, faiths, secret societies as old as civilization, shadow governments, all scrambling in the darkness looking for an advantage. I'm their light. A light that illuminates a little corner of the universe they want to know every time I kill."

A sharp pain cut into the small of Max's back, bled a dull ache up and down his spine, around his hips and belly, into his groin. He curled more tightly into a fetal position while holding on tight to the prayer rug. A spasm seized his stomach, and he dry-heaved, shaking and sweating, until the nausea exhausted itself and his body relaxed. The Beast, its lust for death unsated, pulled back from his body's betrayals and sulked in a pit of hate.

Alioune's eyes opened wider, as if to contain the tears pooling in their corners. She gesticulated frantically as she said, "He's just another distraction. They are all distractions. I am sorry, Tonton. We were just so frightened, we have never seen you this way. We called everyone we knew in the city, hoping—"

"I understand," Max croaked. In a moment of clarity between attacks of illness and moodiness, he saw fear breaching the cool, sensual surface of the twins' demeanors. A chill seized him, touching him more deeply than the wild fluctuations of his own body heat. He knew for that moment what they felt for him, what the twins meant to him. He saw the abyss that would swallow them all if the bonds between them were broken. Tears burned his eyes. A moment later, understanding dissipated like mist under the sun's scrutiny, leaving behind the raw edge of appetite, the driving fury of need.

"Perhaps we should send them all away," Alioune continued, her eyes darting, searching for something to fix on.

"No," Max said, surprised by the exhaustion in his voice. "Let the healers work. Let the vultures circle."

"Do you feel the evil spirit troubling you yet?" Kueur asked hopefully, taking Max's hand and squeezing it.

"Aside from the Beast, no. But something sucks the life from me. If only they can find the hole my enemy has made in me." Nausea crept like a slow, cold mud slide over the borders of his awareness. Max rubbed his slightly distended stomach and asked, "Who's next to try their skill?"

Kueur and Alioune surveyed the loft. They were each about to speak when a disturbance drew attention to the alcove, where Mr. Johnson and Mr. Tung, along with their associates, surrounded a small, thin figure with a cane.

Max thought at first a child had come bundled in a ski jacket and scarf, but then saw the straight, silver hair slipping out from under the newcomer's baseball cap and falling to the figure's slightly hunched shoulders.