"Less than a week, I'm sorry to say. Most of my crew and the network people are already in Zimbabwe."
"What's happening there?" Bertie asked.
A fast grin, quirky, as if responding to a joke on himself.
"I'm going to walk across Victoria Falls. At night." He took in their expressions of amused skepticism. "It's an illusion, of course. I can't say more than that."
"Most of the illusions I've seen you do look dangerous to me," Jean-Baptiste said.
"Most of them are, if they're any good." Grayle glanced at his table, where three Samburu waiters had begun to serve from carts with copper hoods. "Here's lunch. Again, it was a pleasure." This time his eyes lingered on Eden for more than just a moment. She had a sense of being ardently probed, and his undisguised intensity, like a bright flash from a masked lantern, startled her.
"Linc," Bertie said, voicing a spur-of-the-moment inspiration, "if you can drag yourself out of bed, say around four A.M., we'll show you some of the sights while you're here. What d'you think, Tom, the Masai Mara?"
"Elephants?" Grayle asked, as if a scene from an old Weissmuller movie had popped into his head. "I've loved elephants since I was a kid."
"Not in the Masai Mara," Sherard replied. "There are about six hundred in Amboseli, where poachers haven't been able to get at them." Bertie gave him an encouraging look. "Best time to visit Amboseli on a day trip is right at dawn, before Kilimanjaro clouds over for the day. The
tembu
population is used to being studied, so we have a fair chance of getting close to a family."
"How far is Amboseli?"
"Ninety minutes by fast helicopter," Bertie said cheerily. "We happen to have two of them."
"I don't mean to impose," Grayle said to Sherard, who smiled.
"Not at all. Haven't been to Amboseli in quite a while, and I have friends at the Research Center."
"Elephants," the illusionist said enthusiastically. "I made one disappear last year from in front of the fountain at Caesar's Palace."
"Good trick," Eden said, chin on the back of overlapped hands, her elbows on the table. Studying him with a little gleam of fascination. She knew now why he'd seemed familiar, where she had seen him, and recently.
"Maybe it wasn't a trick," Grayle said with that quirky grin. "Nobody's seen him since." He nodded to all and turned to go, saying
ni furaha yangu—asante sana
. My pleasure, thank you.
Good Swahili
, Eden thought. How long had he been in East Africa, a day or two? Obviously a quick study when it came to languages.
And women, of course.
W
here did you meet him?
Eden asked Bertie when they had an opportunity late in the day to chat privately.
Vegas?
Where else? He lives and works there, or just outside of town, in a dinner theatre I think Mies van der Rohe designed. Steel and glass, halfway up a mountain. Looks like it's suspended in the sky at night, remember the mother ship in
Close Encounters
, the Spielberg movie?
No
. Eden yawned. Sunset at Shungwaya, the lake deepening to indigo. The hippos a couple of hundred yards to the south and near the shore were a glossy shade of copper as the sun began to set. There was a good breeze and few
dudu
to contend with. Somewhere in the brush a couple of cheetahs of perhaps two dozen that inhabited the fifty square miles of the reserve were talking in their odd bird-chirp language.
Eden and Alberta Nkambe sat back to back and a few feet apart on one of the verandas of the main house. Someone passing by might have thought they were angry with each other, to judge from the tension in their brows, the rigid jaw lines. But it was a practice session in sub-vocalization, Bertie the tutor and Eden the student. One of the psychic talents that had always been second nature to Bertie. Two months before giving birth, Bertie's mother Guan Ke had been struck by lightning while serenely attending to her daily routine of
tai ji quan
a few yards from their house in the highlands of Thika. Both survived. But the lightning (Bertie had surmised, as an explanation of her gifts), or what the lightning had left behind in her almost fully developed brain, was still there twenty years later.
In a certain state, just this side of sleep, I see it sometimes. A mind within my mind. A separate consciousness.
Bertie's powers were telepathic and telekinetic. Eden, since her "coming out" exercise in a frighteningly high-stress situation that involved the disarming of a nuclear bomb in a parking garage next to a packed stadium in Nashville, Tennessee, had made rapid progress in precisely controlling her psychotronic ability—moving objects with the power of her mind. She possessed other talents that surpassed all of Bertie's potential. Eden dreamed prophetically, had done so all her life. And she had the rare "left-handed Art" that set her well apart from other psychics:
she could produce her doppelganger, a mirror image, visible to others only when clothed. Eden was, whether or not she liked the idea, an Avatar, lodestone for all psychics.
Did he hit on you?
Eden asked after a few moments. She was peeling a small red banana for her pet colobus monkey. Eden had named her young monkey "Uncle Norm" for a relative of Betts Waring, who had the same druidical face, darkening from pure white as the monkey matured. Keeping her hands busy and her mind semidetached made thought transmission less of a chore.
That's just a showbiz formality
, Bertie responded,
ritual intrigue of the high-profile crowd, status as an aphrodisiac:
you know
—
Aph—? I didn't get all of that. Can we just talk now?
"Sure."
"I'm getting my usual afternoon headache. Blood sugar's low."
Eden pinched off half of the banana and gave it to Uncle Norm, ate the rest, turned around to face the red sun cut in half by the Mau Escarpment.
"I got the idea at lunch that you wanted Grayle and me to meet," Eden said with an idle sidewise look at Bertie.
"You haven't seemed to be making a lot of progress with Jean-Baptiste."
"Progress toward what? The sack? A roll in the hay?" Eden said, wiping perspiration from beneath her eyes with a fingertip. Her eyes had a vexed burn going, the redness of the setting sun. "
Aphrodisiac?
Do you think I need a quick fix in bed from a disappearing act like Lincoln Grayle?"
Bertie shrugged and said with a certain impishness, the appearance of a white dimple in one cheek, "There was maaagic in the air! He couldn't keep his eyes off you, darling."
"A little too good-looking. Not a tooth out of place. He is so not my type."
Eden rubbed prickling forearms:
goose bumps. She had a brooding look.
"Bertie, fact is, I think Grayle knows who I am."
"You can't hide here forever."
"I'm not—hiding; I love Shungwaya. Just give me a little more time, all right? After Nashville I needed a straitjacket. But you and Tom have been so great to me."
"You're tougher than you think. You don't have to jump into bed with Linc, but he is an interesting guy. Speaks half a dozen languages. Very well read.
Rich
doesn't begin to describe him, but of course you'll be even richer soon. If he does recall having seen your face on TV or in the tabloids, he'll be discreet. Secrets are his business. Give him half a chance, you'll like him."
Uncle Norm climbed onto Eden's shoulder and when she covered her head with her hands so he couldn't run his fingers through her hair, he scolded her loudly. Eden kept her head down until the monkey jumped to an ebony railing of the veranda. Then she looked up, into Bertie's eyes.
"There's more to it than I've told you," Eden confessed.
Only a rim of sun left, clouds like jet trails but smoke-dark in a sky giving up its blue to a twilight radiance of wafer-thin gold. The monkey chittered at a Shungwaya dog, black and wet from a shoreline romp, that came up on the veranda and slumped down with his muzzle in Bertie's lap.
"I've dreamed about him, a couple of times," Eden said.
"Good or bad?"
"He was
Mwanamke
in my dreams," Eden shuddered. Her headache had worsened. "A woman. And I was afraid of her."
AMBOSELI NATIONAL PARK
KENYA-TANZANIA BORDER
OCTOBER 140530 HOURS ZULU
A
mboseli National Park, mostly in Kenya but with one .ttcorner overlapping the border of Tanzania, was 220 miles southeast of Lake Naivasha, an hour and a half by air in Tom Sherard's fast, roomy Agusta III helicopter. They left at a quarter to five in silver-tinted darkness, the nearly full moon resembling one of those crudely minted coins of vanished nation-states recovered from Aegean shipwrecks. They overflew Nairobi in a haze of light and followed the A120 south, altered course, and at three thousand feet crossed the perpetually dry bed of Lake Amboseli, meeting the sun as it flashed on the dark horizon, already as bright as midday, drowning leftover stars and striking Kilimanjaro's smooth ancient glacial skin. Another fifty kilometers southeast and almost twenty thousand feet high, Kilimanjaro stood massive and alone, a cloudless throne its dark gods seemingly had abandoned to the cruelty, greed, tribal animosities, and abysmal judgment of those attempting to run things on an earthly level. The political machinery that ground every good thing, like the human heart, to rubble and dust.
So went Eden's thoughts as they flew lower over a brightening landscape. She had never been a morning person.
She looked at Lincoln Grayle in the seat next to hers. He was wide awake and absorbed in the changing tones of the mountain. Hadn't shaved for a day or two. Black sandpaper of beard that humanized him, in Eden's eyes. So did the vivid nicks and larger scars:
back of his neck, underside of chin, forearms. He regularly performed an illusion—
no
, he had corrected her at once, it was an escape routine, with a degree of difficulty Houdini perhaps would have envied—which first required him to be bound in barbed wire before being boiled alive. The wire was chrome-plated, for theatrical effect, but the barbs were sharp and real. So he assured her. She hadn't been impressed, wondering only
why
?
Etan Culver, who was a moody fellow when he didn't have a camera in his hands, remote in his reverence for making film when he did, was alternately peering through a side window and doing lens and eyepiece adjustments. Pegeen napped beside him, face relaxed for once, a look of inward stealthy bliss. One of those people who are easily becalmed, on short or long trips.
Tom and Bertie had the controls of the helicopter. Bertie loved flying. Her enthusiasm for any new adventure was endearing but exhausting to others. Bertie never seemed to run low on pluck or zeal; she seldom had a negative or brooding thought about anything... even Tom's caution when it came to marrying, or at least bedding her without sanction, which would have been just fine with Bertie.
"Of course I know what I'm in for," Etan Culver was saying to Lincoln Grayle in defense of his chosen art. "Accomplishment without critical recognition is tantamount to serving a life sentence of neglect."
The land turned green and marshy below drifting mist. Daylight spread in a soft flood, wildlife appearing, motionless, like painted figurines in a shop window. The chopper's shadow coasted over flashy groundwater, seepage from the porous black lava into which Kilimanjaro's snowmelt flowed. Entire groves of yellow-bark fever trees looked bone yard dead in the dawning, destroyed, Tom told them, by elephants for whom acacia bark was a basic food group, or by toxic salts flushed into the root systems when the water table rose in other, wetter years.
Tom set the helicopter down on the dirt landing strip near Tukai and three of the tourist lodges by Olokenya swamp, one of which had five-star pretensions. They were met by a Land Rover and a VW combi from the Elephant Research Center.
Pegeen vomited as soon as she climbed out of the helicopter. She looked wan and contrite. Etan was annoyed.
"Don't know what that's about," he said. "She's been doing it all week. Change of food, I reckon."
Pegeen made a face. Bitter taste in her mouth, or bitterness in the young marriage. Bertie gave her water, glanced at Eden. They knew, from what Pegeen's aura was telling them, that Pegeen was pregnant. They hadn't said anything: it needed to be Pegeen's surprise, once she found out for herself.
They had breakfast at the luxury lodge; Tom was a partner, owning a third share. Then they were on the move again.
T
he Acoustic Biologist in charge of the Elephant Research Center was a Scot named Pert Kincaid, middle-aged and reedy in a tan T-shirt and khaki shorts. She'd had two operations for carcinoma. She was subject to eye infections and wore dark wraparound glasses. Her body seemed withered by ordeal in the harsh pastoral of Equatorial Africa. She was hardy and unbreakable only in her desire to glean every bit of information from the subsonic language of her elephants.