Tongues of Fire (25 page)

The man in the wet suit wiped his nose with his rubber sleeve and dipped his arm over the side. “Occupational hazard,” he said, grinning at Krebs.

The little boat sped over the water. A big brown fish jumped into the air close to the starboard side. “Like fishing?” Derlago shouted to Krebs.

“Never done much.”

“Too bad. This is great country for fishing. And hunting. We still get moose up here.”

“What?”

“Moose,” Derlago bellowed.

At the southern end of the lake a seaplane had been dragged up onto the shore. Once it had been red. Now most of the paint was scraped off. So were the rudder, the propeller, and one of the wings. The nose casing lay on the ground, and two men were looking at the engine. The man in the wet suit brought the Zodiac gently up to the beach. Krebs and Derlago stepped out and went over to the plane.

One of the men had reached deep into the engine. He felt around inside it for a long time. Then he took his hand out, looked at the other man, and shook his head. The other man turned around and punched a tree, very hard. Derlago laid his hand softly on the man's shoulder. “It was insured, wasn't it, Wes?”

“That's not the point,” the other man said. He was crying. Derlago patted his shoulder.

They rode back across the lake. The sun shone, there was no wind, but the air felt very cool. Krebs fastened all the buttons of his suit jacket and turned up the collar. “Winter's coming,” Derlago said, glancing up at the sky. It was the middle of August.

Krebs walked into a room full of rocks. There were rocks in glass cases, rocks on shelves, rocks in boxes on the floor, and rocks on the long table in the middle of the room. A sinewy old man with long soft white hair stood beside the table. All he wore were khaki shorts and sandals: Years of sun had dried his skin to brown leather. He had a mound of pink rocks in front of him and he was sorting them into five piles.

“Come in,” he said without looking up, “once you're in.”

“Sorry. I knocked.”

“Didn't hear you. It's the goddamned football practice. Every afternoon while I'm trying to get something done. They've deafened me.”

Krebs listened hard and thought he heard someone shouting far away, and perhaps the thudding sound of leather being kicked. He went across the room and stood on the opposite side of the table. The old man held up a pink rock. “Eeeny meeny miny mo,” he said, and dropped it into one of the piles. All the pink rocks looked the same to Krebs.

“Professor Stilton?”

“Present.”

“I wonder if you could tell me anything about this.” Krebs slid the photograph onto the table.

The old man glanced at it and then looked closely at Krebs. He had eyes as blue as the sky on a perfect day. They glittered in his wrinkled brown face. “You wildcatters,” he said. “You just never quit, do you?”

He picked up a magnifying glass and peered through it at the photograph. After a few seconds he frowned and set the magnifying glass aside. His eyes got ready to be less friendly. “I don't get it,” he said.

“You've never seen anything like it before?”

“Oh, I know what it is, all right. It's goz. Nothing unusual about that.”

“Goz?”

“Stabilized sand dune country with vegetation cover—coarse grasses, acacia, that kind of thing.”

“Where is this goz?”

“That's the point. There was another fellow in here a while back full of questions about the same area. Except he knew a lot more about it than you seem to.” The old man picked up the photograph and handed it to Krebs. “I told him the same thing I'm telling you. There's no oil there. Not one drop. And even if there was you couldn't get at it. They've been fighting a war there for the past two years, or haven't you heard?”

“Where?”

“Christ. The western Sudan. Kordofan. Darfur. Don't you know anything?” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a little pink rock. “Jurassic,” he snapped and tossed it onto one of the piles. Krebs counted the pockets in his shorts. There were eight.

“When was this other man here?”

“About a week ago. Two weeks. Why? Your partner run out on you? That's it, isn't it? He's the field man, you're the money man. I've seen it a thousand times. I can tell by looking. There's you in your three-piece suit, twenty pounds overweight. And him strong and sunburned from spending his life outdoors. Am I right?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?” The old man picked a rock out of the mound. “What the hell is that doing here?” It was pink like all the others. He threw it into a box on the other side of the room. “Students,” he said. “They're idiots. Every damn one of them. I don't know why they don't expel the whole damned bunch. Then I could get something done around this place.” To make up for lost time he increased the tempo of his sorting, moving with the speed of an assembly line worker in a silent comedy. After a minute or two the mound was gone. Five pink piles circled the space where it had been. “Where was I?”

“‘What do you mean, maybe?'”

“Right. You're not so stupid after all.” He bent down and picked up a box. It was full of rocks but he lifted it quite easily. He dumped them on the desk. They were pink. “Your partner. He's about your height, but younger looking? And dark. Jewish, maybe?”

“That's him.”

“Of course that's him. I told you in the first place.” He started sorting the rocks, but interrupted himself almost immediately. He brandished a rock at Krebs. “If you catch up with him tell him I want my maps back.”

“Maps?”

“Sure They won't do him any good. There's no oil there. Zero. Zilch. But what's the use? You guys never believe anybody. You probably think I'm trying to gobble up every damned drop myself.”

“What kind of maps do you mean?”

“Maps I made eight or nine years ago. Spent about six months over there. I didn't get to finish. They started shooting at each other and I had to get out. This was the government before last. Or maybe the one before that. They weren't so bad as governments go over there. They actually paid me for some of my work. Of course by the time I got back here and had anything ready to show, they were all dead or in jail, so they never did get any results. And it might have done them some good, the way this drought's been going on.”

“I'm not sure what kind of maps you're talking about.”

“Wouldn't interest you,” the old man said. “Nothing to do with oil, if you can imagine such a thing. They're water maps.”

“Water maps?”

“Stop echoing everything I say. Christ. Don't you think I get enough of that from freshmen?” He flung another rock across the room. “And the jerkasses will be back in a few weeks.”

“I'm interested in what you mean by water maps,” Krebs said.

“That's smart of you. Because it is interesting. See, I had an idea that there might be certain water-trapping Maestrichian deposits quite deep under the surface, much deeper than they normally dig their wells. I won't tell you the details. They're way over your head. So I went over there and sunk a few boreholes. And found out I was onto something. But I didn't have time to do much more than make note of a dozen or so likely spots before the shooting started. I only ended up covering a little bit of territory down in southwestern Kordofan and over into Darfur.” He picked up a rock and looked at it closely. “Why do people shoot each other when they haven't even got enough water to wash their faces in the morning? Answer me that.”

That was easy. Because people like shooting at each other. Krebs knew that by now. He said: “Why did you give him the maps?”

The old man put the rock down on the table in a pile all its own. “I didn't give him the maps. The bastard stole them. I'd been showing him the maps. Naturally he lost interest pretty quick. Nothing to do with oil, you see. Then he asked about some samples I had upstairs. When I came back down he was gone, and so were the maps.”

“I'll send them to you if I can.”

“That'd be very obliging of you. They won't do you any good. There's no oil there.”

“You never know.”

“You guys. You're something else.” The old man threw back his head and laughed. He laughed until his sky-blue eyes grew watery and stopped glittering. “You guys.”

Krebs walked across the campus. Flowers grew neatly in their beds; the grass was trim and immaculate. There were no students lying on it smoking dope, drinking beer, or writing home for money. It had a few more weeks to flourish in peace.

Down on the practice field a football flew end over end through the air, not very high, not very far. A skinny young man caught it with some difficulty and ran a few steps to his right, then back to his left, then to the right again. Other young men dove at him. After a little more of this he slipped and fell down. Others fell on top of him. A man with a beer belly and a whistle in his mouth ran across the field. “Is that what you call hitting?” he screamed at a big boy who was picking himself up from the pile, uniform soaked with sweat, chest heaving. “Is that what you call hitting? A thalidomide baby hits harder than that. I want you to hit. Hit. Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit.” He demonstrated with his palm against the earhole of the big boy's helmet.

But first you've got to catch them, Krebs thought. He was worried. It was supposed to have been a simple mopping up of a little mess left over from the past. Now he wasn't sure.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Fairweather met him at the airport. He was wearing a green and white seersucker suit, a pink shirt, and a red tie. He hurried across the arrivals lounge, waving and smiling broadly, as if they were friends. Maybe he thought they were.

“How was the trip? Hook any big ones?”

“No,” Krebs said, trying to remember how he had been saddled with Fairweather. He felt tired; and his eyes were sore—the stale air in the plane had dried his contact lenses.

“Too bad,” Fairweather said, taking Krebs's bag and wafting the smell of sandalwood through the air. “The fishing's great. When I was a kid we had a summer place up in the Laurentians. Trout, bass, pike—you name it.”

“I wasn't anywhere near there.”

“No? Oh well.”

Fairweather led him across the parking lot to the little electric car. “Hop in. It's open.”

Fairweather got in behind the wheel. Krebs sat beside him. “Did you bring the notes I asked for?”

“In the glove compartment,” Fairweather replied.

“You left them in the car?”

“Oops.”

They drove toward Manhattan in morning traffic that sounded like an army of golf carts. Fairweather kept pointing out all the empty buildings. “Boy oh boy. Before you know it you'll be able to buy up the whole town for a song. That's what my old man says. He's already started.”

Krebs studied the old file. There wasn't much in it, and what there was didn't help. Fairweather waited until he was finished and then said, “We looked for the woman. Nothing. Disappeared without a trace. As for the drug dealer, what's his name—”

“Cohee.”

“Right. Cohee. Shot four or five years ago. Some sort of gang war apparently. There was something a little odd about it though. What was it?” Fairweather thought for a while, then shook his head. “No go. Anyway, it's not important. We did turn up Katz and his wife.”

Krebs reread the brief record of his talk with Katz, long ago. Katz had known nothing. Neither had his wife.

“Still want to see them?”

“Yes.”

On the way Krebs scanned what Fairweather had brought on the Sudan. “Is this all there is?”

“That's what they say. It's been like that since the embassy closed down. But it's the same old thing.”

“What same old thing?”

“That's happening in all those places. Islamic brown-colored northerners fighting Christian and animist black southerners. With a few secessionist movements thrown in.”

Krebs looked at the last page in the file. “We've got three people in the whole country?”

“Only one full time,” Fairweather said. He leaned over and pointed to a name on the page. Gillian Wells. She was a reporter for a magazine called
L'Africaine
.

Fairweather stopped in front of an art gallery on upper Madison Avenue. L'Oeil said the sign, in slim silver letters. In the window hung a large oil painting draped in black velvet. It showed a woman bathing in a forest pool. A man was watching her from behind a tree. He had hooves instead of feet. In the bottom corner a rabbit was looking on. It had a little white tail.

Krebs opened his door and got out. Fairweather got out too. “Wait here,” Krebs said. Fairweather got back in.

Krebs went inside. More nudes hung on the walls. Many of them were bathing in forest pools, some singly, some in twos and threes. At the rear of the gallery a fat man sat behind a little antique desk, reading a book. His head was bald, except at the sides where hair grew in thick curly clumps like earmuffs. As Krebs came closer he put down the book and began writing on a pad of paper.

“Mr. Katz?”

“Yes?” the man said, lifting his pen reluctantly. Krebs read the writing on the pad, upside down: “Quentin Katz, Quentin K., Mr. Q. Katz, B.A.”

“Do you remember me?”

Katz looked at him closely. “Were you the one who was interested in the Bouguereau?”

“No.”

“Really? You look a lot like him. Anyway, it's sold,” he added as a door opened behind him and a tall, gray-haired woman emerged carrying three sides of an ornate gilded frame.

“Quentin, where the hell—” She stopped when she saw Krebs. “I knew there'd be trouble,” she said. Katz looked at her, then looked back at Krebs.

“Why is that, Mrs. Katz?”

“Ms. Finkle,” she said. The muscles in her thin face bulged slightly, as though she was grinding her teeth. “I've retained my maiden name.”