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“I’m really looking forward to West Point,” Cam says, fishing for a response from the general that he can gauge.
“Yes, well, I’m sure they’re looking forward to you, too.”
“Montresor!” Cam blurts out. He doesn’t mean to, but those curious connections in his brain still spark out references now and then that he can’t control.
“Pardon?” says the general.
“Uh—Mr. Montresor—our chef,” Cam says covering as best he can. “I’ll be sure to let him know his Chateaubriand is appreciated.”
Roberta throws him a severe glance, but does not give him away. Perhaps because she knows exactly what his outburst meant. “Yes,” she says, “his offerings are always beyond reproach.” The general, not a man of literary prowess, accepts this at face value, and his attaché is too involved in attempts to spear his peas to sense the lie.
• • •
Bodeker leaves the following morning without saying good-bye—or at least without saying good-bye to Cam. Once he is gone, Cam walks the grounds alone, pausing on the back lawn, at the spot overlooking the sea where he and The Girl looked up at the stars. He gave her a lesson in astronomy, but of course the memory has him lying on the lawn alone, conjuring the stars for himself. This is how he knows she must have been a part of the memory. That he remembers speaking aloud to no one. Now no stars save the sun are visible in the morning light, but he doesn’t need stars to string together constellations of meaning from the general’s visit.
The day before, while Cam was obliged to give Bodeker’s lackey a tour of the grounds, he had taken note of the general riding off in a golf cart with Roberta to a distant part of the compound. Cam is pretty sure they hadn’t gone to explore the fields of cane and taro still cultivated by Proactive Citizenry, to maintain a semblance of normality. Cam is well aware that there are other buildings within the massive compound, hidden by heavy growth. He’s never actually seen them, but he knows they’re there.
He also knows that if he asks Roberta about them, she will dissemble as she always does. Deflection that borders on deception is her finest gavotte, and she dances so well it has become its own form of entertainment to Cam.
General Bodeker, however, is not so skilled. He wears his lies on his sleeve like the chevrons of his uniform.
Montresor, indeed! The king of insincerity; Poe’s most despicable character, claiming friendship even as he seals Fortunato alive in a secret tomb. Is Cam then Fortunato? Watching the bricks of his own doom laid one upon another? Or maybe it’s all in his imagination. After all, Cam’s personality is a composite of Unwinds—paranoia must have run rampant in many of them. Still, he can’t help but feel that it all comes down to Roberta’s little side trip with the general yesterday. Wherever they went holds the answer to the general’s cool and distant behavior. Perhaps it’s time Cam got to know Proactive Citizenry’s Molokai compound more intimately.
“Here be dragons,” he says aloud, but there’s no one else on the back lawn to hear him.
9 • Una
She hopes that she and Lev find Hennessey and Fretwell. She also hopes they don’t. Because she knows if they do, she’ll tear the two parts pirates to shreds. Not figuratively, but literally. She’ll cut them up bit by bit, relishing their agony as they die. Does she have it in her to do such a thing? She nearly did it to Camus Comprix. She took
a chain saw to him, and almost cut off those beautiful hands that had once been Wil’s. She knows if she had done it, she would have forever regretted it, for Cam was as much a victim as Wil had been. He never asked to be rewound. Wil, on the other hand, chose to give himself up to save the others. He chose unwinding over the alternative. Had she taken Wil’s hands back from Cam, it would have turned Una into a monster, and there would be no coming back from that.
But tearing apart these human vermin would be different. It would be just. It would be satisfying. Maybe.
Would Wil want her to do it, if it gave her some peace? Or would he want Lev’s justice to prevail? Would he want the parts pirates captured and turned over to the Arápache Tribal Council? To bring them back alive would require incredible restraint and forbearance on Una’s part. Even if she isn’t callous enough to tear them apart, she has no qualms at all about shooting them dead.
So she hopes they find them. And she hopes they don’t.
• • •
It’s night in a seedy Minneapolis neighborhood. Perhaps not as seedy as other neighborhoods in other cities, but even Minneapolis has armpits and nether regions. Una is necessarily alone, because even with his long hair, Lev is still highly recognizable.
“I wish I could go with you into these places,” he said before she first put herself in harm’s way.
“You couldn’t anyway,” she replied. “They’re all bars, and you’re underage.”
Of course, at six months shy of her twenty-first birthday, Una is underage as well—but her ID says otherwise.
She walks into the third bar this evening—twelfth one since arriving in town. Her long black hair is pulled back with a colorful ribbon, the kind that Wil always would untie because he liked her hair to flow free. There is a pistol in her purse. Small and dainty, a little .22 caliber. She much prefers her rifle, but that’s not exactly something you take with you into a bar. Even a sleazy one like this.
For three nights she has been trolling these gutter spots, where bad news meets more bad news and maybe gets lucky. But no luck for Una. She hasn’t come across a single sign of the parts pirates she seeks.
This place—the What Ales Ya Saloon—has long faded from a glory that wasn’t so glorious to begin with. Greasy booths where the dark leatherette seats are held together by matching duct tape. A linoleum floor that may have once been blue. Light low enough to rob what little color there is left to the place. The only thing sorrier than the establishment is the clientele, sparse and mostly sullen.
Una sits down at the bar, and the bartender, a man who’s had some exceptional good looks bashed out of him by a hard life, comes over to her. Before she’s asked, she shows him her ID, and flashes her medical alcohol license. Sometime around the Heartland War, they made alcohol a controlled substance. So now everyone has a medical alcohol license. Scalpers sell them on street corners, and you can even buy them from medical vending machines. So much for separating mankind from its favorite vice.
“What’ll it be?” the bartender asks.
“A pint of Guinness.”
