Hardball

The hunt, with a full pack of hounds closing in on a lame and limping fox and her brash and ignorant cub, that was my cousin and me just now. I went back to my burrow because I didn’t know where else to go. But I didn’t feel safe, reaching home.

I took my neighbor and the dogs into the backyard, away from any possible surveillance, and explained the situation as best I could, given how little I understood of it myself.

“You don’t think Peewee’s pa is really in on this!” Mr. Contreras was horrified.

“I think he knows what his pals are looking for, and he’s a frightened man indeed, but I don’t believe he knowingly put his kid in harm’s way.”

“So where is she?” the old man fretted.

I shook my head. “I’m too tired to think clearly. I’m hoping she’s run away, hoping they don’t know where she is. If she calls you, tell her to lay low. Then tell her to hang up at once before they can trace her. These guys have me totally off balance. If only I had the faintest idea what they want!”

37

THE OLD MAN AND THE DOGS HELPED ME SEARCH MY apartment for any obvious intruders or bombs. Mr. Contreras offered to feed me, but I was too tired to eat. As soon as they left, I went to bed and fell deeply asleep. I was so tired, none of my anxieties had the power to disturb me. But when my phone rang at one in the morning, I was instantly awake.

“Petra?” I cried into the mouthpiece.

“Ms. Warshawski, is that you?” The voice on the other end was diffident.

“Who is this?” I choked out.

“I woke you again. I’m sorry. It seems like it’s only in the middle of the night that I have the courage to talk to you.”

I’d been so sure the call would be from Petra, or a ransom demand, that I couldn’t think of anyone else, any other context. I lay back in the bed, trying to calm my pounding heart enough that I could think.

“I saw about your cousin on the news. It’s a terrible worry, when someone you love disappears on you.” The hesitant voice was flat.

Behind the speaker came the sound of hospital pages. Rose Hebert! My skin crawled. She had snatched Petra so that I could understand how bereft she’d been at losing Lamont Gadsden.

“Knowing how you must be suffering, I’ve been feeling guilty that I haven’t been wholly truthful with you.” She took a breath, the way she had the last time she called in the middle of the night, when she launched into the painful admission of her love for Lamont Gadsden.

“When you asked if I knew another name Steve Sawyer might be using, I said no. But back in the sixties, the Anacondas, they all took African names. Lamont, his code name in the gang was Lumumba.”

There was a long silence, during which I thought I might break into hysterical laughter. Petra had disappeared, perhaps been kidnapped, and the only thing Rose could think of was her long-vanished lover. It was hard to think of a response, but, in the end, I asked what Steve Sawyer’s gang name had been.

“I don’t know, but it was probably African. Like I told you, Joh

Her voice trailed off, into the confusion of memories of adolescence, where liberation meant sex as well as politics. I wondered why Rose hadn’t told me earlier; what about me would have made her think I would find African nationalism shocking.

She answered in her half-dead voice, “I guess I was afraid if I told you about Lamont and Lumumba, you might be, well, like some folks, like my daddy even, who thought if you called yourself after an African national hero you were next door to being a Communist. And then you’d stop looking for Lamont.”

I managed to thank her, and to tell her not to worry, that I’d see whether I could find Lamont under his nom de guerre. “Is there anything else it would be good for me to know? Something we could cover tonight? It may be hard to reach me for the next week or so.”

She thought about it seriously but decided she didn’t have any more secrets to reveal, at least not this morning. After she hung up, I lay back down, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. My brain started jumping around again among all the confused ideas I’d had yesterday afternoon. Lumumba. I tried to think about Patrice Lumumba, but it wasn’t a good meditation. Instead, visions of his torture and death blended with my images of Sister Frankie’s death, my fears about Petra, my fears for my own safety.

I sat up. I’d heard the name Lumumba recently. It was co

I went into the living room and plugged in my laptop. Sitting cross-legged on the couch, I looked up Lumumba. He had died in 1961. I couldn’t possibly be remembering a conversation about him that went that far back into my childhood. Since I was awake and alert, I searched for Lumumba in the databases I use for background checks. I found a singer with the name and a doctor in New York, but deeper looks at them showed that both were too young to be Lamont Gadsden under a new name.

It was two in the morning, the heart of darkness, the time of deepest loneliness. I thought of Morrell, in Mazär-i-Sharif and wondered if he, too, was awake and lonely or if his old friend Marcie Love was keeping him company. Or perhaps a new friend more in tune with his mind than I had been.

These were such strange times we were living through, the Age of Fear, with endless war around the world, never knowing who we could trust, with our bank accounts and our e-mails an open book to any garden-variety hacker. Even though I use the Web constantly, I’m an old-fashioned detective. I do better on foot and in person than through the ether.

Someone had gone after Petra the old-fashioned way, breaking into her apartment. Had they made off with her laptop, or had she taken it with her? I looked again at the rudimentary surveillance footage from my office camera that I’d e-mailed myself. It didn’t look to me as though any of the office breakers-Petra or her two companions-were carrying a backpack or anything big enough to be holding her laptop. So someone had gone after that, looking for… her e-mails, I supposed… or to see whether she’d been looking up African national heroes.

Spy software. Of course, Petra had used my office computer, my big Mac Pro, one night at the begi

I started to get dressed again, but I paused while zipping my jeans. I had to assume from now on that whatever I did, wherever I went, I’d have some shadow from Homeland Security, or Mountain Hawk, or maybe both, and I’d just as soon not be caught alone on the streets in the middle of the night. Even if I could sneak out to my car, it was possible-perhaps probable-that they’d installed some kind of GPS tracker in it, some little gizmo I wouldn’t be able to find easily. They wouldn’t have to stay with me on the streets to keep tabs on me. They could use their hotshot triangulation software to watch me online.

A thump on the back stairs made my heart jump again. I took the Smith & Wesson and slipped into the kitchen, tiptoeing on the tile. I laid my head against the door and squinted out through the glass. And felt another bubble of hysteria rise in me. The sound was Jake Thibaut, hauling his double bass up the back stairs to the third floor.