Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [110]
“No one knows what ‘Juh’ means,” he said. “It may be a nonsense name, or just a sound he made to refer to himself. But in historical accounts of several of the most famous and most tactically accomplished raids, survivors remember seeing the warriors looking toward a large, dark man who was signaling with his hands. Juh had a bad stutter and couldn’t really speak, so he used a complicated set of hand signals. He and Geronimo were childhood playmates and lifelong friends. And, if the stories are true, Geronimo may have been more vicious but it was Juh who never failed to find an enemy, even when it took years.”
I got along with—and learned something from—every one of them except the Latina. I asked Gem if she knew why that woman wouldn’t come anywhere near me.
“Yes,” is all she said.
It was late at night when I found Lune. He was alone at his computer, his angel’s face bathed in blue light from the screen.
“I’m done,” I told him.
He didn’t look away from the screen. “Are you sure, Burke?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’ve been going over and over it. Again and again. I must have told poor Gem my whole lousy life story a dozen times. If there’s anyone not on this list, I don’t know it.”
His head swiveled suddenly. “Sometimes …” he began, his voice soft, “people don’t remember things that—”
“It’s not like that for me, Lune,” I said, quickly, cutting him off before he went someplace he’d never return from. “I remember every one of them. Right to this day. You know what? You’re right—the stuff some people repress, it’s all right on the surface for me. And if I could find any of them …”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been working, too. Now we’re going to have to take what you’ve got and see where the pattern is.”
“Is there any way I can help?”
“Not yet,” he said, taking the thick looseleaf book I’d been working in from my hand and turning back to the computer screen.
“I could stay here,” Gem said that night. “What?”
“I could stay here,” she repeated, calmly. “Minh is searching for the same pattern I am. Only I did not know there could be a pattern to the killing fields. It all seemed so …”
“Random?”
“Yes. Random. But now I am not certain.”
“Are you going to?”
“What?”
“Stay here.”
“Oh no.”
“Why not, girl?”
“Because you are not,” she said. Then she pulled my thumb into her mouth.
Another few days went by. I’m not sure how many. Even though I’d turned in my list to Lune, I kept going over it in my head, thinking maybe there was something I wasn’t facing. But it was no good—my tank had been drained.
I was lying back on the couch when someone knocked on the door. Gem walked over and opened it. The Latina was standing there.
“It’s time,” is all she said.
They were all there in the patterning room, waiting on me. The screen was empty except for one word:
Darcadia
I took a seat, Gem next to me. “What does it mean?” I asked Lune.
But it was Clint who answered: “It’s a corruption of ‘Arcadia,’ a mountainous region of the central Peloponnesus of ancient Greece, represented as a paradise in Greek and Roman bucolic poetry and in the literature of the Renaissance. It was a plateau, bounded by mountain ranges and itself divided by individual mountains. For a number of geographical reasons, it was cut off from the coast on all sides—like an island on land, if you can picture that. So it survived a number of invasions but, eventually, it accepted a forced alliance with Sparta, and fought with the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War. It finally fell into decline during Roman times.”
“I don’t see how—”
“The key is Sparta,” Minh said. “For a number of white-supremacist organizations, the Spartans represent the ultimate warriors.”
“I’d’ve thought it would be the Vikings,” I said. “The ones who call themselves ‘racialists’ are always hooking to some religion, and you hear ‘Odinism’ down