CHAPTER 2

 

Meanwhile, at Heathrow airport, a certain redheaded hell-raiser in a flight attendant's uniform watched a fellow flight attendant whose nametag said "R. McCorley" carry a wee little bomb off the plane in his carry-on luggage. McCorley shouldered his way into the cattle-pen maze barriers and walkways that herded people through the customs line, inserting himself between the musician, Willie MacKai, who was toting a banjo in a garment bag, and another musician named Brose Fairchild. They were bringing up the rear. The deaf girl, Julianne Martin, the dark growly-looking woman the others called Anna Mae but whose passport said "Mabel Gunn," the young Randolph couple, Faron and Ellie, and the chatty old gal named Gussie, who was much older than she had been a year ago but who was not yet as old as I am, were already being questioned.

The redhead, whose tag said "T. Burns," twirled her own flight bag from one finger and rocked one high heel idly from side to side, her mouth quirking in amusement as she ambled along behind Brose Fairchild and watched to see what McCorley would do next.

The Martin girl tried signing to the first customs officer but he didn't seem to understand, and when Gunn stepped forward to explain or possibly interpret, he warned her sternly to stay in line. Meanwhile, Fairchild, the old gal, and the Randolphs passed by another officer without much incident, but MacKai was stopped and ordered to unzip the garment bag.

"Anything to declare, miss?" the officer asked the redhead as she slung her flight bag up onto his counter.

"Just the usual," she said.

Up ahead, the customs officer was eyeing the banjo, which was softly playing a line from an old ballad that started, "Oh, let me in, the soldier cried. Cold haily windy night—"

"Does it always do this, sir?" the customs man demanded.

"Sure as hell does, buddy," MacKai was saying. "And you better believe it cost me a pretty penny to get that electronics engineer to rig it up this way."

"As you say, sir. However, we can't allow you to bring this into Britain."

"And just why would that be?" MacKai asked softly as anxiety welled up inside him that after coming so far, the devils were finding yet another way to separate him from the only key to reclaiming the music. At the same time, he knew that belligerence wouldn't get him far with the authorities so he tried to sound pleasant.

"We have a description of an instrument of this sort, self-frailing, I believe it said, as stolen goods, sir."

"That must be some other banjo they're talkin' about, officer. See this one here was given to me by . . ." MacKai tried to explain but the officer nodded to an armed man behind him who started forward.

"And what do you mean by the usual, Miss?" T. Burns's official asked.

"You know, a lid of heroin, a few crystals of crack, and some new stuff—"

"I'm sorry, miss, we don't like joking about that sort of thing. You'll have to—"

Ordinarily, she would have delighted in choosing that moment to disappear from sight and memory, leaving the man with a loaded flight bag, a mountain of paperwork, and nobody to blame anything on, but McCorley had just opened his own bag. He pulled something from it and threw it to the floor behind the customs official. A thick cloud of acrid smoke billowed up from the floor as if cloaking some particularly bashful dragon.

"Shee-it!" Fairchild bellowed, and grabbed the redhead's hand, barreled into MacKai, and plowed the rest of his party before him with the exception of McCorley, who lobbed the wee little bomb far enough into the cattle-pen arrangement to give himself time to escape before the whole works blew sky-high.

Shouting, coughing, random gunfire, and an alarm siren mooing throughout the terminal added to the excitement. No security guards from inside the terminal tried to stop Willie and his friends from leaving the customs area, however, because of the nostril-burning day-old-corpse smell of the smoke that doubled everybody up with coughing. Out in the terminal, nobody tried to apprehend the fleeing group because plenty of other people were dancing around trying to find out what the excitement was all about, was it dangerous, and how to avoid being hurt by it while enjoying the spectacle as something to write home about.

Faintly tinkling in the background, the banjo, half-smothered by the garment bag, played the line from Loch Lomond that was sung as, "You take the high road and I'll take the low road."

"How the hell do you get out of here?" Willie demanded of nobody in particular.

"You heard the banjo," Gussie said. "They take subways around here. Torchy honey," she hollered back to the redhead, "You're the local. Which way is the subway?"

Torchy Burns, as she was sometimes called, occasionally liked to play by the rules just long enough to confuse everyone, so she led them to the nearest underground station.

 

* * *

 

"Wait, wait, wait," Sass said. "What is it with this redheaded lady? Is she a spy or what?"

"Or what," the voice behind the candle and cowl drawled. "She's one of those Certain Parties I was telling you about but I'm not supposed to say exactly who or what they are for fear of offending somebody's mother."

"But if she's one of the Certain Parties," Minda put in, "why is she helping them so much?"

"She's a little different from the other Certain Parties," the cowled voice said. "For one thing, she's not as reliable. She doesn't much care about right and wrong, just about doing whatever she feels like at the moment. Not much on long-range goals, doesn't care if she spreads disease, doesn't care if she doesn't, doesn't care if what she does kills folks, and doesn't care if it doesn't. She just likes to see what happens."

"Where did she get all those drugs?" another kid wanted to know.

"Why, son, she's got all the drugs and all the booze and all the other mind-bending, weird-making stuff anybody'd ever think to look for. She's the source of all of it and the source of anybody wanting it. She makes any other drug dealer or vice lord look like an amateur."

"But she helped them," Minda said. "She helped them get away, didn't she?"

"In about the same way a cat lets a mouse scuttle out between its paws for a while. And she was still putting moves on ol' Willie, trying to charm the banjo away from him just to see if she could."