undoubtedly boring, but peaceful. Its various tribes, who got along with one another quite happily, had long since beaten their swords into ploughshares; a fight had broken out in the city square in 1952 between a drunken ox-drover and an equally drunken ox-thief. People were still talking about it.
Scarlett yawned in the heat. She fanned her head with her broad-brimmed hat, left the useless truck in the dusty street, and wandered into a bar.
She bought a can of beer, drained it, then grinned at the barman. “I got a truck needs repairing,” she said. “Anyone around I can talk to?”
The barman grinned white and huge and expansively. He’d been impressed by the way she drank her beer. “Only Nathan, miss. But Nathan has gone back to Kaounda to see his father-in-law’s farm.”
Scarlett bought another beer. “So, this Nathan. Any idea when he’ll be back?”
“Perhaps next week. Perhaps two weeks’ time, dear lady. Ho, that Nathan, he is a scamp, no?”
He leaned forward.
“You traveling alone, miss?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Could be dangerous. Some funny people on the roads these days. Bad men. Not local boys,” he added quickly.
Scarlett raised a perfect eyebrow.
Despite the heat, he shivered.
“Thanks for the warning,” Scarlett purred. Her voice sounded like something that lurks in the long grass, visible only by the twitching of its ears, until something young and tender wobbles by.
She tipped her hat to him, and strolled outside.
The hot African sun beat down on her; her truck sat in the street with a cargo of guns and ammunition and land mines. It wasn’t going anywhere.
Scarlett stared at the truck.
A vulture was sitting on its roof. It had traveled three hundred miles with Scarlett so far. It was belching quietly.
She looked around the street: a couple of women chatted on a street corner; a bored market vendor sat in front of a heap of colored gourds, fanning the flies; a few children played lazily in the dust.
“What the hell,” she said quietly. “I could do with a holiday anyway.”
That was Wednesday.
By Friday the city was a no-go area.
By the following Tuesday the economy of Kumbolaland was shattered, twenty thousand people were dead (including the barman, shot by the rebels while storming the market barricades), almost a hundred thousand people were injured, all of Scarlett’s assorted weapons had fulfilled the function for which they had been created, and the vulture had died of Greasy Degeneration.
Scarlett was already on the last train out of the country. It was time to move on, she felt. She’d been doing arms for too damn long. She wanted a change. Something with openings. She quite fancied herself as a newspaper journalist. A possibility. She fanned herself with her hat, and crossed her long legs in front of her.
Farther down the train a fight broke out. Scarlett grinned. People were always fighting, over her, and around her; it was rather sweet, really.
SABLE HAD BLACK HAIR, a trim black beard, and he had just decided to go corporate.
He did drinks with his accountant.
“How we doing, Frannie?” he asked her.
“Twelve million copies sold so far. Can you believe that?”
They were doing drinks in a restaurant called Top of the Sixes, on the top of 666 Fifth Avenue, New York. This was something that amused Sable ever so slightly. From the restaurant windows you could see the whole of New York; at night, the rest of New York could see the huge red 666s that adorned all four sides of the building. Of course, it was just another street number. If you started counting, you’d be bound to get to it eventually. But you had to smile.
Sable and his accountant had just come from a small, expensive, and particularly exclusive restaurant in Greenwich Village, where the cuisine was entirely nouvelle: a string bean, a pea, and a sliver of chicken breast, aesthetically arranged on a square china plate.
Sable had invented it the last time he’d been in Paris.
His accountant had polished her meat and two veg off in under fifty seconds, and had spent the rest of the meal staring at the plate, the cutlery, and from time to time at her fellow diners, in a manner that suggested that she was wondering what they’d taste like, which was in fact the case. It had amused Sable enormously.
He toyed with his Perrier.
“Twelve million, huh? That’s pretty good.”
“That’s great.”
“So we’re going corporate. It’s time to blow the big one, am I right? California, I think. I want factories, restaurants, the whole schmear. We’ll keep the publishing arm, but