they would hand one of her stories over to a rewrite man to fix up. (“Jesus appeared to nine-year-old Manuel Gonzalez during a pitched battle on the Rio Concorsa, and told him to go home because his mother worried about him. ‘I knew it was Jesus,’ said the brave little child, ‘because he looked like he did when his picture miraculously appeared on my sandwich box.”’)
Mostly the National World Weekly left her alone, and carefully filed her stories in the rubbish bin.
Murchison, and Van Horne, and Anforth didn’t care about this. All they knew was that whenever a war broke out, Ms. Zuigiber was there first. Practically before.
“How does she do it?” they would ask each other incredulously. “How the hell does she do it?” And their eyes would meet, and silently say: if she was a car she’d be made by Ferrari, she’s the kind of woman you’d expect to see as the beautiful consort to the corrupt generalissimo of a collapsing Third World country, and she hangs around with guys like us. We’re the lucky guys, right?
Ms. Zuigiber just smiled and bought another round of drinks for everybody, on the National World Weekly. And watched the fights break out around her. And smiled.
She had been right. Journalism suited her.
Even so, everyone needs a holiday, and Red Zuigiber was on her first in eleven years.
She was on a small Mediterranean island which made its money from the tourist trade, and that in itself was odd. Red looked to be the kind of woman who, if she took a holiday on any island smaller than Australia, would be doing so because she was friends with the man who owned it. And had you told any islander a month before that war was coming, he would have laughed at you and tried to sell you a raffiawork wine holder or a picture of the bay done in seashells; that was then.
This was now.
Now a deep religio-political divide, concerning which of four small mainland countries they weren’t actually a part of, had split the country into three factions, destroyed the statue of Santa Maria in the town square, and done for the tourist trade.
Red Zuigiber sat in the bar of the Hotel de Palomar del Sol, drinking what passed for a cocktail. In one corner a tired pianist played, and a waiter in a toupee crooned into a microphone:
“AAAAAAAAAAAonce-pon-a-time-dere-was
LITTLE WHITE BOOOL
AAAAAAAAAAAvery-sad-because-e-was
LITTLE WHITE BOOL … ”
A man threw himself through the window, a knife between his teeth, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in one hand, a grenade in the other.
“I glaim gis oteg id der gaing og der—” he paused. He took the knife out of his mouth and began again. “I claim this hotel in the name of the pro-Turkish Liberation Faction!”
The last two holidaymakers remaining on the island19 climbed underneath their table. Red unconcernedly withdrew the maraschino cherry from her drink, put it to her scarlet lips, and sucked it slowly off its stick in a way that made several men in the room break into a cold sweat.
The pianist stood up, reached into his piano, and pulled out a vintage sub-machine gun. “This hotel has already been claimed by the pro-Greek Territorial Brigade!” he screamed. “Make one false move, and I shoot out your living daylight!”
There was a motion at the door. A huge, black-bearded individual with a golden smile and a genuine antique Gatling gun stood there, with a cohort of equally huge although less impressively armed men behind him.
“This strategically important hotel, for years a symbol of the fascist imperialist Turko-Greek running dog tourist trade, is now the property of the Italo-Maltese Freedom Fighters!” he boomed affably. “Now we kill everybody!”
“Rubbish!” said the pianist. “Is not strategically important. Just has extremely well-stocked wine cellar!”
“He’s right, Pedro,” said the man with the Kalashnikov, “That’s why my lot wanted it. Il General Ernesto de Montoya said to me, he said, Fernando, the war’ll be over by Saturday, and the lads’ll be wanting a good time. Pop down to the Hotel de Palomar del Sol and claim it as booty, will you?”
The bearded man turned red. “Is bloddy important strategically, Fernando Chianti! I drew big map of the island and is right in the middle, which makes it pretty bloddy strategically important, I can tell you.”
“Ha!” said Fernando. “You might as well say that just because Little Diego’s house has a view of the decadent capitalist topless private beach, that it’s strategically important!”
The pianist blushed a deep red. “Our lot got that