The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller by J. M. Porup Page A

find him.”
    I hung my head. “Yes.”
    “I understand.”
    I studied her. Was this part of her seduction? Turn shrink and psych me out? She wanted to fuck my mind as well as my body. That is
verboten
in Horse Land.
    “Do you?”
    “I am his…” she paused, bit her lip. “That is, in my dark moments, when he is not around, I call myself his secret shadow.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “I have done him wrong.” She laughed, and the sound seemed to conceal great sadness. “A lousy wife, remember?” She gestured at the children, none of whose various skin tones matched Pitt’s striking blond Nordic features. “I take what scraps of love I can, and for that I am grateful.”
    I sat down next to her again. “Has he called? An email? Letter, anything?”
    “Sergio called from Anglo-Dutch. ‘On special assignment’ was all he said.”
    I exhaled through my nose. Lit a cigarette. A cloud of smoke rose in the air. Maybe it would be enough to keep her at arm’s length. Doubtful.
    “Nothing else?”
    “His Highness came by.”
    “Ambo.”
    She laughed and sucked in a lungful of secondhand smoke. “Pitt taught you that too.”
    “And?”
    “Said the mining company wouldn’t talk to him. Wanted to know had I heard from Pitt.”
    “Had you?”
    “No. But then I don’t usually. Ambo asked me to call if I heard anything.”
    “So Pitt said nothing, where he might have gone?”
    The children under the table were inserting matches in the cat’s anus. The animal arched its tail to allow for greater access.
    Janine sat back against the sofa. She laid one forearm across her belly, tightening the thin silk across her breasts. “He had to go find himself,” she said softly. “I had to let him go.”
    “Go where?” My anger was seeping away, replaced by frustration.
    “Does it matter?”
    I took a long drag on the cigarette, let the cancerous smoke trickle from my lungs.
    One child, the oldest again, scraped a match against the box. It failed to light. He scraped it again. The third time it caught. The cat looked around, curious, nosed the boy’s hand. The child held the flame to the match heads. There was a flash of sulfur, and the cat’s tail caught fire. The animal yowled and ran across the room, the movement fanning the flames that spread across its body.
    Janine reached behind the sofa and came up with a fire extinguisher. She tracked the cat, like shooting skeet, and let go a blast of white powder that coated the animal in white sugar frosting. Snookums dove under a recliner, trying to escape its tiny tormentors. The fire extinguisher returned to its appointed post behind the sofa with a hollow clunk.
    “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
    She walked to a corner of the house, strode down a narrow corridor. She unlocked a side room. I followed after her, and she closed the door.
    An unmade king-size bed sprawled across the empty room. Bookshelves overflowed, their contents in disarray. Empty beer bottles stood on a nightstand. A rolltop desk sat open in a corner, its pigeonholes stuffed with papers. One corner of the room was coated in dry vomit. The stink of stomach acid and rotting, half-digested bits of food filled the room.
    “Tell me something, Horse,” she said.
    She unlatched the chain that held the veil across her face. She dangled the silk between two fingers. Let it slip to the floor. If her eyes were astonishing, her face doubled the effect. Angular features formed the platinum setting those burnings balls of sapphire deserved.
    I shuddered. I put the cigarette in the corner of my mouth and ran a thumb along the bookshelf. Plato. Nietzsche. Sartre. Augustine. Camus.
    I said, “Shoot.”
    “Am I beautiful?”
    I pulled out a well-thumbed copy of Kierkegaard’s
Sickness Unto Death.
“Didn’t know Pitt was into philosophy.”
    She clucked her tongue. “He’s not.”
    “No?”
    “Or wasn’t. Until recently.”
    “What happened?”
    She sighed. “I was a philosophy