Minister Faust (40 page)

L
acking external foes, one F*O*O*Jster was psychosomatically destroying herself, and collectively the remaining F*O*O*Jsters were turning on themselves in a psychotic downspiral of workplace-superpowered civil war. Most disturbingly, in their collective breakdown, the F*O*O*J’s paranoia had plummeted even to the point of questioning the identity and integrity of their therapist.

Unless I were able to help my sanity-supplicants integrate the disparate lessons they’d gained from therapy into a new paradigm of postheroic psychemotional equilibrium, they would soon destroy themselves…and countless innocent people along with them.

P
erhaps I should leave,” I suggested, “and let you all
work during this obvious crisis.”

“You’re not going anywhere, Miss Brain!” said Festus.

“Surely you don’t believe Kareem’s delusion about me being…I mean, that I could be—”

“It’s not whether
I
believe it. It’s that
he does.
Which means you’re his target. So you’re not only in danger and needing our protection,” he said, stepping toward me and clamping his gigantic hands on my shoulders in a gesture I imagined was intended to be reassuring, “you’re our bait.”

After forcing me to offer multiple reassurances that I was not Menton the Destroyer, the three F*O*O*Jsters focused on the aforementioned frightening fracas soon to unfold. Not since the breakdown of Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid had there been the threat of terrorism by a member of the F*O*O*J.

After a moment of silence, Festus said, “How do we know
Edgerton
didn’t kill Hawk King?”

Syndi’s lips parted, curled into disgust accentuated by the electrical burn on her cheek. “Oh, shut up, Festus! Why not just accuse him of killing Kennedy while you’re at it? Oh no, I forgot—Kareem was only a baby, but
you
were in Dallas that day—”

“Naw, look here, girly,” said André, regaining his trademarked urban drawl and swagger. “What if Squirrel-dawg be right? Check it: Major Ursa and the Spectacle said there were no signs of forced entry or teleportation at the Blue Pyramid. Whoever, y’know…
did
it, like, Hawk King had to’ve known im, right? So what if Kreem’s tellin the truth about a special relationship with Hawk King? The King coulda let him in—”

“How, André? How would Kareem have enough power to kill Hawk King?” she said. “And more important, why would he want to kill his idol?”

“Look, girl, who knows how powerful Kreem really is? Think about what he could do with all his logo-magicalisms. He could send words down somebody’s throat and clog their lungs or stop their heart, or inside their veins and explode their brains! F’all we know he could make poison gas or a nuclear bomb—”

“Why, André? You haven’t said anything about why!”

“Why? Shit, P-girl, man’s a Afro-paranoid! He prawly blieves Hawk King really was black, so maybe he went to im, said, ‘Help me knock off whitey,’ an when the King said
hell, no!
and got ready to lock im up,
BAM!,
Kreem up an
words
im to death—”

“—and then leads an investigation not only to boost his electoral delusions,” nodded Festus, “but as a diversionary tactic away from himself and onto an absurd conspiracy theory about Menton.”

“Absurd?” spat Syndi. “You yourself said that—”

“And worse,” said Festus, “his goddamned plan worked! That diabolical deviant is smarter than he smells. He wanted power on the F*L*A*C, power now denied to him—oh, you wouldn’t believe how many transcripts I’ve read of his speeches to antiwhite agitators and melanin-maddened malcontents over the years—”

“Damn, Peej, Kreem be usin his word-things to do his spyin inside computers? He could track anybody, maybe
evra
body? Think about it! Combine that with what he could do inside people’s cells, they brains…snap, he on his way to becoming the most powerful man in the world, you knawm sayn?”

“The man hates the F*O*O*J,” said Festus. “And he never hid it. Hates the F*L*A*C, hates the membership, hates our history, our traditions, our values, our mission—the only thing he
didn’t
hate—”

He stopped a second to rake Syndi’s pelvis with his gaze.

“Fuck you, Festus!”

André: “People, people, eyes on the prize, here!”

“Obviously, Edgerton’s aim,” said Festus, “was to seize control of the F*O*O*J, by election if possible—remember, Hitler came to power by election—or by nefarious means if necessary…and eventually make the F*L*A*C all-black, contract all outsourcing services to black companies—”

“Do you have an atom of proof for
any
of this, Festus?”

“When you’ve been the World’s Greatest Detective for fifty years, little girl, your instincts lead you far more than the evidence ever does. And you…weren’t you the one who sponsored him to join the F*O*O*J in the first place?”

She rocked back. “Suh-so what?”

“How do we know you aren’t spying for him right now and that your perfectly timed public ‘outing’ wasn’t intended to distract attention from your continued collusion with him?”

“Now who’s paranoid,
detective
?” she yelled at the exact moment something smacked her in the face and hovered above her head.

It was a black rectangle no larger than an ordinary envelope.

“It’s from Edgerton!” said Festus, reaching for it, but Syndi got it first.

“It’s got
my
name on it,” she scolded, turning it over to show us. Opening what was not an envelope but merely a folded sheet, she flashed its contents at us: letter-shaped holes in the black substance formed text. Placing the logogram against the wall for easier reading, she shielded it with her body for privacy.

“How’d that get in here?” said André.

“Perhaps it followed you,” I suggested.

“But if it’s for her,” said Festus, “how would he’ve known André’d be meeting up with her?”

“Brotherfly’s more concerned,” said André, “that Kreem can be trackin any
body,
any
where.
An next time he might not be sendin no letter, knawm sayn?”

“What’s it say?” demanded Festus.

Syndi paused. “He…he wants me to meet him.”

Festus glared an
A-ha!
at her.

“I’m not working with him!” she said. “He said he just wants to see me to tell me what he’s figured out. He said,” she choked, “that he’s…he’s worried about me. That he wants to protect me.”

“Go to him,” said Festus. “And we’ll be right behind you with a hammer the size of his skull!”

“You think I’m gonna help you kill him, Festus?”

“For someone who said she’s not working with him—”

“I’m not, but I’m still not gonna lead you to him like a Judas-goat—”

They shouted at each other for minutes, Syndi refusing even to take a holographic imager, tracking device, or microphone along. “And I’m not going anyway! Unless you forgot, my mother’s sick and dying in there!”

“Oh, and you’ve always been such an attentive, devoted daughter!”

After she’d drenched Festus in a steaming spew of profanity, he reminded her that saving others was what her mother would want her to do.

“If you’re going to live with yourself after…
after,
” he stage-whispered, even touching her forearm with a gentleness of which I hadn’t thought him capable (and even more shockingly, she didn’t flinch at his touch), “then you know that having carried out what would’ve been your mother’s final request will be what you’ll need…so you won’t spend the rest of your life with that regret crushing you like a fallen building.”

André and I were as shocked by Festus’s reasoned delicacy as Syndi seemed entranced by it.

Quietly denying a final request to bring Festus along to the rendezvous location, Syndi said she’d reveal any plans Kareem had on the condition they posed a threat. After Festus made one last effort to divine the location of the meeting, Syndi conceded only one piece of information: that Kareem had asked her to meet at a place only the two of them would know.

“Where I first kissed him,” she said, choking up, covering her face and dropping the letter.

Just before she could leave I grabbed her arm.

“Be careful, Syndi. The Kareem you fell in love with…he’s suffering. And when people are suffering, they usually hurt the people closest to them, because those are the only ones left around.”

She showed me her white-and-black smear of a face, her eyes cold and deathly. “Kareem…my mother dying,” she said. “This is all a wake-up call for me.”

The Intoxicating Ambrosia of Old Hatred (and Older Love)

T
he moment Syndi exited the Medical Hollow, Festus stooped to retrieve the letter but reared back when it broke up at his touch and its pieces scrambled away like cockroaches. “Disgusting!” he said.

“That’s Kreem fuh ya,” said André. “Just like a cockroach: a low-down, dirty scavenger who runs when the light’s on im.”

I hung back a few steps with the Brotherfly while Festus led us to his crime lab. “André,” I said softly, “I asked you once before, but your answer was clearly hiding more than it was revealing. So tell me at last, why do you hate Kareem so much?”

“Damn, Doc, fool be threatenin
mad
havoc an you aksin me why
I
hate
him
?”

“Yes, but André, you felt this way about him long before today, which is partly why you ended up being ordered into therapy in the first place.”

“André’s whole life,” he said, fussing, fidgeting, even fluttering his fly wings, “fools like him be all up in André’s face, hatin, hatin, tryinna put they cleats all up in my ass—”

“Are you sure you have an accurate picture of your relationship with Kareem? At one point you even suggested you were jealous of him for, as you claimed, having fairer skin, when you’re both obviously black. Truly, André, you seem far more antagonistic to him than the reverse.”