White Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

signature. Idiomatic English. She just came up to the bar and wrote it: as if she’d been stood up by her boyfriend. Hey, you, you know who you are. Where were you?
    He didn’t know what to do.
    The barman appeared and laid another beer.
    “Who ordered this?”
    The man grinned broadly. “Your other girl, Johnny. You can stay a while, if she paying.”
    But don’t breathe on anything with a processor in it.
    Ms. Wilson came down the steps from the hotel, in a mulberry colored sheath of clinging and fluid bodywrap. He seriously wondered why she’d hauled these outfits to darkest Africa, if not for the sole purpose of making his life a misery. She must have suborned the barstaff, unless she had fixed her room system to trawl the hotel’s external. CCTV for something that looked like Johnny Guglioli. Which wasn’t unlikely. It was the sort of thing people used to do all the time, in the lost world. She came over slowly, giving him the chance to walk away. But he stayed.
    The dress was the same shade as her hair. The artful simplicity of it brought out the non-Caucasian in her features, somehow; and in her skin, that was the color of heavy cream.
    “You speak French, don’t you,” said Johnny, after a pregnant pause. “What does the term ‘jolie-laide’ mean?”
    “In English? Attractively ugly, I suppose. Attractive, though one can’t explain it as conventional goodlooks.” She smiled wickedly. “Why d’you want to know that?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    Braemar sat near him. “Have you decided to stop freezing me out? I hope so. You need me, Johnny.”
    “Oh?”
    She sighed in exasperation. “I don’t want to hurt your pride, but how can I avoid it. You might have a hot story, my boy. Anything’s possible. But you have no way to take it home.”
    “Tell me about this story,” suggested Johnny.
    She moved: into his space and out again, a shock to his whole system. She was curled back on the red plush, the scrap of printout between her fingers.
    “Oh, Johnny. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it.” She grinned. “Since you last practiced your profession, I mean. Surely one’s supposed to eat these things after one has memorized them?”
    Johnny was furious with himself, but only for a moment. He had a sudden and powerful intuition that Wilson wasn’t such a threat as he’d feared.
    He stood up.
    “Okay, you win. Go along on your own. I can’t stop you.”
    Braemar lit a cigarette and used it to point at Johnny’s feet. His shoes were still soaking from the walk over here.
    “She wants you, Johnny. I think she might notice the difference. But the Devereux fort is thirty kilometers out of Fo. Are you going to paddle all the way?”
    “I have money.”
    “Fine, you have money. No doubt you can even work out ways of spending it, here in darkest Africa. But are you going alone? Do you think that’s wise?”
    She looked past him, at the screen, where a sequence of astonishing technical bravura was playing out the terrible litany of fire. The red chrysanthemums: Asamayama, Asosan, Sakurajima, Mikhara, Fujiyama.
    “I know how you feel. You’re reduced to playing around with a loony sideshow when you should be at home, covering the main event. It’s demeaning. But a newspaper isn’t print on paper, comic strip on a screen, a multipage charged up over the phone. Or even the program belonging to the proprietors. It is an assessment of newly critical events, sacred to words alone: a survival of human communication in a world that’s reverting as fast as it can to chimpanzee bottom-jerking and grooming noises. You’re a reporter. They can stick you in the Gulag but they can’t stop you from doing what you do.”
    Her eyes, dark and clear, told him more. Press my pad and I’ll go on like this indefinitely. He’d been right first time. She was selling herself, her geisha presence and a discreet ego-massage, in exchange for a piece of Johnny’s fantasy game. He felt a surge of elation, as he