Inside Straight

His BMW was in Munich though, and so he sat astride this relic with its bald tires, flaking green paint, and an exhaust pipe that looked to be made of solid rust. The bike’s gas gauge was broken, too, stuck somewhere just above empty even when the tank was freshly filled. I am running on fumes, he thought. Klaus prayed that it would be enough to take him through the hills, and down into the Valley of the Queens.

“You get them, Lohengrin!” Tut shouted, as Klaus fed some fumes to the engine. “You kill them good!”

Over ground like this, he dare not push the Royal Enfield too hard. Even at a sprinter’s pace it rattled so badly that he feared it might shake itself to pieces before he reached John Fortune. A nimbus of white light played about his head, took form, became a warhelm with a narrow eye slit and swan’s wings sprouting from the temples. A motorcyle helmet it was not, but Klaus had faith that the ghost steel would protect him in a spill.

Turning west and south, he wove a crooked path through the squalor of the camp, bouncing past the hulk of an abandoned school bus where a dozen families now were living. Behind the bus, the carcass of a dog was turning over a cook-fire that stank of burning camel dung. A cloud of wasps trailed after Klaus, glimmering and winking in the sunlight. A joker whose face had sprouted dozens of small heads threw a rock at them as they went by, and a dark-eyed woman with a child at her breast gave Klaus a lingering look, as if to say, You are not one of us. What are you doing here?

Some nights Klaus would ask that selfsame question as he twisted in his sleeping bag on the hard ground, wondering if that was a scorpion crawling up his leg or just another of Jonathan’s wasps. Barbarossa would mock at him for coming here, he knew, and most of the other aces of the Reichsbanner would consider him a fool. He had thought to find in them a modern Round Table, where heroes broke bread together and talked of righting wrong, but the only wrong they wished to right involved their tax rates. “You expected more, ja?“ Barbarossa said afterward, when he and Klaus escaped the feast for a beer garden in Heidelberg’s student quarter. “You are young. You will learn. It is all cartels and sponsors now. Mighty Euro and Mighty Dollar are more powerful than any ace on earth. They own us, ja.”

“Not me,” Klaus had insisted. “My honor is not for sale.”

Barbarossa pinched his cheek. “Keep your honor. It’s your smile they will buy, your big blue eyes and pale blond hair, and these apple cheeks of yours.”

He was right, and I was wrong. His first endorsement had been a local dairy that offered him five hundred euros to say their milk helped him grow up big and strong. Klaus had resisted at first, but his mother said he should do it for the children, that milk was good for children, and maybe they could go as high as a thousand euros. That was a lot of money, so Klaus drank the milk and smiled for the cameras. Other endorsements followed, until finally he signed with an agent and she brought him BMW. He loved his motorcycle, and loved the freedom that fame and money brought him, but sometimes at night he still felt like a fraud, no different from the hollow heroes of the Reichsbanner, who took adulation as their due but never did a thing to earn it. Yet, what had he done since Neuschwanstein? Nothing but smile and sign “Lohengrin” on pictures of himself. That was no life for an ace, or for a knight. There was no honor in it.

~ ~ ~

The road wound back and forth as it made its way through the hills down into the valley known as Biban al-Harim, where the tombs of eighty ancient Egyptian queens were sunk into the dry and stony soil. Klaus was banking round a curve and wondering how long his fuel would last when he heard the sound of gunfire ahead.

Jackals, was his first and only thought. That was the name that Jonathan had given to the rabble of Ikhlas al-Din, the Muslim fundamentalists who had been swept to victory in Egypt’s last election. It was not enough for them to drive the Living Gods and their worshippers from their homes. All the long way south, they had continued to hound the refugees, raiding their camps, picking off stragglers, even burning villages and poisoning wells along the way to deny them water, food, and fuel.