The rubble left behind was pushing into piles. Eventually those piles were redistributed about the city, forming a fourteen-mile Great Wall of Junk in a blister based at the river that eventually had dirt piled on top of it to turn it into a true barrier. Now a precarious jeep trail circumnavigates the city atop the wall, except for three gaps to the north, east, and south.
The south gap is a subcarbuncle of its own, a fenced-in stretch of land between Memphis and Tunica full of livestock pens and grain silos, barge docks and coal piles, a supplemental reserve of food and fuel for the city in case events of war or nature cut it off from the rest of the Kurian Order.
Inside the wall, around the heart of the city, are the great bank camps, a temporary concentration of identical, wire-divided cantonments that stretch in some cases for miles. Once a tent city for those left homeless after the quake, the tents have given way to fifty foot barracks, now wooden-sided, with windows and cooking stoves. Rail lines, sidings, and spurs stretch into the camp like the arteries, veins, and capillaries feeding the liver.
The residents go out of their way not to think about those in the camps.
Memphis still has some of its pre-2022 culture along Beale Street and in the "commons," the stretch of city bordering the waterfront. The commons are dominated by the ravaged and only partially glassed superstructure of the Pyramid. This mighty sports arena and convention center has canvas stretched over the missing panes, to admit air without the heat of the sun, giving it the appearance of an impossibly huge sailing ship squatting at the edge of the Mississippi, the trees of Mud Island separating its inlet from the main river.
The area around the Pyramid rivals Chicago's famous zoo as a center of dubious entertainments, though it is a good deal more exclusive, limiting its clientele to the River Rats, the men who work the barges and patrol craft of the great rivers of middle North America, and those brave enough to go slumming. The Pyramid itself sees a higher order of customer with appetites just as base. As a den where flesh is exchanged for goods or services, temporarily or permanently, the Pyramid has no rival on the continent.
While the city has any number of competing factions, captains of war and industry, mouthpieces both civil and Kurian, the commons and the Pyramid look to only one man for leadership. The great auctioneer Moyo has bought and sold more slaves in his forty years than many of the tyrants of old. Always to an advantage.
If anyone has gotten the better of him and lived to tell of it, even the old-timers of Memphis cannot say.
* * * *
"You want to do what?" Vic Cotswald said.
Cotswald was a heavyset man, and puffed constantly, like an idling steam engine. He took up a substantial portion of the back cabin of his "limo"-a yellow-painted old Hummer.
"Learn about this fellow's setup," Valentine said. "Everyone's heard of Moyo. Why not do what he did, only somewhere else?"
They'd met at a roadside diner built out of a pair of old trailers fixed together and put up on concrete blocks. Duvalier looked a little wan and not at all herself. Valentine hoped it was just the pain of her wound and not the onset of ravies.
He'd know if she started trembling. That was usually the first sign. It might have been better to leave her with Everready in his casino-barge hideout, but she'd insisted on accompanying him into Memphis.
Valentine was dressed all in black. His costume was, in fact, a cut-down version of a priest's habit-it was the only well-made, matching clothing Everready could easily find at the Missions. Valentine had dyed the snake-boots to match on his own, and after cutting off the sleeves added a red neck cloth and a plastic carnation, scavenged from a discarded kitchen on one of the old gambling barges. He wore the gleaming pistol openly in its leather shoulder holster. The U-gun was zipped back up with the rest of their dunnage.
Cotswald wiped grease from his brow and sweat from his upper lip. "Of course everyone's heard of Moyo. Nobody moves deposits in or out of this town without him. The reason Moyo's still Moyo is that he doesn't let anyone get close to him who hasn't come up through his organization. He doesn't just hire Gulfies up to get a chance at the inventory."
Valentine had already learned two pieces of Memphis slang: deposits were the individuals in the bank camps waiting for transshipment to their probable doom; inventory was attractive women-and a few men and kids, he imagined-meant for the fleshpots, private and public.
"Octopus is a good guy. Pays well for the little scraps of information that pass my way. What are you offering?"
Valentine reached under his shirt and pulled up a simple lanyard that hung around his neck. A shiny ring turned at the end of the line.
Everready had taken it off a dead general.
"A brass ring? Is it legit?"
"It's mine. You get me in to see Moyo, talk me up, and I'll give it to you. I'm sure you have contacts who can verify its authenticity. If it doesn't check out, you can blow the whistle on me."
"A coast ring's no good here."
"But it is good on the coast. Ever think of your retirement? There are worse places than a beach in Florida."
Cotswald broke into a fresh sweat. "A ring. You better not be doing a bait and switch."
"A real ring and a friend named Jacksonville. The higher-ups are putting me in charge of Port Recreation. Got to keep the plebes happy."
"When's the end of the rainbow, Jacksonville?"
"I'm rebuilding a hotel down there. Furnishings are on their way. I just want to see about some-inventory."
"I'm your man," Cotswald said. "Just be warned, stay on the up-and-up with Moyo. He's a razor, he is."
* * * *