Island of the Sequined Love Nun

the Sorcerer, so it must be the will of Vincent. They want the girl-man."
    "We should fight," Favo said. "We should kill the guards."
    "Spears against machine guns, Favo? Should the children grow up without fathers like we did? No, they will find the girl-man and they will go away."
    "The girl-man has gone to live with Sarapul. Did you tell them?"
    "I told them. I took the Sorcerer there."
    The guards came out of the old church and crunched in single file down the path toward Favo and Malink. The old men stood their ground, making the guards walk into a stand of ferns to get around them. They made no eye contact and said nothing. Favo hurled a curse at them, but it had been too long since he had spoken Japanese and it was not a language suited for swearing. He ended up telling them that their truck tires smelled of sardines, which elicited no response whatsoever.
    "Excellent curse," Malink said, trying to raise his friend's spirits.
    "It needs work. English is the best for swearing."
    "They have machine guns, Favo."
    "Fuckin' mooks," Favo said.
    "Amen," Malink said, crossing himself in the sign of the B-26 bomber.
    The two old men fell in behind the guards, following them from house to house, waiting outside on the path so the villagers could see them when they were roused out of their houses.
    For the guards' part, it was a wholly unsatisfying endeavor. They had been looking forward to kicking in some doors, only to find that the Shark People had no doors. There were no beds to throw over, no back rooms to burst into, no closets, no place, in fact, where a man could hide and not be exposed by the most perfunctory inspection. And the doctor had told them that no one was to be hurt. They did not want to make a mistake. For all the appearance of military efficiency, they were screwups to a man. One, a former security guard at a nuclear power plant, had been fired for taking drugs; two were brothers who had been dismissed from the Tokyo police department for accepting Yakuza bribes; the fourth, from Okinawa, had been a jujitsu instructor who had beaten a German tourist to death in a bar over a gross miscarriage of karaoke. The man who had recruited them, put them in the black uniforms, and trained them made it clear that this was their last chance. They had two choices: succeed and become rich or die. They took their jobs very seriously.
    "He might be in the trees," Favo said in Japanese. "Look in the trees!"
    The guards scanned the trees as they marched, which caused them to bump into each other and stumble. Above them there was a fluttering of wings. A glout of bat guano splatted across the Okinawan's forehead. He threw the bolt on his Uzi and the air was filled with the staccato roar of nine millimeters ripping through the foliage. When at last the clip was empty, palm fronds settled to the ground around them. Frightened children screamed in their mothers' arms, and Favo, who was Lying next to his friend with his arms thrown over his head, snickered like an asthmatic hyena.
    The guards scuffled for a moment, not sure whether to disarm their companion or shove their clips home and begin the massacre. Above the crying, the scuffle, the snickering, and the tintinnabulation of residual gunfire, a girl giggled. The guards looked up. Sepie stood in the doorway of the bachelors' house, naked but for a pair of panties she'd recently acquired from a transvestite navigator. "Hey, sailors," she said, trying out a phrase she'd also acquired from Kimi, "you want a date?" The guards didn't understand the words, but they got the message.
    "Go inside, girl," Malink scolded. Women, even the mispel, were not permitted to show their thighs in public. Not even when swimming, not when bathing, not when crapping on the beach, not ever.
    "Go back inside," Favo said. "When they go away, you will be beaten."
    "I have been beaten before," Sepie said. "Now I will be rich."
    "Tell her," Favo said to Malink.
    Malink shrugged. His authority as chief worked only as long as his people willingly obeyed him. The key to retaining their respect was to find out what they wanted to do, then tell them to do it. He levied the most severe punishment he knew. "Sepie, you may not touch the sea for ten days."
    She turned and wiggled her bottom at him, then disappeared into the bachelors' house. The stunned guards ceased their scuffle and moved tentatively toward the doorway looking to each other for permission.
    "This is your fault," Malink said to Favo. "You